There's anew science that may finally be up to the task of explaining autism's causes.  What scientists are discovering is what we do today may not only affect our health and future, but also children and our children's children.

Standing on a soap box and callingout, "It's Thimerosal, it's Vaccines, it's Pesticides, it's Mercury fromcoal burning power plants," without the "Evidence of Harm" toback up such accusations only causes our cries to fall on deaf ears anddiscredit our position. Especially when the Parma companies, politicians andindustry leaders lay back on their laurels and say "There is no conclusiveevidence." Fortunately that's all that is about to change.  

Up until now every theoryattempting to connect toxins like thimerosal, pesticides and methylmercury fromcoal burning power plants have always run into a conundrum. When thimerosal wasfinally removed from infant vaccines one would think there would at least be aleveling off of autism, but just a week ago, the incidence rate of autism increasedfrom 1 in 150 children to 1 in 100 and from 1 in 94 boys to 1 in about 66. Therate is still climbing exponentially. When we call out the pesticide and coalburning power plant companies, they say "show me the evidence," andmany times when blood tests are run on our children there are no elevated levelsof these suspect compounds. Even when scientists have shown increased rates ofautism is directly correlated to proximity of the pesticide ridden fields orcoal burning power plants, it's only been relegated as "coincidence."

So where is the "evidence ofharm?" Where is the bridge that can finally be built to connect suspectcompounds like thimerosal, pesticides and mercury from power plants?  How do we prove that subtle poisoning overgenerations is finally pushing our genetic material beyond its limits when ourhard DNA strands show no damage and our blood samples come back clean?

Enter the new science ofepigenetics. Our understanding of static genetics,biology, the environment and how they interact is quickly changing. Epigeneticscience is proving to be the very bridge we are looking for. In 2001 themapping of the human genome was thought to solve all of life’s mysteries.Scientists imagined once they had the book of life, they could then comparedisease to genetic codes – change the codes back to where they belonged andcure it. But they soon discovered that disease still reared its head withoutany gene mutation. It was particularly evident in identical twins developingprofoundly different diseases. Schizophrenia, autism or cancer would afflictone twin while the other was unaffected. This left the scientists scratchingtheir heads after their genetic codes were proven identical. So what was goingon? 

When youthink about the fact that every cell in your body carries your full geneticcode, how do your skin cells know to only become more skin cells? What’sprogramming them to only use (or express) the genes needed to create that cell?Triggers outside the entire gene strand that individually express or suppressthem have been discovered. The gene’s expression is known as methylation. Thisis the cornerstone of epigenetic science. It’s a tough concept, but I think ofit like this. Imagine a grand piano as a cell. Each string on the pianorepresents a single gene on the DNA strand. Each key (or gene) is designed toexpress a specific note if triggered or make no sound if untouched or (suppressed).Now imagine a pianist sitting before the keyboard – he is the epigeneticexpresser. He begins to play a beautiful song, hitting each key (or gene) releasingits code. He composes a perfect melodic body of sound. He can even play thekeys soft to partially express the gene. One set of keys expressed in a certainorder create a skin cell. Another set of keys played represent nerve cells. Onecan close their eyes to the beauty as the soothing cacophony of notes gel inperfect unison to make a whole. But then the Pianist (or epigenetic trigger)gets disturbed by a fly buzzing around his ear or a cough from the audience(the environment) and he hits the wrong key (expresses the wrong gene.) Thewrong note rings sour changing the entire melody or in this case, cause a nervecell to not form and function properly. The body of music or physical nervecell is no longer in tune. Simply having the notes misplayed can have asdramatic effect as a broken piano string.

A genemutation would be equated to a snapped piano wire. What has been so elusive toscientists in the past is that the piano (or genes) were not damaged, making itimpossible to explain why things were going wrong. What they realize now iserrors in gene programming can cause as dramatic and cataclysmic physicalproblems in the body as hard gene mutation.

