Diseases/Conditions

New Gambit to Pretend Autism Isn’t Caused by Vaccines: Blame It on Antidepressants in Pregnancy

October 25, 2011 by admin in Science with 0 Comments

Baby, hypodermic & image reflected in eyes

Image created by Heidi Stevenson. May be used only with credit & link back to original. ()

We now have studies clearly showing that antidepressants cause birth defects and miscarriages. It’s becoming difficult to protect that class of drugs as a treatment for pregnant women. So, why not use that problem to deflect attention away from vaccines as the cause for autism? That’s just what the NIH and NIMH are doing.

Before going further, let me make absolutely clear that I’m not trying to give antidepressants a pass. They cause enormous harm, including but not limited to, birth defects, as has been documented on these pages. However, that doesn’t mean they cause autism.

Before going on, a point needs to be made. Even if the claim of the National Institutes for Health (NIH) were true—and they’ve provided nothing that actually backs it up—a glaring omission destroys the entire basis of an autism-antidepressant link: The parents of nearly all autistic children report that they were healthy and developing normally until given a vaccine, whereupon they suddenly changed. These children go backwards. They deteriorate in a horrifying way, as compellingly described by Amy Leal, a scholar of 19^th century British literature, who watched her own son disappear into autism:

He stopped looking in my eyes, and when I caught his chin in my hand to look in his face, there was nothing there. He was irritable and spun in circles most of the time, and when he did sit down, he kept pushing the same button on a musical toy over and over and couldn’t be engaged. He didn’t even like his beloved books anymore. My son was gone—there was no spark in his face, no sign of life, just dead eyes.

The worst part was that I knew he sensed it, too. In the same way that I know when he wants vegetable puffs or puréed fruit by the subtle pitch of his cries, I could tell that he also perceived the change—and feared it. At night he was terrified to go to bed, needing to hold my fingers with one hand and touch my face with the other in order to get the few hours of sleep he managed. Every morning he was different. Another word was gone, another moment of eye contact was lost. He began to cry in a way that was untranslatable. The wails were not meant as messages to be decoded; they were terrified expressions of being beyond expression itself.

This is autism. Except perhaps in fadingly rare instances, it isn’t a birth defect. Too many parents describe what happened in much this same way. A normal healthy child suddenly reverses, losing developmental gains, shortly after being vaccinated.

The Rat Antidepressant Study

The study, titled “Perinatal antidepressant exposure alters cortical network function in rodents” and published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), is actually the third in a group of three. The authors don’t bother to describe the methods used, a significant lack—enough to discredit the entire report. They do state that the same methods described in the first two studies for “basic preparation of the SSRI, CTM, and animal care were performed as described previously”. However, this study used both male and female rat pups, while the first one killed the females at birth and studied only the males.

Two things could be ascertained in all studies:

No rat mothers were dosed with any antidepressant. Only rat pups were dosed.
All rat pups were dosed with antidepressant from ages 8 days through 21 days.

NIH-NIMH Claim of Dosing Rat Mothers

The NIH, which funded the study, issued a press release in the name of one of its subdivisions, the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH). The first words in the report are:

Rats exposed to an antidepressant just before and after birth showed substantial brain abnormalities and behaviors, in a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. [Emphasis mine. –Ed.]

That’s a fabrication. No rat mother was dosed with antidepressant. Yet, this is what’s quoted in the media. Science Daily‘s report on the study is little more than a cut ‘n’ paste of the NIH’s report. Live Science simply focused on the pre-birth part of the NIH’s announcement.

NIH-NIMH Claim of Perinatal Dosing

According to the NIH’s own documentation, a rat doubles its weight in the first 6 days after birth. A human baby takes half a year to do so. Therefore, these rats were not dosed until they had passed a size equivalent to a human child more than half a year old. That means the terms neonate and perinatal are inaccurate. The researchers had to know that.

Technically, the term neonate refers to a rat up to age 10 days. So these rats, which were more than double their birth weight, were just barely neonates at the time of first dosing, and most of the antidepressant dosing occurred after that time. The term, perinatal, simply does not legitimately apply to these rat pups.

Misleading Report & Study: Intentional?

