Dan Olmsted

Dan Olmsted is an investigative reporter and senior editor for United Press International (UPI), and wrote The Age of Autism report series about autism. His columns on health and medicine appeared regularly in the Washington Times and were syndicated nationally from UPI's Washington D.C. bureau.

The Age of Autism
From January 2005 through July 2007, Olmsted wrote about his investigative findings concerning the possibility that autism's incidence rate has risen throughout the United States and elsewhere in a series of columns titled The Age of Autism. Though most mainstream experts think autism is a genetic disorder and that reported increases are due to changes in diagnostic practices, Olmsted thinks the increases are due to environmental factors and that the genetics is mostly secondary.

By April, 2005, Olmsted had begun searching for children who had not been exposed to mercury in vaccines, the kind of population that scientists typically use as a 'control' in experiments. Because of the unlikelihood of finding a large enough group of unvaccinated children to compare with those who have been vaccinated, Olmsted learned, government medical officials have not yet conducted an epidemiological study with such a control group &mdash; despite the urging of many parents and some medical professionals who suspect a link between autism and vaccines. While the federal government has worked to prevent scientists from studying the adverse effects of vaccines, recommending research dollars should be spent elsewhere, journalists like Olmsted and others have stepped in to study the link to autism.

Olmsted looked for such a group that might establish demonstrative evidence of whether a link exists, and caught wind of scattered reports that autism was virtually unheard of among the Amish, prompting him to begin investigating what has come to be known as the 'Amish anomaly'. The Amish rarely vaccinate children, and Olmsted found a family doctor in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, who had treated thousands of Amish patients. The doctor indicated he had never seen an Amish person with autism. Based on the national rate of autism, Olmsted determined there should be 130 Amish children with autistic syndrome around Lancaster County. After an exhaustive search, he found four. One had been exposed to high levels of mercury from a power plant and the others had been vaccinated.

Olmsted then traveled to Amish communities in Ohio and Indiana, with similar results. In the Amish community around Middlefield, Ohio, the autism rate was one in 15,000, according to the medical director at a clinic for special needs children there. In contrast, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has estimated the nationwide prevalence rate at one in 166.

Olmsted later discovered another large unvaccinated group, thousands of children cared for by Homefirst Health Services in and around Chicago, Illinois; according to Homefirst doctors, none of these children has autism. "We have about 30,000 or 35,000 children that we've taken care of over the years, and I don't think we have a single case of autism in children delivered by us who never received vaccines," said Homefirst's medical director, Dr. Mayer Eisenstein.

Congressional action
Citing Olmsted's The Age of Autism reports, on March 30, 2006, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (NY) announced that she is drafting legislation calling for scientific studies into the possible link between autism and thimerosal containing vaccines (TCVs), in which ethylmercury is used as a preservative. . The bill was to be introduced in the U. S. House of Representatives in April 2006, after gleaning further input from her constituents and researchers. Maloney made the announcement at a National Press Club press conference in Washington, D.C., along with Olmsted and David Kirby, whose book Evidence of Harm has drawn much attention to the possible mercury-autism link.

If successful, Maloney's bill would mandate that research be conducted by the federal government that would compare the incidence of autism in the general population with its incidence in a control group, drawn from populations which remain unvaccinated for religious or personal beliefs.

Criticism
In a critical assessment by the Columbia Journalism Review of the thimerosal controversy, Olmsted's reporting on unvaccinated populations has been characterized as "misguided" by two anonymous reporters. Both sources "believed that Olmsted has made up his mind on the question and is reporting the facts that support his conclusions".

A 2006 study demonstrated a genetically determined syndrome that some have claimed deomsntrated symptoms of autism and [[mental retardation] in the Old Older Amish population. Olmsted's critics have suggested that he missed this population of autistic Amish children. But in fact, Olmsted repeatedly asked to interview Morton, the senior author on this study and was rebuffed. The Amish patients recruited for this study were not diagnosed autistic and were almost certainly vaccinated, most likely by Morton himself.