Autism: Ground Zero = mercury

[Guest guest]

> http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/56227.html#

>

> The Age of Autism: Ground Zero

> WASHINGTON, April 26, 2007

> By DAN OLMSTED

>

> This column has long made the controversial case that autism had a

> beginning, a " big bang " if you will. That moment was 1930 -- no U.S. cases

> before then fully match the classic description of the disorder. Now let's

> take the next logical step: Not only did autism have a big bang, it also

> had a ground zero -- a place where many of the first cases concentrated

> before the disorder exploded nationwide. Ground zero was the nation's

> capital, in particular the land suburbs where cutting-edge government

> research in the 1930s and 1940s exposed families to the chemical that

> first triggered the baffling disorder.

>

> The foundation of this argument was laid out in the most recent Age of

> Autism column, " Mercury link to Case 2. " Case 2 was known only as

> Frederick W., but we identified him as the son of a prominent plant

> pathologist named Frederick L. Wellman. At the time " Frederick W. " was

> born, we showed, the senior Wellman was doing advanced work at the U.S.

> Agriculture Department's Beltsville research center in suburban land,

> just outside the nation ' s capital. Wellman was experimenting with plant

> fungi and ways to kill them, and his extensive archive makes clear one

> compound he studied was ethyl mercury fungicide -- the exact kind also

> used in the controversial vaccine preservative thimerosal, which many

> parents blame for the recent rise in reported cases (mainstream experts

> say it has been ruled out as a cause).

>

> Ethyl mercury in both vaccines and fungicides was pioneered and patented

> in the 1920s through the work of S. Kharasch. When Kharasch filed

> the first relevant patents, he was a chemistry professor at the University

> of land in College Park, which actually adjoins the Beltsville

> research center.

>

> More links to Washington are evident in other early cases described in

> 1943 by s Hopkins University child psychiatrist Leo Kanner, who first

> diagnosed the disorder in Frederick W. and 10 other children born in the

> 1930s. Reading between the lines of his landmark 1943 paper, the very

> first autistic child seen at Hopkins (in 1935) was " Alfred L., " whose

> father was a lawyer and chemist at t he U.S. Patent Office. Also a clear

> connection to newly patented chemicals, the federal government and the

> nation ' s capital. A child later profiled by Kanner was named T.

> " originally lived in Philadelphia, " Kanner wrote in 1951. " The family

> then moved to Greenbelt, to Chicago, and back to Greenbelt. " Take a look

> at Greenbelt, Md.: It also abuts the Beltsville agricultural center in the

> Washington suburbs.

>

> Recently, a mutual friend in Washington introduced me to a 58-year-old man

> with Asperger's disorder, the milder version of autism. We got together

> for lunch, and when I asked where in the Washington area he lived, I was

> both startled and somehow not surprised: Riverdale, Md. That's another

> Washington suburb that clusters with the College Park-Beltsville-Greenbelt

> dots I was already plotting. What's more, he was born there in 1948 in the

> same house he lives in now.

>

> I asked what his father did. He told me he was an engineer. That fits a

> stereotype of Asperger's affecting kids of scientists and engineers -- the

> so-called " geek syndrome, " nerdy brainiacs hooking up to somehow spawn a

> generation of kids with " autism lite. " I asked him what kind of engineer

> his father was. The answer: a mechanical engineer who tested guns for the

> Navy at the time he was born. And where was that? At what is now the Naval

> Surface Warfare Center in White Oak, Md. -- just a hop and a skip across

> I-95 from the Beltsville agriculture center.

>

> I already had come across his father's line of work. In a 1972 paper,

> Kanner talked about a child named " Walter P., " born in June 1944. His

> father, too, was " an ordnance engineer for the federal government. " Kanner

> didn't say where Walter P. was from, but the similarity makes me wonder.

> Mercury fulminate was widely used as a detonator for explosives and

> armaments. Could those two fathers, like Frederick W., be linked to

> cutting-edge research involving mercury? (My Riverdale acquaintance said

> his father sometimes brought containers of mercury home from the weapons

> center for the kids to play with.)

>

> And is that kind of research a reason Leo Kanner, at s Hopkins in

> nearby Baltimore, started seeing cases of this " markedly and uniquely "

> different disorder in the 1930s and 1940s? Just last week I got an e-mail

> from the mother of a child with autism who lives on the other side of the

> country; her son was born nowhere near what I'm calling ground zero. But

> as I outlined this idea to her, she had a shock of recognition:

>

> " I lived on a farm in Burtonsville, Md., while young and it is near

> Beltsville. The farm was surrounded by forest and abutted the Patuxent

> River. " Of course, not all the early cases cluster this way. But of the

> two other original " Kanner kids " from his 1943 paper that I' ve been able

> to identify along with Frederick W., one grew up in a town called Forest,

> Miss., a center of timber farming and planting; the other was the son of a

> forestry professor at North Carolina State University. Ethyl mercury

> fungicides were used to treat seeds, saplings and lumber in the 1930s, and

> in both places (as well as in Beltsville) the newly launched Civilian

> Conservation Corps was hard at work planting trees, cutting timber and

> building things with it. To sum up: The first cases of autism seem to

> radiate outward from a central point -- as big bangs tend to do. As those

> exposures expanded, so did autism.

>

> This suggests a new and deeply disturbing truth about the Age of Autism:

> our fate is not in our genes, Dear Brutus, but in the chemicals that

> increasingly pollute our world and our children.

>

> (e-mail: dolmsted@...)

>

> The Age of Autism: Ground Zero

>

>

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