Pope Looks To Destigmatize Autism

[proverbialwisdom]

37. How Recent Is Autism? Vivian Murdock, oldest child in the first case study on autism, born 9.13.31.

How Recent Is Autism?

So recent that the late great director Mike Nichols, born 11.6.31, was just a few weeks younger than Vivian Murdock, oldest child in the first case study on autism, born 9.13.31. ASSERTION: Autism is man-made.

ASIDE: See post 11 (above) for recent Washington Post link referencing Age of Autism website.

http://www.ageofautism.com/2014/11/age-of-autism-weekly-wrap-.html#more

When Mike Nichols died Thursday, I noticed that he was born in 1931, the same year that autism began (in the person of Vivian Murdock, oldest child in Leo Kanner’s case series from 1943, whom Teresa Conrick, Mark Blaxill and I first identified on AOA – an example, come to think of it, of what financial support helps accomplish).

When I learn about other people born then, it reminds me how recent autism is – within the span of one lifetime, this catastrophe has descended upon us. The reason, we believe, is the first use of ethylmercury in commercial compounds starting then, including in vaccines as thimerosal.

So I wrote a brief note about the coincidence of birth year, as I often do (it’s still up there in the right hand corner). Then, reading his obit in the Times on Friday morning, I came across this: “Young Michael’s sense of being a stranger in a strange land [a Holocaust refugee from Germany] was aggravated by the loss of his hair at age 4, the result of a reaction to an inoculation for whooping cough.” That’s called alopecia. He would have gotten the shot in Germany. That nice head of blond hair, it turns out, was a toupee.

Well, then. A vaccine caused him a severe reaction in 1935 or 1936. I assume that the vaccine – pertussis, later to become the worst part of the deadly and damaging DPT -- contained thimerosal. (Remember, Asperger’s was showing up in neighboring Austria then. Bayer, which used ethylmercury in pesticides, was based there.)

Here’s a counterfactual exercise. What if, instead of musing about bad parenting, Leo Kanner had realized the toxic exposure in autism, just as Mike Nichol’s doctors did in alopecia, and the Age of Autism had been stopped as soon as it started?

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Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism.

BEGIN VIDEO @ MINUTE 1:10

How Mercury Triggered The Age Of Autism
Published on May 25, 2013

By Dan Olmsted, Mark Blaxill
Motion Design By Natalie Palumbo
Special Thanks to Teresa Conrick