MB Civic

my brother Mark tesified before Congress yesterday – from his opening statement ..

For a long time, reported U.S. autism rates were low, estimated at about 1 in 10,000. Then around 1990 something new and terrible happened to a generation of children. Autism rates didn’t just rise, they multiplied .. CDC first started investigating environmental causes in 1999 in Brick NJ. Their survey data showed that autism rates went from zero in 1989, to 1 in 128 four years later. But they used statistical tricks (and the fact that autism surveys miss many three and four years olds) to publish a finding that there was no increase .. A CDC analyst also discovered in 1999 that higher levels of infant exposure to a mercury compound in vaccines increased autism risk more than tenfold relative to zero exposure. The analyst wrote about this result to his supervisors: “It just won’t go away,” he said. But he and his colleagues used more statistical tricks and published a finding that made the risk go away. In the financial world, the result of the pressure to manipulate numbers to provide the answers bosses want has a name – securities fraud

here’s video link from CSPAN of the hearing, Panel 1 was the CDC and NIH reps; Panel 2 (link on right) was autism community advocates – mab .. read more