[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 5]
[House]
[Pages 5997-5998]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                 AUTISM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Chocola). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, I have with me today a box, and 
on this box I am not sure my colleagues can see this, but there is 50 
to 100 pictures of children who are autistic, and

[[Page 5998]]

in the box I have in back of my office I have probably close to 1,000 
letters from parents who have autistic children who believe their 
children became autistic because they received vaccinations that 
contained mercury.
  We all know mercury is a toxic substance, and we know that we should 
not have it around us, but we have, as a matter of fact, been 
vaccinating our children with many micrograms of mercury in each 
vaccination for probably the last 20 years, and as we increase the 
number of vaccines that the children were being inoculated with, the 
amount of mercury that they were being confronted with went up as well, 
and as a result, we have gone from one in 10,000 children who are 
autistic to one in 200 children that are autistic. That is a fifty-fold 
increase.
  Soon what I am going to be doing, Mr. Speaker, is each night I am 
going to be coming down here and reading to the American people and my 
colleagues letters from these families telling of their child becoming 
autistic, when it happened and how it happened so that my colleagues 
and the American people will really know what is going on.
  Many of the pharmaceutical companies do not want this to happen 
because they are concerned about the liability that they might incur. 
We have what is called the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund, which if 
handled properly could deal with most of these children and their 
families, but unfortunately, the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund, 
which was created not only to protect the pharmaceutical companies but 
to help these children in a nonadversarial way by getting money to take 
care of their damaged bodies and minds, has not been administered 
properly, but we are working on that now. Until we get a resolution of 
that problem, we will be down here every night or every other night 
reading these letters.
  This is a letter from a man named Scott Bono and his wife is Laura 
Bono, and they tell about their child and how their child became 
autistic after he received vaccines. Now they have done a mercury 
toxicity test on their son which shows that he has quite a bit of 
mercury in his body, and the way he got that mercury into his body was 
through these vaccinations. They say in this letter, ``When Jackson was 
first diagnosed with Pervasive Developmental Disorder at 20 months old, 
he had just experienced a four-month regression beginning days after 
his August 9, 1990 shots. He received HiB shot, with 25 micrograms of 
mercury, on July 25.'' And 2-weeks later he received on August 9 a DT 
shot with 25 micrograms of mercury in it. He had received, prior to 
that, 75 micrograms of mercury from other shots, and the boy became 
autistic shortly thereafter.
  The parents were not aware of and did not get their child into what 
was called the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund, which has a 3-year 
statute of limitations, which means that if they did not get into it 
within 3 years of finding out he was autistic and they believe the 
cause was vaccines that they could not get into the fund. We have 
thousands of families that were not aware of the Vaccine Injury 
Compensation Fund, who never applied, and those people have been left 
out in the cold.
  Let me tell my colleagues the results of just this one family's 
problem.
  Since he became autistic, their medical expenses have cost $578,980. 
Their insurance companies have paid $306,000 of that, but including 
food and everything else that they are providing for this boy for his 
special needs, it is costing them $35,000 in after tax dollars to take 
care of this child, and when we add all this up, it is over $600,000 in 
medical needs and therapy and food for this boy. Actually, they are in 
a very difficult financial situation because of that.
  We have families that have sold their homes, have gone bankrupt, have 
borrowed money until they are about to go bankrupt to take care of 
their children's needs, and those people are confident, as I am, that 
their child was damaged by the mercury in these vaccines.
  So, Mr. Speaker, we have got to do something about that. We have to 
either change the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund to allow these 
people to get in there where their child and his problem is going to be 
reviewed by a special master, and if there is merit to their claim, 
this Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund should take care of that. If we 
do not get that, then the next thing we ought to do is allow them to be 
able to go to court to sue the pharmaceutical companies.
  In any event, Mr. Speaker, I will be back here tomorrow night and I 
appreciate the Chair being liberal with his time. We have got to solve 
these problems for these kids. We cannot leave them out in the cold. 
The President said he was going to leave no child behind, and we should 
not leave these children behind.

                          ____________________