ABC Drama takes on Science and Parents

[Guest guest]

Brought to you by AutismLink

ABC Drama Takes on Science and Parentssource: New York Timeshttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/arts/television/23ston.html?8dpc Cartwright/ABC

Jonny Lee , left, as Eli Stone, with Benanti as the mother of an autistic child, and Topputo in “Eli Stone.”

By EDWARD WYATT

Published: January 23, 2008

LOS ANGELES — A new legal drama making its debut this month on ABC is stepping into a subject that is the source of heated debate among some parents — the relationship between autism and childhood vaccines — and seemingly coming down on the side that has been all but dismissed by prominent scientific organizations.

The drama, “Eli Stone,” scheduled to be broadcast at 10 p.m. on Jan. 31, centers on a lawyer who begins having visions that cause him to question his life’s work defending large corporations, including a pharmaceutical company that makes vaccines.

The title character of “Eli Stone,” adopting the message of his visions to fight for the little guy, takes his first case: suing his former client on behalf of the mother of an autistic child who believes a mercury-based preservative in a vaccine caused her son’s autism.

For the last decade some parents and advocates for autistic children have championed the theory that a mercury-based vaccine preservative called thimerosal, developed in the late 1920s and used in many childhood vaccines until about seven years ago, is a primary cause of autism in young children.

Autism often is diagnosed in children between their first and fourth years, during the time that many children begin receiving regular rounds of vaccinations.

But reams of scientific studies by the leading American health authorities have failed to establish a causal link between the preservative and autism. Since the preservative was largely removed from childhood vaccines in 2001, autism rates have not declined.

While police and legal dramas often use ripped-from-the-headlines topics as the basis of episodes, rarely do broadcast networks allow themselves to stray into the middle of heated debates that contain such emotional touchstones for large segments of their audience, if only because another big segment of a network’s audience is likely to be on the other side of the debate.

With “Eli Stone,” however, neither ABC nor its ABC Studios production unit has expressed any qualms about the story, according to Greg Berlanti, a co-creator and an executive producer of the series, who said he believed that the script showed both sides of the argument. “I think they wanted us to do our homework about all of it, which we did,” he said.

But the script also takes several liberties that could leave viewers believing that the debate over thimerosal — which in the program’s script is given the fictional name mercuritol — is far from scientifically settled.

Through a spokeswoman, ABC declined to offer an executive to discuss the show.

The issue is a potentially delicate one for ABC. Eli Lilly & Company, which developed thimerosal, and the two companies that now make the bulk of childhood vaccines used in the United States, GlaxoKline and Sanofi-Aventis, spent an estimated $138 million for advertising on ABC last year, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus, though little to none of it was spent advertising vaccines.

Representatives of all three companies expressed dismay about the series, of which they said they were unaware until called by a reporter.

Pekarek, a spokeswoman for GlaxoKline, said the episode raised public-health concerns. “If parents watching this fictional series make that incorrect conclusion about a link” between vaccines and autism “and as a result choose not to vaccinate their own children, the consequences could be devastating,” she said.

Doctors have previously expressed fears that the popularity of the antivaccine movement could have adverse effects. In Britain a widely publicized — and since discredited — research paper published in 1998 started a scare over the safety of the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella, drawing a potential link to autism. Though the premise of the research did not concern thimerosal, vaccination rates plunged in Britain. Over the next two to six years, outbreaks of measles soared in Britain and Ireland, causing at least three deaths and hundreds of children to be hospitalized.

Join our listserv! Don't get your news second hand! Get LINKED! http://lists.autismlink.com/lists