In this month's cover story, Paul Shattock, with Andrew Wakefield and his team, are among a small band of renegades attempting to demonstrate that diseases like autism result from an environmental cause. They are being shouted down by officialdom in the form of the medical profession and the government who continue to maintain that autism is genetic and that what appears to be an epidemic to the uninitiated is simply a result of better diagnoses and reporting facilities.
Let's look at the recent statistics for autism. A decade ago, 350 cases of autism were reported every year in Britain, a total of 5600 cases among British children from one to 16 at any one time. Today, some 10,000 cases have been reported in one British county alone. The National Autistic Society reckons that, nationwide, there are now 518,000 people with a condition somewhere along the autistic spectrum. This translates into nearly one in every 100 people in Britain now getting a disease which, before 1940, was virtually unheard of.
Although an entire spectrum of symptoms is categorised as autistic, it strains credulity to think they wouldn't be noted in some way, as they are today. Autism just isn't one of those conditions you tend to miss.
The virtual explosion in the cases of childhood conditions like autism, attention deficit, learning difficulties, dyslexia and the strange new behaviours like headbanging and rocking now considered common in children all say one thing to the common sense in all of us: there is something basically wrong in what we are doing in bringing up this generation of children.
Let's consider some of the things that have changed. Today's baby is exposed to many live or killed 'weakened' pathogens virtually as soon as he makes his appearance into the world. Each vaccine is a comples brew of components, plus a whole load of other chemicals thimerosal, derived from mercury; formalin, a dilution of formaldehyde, a known carcinogen; aluminium sulphate, a toxic heavy metal; phenol, a disinfectant; ethylene glycol, the main ingredient in antifreeze; benzethonium chloride, an antiseptic; and methylparaben, a preservative and antifungal which help preserve, purify, stabilise and nudge the jabs into working harder. For every child who adheres to the complete vaccination schedule, a variation of this brew will be pumped into his immature system 30 times before his fifth birthday. He'll receive a good number of these before he is two months old.
The child of this generation also faces a virtual plague of strange new chemicals that surround us in our homes, our air, our water, our food indeed, in virtually every product we use in our modern lives.
In a Foresight study, researcher Tuula Tuormaa worked out that every year, nearly half a kilogram of chemicals is released for every man, woman and child in Britain. Something like 350 different man made chemicals have been detected in British tap water.
If Shattock and Co are right and these chemicals do damage the gut, we then throw antibiotics indiscriminately at these children to finish off the job. Antibiotics have long been known to disturb the delicate ecological balance of the intestines.
As a foreshadowing of what's to come, we have the health profiles of the Gulf War vets, also studied intensively by Shattock and his colleagues. These vets were also assaulted with large numbers of vaccines and exposed to multiple pesticide like chemicals. They are a ruined bunch, with a host of puzzling ME like symptoms, themselves often fathering damaged children. Shattock has evidence, largely suppressed by the British and US governments, that huge numbers of vets both here and in America have died or committed suicide.
If Rachel Carson were around to write a sequel to A Silent Spring, I have a feeling that she'd now be writing about the chlling legacy all of us leave the next generation.