One must wonder if this could possibly be an accident on the part of the NIH and NIMH, but it seems doubtful. One of the standard items found in any scientific study is the methods used. Yet, in this case, the authors didn’t bother. They simply referred readers to two previous studies they’d done. That, of course, makes it a bit tough to track down.

But I smelled a rat, so checked it out—and am very glad to have done so. I tried to find a reference to mother rats (or parent or dam or any other terminology that could be used) being given antidepressants. But there weren’t any. In fact, the rat pups were not given any antidepressant until they’d reached 8 days after birth.

And that seems highly suspicious. What was the purpose of hiding the actual study methods, if not to give a false impression?

The simple fact is that no antidepressants were given to the mothers of any of the rat pups in the experiments, nor were the rat pups at a perinatal stage. Yet, the NIH-NIMH report makes both claims.

How can the NIH and NIMH make claims for antidepressant effects on rat pups of antidepressant dosed mothers, when they didn’t dose the mothers?

How can the NIH and NIMH make claims for antidepressant effects on perinatal rat pups, when they didn’t dose them at that age?

There’s definitely a rat here.

Why Produce Such a Misleading Report?

There are two possible reasons. More people have been resisting vaccinations, especially in children. Yet, the clear policy of the governmental agencies is to push more and more vaccines, even to the point of mandating them. At the same time, they are facing a disaster in their entire approach to mental health. It’s been falsely defined as an issue of biology, one that can be cured through pharmaceutical drugs.

Keeping SSRIs on the Market for Young Children and Pregnant Women

Fairly straight-forward documentation has come out demonstrating that babies of women taking antidepressants are born with deformities and antidepressants are causing a major increase in miscarriages. Zoloft lawyers are fighting against the danger this drug poses when prescribed to pregnant women.The time is coming when it won’t be possible to push antidepressants on pregnant women.

The rat studies done recently clearly demonstrate severe harm to young rats dosed with antidepressants, especially selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). This bodes ill for the massive use of antidepressants in children.

So, if these studies can be spun to acknowledge that SSRIs are dangerous to young rats, but give the impression that it’s only true when given to perinatal rat pups, then it allows the drugging of young children to go on—merely prevents it in pregnant women near to giving birth and newborn babies.

The spin on these studies would allow the continuation of pushing SSRIs on toddlers.

Pointing the Finger at SSRIs As the Cause of Autism

Then, there’s the autism angle. First, let’s take a quick look at some of the damage found by these studies:

Abnormal fear of a new sound.
Less investigation of new objects.
Male rat pups avoided normal juvenile play. Females behaved more normally.
The raphe system in the brain, a major serotonin pathway, had reduced density of neuronal fibers.
Abnormalities were found in the corpus callosum (band of nerve fibers that join the two sides of the brain).
Neurons may have fired out of sync.

These are serious indications of brain damage, and the study demonstrated that the damage persisted into adulthood, thus indicating harm to the life potential of people. However, they described nothing that reaches the level of autism.

The authors tried to tie these effects to autism. However, they were unable to demonstrate that these rat pups had become autistic, so they alluded to it in the study. An entire section, “5-HT Dysfunction and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)”, was dedicated to making a connection between their findings and autism. They suggest that autistic children be investigated for the same findings. But they never demonstrated a sudden decline in functioning, as is experienced by nearly all children as they slide into autism.

They didn’t show that the rat pups were autistic. They demonstrated, quite clearly, that they were brain damaged, and in a way that no one wants to see. In fact, much of what they demonstrated may relate to some of the dysfunction that’s being seen in children today, especially ADHD. However, no rats went into sudden declines. No rats became damaged to the degree that fully autistic children are.

Nonetheless, the spin given to these studies is a clear redirection away from vaccines as the likely cause of autism.

NIH-NIMH Claims: Fraud?

These studies and the NIH-NIMH spin on them seem designed to accomplish two things:

Redirect attention away from vaccines as the cause of autism.
Redirect attention away from the use of antidepressants in young children—towards a younger age that isn’t now being drugged with them—so that it can continue.

The media has been cooperative in the process, simply parroting what the NIH and NIMH state.

The result is nothing less than a crime: the theft of entire lives, their hopes, their joys, their independence, their human relationships, and their health. The agencies that should be protecting us from the predatory pharmaceutical corporations making and profiting from these poisons are, instead, aiding and abetting them in the process.