AUTISIM
...ze a child mute, rocking, screaming, inaccessible, cut off from human contact. And we almost always speak of autistic children, rarely of autistic adults, as if such children never grew up, or were somehow mysteriously spirited off the planet, out of society. Or else we think of an autistic “savant” a strange being with bizarre mannerisms and stereotypes, still cut off from normal life, but with uncanny powers of calculation, memory, drawing, whatever—like the savant portrayed in Rain Man. These pictures are not false, but they fail to indicate that there are forms of autism which do not incapacitate in the same way, but may allow lives that are full of event and achievement, and a special sort of insight and courage too” (Riccio, 1999). The United States Government has paid out nearly one and a half billion dollars to vaccine damage cases but the cost, if all autism cases were proven to be caused by vaccine damage, could dwarf this. The US Government has since 1986 given an indemnity to pharmaceutical companies against vaccine damage claims. Payments are made under a government scheme into which vaccine makers pay a levy. In the last few years the US Government appears to have given vaccine makers further retrospective immunity against mercury claims in the Homeland Security Bill. In the United Kingdom vaccine makers rejected a request from the Government to pay such a levy and no further action seems to have been taken to require this of them (White, 1997). But things are changing, in the United States the Food and Drugs Administration issued a request to United States manufacturers to withdraw mercury compounds from infant vaccines in the United States from the beginning of 1999. This is now being partially met, although there are many instances of old stocks being used; mercury free vaccines should be widely available in the future. However these vaccines cannot be administered to older age groups, for diseases such as Hepatitis B, Meningitis and Influenza (Johnson, 2003). A recent review of the Californian statistic on autism have confirmed what many professionals already suspected and that is that autism is actually on the increase. This implies that there is an environmental component to autism because the idea of hereditary does not allow for a genetic epidemic (Oates, 1997). Many ideas have suggested that a genetic component which is triggered by an environmental vaccination referred to as the MMR vaccine. As the study has been conducted and new research is available there has been a marked increase in the proportion of children on the autistic spectrum since the introduction of the MMR. The vaccine overloads the immune system and causes the children to lose speech, limit their developmental stages, and become autistic. Opponents of this state that autism is normally diagnosed around this time of age and that the factors of time and vaccination are coincidental. Current studies being researched are the time frame of the MMR vaccination being changed so that they can determine if the child is autistic before the vaccine or if signs and symptoms are present after (Moore, 1997). Scientists have uncovered the strongest evidence yet that the three-in-one Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine plays a clear role in the development of autism. Expert Dr. Andrew Wakefield and pathologist Professor John O'Leary established a possible link between the measles virus and autism. They found fragments of the measles virus from the MMR vaccine in the intestines of autistic children. Several studies have been performed since then including the ...