Carolyn Maloney is the congressional Chairwoman.
00:00. I want to compliment Congressman Burton for his leadership he's not here now for being the chairman of this committee for such a fine job but you really focused on this and I think you've made some progress and I want to thank you for your leadership on this issue and on so many others and express my gratitude to you and how much I've enjoyed working with you.
00:25. Now the numbers that he pointed out earlier that it used to be one in 10,000 kids got autism is now 1 in 88. And I'd like to ask Dr. Colleen Boyle, why? and I don't want to hear that we have better detection. We have better detection but detection would not account for a jump from one in 10,000 to 1 in 88 that is a huge huge huge jump what other factors could be part of making that happen besides better detection take better detection off the table I agree we have better detection but it doesn't account for those numbers.
01:05. Dr. Colleen Boyle, Director, National Center on Birth Defects and
Developmental Disabilities. So just to put in context, better detection is accounting for some of that. Our surveillance program counts cases of autism and establishes the prevalence. It doesn't tell us all the answers to the questions as to why. We are doing a number of studies to try to understand the why, and one of the things that we've looked at we've tried to look at what's changed in the environment of things that we know are risk factors for autism things like pre-term birth, birth weight, various . . .
01:40. Are you looking at vaccinations? Is that part of your study?
01:48. So there is a large literature as I mentioned before . . .
01:51. Are you having a study on vaccinations and the fact that they are cramming them down and having kids have 9 at one time? Is that a cause . . . do you have any studies on vaccinations?
02:02. There have been a number of studies done by the CDC on vaccination . . .
02:06. Could you send them to the ranking member and the Chairman here? Now I want to tell you a story. We all react to our lives, and I remember people talking about hormone replacement. It's going to save women's lives. You've got to take it. Every nurse I'd talked to said go to the bank. It causes cancer. Every relative that got cancer said they got it because of the hormone replacement.. I'm hearing the same kinds of stories of vaccination. I must have had 50 different parents write me or come to me and say, "I had a healthy child, yet then they had 10, 9, or 6 vaccinations at one time and that child changed overnight and was knocking their head on the wall, and it was a changed child." In fact, I had a family in my office today where the mother broke down crying, saying, "My child was wonderful, bright, precocious, talking. She took those vaccinations and the child became very incredibly sick and has never recovered. So I'm interested in any studies on vaccinations in trying to understand that. Now it used to be that you'd go and get a vaccination. Now my child never got more than three at a time. And in the state of New York, children are recommended to get 6 shots every 2 months throughout the first year of a child's life. And my question is why does the schedule of these vaccinations require a child to receive so many shots in such a short period of time? That you could plan those shots over a period of time. I'm for vaccinations. They prevent disease. I'm totally for it, but why do you have to cram 9 . . . 6 at one time when the verbal evidence seems so strong from so many people that they had a healthy child until they got vaccinated? And you've got to just listen. I remember smoking. I was on the city council. I sat through so many hearings where they vowed that smoking was not bad for your health. It's a common sense that it is bad for your health. And then finally the Surgeon General said that it was bad for your health. And the same thing seems to be here with the vaccinations. There's just too much verbal evidence coming from parents where they break down, "I had a normal child. I gave him a vaccination, and they came down with autism." So it seems to me that we should . . . I would start spacing it out. Why do we have to have 9 vaccinations . . . 6 vaccinations every 2 months? Why can't we do it over two or three years and space it and wait for the scientific evidence or whatever? May she answer that question?
05:06. Sure, there is a Federal Advisory Committee that determines the vaccination schedule, and the reasons and again we will clarify this and get you more information, but the reason they cluster the vaccines is really to try to make sure that everyone gets it and people don't and again we're trying to make sure vaccines go to all children and not everybody goes to the doctor routinely. So they they use that opportunity to make sure that happens . . . .
