On March 8, 2009 we interviewed Dr. Paul Stehr-Green in Port Angeles, Washington.  Dr. Stehr-Green worked as an Epidemiologist for the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for 13 years, working in chronic diseases, environmental health, and had a major focus in vaccine-preventable diseases.

For those of you who do not know what Epidemiology is, to put it in very simple terms it is the use of population based studies to help identify patterns, causes, and control of diseases and/or epidemics.  This branch of Science has really been the major focus of the CDC in trying to evaluate and determine if the mercury based preservative thimerosal has played any role in neurological problems in children, including Autism.

Dr. Stehr-Green was the lead on one of the population based studies in which the conclusion indicated no association between Thimerosal and Autism.  The name of the study was ‘Autism and thimerosal-containing vaccines: lack of consistent evidence for an association’.  This study compared the prevalence/incidence of autism in California, Sweden, and Denmark with average exposures to thimerosal-containing vaccines.  We discussed this study with him in detail, however you will have to wait for future blog videos to see what he has to say about it. 

This blog video focuses specifically on what has become the very controversial Simpsonwood Conference.  This conference was held about 45 minutes outside of  Atlanta Georgia in June of 2000, and was called by the CDC to address concerns of some preliminary data from a study that was being headed by another CDC Epidemiologist named Dr. Thomas Verstraeten, who had been analyzing the CDC’s massive Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).  This database contained the medical records of hundreds of thousands of children, and he was analyzing this data specifically in relation to exposures to thimerosal, and whether or not it was playing any role in the significant increase of neurological problems in children.  His preliminary findings were alarming enough for the CDC to call this conference with high level officials from the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the World Health Organization (WHO), and many other experts in this field such as Vaccine Makers.  Dr. Stehr-Green was invited by the CDC to be one of the expert panel members involved in the discussions and analysis, and he was also chosen to be the one responsible for finalizing and distributing the conclusion at the end of the conference.  The major focus of this conference was to analyze and critique Dr. Verstraeten’s preliminary findings in order to ensure his methods and interpretations did not have any flaws, errors, inaccuracies, etc.  It was also to determine if further studies should be performed specifically in relation to the vaccine preservative thimerosal and neurological harm in children.          

This conference would go on to become very controversial given the fact that the CDC did not announce this conference to the public, the conference was held in a very remote and almost hidden location, and the presentation of Dr. Verstraeten’s final version of his study a few years later completely dismissed any relation between thimerosal and neurological conditions in children, after it had first showed a significant relation.  To make matters worse, Dr. Verstraeten’s preliminary data has since been lost and is unavailable for anyone to look at, and almost immediately afterward he went to work for GlaxoSmithKline, a major Vaccine Manufacturer who uses thimerosal.  To this day the Verstraeten Study remains a major piece of the Science the CDC uses to claim thimerosal has been ruled out as a potential cause of Autism.    

It was great to finally talk to someone who was actually at the Simpsonwood Conference to get an inside perspective.  I found Dr. Stehr-Green to be very open minded and objective about this subject as a whole, and I really appreciated him taking the time to talk about such an important subject.  I think you will find what he has to say very interesting.        

   
Logged by:  Eric Gladen on January 15th, 2010