David Kirby in England
It had to happen. David Kirby, the erstwhile journalist and ersatz apologist for the mercury malicia is visiting Britain, paid for by Generation Rescue. There will be a public lecture on Wednesday 4th June, 6:30pm at Regent Hall, Oxford Street and a book signing and Q&A on Friday 6th June, 4:00pm at Gudrun Jonsson’s Biopath Centre in Kensington whose
unique philosophy focuses on a combination of the traditional healing arts from the sub-continent, biopathic treatments, and the latest scientific health and beauty advances. By combining these three concepts, Napier Road has developed an innovative and refreshing approach to health and beauty, which aims to reverse the degenerative processes of the body and promote general wellbeing.
So no surprises there, then. What is surprising is Kirby’s opening gig at the Palace of Westminster. According to an email circulating on numerous web forums
Mr. Kirby will speak about recent legal, political and scientific developments in the United States in the ongoing vaccine-autism controversy. The briefing is open to Peers in the House of Lords, Members of Parliament, their Staff, members of the Media, and Invited Guests. It is sponsored by His Lordship Robin Hodgson, Baron Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, Shropshire.
Kirby and a biopath makes sense. Hack ‘n’ Quack sounds about right. But what is the connection between Kirby and Robin Hodgson? Hodgson was deputy chairman of the Conservative Party from 1997 to 2000 when he became a life peer. His wife is chairman (sic) of the Conservative Women’s Association. As a member of the House of Lords Robin Hodgson acted as a front bench spokesman on Trade & Industry and Home Affairs between 2002-2006. I do not know if he is a member of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Autism. But he revealed that he has a son with ADHD when he introduced a parliamentary debate on the subject of Attention Deficit Disorders on February 5th, 2003.
Lord Hodgson on ADHD
Families with ADD/ADHD children need help. To get help, they need joined-up government across the Department of Health, the Department for Education and Skills and local social services. The key is early diagnosis, so that families, schools and, where appropriate, social services are aware of the condition. Taking medication can then become the norm. By contrast, children who are diagnosed later have probably already experienced several years of underachievement and failure and are more likely to be oppositional and unprepared to co-operate with medication, thus in many cases condemning themselves and their families to a living hell.
We need to spread more awareness of the condition among the teaching profession. It is estimated that 90 per cent of teachers have had no special training on how to recognise the symptoms of ADD/ADHD.
Most importantly, we need immediately to begin a programme to build awareness among social workers. For the most part, they do not seem to appreciate the strain on a family living with a severely ADD/ADHD child. There is therefore little or no respite care. Rather, too many social workers have been inclined to see erratic behaviour by a child as evidence of child abuse. No one suggests that there is any malice in that; I am sure that everyone’s intentions are good; but there is profound ignorance that we must tackle.
He could just as easily be talking about autism and the problems we face from inadequate services provided by people without proper training or resources who are ill-equipped to understand our needs. And there is much in the debate in similar vein. There is also much else that we are familiar with.
Lord Hodgson on Quackery
Although medication undoubtedly has an important part to play, it is not the only help for which parents may reach. Indeed, for some children it does not work at all; for others it may lose its effectiveness in their teenage years. Alternative approaches can be tried: for example, homeopathy, specialist exclusion diets, cranial osteopathy, megavitamin therapy, together with behaviour modification therapy, psychotherapy and others. We need to know more about their relative success and to inform parents, teachers and social workers about them.
Lord Hodgson on Thimerosal
So why has there been that increase in those conditions and what can we do to reverse the trend? It is unlikely that there is any one single cause. Genetics and heredity will probably be found to play a significant part. But what other factors are in play? One matter looks increasingly likely to be a significant contributory cause: the requirement in this country that every baby receives three injections in the first 16 weeks of life as immunisation against diphtheria, tetanus and whole cell pertussis—whooping cough, to laymen—(DTwP). As I understand it, each standard dose of the vaccine used in the UK contains 50 micrograms of a substance called thimerosal. Each dose of thimerosal contains 25 micrograms of ethylmercury. Mercury is a highly toxic substance. That means that, by the 16th week of life, every baby in this country, with an inevitably fragile immune and nervous system, has been injected with 75 micrograms of ethylmercury.
Lord Hodgson is not anti-vaccine
I must make it clear that this is not an attack on immunisation. Immunisation is an important part of child healthcare. But it is a question of what goes into the vaccines. Thimerosal is not an essential part of a vaccine; its function is as a preservative. There is a mercury-free vaccine licensed in this country under the name Infanrix DTaP. Although it is more expensive, that would be a small price to pay compared to the cost of a child with neurological damage.
But he does believe that a percentage of children are vulnerable to damage from mercury in the quantities that used to be present in the UK vaccine schedule.
The figure that has been suggested to me is 18 per cent of the whole.
Other contributions
Other speakers took up some of his themes. Lord Colwyn praised the Feingold diet and stated that study after study backs Feingold’s theories. He proposed vitamin B6 as an effective alternative to Ritalin and also blamed hypoglycaemia.
Earl Howe (not to be confused with Geoffrey Howe) admitted to reading
a most persuasive paper recently published in the United States, which concludes that the likelihood of a causal relationship between mercury in vaccines and autism is very great. If that theory is borne out, it has the most profound implications. I wholly agree with my noble friend that a great deal more research is needed.
The Earl Howe found Lisa Blakemore-Brown equally persuasive.
The notion that a child may have several disorders running alongside one another has been powerfully explained by a British child psychologist, Lisa Blakemore-Brown. She used the metaphor of a tapestry to illustrate that a child may present with various threads of difficulty; for example, ADD combined with Aspergers, or ADHD with a language impairment. Those threads may appear to be the same as those in another child but each individual will have his own unique weave of problems. The key to helping a child is discovering what threads are there and how they are interwoven. I believe that Lisa Blakemore-Brown’s book, Re-weaving the autistic tapestry, should be required reading in every LEA—and in the Department of Health. It is very persuasive.
Blame the Parents
I first came across Lisa Blakemore-Brown at a conference where we were both speakers. She made an eloquent, somewhat emotional speech, that relied more on anecdote than data to raise the question of false accusations of Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy against parents of autistic children. There seem to be a number of potential pitfalls for parents of autistic or ADHD children.
- Parents’ concerns about their child’s problems are dismissed. If they persist they are accused of MSbP.
- Parents who claim their child has biomedical problems [either as a cause or a consequence of their autism/adhd] that need special diets and other alternative therapies are accused of MSbP.
- The child’s behavioural problems are recognized but put down to abusive parenting. When the parents insist that their child is autistic/adhd they are accused of MSbP.
The Earl Howe actually spoke a lot of sense about MSbP in this debate. I would not be surprised if he had been briefed by Lisa Blakemore-Brown. Unfortunately she also believes in a vaccine induced autism epidemic. And, if we are to believe Aasa over on the JABS forum, Ms Blakemore-Brown is also responsible for bringing David Kirby to London.
From Peer to PR
Back in 2003 it may have been reasonable for Hodgson and others in the House of Lords to want more investigations into thimerosal in vaccines. They were right then and now to ask whether medication is necessarily the best answer to behavioural and neurological difficulties in children. They are to be applauded for taking up the thorny issue of false accusations against parents. But, while Lisa Blakemore-Brown may continue to weave all these issues into a single tapestry, five years down the line we have the science to say that thimerosal in vaccines is a broken thread. Kirby is not worthy of Hodgson’s patronage. Hodgson has allowed himself to be misled and misadvised in this affair.
