Dan Olmsted

Dan Olmsted is an investigative reporter and former senior editor for United Press International (UPI), a news agency of the Unification Church company News World Communications. Olmsted wrote a series about a discredited hypothesis linking vaccination to autism. His columns on health and medicine appeared regularly in the Washington Times, also owned by the church, and were syndicated nationally from UPI's Washington D.C. bureau. He currently owns and edits the Age of Autism website, which he describes as the "Daily Web Newspaper of the Autism Epidemic".

The Age of Autism

From January, 2005, through July, 2007, Olmsted wrote about his investigative findings concerning the possibility that the apparent global epidemic of autism in a series of columns titled The Age of Autism. Though most mainstream experts think autism is a primarily genetic disorder and that reported increases are mainly due to changes in diagnostic practices, Olmsted claims that the increases are due to mercury poisoning, particularly from vaccines, and that the genetics is mostly secondary.^[1]

Congressional action

Citing Olmsted's reports, on March 30, 2006, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (NY) announced that she would be drafting legislation calling for scientific studies investigating thiomersal and autism, additional to the many already conducted.^[2] The bill was introduced in the U. S. House of Representatives in April 2006. Maloney made the announcement at a National Press Club press conference in Washington, D.C., along with Olmsted and David Kirby.^[3][4]

Criticism

Many scientific studies have found no credible evidence that thimerosal vaccines and the MMR vaccine cause autism, and the MMR vaccine controversy has been determined to be the result of an "elaborate fraud" by British researcher Andrew Wakefield.^[5][6]

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".^[7]

See also

Pervasive Developmental Disorders portal

• List of autism-related topics
• List of vaccine topics
• MMR vaccine
• Thimerosal
• Vaccine controversy

References

1. ^ Dan Olmsted (2007-07-18). "The Age of Autism: the last word". UPI. http://www.upi.com/Consumer_Health_Daily/Reports/2007/07/18/the_age_of_autism_the_last_word/5761/. Retrieved 2007-07-23. 
2. ^ Carolyn Maloney (US congress page) - "New, Thorough Study of Possible Mercury-Autism Link Proposed By Rep. Maloney". PDF draft of legislation.
3. ^ UPI.com - 'UPI Autism story prompts bill' (March 30, 2006)
4. ^ Offit PA (2007). "Thimerosal and vaccines—a cautionary tale". N Engl J Med 357 (13): 1278–9. doi:10.1056/NEJMp078187. PMID 17898096. http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/357/13/1278. 
5. ^ Doja A, Roberts W (2006). "Immunizations and autism: a review of the literature". Can J Neurol Sci 33 (4): 341–6. PMID 17168158. 
6. ^ Godlee F, Smith J, Marcovitch H (2011). "Wakefield's article linking MMR vaccine and autism was fraudulent". BMJ 342:c7452: c7452. doi:10.1136/bmj.c7452. http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c7452.full. 
7. ^ Daniel Schulman (2005). "Drug test". Columbia Journalism Review (6). Archived from the original on 2007-04-07. http://web.archive.org/web/20070407091027/http://cjr.org/issues/2005/6/schulman.asp. Retrieved 2007-07-23. 

External links

• AgeOfAutism.com - Age of Autism, Editor: Dan Olmsted
• DissidentVoice.org - 'Dan Olmsted - Autism's Dick Tracy', Evelyn Pringle (December 21, 2005)

Persondata
Name	Olmsted, Dan
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death