FW: Thimerosal in vaccines

July 10, 2005

A very alarming report that I hope you will distribute far and wide. By RF

Kennedy Jr., attorney Natural Resources Defense Council, etc. The Sierra

club has recently offered mercury testing for individuals at $25 a kit.

Caterina Di Palma

PLEASE, BECOME AN ADVOCATE ON BEHALF OF THE CHILDREN.

DEMAND that NONE of the vaccines or medicines prescribed to your children

contain the deadly, mercury-laden toxin THIMEROSAL. Our precious children

are the hope of the future. We must intervene NOW!

DEADLY IMMUNITY

When a study revealed that mercury in childhood vaccines may have caused

autism in thousands of kids, the government rushed to conceal the data -

and to prevent parents from suing drug companies for their role in the

epidemic.

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

June 16, 2005

About the writer

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense

Council, chief prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper and president of

Waterkeeper Alliance. He is the co-author of " The Riverkeepers. "

In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials

gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in

Norcross, Ga. Convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,

the meeting was held at this Methodist retreat center, nestled in wooded

farmland next to the Chattahoochee River, to ensure complete secrecy. The

agency had issued no public announcement of the session-only private

invitations to 52 attendees.

There were high-level officials from the CDC and the Food and Drug

Administration, the top vaccine specialist from the World Health

Organization in Geneva, and representatives of every major vaccine

manufacturer, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Wyeth and Aventis Pasteur.

All of the scientific data under discussion, CDC officials repeatedly

reminded the participants, was strictly " embargoed. " There would be no

making photocopies of documents, no taking papers with them when they

left.

The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled to

discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the

safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and

young children. According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten,

who had analyzed the agency's massive database containing the medical

records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the

vaccines-thimerosal-appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in

autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children. " I was

actually stunned by what I saw, " Verstraeten told those assembled at

Simpsonwood, citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate

a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit disorder,

hyperactivity and autism.

Since 1991, when the CDC and the FDA had recommended that three additional

vaccines laced with the preservative be given to extremely young

infants-in one case, within hours of birth-the estimated number of cases

of autism had increased fifteenfold, from one in every 2,500 children to

one in 166 children.

Even for scientists and doctors accustomed to confronting issues of life

and death, the findings were frightening. " You can play with this all you

want, " Dr. Bill Weil, a consultant for the American Academy of Pediatrics,

told the group.

The results " are statistically significant. "

Dr. Richard Johnston, an immunologist and pediatrician from the University

of Colorado whose grandson had been born early on the morning of the

meeting's first day, was even more alarmed. " My gut feeling? " he said.

" Forgive this personal comment-I do not want my grandson to get a

thimerosal-containing vaccine until we know better what is going on. "

But instead of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the

vaccine supply of thimerosal, the officials and executives at Simpsonwood

spent most of the next two days discussing how to cover up the damaging

data. According to transcripts obtained under the Freedom of Information

Act, many at the meeting were concerned about how the damaging revelations

about thimerosal would affect the vaccine industry's bottom line.

" We are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits, "

said Dr. Robert Brent, a pediatrician at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for

Children in Delaware. " This will be a resource to our very busy plaintiff

attorneys in this country. " Dr. Bob Chen, head of vaccine safety for the

CDC, expressed relief that " given the sensitivity of the information, we

have been able to keep it out of the hands of, let's say, less responsible

hands. " Dr. John Clements, vaccines advisor at the World Health

Organization, declared flatly that the study " should not have been done at

all " and warned that the results " will be taken by others and will be used

in ways beyond the control of this group. The research results have to be

handled. "

In fact, the government has proved to be far more adept at handling the

damage than at protecting children's health. The CDC paid the Institute of

Medicine to conduct a new study to whitewash the risks of thimerosal,

ordering researchers to " rule out " the chemical's link to autism. It

withheld Verstraeten's findings, even though they had been slated for

immediate publication, and told other scientists that his original data

had been " lost " and could not be replicated. And to thwart the Freedom of

Information Act, it handed its giant database of vaccine records over to a

private company, declaring it off-limits to researchers. By the time

Verstraeten finally published his study in 2003, he had gone to work for

GlaxoSmithKline and reworked his data to bury the link between thimerosal

and autism.

Vaccine manufacturers had already begun to phase thimerosal out of

injections given to American infants-but they continued to sell off their

mercury-based supplies of vaccines until last year. The CDC and FDA gave

them a hand, buying up the tainted vaccines for export to developing

countries and allowing drug companies to continue using the preservative

in some American vaccines-including several pediatric flu shots as well as

tetanus boosters routinely given to 11-year-olds.

The drug companies are also getting help from powerful lawmakers in

Washington. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who has received $873,000

in contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, has been working to

immunize vaccine makers from liability in 4,200 lawsuits that have been

filed by the parents of injured children. On five separate occasions,

Frist has tried to seal all of the government's vaccine-related

documents-including the Simpsonwood transcripts-and shield Eli Lilly, the

developer of thimerosal, from subpoenas.

In 2002, the day after Frist quietly slipped a rider known as the " Eli

Lilly Protection Act " into a homeland security bill, the company

contributed $10,000 to his campaign and bought 5,000 copies of his book on

bioterrorism. Congress repealed the measure in 2003 -- but earlier this

year, Frist slipped another provision into an anti-terrorism bill that

would deny compensation to children suffering from vaccine-related brain

disorders. " The lawsuits are of such magnitude that they could put vaccine

producers out of business and limit our capacity to deal with a biological

attack by terrorists, " says Andy Olsen, a legislative assistant to Frist.

