Parents of autistic children are appearing in a Toronto court Friday to try force the Ontario government to pay for their children's treatment.
The parents are currently being forced to pay for the therapy out of their own pockets, often at a cost of thousands of dollars.
Five families are part of the group that launched a $1.25-billion lawsuit. They claim that seven school boards and the government have discriminated against their children and denied them a public education by failing to provide access to specialized treatment in school.
David Baker, a lawyer representing the families, argued in court Thursday that families are being forced to choose between sending their autistic children to school or paying for costly intensive behavioural intervention therapy.
Private therapy costs between $30,000 and $80,000 a year for one child.
'Just another Band-Aid solution': parent
The lawsuit marks the latest battle between parents of autistic children and the province.
Last July, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled the province does not have to pay for costly specialized autism treatment for children ages six and older.
Since the ruling, the government has said it will provide funding to treat autistic children over six years of age if an assessment shows they are in need.
Two weeks ago, Ontario promised to boost spending on a program to provide therapy by $13 million, increasing total spending on autism to $115 million a year."
Mary Ellen Egan 04.09.07
The recent spike in autism diagnoses has school districts spending ever more time and money fending off special ed disputes.
Steven Wyner spends the bulk of his days sitting behind his 14-foot-long custom-made desk fielding calls from anxious parents. Twelve years earlier he left his lucrative career as a tax attorney to practice special education law. He had grown attracted to the specialty after fighting for his learning-disabled child. He worked out of his home for a couple of years, but as he won case after case against southern California school districts, he could afford to move out of his home office and partner with another lawyer.
Two years ago Wyner hit the jackpot. He'd represented a grade-school autistic student who sued the Manhattan Beach Unified School District and the California Department of Education for failing to provide him with an appropriate education, including extra reading instruction. In August 2005, after six years of legal wrangling, the parties agreed to a $6.7 million settlement, including $2.4 million for a family trust. Wyner's firm took home $1.6 million. He now has a partner, two lawyers and three paralegals and says he has more business than he can handle.
The number of kids diagnosed as autistic has risen from 1 in 2,500 in the 1980s to 1 in 150 now. Why? Various environmental influences have been offered up as possible causes, but the evidence for these theories is thin. Dr. Edward Ritvo, professor emeritus at UCLA's medical school and one of the psychiatrists who wrote the original definition of autism for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, explains the phenomenon in a very different way. "Two things have happened," he says. "We've broadened the definition of autism, and we have a whole cadre of people looking for these kids." The broader definition includes kids with Asperger's syndrome, which means they are socially maladroit. The narrower definition has the ones unable to function in jobs or school at all.
Whatever the cause, the explosion in autism diagnoses has been a boon to lawyers who represent parents dissatisfied with the level of education their autistic kids are getting. Usually well-off, these parents don't hesitate to hire a lawyer to seek extra services or private school tuition. New York City's education department hired ten additional lawyers to focus on disputes over special ed, including the education of autistic students. In Los Angeles, which has seen a sixfold increase in autistic children in the last three years, the bill to reimburse parents' attorneys came to $3.3 million last year.
Little wonder that lawyers are moving into the field. "It's one of the fastest-growing segments of the law," says Diane Pappas, associate general counsel for the Los Angeles school district. "In the late 1990s we had only about 10 or 12 firms that dealt with special education, and now it's over 70."
The suits arise out of a 1975 federal law declaring that every child is entitled to a "free, appropriate education," regardless of ability. That means that kids with learning problems such as dyslexia, speech difficulties or autism are entitled to have their public school systems pay for special services.
So, what's "appropriate"? With help from a lawyer, a school district might be persuaded to pay for one-on-one behavioral therapy, afterschool programs, an individual classroom aide or even horseback riding. And if the public schools aren't doing enough, the parents might send a child to a private school and send the bill to the school district. In New York, sending a child to a private school for autistic children can cost up to $100,000 per year.
In 2004 the autistic daughter of Marvin and Suzette Josif, then 4 years old, was accepted at the New York Child Learning Institute, a private school in Queens, N.Y. "They only take 25 students, and they can stay in the school until they are 21 years old, so it was like winning the lottery," says Suzette Josif.
It was rather like that. After initially insisting that the Josifs' daughter would get an appropriate education in a city special-ed class, the New York City Department of Education and the state were persuaded to cough up the $50,000 in annual tuition for the private school. The private, but not the public, school provides an intense form of therapy known as applied behavior analysis. "It cost us a fortune and a tremendous amount of time to fight this," says Suzette Josif. "But I knew that with the right program and the right teachers, she will succeed."
Steven Wyner's client, Deborah Porter, asked the Manhattan Beach district (south of Santa Monica) to give her fourth-grade son extra reading instruction and work on his socializing skills. (He would later be diagnosed with autism.) She won an administrative ruling requiring the district to provide them. But a year later, after the district failed to act, she sued Manhattan Beach in federal court. Five years later Porter, the district and the California Department of Education settled the case for $6.7 million. "No amount of money can compensate for the school district's deliberate failure to provide an appropriate education at a crucial point in our son's life," she says.
