A branch of Toronto’s renowned Hospital for Sick Children is being criticized for funding an autism conference whose organizers champion the discredited belief that childhood immunization causes the neurological disorder.
The event – to start on Saturday at the University of Toronto medical sciences building – also includes presentations that some experts are calling unproven science, promoting such alternative treatments for autism as homeopathy and hyperbaric oxygen chambers.
Organized by the American group AutismOne and Austism Canada, the meeting has received $5,000 in funding from SickKids Foundation, the hospital’s fundraising wing.
Blogs designed to expose practitioners of dubious science have railed against the event for the past two months, questioning why a respected health-care institution would offer its support to a group that considers vaccination of children a health risk.
“The name of Sick Kids is worth more to them than the money: it is a stamp of legitimacy,” Scott Gavura, a Toronto pharmacist who runs the Skeptic North blog, said in an interview on Monday.
“Sick Kids hospital has some of the world’s most renowned autism researchers. I suspect most of them would not be thrilled by the fact that SickKids Foundation is supporting this conference.”
Carole Duncan, a spokeswoman for the foundation, said the grant was awarded in May after Autism Canada submitted a detailed application.
“From our perspective, Autism Canada is a reputable organization doing excellent advocacy work in Canada,” said Ms. Duncan in an emailed response.
“Based on our experience in working with Autism Canada, their grant application and their reputation, we have no reason to believe the grant is being used for anything other than providing a respectful forum for parents, therapists, doctors, researchers and individuals with autism spectrum disorder.”
In an email sent to Mr. Gavura and others who asked about the grant decision, the Foundation also indicated that it takes a “neutral stance” on alternative and complementary health care for children, and has a history of funding it.
The event’s organizers were not available for comment yesterday.
AutismOne, one of the co-hosts, is a U.S. group whose website states prominently that “autism is caused by too many vaccines given too soon.” The vaccine-autism connection was first promoted in a small 1998 study, but several “large and well-conducted” studies have since unearthed no evidence to support the notion, said Dr. Susan Bryson, a clinical psychologist and autism expert at Dalhousie University.
Dr. Bryson said she did not know enough about the conference to comment directly on the funding decision, but voiced skepticism about at least two of the presentations. One supports the idea of treating autistic children with hyperbaric therapy, where the patient is put inside a locked chamber and delivered a high concentration of oxygen.
Though approved for treatment of problems such as gas bubbles in the blood stream and carbon-monoxide poisoning, there is no evidence it helps autistic children, said Dr. Bryson. She said she reviewed the last study published on the therapy for autism and found it to be “very poorly conducted.”
Another presentation promotes treating the disorder with homeopathy, which uses heavily diluted solutions of miniscule amounts of substances like arsenic. There is little evidence to support its effectiveness in treating any condition, says the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Dr. Bryson said she is unaware of any research supporting its use in autism.
She said it would be wrong to “censor” any new or unusual idea for treating autism, but argued such theories must be examined with scientific rigour, not accepted on limited evidence.
Dr. Stephen Scherer, an autism researcher at Sick Kids Hospital, said he also did not know enough about the conference to comment on it. He did note, however, that one of the presenters was Dr. Evdokia Anagnostou, a “serious” and science-based autism researcher at Toronto’s Bloorview Research Institute.
The keynote speaker is Dr. Martha Herbert, a Harvard Medical School neurology professor, and a medical advisor to the Autism Society of America. When she testified in support of the 2006 lawsuit of a woman who claimed her daughter had contracted autism through mould in an apartment, however, the Massachusetts Superior Court judge rejected her testimony. Her study method appeared to be “a series of deductions based on possibilities, together with a process of elimination,” concluded Justice Judith Fabricant.
“Clearly, Dr. Herbert’s method is not generally accepted in the scientific community,” she said. “Dr. Herbert’s theory of environmental triggers of autism may some day prove true. It has not yet.”
National Post
tblackwell@nationalpost.com
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