So what’schanged over the last sixty years to cause the diagnosis of ASD to growexponentially? What scientists are proving is the epigenome system is much moresensitive to environmental factors than the hard genes. Even though the genesaren’t mutated, profound adverse affects can still occur not only on theindividual, but to our dismay, can also effect many future generations down theline in ways scientists never imagined. Over a person's life time,environmental factors alter our epigenetic programming. What’s worse yet issome of these epigenetic mutations can be passed down to future generations. Itused to be believed that the epigenetic changes that took place over a person'slifetime were not passed down, but that's been proven untrue in manyexperiments.  For instance, MichaelSkinner, a professor of molecular biosciences at Washington State Universityand his team described how they exposed rats to a pesticide and documented theill effects. Not surprisingly, increased cancer and neurological disorders weredocumented in about 85% of the rats. They were checked for any gene damage andthere was none. I repeat – no hard genetic damage.

Here’s the most frighteningdiscovery. As they were bred, the percentage of offspring affected with thesame ailments continued at the same rate four generations later. Even though there was no genetic damage ordirect contact with pesticide, the offspring four generations down the linebehaved as if they had been directly poisoned. Digging for moreinformation, they found altered DNA methylation of certain genes. (Now correlate this finding to our exposure to pesticidessince the 1940's, thimerosal since the 1920's and methylmercury from coalburning power plants over the last few generations and you can see why it’sbeen so hard to find ‘direct causal effect’.) The minute exposure and subtlepoisoning began generations ago.

Discoveringthe rats passing down epigenetic mutations is called genomic imprinting.Indeed, much of the research today illustrates the genetic anomalies associatedwith autism are improper gene expression that was passed down from parents. Inother words the genetic mutations associated with autism are for the most partepigenetic. The piano is whole and intact, but the pianist has lost his abilityto play the tune correctly. This helps explain why trying to find the ‘damagedgene’s’ has been so elusive to scientist. The genes are not broken; they’resimply the victim of improper expression or suppression.

Epigeneticsties together the elusive gap of “causal relationship” of methylmercury,thimerosal and pesticides when it comes to connecting it to our children. Asthis and other startling experiments illustrate that epigenetic changes mayendure for at least four subsequent generations presents the argument that solong as thimerosal laced flu vaccines are pumped into our bodies in adulthood,each vaccination chips away at our epigenetic programming and only increasesthe chances of passing down neurological maladies. (Thimerosal is still lacedin vaccination and flu shots for children ages five and up.) The older we getthe more damage our epigenetic code endures and the greater chance we have atpassing down maladies that will profoundly affect a newborn even though he orshe has never been directly exposed to the toxins.

Our sheet music of life isnaturally altered as we grow older; however, compounds like thimerosal,pesticides and methylmercury are shredding it beyond repair. Epigenetic expressionis designed to be malleable to allow an organism’s quick adaptation for survivalso it can endure rapid environmental changes. What nature hasn’t prepared foris the unnatural super toxic manmade neurotoxins that have disseminated intoour environment over the past handful of generations. The terrifying specterthis raises is these elements are wreaking havoc not only on us, but on ourchildren and possibly for generations to come. 

 Epigenetic science provides the onlycomprehensive picture that ties together many of the ‘loose ends’ that theseparate theories of autism could not answer:

1.) Why it has it been sodifficult for scientist to pin down the genes that cause autism? The geneshave not mutated, therefore the scientist are missing what’s really happening.Only when they looked into gene methylation did they start to see many ‘hotspots’ correlating to autism.

2.) Why are some children‘born’ with autistic symptoms before being vaccinated? The damagedepigenetic code inherited from the parents is expressed in a newborn.

3.) Why are children bornwith neurological disorders, yet don’t show elevated levels of mercury orpesticides in their system? Their epigenetic code was already altered bythe parents grandparent or even great grandparents before they were born. This isperhaps the most profound bridge that has eluded proponents of thimerosal andother environmental poisons from proving causal relationship. No one knew theseheavy metals and other toxins could leave DNA intact, yet still wreak havocdown a multigenerational level as proven with recent experiments.

4.) Why are older couples aremore prone to sire autistic children? The longer we live, the more ourepigenetic code is assaulted by adult thimerosal laced flu shots, pesticides,methylmercury, smoke and all the other every day environmental hazards of life.Furthermore, this presents an excellent argument to rid ALL vaccines ofthimerosal. Even though our adult bodies can tolerate thimerosal in fluvaccines and such, we are damaging our epigenetic code for our futuregenerations.