Parents can make their own cases for special treatment but usually hire lawyers if they are going after a big-ticket item like private school tuition. A typical fee is $3,000 for a case settled prior to a hearing and between $5,000 and $15,000 if it goes to a hearing. In New York City the number of hearing requests for all special-education disputes (autism cases are not separately tabulated) has jumped by a third since 2000, to 4,794 in 2006. Under the federal law parents can recover attorney fees from their school district if they win hearings, but not if they settle.
"When you have more kids diagnosed with certain disabilities, you see more suits," says Neal McCluskey, an education analyst with the Cato (nyse: CTR - news - people ) Institute, a think tank. McCluskey likens the recent rise in autism cases to the spike in attention deficit disorder ten years ago. "Better-off parents are savvy enough to learn how to work the system. They find the doctors to make these diagnoses, and they can afford to hire attorneys to challenge the districts," he says.
The Josifs hired Neal Rosenberg, a Manhattan lawyer. Another of his clients is Thomas Freston, founder of MTV, who received $60 million in severance when he left the network last year. Freston is contesting a federal law that says that a child has to attend a public school first before a parent can sue for private school tuition reimbursement. New York City paid for part of two years at a private school for Freston's son, who is learning disabled. Freston is seeking full payment for three years of partial tuition, at $25,000 each. Freston won a federal appeals court decision, and now the city is appealing to the Supreme Court. "This isn't a financial issue, it's a moral one," says Rosenberg."
WASHINGTON, June 4 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The first test case of approximately 4800 claims that vaccines caused autism goes to federal court June 11th. Cedillo v. HHS will be heard by three special masters, part of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, established under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP).
Parents filed the claims after their children regressed into a diagnosis of autism following multiple rounds of vaccines, many of which were preserved with amounts of mercury that exceeded EPA guidelines.
Thimerosal's inclusion as a vaccine component increased in the early 90's, its rise mirroring the alarming rise in autism. Parents note their children's symptoms of autism mimic mercury poisoning and many autistic children are now being successfully treated for mercury poisoning and damaged immune systems.
Earlier today, Ann Brasher, Board Member of the National Autism Association (NAA) stated, "I believe that NVICP will not provide the specialized medical care necessary for autistic children despite a favorable ruling for the plaintiffs. But the overwhelming evidence needs to be explored. The public deserves to know all the facts and the truth behind them." Parents cite fatal flaws in the NVICP including:
- Families are forced to sue the government, which has no incentive to settle and can drag out cases for years while children go untreated. - Unlike civil court, there is no right to discovery in vaccine court and no jury trial. - The master denied access to vaccine company documents and CDC/HMO vaccine database records that would be routinely available in civil court. - Tax payers end up paying for pharmaceutical mistakes. No other industry is allowed unparalleled protection in a "Free Market" economy. - The massively profitable vaccine industry is not held liable, therefore has no incentive to create safe vaccines.
Several families who have waited years for justice and are willing to share stories of their children's regression will be available for interviews during the hearings. For contact information, please write to
and last source:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/06/03/at_risk_vaccines/
"No single medical advance has had a greater impact on human health than vaccines. Before vaccines, Americans could expect that every year measles would infect four million children and kill 3,000; diphtheria would kill 15,000 people, mostly teenagers; rubella (German measles) would cause 20,000 babies to be born blind, deaf, or mentally retarded; pertussis would kill 8,000 children, most of whom were less than one year old; and polio would paralyze 15,000 children and kill 1,000.
Because of vaccines all of these diseases have been completely or virtually eliminated from the United States. Smallpox -- a disease estimated to have killed 500 million people -- was eradicated from the face of the earth by vaccines. And we're not finished; vaccines stand as our only chance to prevent pandemic influenza, AIDS, and bioterror, and our best chance to prevent certain cancers.
Now, massive litigation could force companies to leave the vaccine business, threatening the future of one of medicine's greatest achievements. On June 11, in an unprecedented action before a federal claims court, lawyers for 4,800 autistic children will argue that vaccines caused autism. If successful, these claims could exhaust the pool of money currently set aside to compensate children who have been hurt by vaccines. Further, lawyers will likely take their claims that vaccines cause autism to civil court, where awards could be enormous.
"I don't want to see the drug companies go out of business," said David Kirby, author of the book "Evidence of Harm," speaking on Imus in the Morning in April 2005. But "we are looking at trillions and trillions of dollars of care for these people."
Predictions of massive awards, and dire warnings about the fate of vaccines, may seem over-dramatic. But vaccines were the first medical product that came close to being eliminated by lawsuits.
In 1974 a British researcher named John Wilson published a paper claiming that the whooping cough (pertussis) vaccine caused permanent brain damage. Wilson reported the stories of 22 children who suffered from epilepsy or mental retardation following vaccination. The British media hailed Wilson's report as fact and the percentage of children immunized dropped from 80 to 30. During the next few years, 300,000 children in England were hospitalized and 70 killed by pertussis.
