Sorry I can't seem to get it off center and post it like normal. I
thought this might be useful to the original poster. Thank you Peter for
bringing this to everyone's attention. (this was posted to another board) I
hope this is helpful. UM MOM Susan
http://www.***.com/
Boy dies during autism treatment
Thursday, August 25, 2005
By Karen Kane and {*filter*}ia Linn, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A 5-year-old autistic boy died Tuesday in a Butler County doctor's
office while undergoing an increasingly popular though controversial medical
treatment touted by some as a cure for the lifelong neurological and
developmental disorder.
Abubakar Tariq Nadama died while receiving chelation therapy, an
intravenous injection of a synthetic amino acid that latches onto heavy
metals and is then passed in the urine.
State police at Butler are investigating Nadama's death, which
occurred at about 10:50 a.m. Tuesday in the office of Dr. Roy Eugene Kerry
in Portersville.
Authorities said Kerry's office reported that the child was receiving
an IV treatment for lead poisoning when he went into cardiac arrest.
The boy was being treated with EDTA, or ethylene diamine tetraacetic
acid, which has been approved by the cooking.net">food and Drug Administration for use
only after {*filter*} tests confirm acute heavy-metal poisoning.
Exposure to heavy metals, especially mercury, has been linked by some
researchers as a contributing cause to autism. Removing those metals, they
believe, can improve a child's condition. The theory is a matter of dispute
among scientists and within the autism community.
A family friend said the boy and his mother, Marwa, who are from
England, moved here in the spring, specifically to receive chelation
therapy, and were living in Monroeville.
In the autism community, the use of chelation as a way to detoxify
environmental contaminants in children has exploded since 2000 as more and
more families have reported miraculous improvements and even cures. But
skeptics in the community say they fear the procedure is at best risky and
possibly lethal.
"It was just a matter of time before something like this would
happen," said Howard Carpenter, executive director of the Advisory Board on
Autism-Related Disorders.
"Parents of children with autism are desperate. Some are willing to
try anything," he said.
"I can't sit there and endorse it as a viable treatment. It's not
something published in peer review journals and studies," said Dr. Gary
Swanson, a child psychiatrist at Allegheny General Hospital who works with
autism patients. "It's probably a quack kind of medicine."
If the child's death is tied to chelation therapy, it would be the
first associated with the procedure since the 1950s, said Dr. Ralph Miranda
of Greensburg. Miranda is the former president of the American College for
Advancement in Medicine, a group that sets clinical practice and education
standards for chelation and other, similar therapies.
Chelation can be administered through pills, skin creams or other
transdermal methods, nasal sprays, sauna baths and intravenously. Miranda
said it is unusual to give a young child IV treatments unless he has an
extremely high level of heavy metals.
He said although EDTA is a "very safe drug" he usually administers an
{*filter*}form of chelation {*filter*} to children to remove toxins because pills are
safer. It does, however, take longer to remove the toxins with the pills.
"There are people out there suggesting using the IV to get faster
results. I'm not," he said.
Marwa Nadama said yesterday she did not want to comment except to say
that she is not blaming chelation for her son's death, at least not at this
point.
"Let's wait until we have the results of the autopsy," she said.
An autopsy conducted yesterday on the child's body by the Allegheny
County coroner's office was inconclusive. Results on the cause and manner of
death are pending additional testing which could take up to five months to
complete, authorities said.
Kerry, who is a board-certified physician and surgeon, advertises
himself as an ear, nose and throat specialist, dealing with allergies and
environmental medicine. He operates out of offices in Greenville and
Portersville under the name Advanced Integrative Medicine Center Inc. Kerry
did not return calls to his offices yesterday.
Doctors affiliated with the National Institutes of Mental Health and
American Academy of Pediatrics do not endorse the use of chelation therapy
to remove heavy metals for autism. Such {*filter*} used in the process can cause
liver and kidney damage and other problems.
Cindy Waeltermann, director of the Pittsburgh-based national advocacy
group AutismLink, issued a statement to members yesterday warning that
caution needs to be used as parents seek help for their autistic children.
"Please, before you try any new therapies, we urge you to research the
physician, the methods, and the safety. Some of these therapies are quite
dangerous. We're not telling you what to do, we're just urging you to use
caution. We all do what we think is best for our children, and sometimes we
are desperate. While we've heard stories of chelation success, it is
definitely a dangerous process," Waelterman wrote.
She said parents on her group's online forum have referred to Kerry as
a known practitioner of chelation therapy.
News of the death soared across the autism community yesterday,
alarming proponents and foes of the treatment.
"It's just terrible. My heart is just dying for the family," said J.B.
Handley of San Francisco, who helped found Generation Rescue, an
international advocacy program for the use of biomedical treatments that
include chelation therapy to help autistic children.
He claims his son Jamison, now 3, has dramatically improved since
undergoing chelation therapy to remove mercury, the metal most associated
with autism because of its presence in some childhood vaccines. He and his
wife launched their international group in May.
He said that, in 2000, perhaps a dozen autistic children were treated
with chelation therapy. This year, it's more than 10,000.
titanium implant and chelation