There may be some questions thatI’ll try to answer: If epigenetics istrue, is there research to being done to reprogram epigenetic malfunctions?Yes, as a matter of fact there is and it mostly is in the realm of cancerresearch. In essence epigenetic therapy is to not kill the cancer cells, but tobe more subtle. The idea is to correct the expression or suppression of thegenes to get the cancer cells to behave as they were originally programmed. Tosay, ‘hey you’re not a cancer cell,’ and remind it to be the lung cell it wassupposed to be. This is wonderful for the treatment of cancer because it wouldspare the person the poisonous remedy and horrendous side effects ofchemotherapy. 

Isthere any success in this research? Yes. It is very preliminary, but thereare tests with some very positive results. Take MDS, cancer of the blood andbone marrow. It is a type of leukemia. There was no known cure and peoplediagnosed with the disease were typically given only a few months to live. Anexperimental drug was administered with the idea to correct the epigeneticexpression of tumor suppressing genes. It was believed that over the course oflife that the tumor suppressor gene was accidentally turned off or suppressed.The drug was designed to turn it back on. In nearly 50% of the patients thedisease completely disappeared after administering the drug. This is an immensebreak though since previous mortality rates were 100%. It’s obvious thatepigenetic science is not simply theory or conjecture. It is working science.

Isthere any research looking to correct the improper DNA methylation in autisticchildren? Not that I'm aware of. To me, the problem with taking thisapproach towards "curing" autism is trying to do it the hard way. Aswe are seeing, autism has an infinite amount of variables in how individuals areaffected. And as scientists delve deeper into discovering which genes areimproperly expressed, they're finding this task to be laced with infinitevariables. The toxic compounds mixed and exposed to us in variable amounts overgenerations on something so complicated as our epigenetic system has thepropensity for an infinite amount epigenetic mutations. Trying to find everysingle malady and individually chemically repair it is a road we've been forcedto take, but it's ass backwards. I have an idea, let's take a stronger approachto not expose ourselves to the chemicals in the first place. Scientist can tryto chemically fix the three legged frogs in the polluted pond, but we're stillgoing to keep getting deformed frogs so long as they're still swimming in atoxic soup. Once we prove causal relationship to certain chemicals and autismwe can begin to really get to the heart of stopping it by cleaning up thechemicals that are causing it in the first place.

So is any amount of toxic exposure safe?

The Federal Government hasstandardized what it perceives as a ‘tolerable or safe level’ of mercury andpesticide exposure and they still have not removed thimerosal from adultvaccines.  But at that time they had nounderstanding of epigenetic accumulation, environmentally induced epigeneticalterations nor how parental epigenetic mutation can be passed down tochildren. The revelations in epigenetic science illustrates there will never bea safe or tolerable level of these toxins.

Methylmercury, pesticides, andthimerosal are much like the deadly gases in the coal mines. They’re silent,odorless and invisible – especially when their effects are epigeneticallypassed down to our children. They have insidiously poisoned the minds of ourhelpless children without leaving behind a telltale trail of genetic mutationsor toxic chemical/heavy metal signatures in the bloodstream that everyone waslooking for. The causal relation of these neurotoxins to autism has beenelusive, but our eyes are now open, at least for some. I imagine sooncontrolled lab tests will reveal how minute amounts of pesticides, thimerosaland alike will directly affect specific gene expression. These results can thenbe compared to expression in afflicted children and the evidence will becomeundeniable.

 This is a manmade catastrophe and only man can turn this around. Butperhaps the most frightening revelation of epigenetic science is that even ifwidespread environmental changes were immediately instituted, it may takegenerations before the tsunami of autism will ebb.

Formore information on Epigenetics, the DVD documentary by NOVA called: Ghost In Your Genes is a greatresource.  Other articles of interest maybe: Environmentalmercury release, special education rates, and autism disorder: an ecologicalstudy of Texas. 

Visit:  http://www.generationrescue.org/pdf/seed.pdf

California study draws possible linkbetween pesticides, autism

Visit:www.nctimes.com/lifestyles/health-med-fit/article_7df7cae6-7330-58d2-91fb-1a4cc66781e1.html

Epigenetics of autism spectrum disordersHumanMolecularGenetics200615(ReviewIssue2):R138R150;doi:10.1093/hmg/ddl213)http://hmg.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/15/suppl_2/R138