By the late 1970s fears of pertussis vaccine had spread to the United States. Before jurors persuaded more by emotional appeals than by science, lawyers successfully claimed that the pertussis vaccine caused sudden infant death syndrome (later found to be associated with sleep position), Reye's syndrome (later found to be associated with aspirin), unexplained coma, paralysis, mental retardation, and epilepsy.
Seven companies stopped making the vaccine; within a few years only one, Lederle Laboratories, remained. Lederle was punished for its persistence. In 1986 a jury awarded $1.13 million to parents claiming that Lederle's pertussis vaccine had paralyzed their son -- an award that was more than half of the annual sales of the vaccine. Subsequent studies of hundreds of thousands of children showed that the risk of permanent brain damage was the same in children who had not received the vaccine as in those who had
Facing further litigation, vaccine makers were poised to leave the business. To save vaccines, the federal government stepped in, creating in 1986 the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. Designed to put an end to unfounded lawsuits, the act included the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Now, if parents want to sue for damages caused by vaccines, they first have to go through a federal claims court.
This "vaccine court" established a list of compensable injuries and lessened frivolous litigation. Children actually hurt by vaccines -- such as those paralyzed by the oral polio vaccine or those with severe allergic reactions to egg proteins in the influenza vaccine -- were compensated quickly, generously, and fairly. On the other hand, people whose claims had been disproved by epidemiological evidence -- such as those claiming that the hepatitis B vaccine caused multiple sclerosis -- weren't compensated. The bleeding stopped.
Unfortunately, the legacy of the pertussis litigation remains. Many pharmaceutical companies that abandoned vaccines never came back. At the beginning of the 1980s, 18 companies made vaccines; by the end of the decade, only four were left.
The infrastructure to make vaccines became tenuous, and vaccine shortages became commonplace. For example, in 1998, the tetanus vaccine was in such short supply that its use was restricted to emergency rooms. Beginning in 2000, a pneumococcal vaccine for children -- designed to prevent bloodstream infections, meningitis, and a common cause of pneumonia -- was available only intermittently; parents could only hope that their children weren't among the thousands permanently harmed or killed every year by pneumococcus.
Between 2003 and 2004 an influenza epidemic created a demand that dramatically exceeded supply; more than 150 children died that year from influenza. Since 1996 severe shortages have occurred for 10 of the 16 vaccines routinely given to children and adolescents. All of these shortages resulted in a delay in getting vaccines, and some children never got the vaccines they had missed.
Now, vaccine makers are again threatened. Lawyers will argue that either the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine or a mercury-containing preservative (thimerosal) in vaccines or the combination of the two can cause autism. This theory has been advanced on television shows such as 60 Minutes, in popular magazines like Time and Newsweek, and on national radio programs such as Imus in the Morning. Most prominently, the mercury-causes-autism theory has been advanced by a parents advocacy group called Safe Minds -- a group now at the center of the litigation.
Certainly there is plenty of evidence to refute the notion that vaccines cause autism. Fourteen epidemiological studies have shown that the risk of autism is the same whether children received the MMR vaccine or not, and five have shown that thimerosal-containing vaccines also do not cause autism. Further, although large quantities of mercury are clearly toxic to the brain, autism isn't a consequence of mercury poisoning; large, single-source mercury exposures in Minamata Bay and Iraq have caused seizures, mental retardation, and speech delay, but not autism.
Finally, vaccine makers removed thimerosal from vaccines routinely given to young infants about six years ago; if thimerosal were a cause, the incidence of autism should have declined. Instead, the numbers have continued to increase. All of this evidence should have caused a quick dismissal of these cases. But it didn't, and now the courthas turned into a circus. The federal and civil litigation will likely take years to sort out.
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(Note, the above article is by)" Paul A. Offit, MD, is the chief of infectious diseases at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, the co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine currently licensed in the United States, and the author of "Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases"
We cannot miss an important aspect of this whole mess. The allopathic medical establishment is not just a neutral party in this debate. When asked what good the allopathic approach has done, one of the first things they usually throw out is how the polio vaccine has ridded us of the scourge of polio, or how the smallpox vaccine has protected millions of children from smallpox. The use of injectable and oral medications and interventionistic chemical preparations is the bread and butter of the modern MD, and the AMA will fight tooth and nail to paint the proposition that vaccines, or any component of the vaccines administered to innocent children, most often as a result of governmental imposition of laws which mandate children be forced to take the vaccines, is unfounded or silly. Another obvious entity with a "dog in this fight", because of the lawsuit, is the federal government.
Any time you get the vast resources of the medical government linked with the significant political and financial resources of the American Medical Association, COMBINED with the pharmaceutical lobbyists and lawyers, you have a formidable opponent.
But, remember, David did slay Goliath. All you need is the right stone, or, in the case of the lawsuit, the right set of facts.