Even many conservatives are shocked by the government's effort to cover up

the dangers of thimerosal. Rep. Dan Burton, a Republican from Indiana,

oversaw a three-year investigation of thimerosal after his grandson was

diagnosed with autism. " Thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines is

directly related to the autism epidemic, " his House Government Reform

Committee concluded in its final report. " This epidemic in all probability

may have been prevented or curtailed had the FDA not been asleep at the

switch regarding a lack of safety data regarding injected thimerosal, a

known neurotoxin. " The FDA and other public-health agencies failed to act,

the committee added, out of " institutional malfeasance for self

protection " and " misplaced protectionism of the pharmaceutical industry. "

The story of how government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma to

hide the risks of thimerosal from the public is a chilling case study of

institutional arrogance, power and greed. I was drawn into the controversy

only reluctantly. As an attorney and environmentalist who has spent years

working on issues of mercury toxicity, I frequently met mothers of

autistic children who were absolutely convinced that their kids had been

injured by vaccines. Privately, I was skeptical.

I doubted that autism could be blamed on a single source, and I certainly

understood the government's need to reassure parents that vaccinations are

safe; the eradication of deadly childhood diseases depends on it. I tended

to agree with skeptics like Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California,

who criticized his colleagues on the House Government Reform Committee for

leaping to conclusions about autism and vaccinations. " Why should we scare

people about immunization, " Waxman pointed out at one hearing, " until we

know the facts? "

It was only after reading the Simpsonwood transcripts, studying the

leading scientific research and talking with many of the nation's

preeminent authorities on mercury that I became convinced that the link

between thimerosal and the epidemic of childhood neurological disorders is

real. Five of my own children are members of the Thimerosal

Generation-those born between 1989 and 2003 -- who received heavy doses of

mercury from vaccines.

" The elementary grades are overwhelmed with children who have symptoms of

neurological or immune-system damage, " Patti White, a school nurse, told

the House Government Reform Committee in 1999. " Vaccines are supposed to

be making us healthier; however, in 25 years of nursing I have never seen

so many damaged, sick kids. Something very, very wrong is happening to our

children. " More than 500,000 kids currently suffer from autism, and

pediatricians diagnose more than 40,000 new cases every year. The disease

was unknown until 1943, when it was identified and diagnosed among 11

children born in the months after thimerosal was first added to baby

vaccines in 1931.

Some skeptics dispute that the rise in autism is caused by

thimerosal-tainted vaccinations. They argue that the increase is a result

of better diagnosis-a theory that seems questionable at best, given that

most of the new cases of autism are clustered within a single generation

of children. " If the epidemic is truly an artifact of poor diagnosis, "

scoffs Dr. Boyd Haley, one of the world's authorities on mercury toxicity,

" then where are all the 20-year-old autistics? " Other researchers point

out that Americans are exposed to a greater cumulative " load " of mercury

than ever before, from contaminated fish to dental fillings, and suggest

that thimerosal in vaccines may be only part of a much larger problem.

It's a concern that certainly deserves far more attention than it has

received-but it overlooks the fact that the mercury concentrations in

vaccines dwarf other sources of exposure to our children.

What is most striking is the lengths to which many of the leading

detectives have gone to ignore-and cover up-the evidence against

thimerosal. From the very beginning, the scientific case against the

mercury additive has been overwhelming. The preservative, which is used to

stem fungi and bacterial growth in vaccines, contains ethylmercury, a

potent neurotoxin. Truckloads of studies have shown that mercury tends to

accumulate in the brains of primates and other animals after they are

injected with vaccines-and that the developing brains of infants are

particularly susceptible. In 1977, a Russian study found that adults

exposed to much lower concentrations of ethylmercury than those given to

American children still suffered brain damage years later. Russia banned

thimerosal from children's vaccines 20 years ago, and Denmark, Austria,

Japan, Great Britain and all the Scandinavian countries have since

followed suit.

" You couldn't even construct a study that shows thimerosal is safe, " says

Haley, who heads the chemistry department at the University of Kentucky.

" It's just too darn toxic. If you inject thimerosal into an animal, its

brain will sicken.

If you apply it to living tissue, the cells die. If you put it in a petri

dish, the culture dies. Knowing these things, it would be shocking if one

could inject it into an infant without causing damage. "

Internal documents reveal that Eli Lilly, which first developed

thimerosal, knew from the start that its product could cause damage-and

even death-in both animals and humans. In 1930, the company tested

thimerosal by administering it to 22 patients with terminal meningitis,

all of whom died within weeks of being injected-a fact Lilly didn't bother

to report in its study declaring thimerosal safe. In 1935, researchers at

another vaccine manufacturer, Pittman-Moore, warned Lilly that its claims

about thimerosal's safety " did not check with ours. " Half the dogs Pittman

injected with thimerosal-based vaccines became sick, leading researchers

there to declare the preservative " unsatisfactory as a serum intended for

use on dogs. "

In the decades that followed, the evidence against thimerosal continued to

mount. During the Second World War, when the Department of Defense used

the preservative in vaccines on soldiers, it required Lilly to label it

" poison. " In 1967, a study in Applied Microbiology found that thimerosal

killed mice when added to injected vaccines. Four years later, Lilly's own

studies discerned that thimerosal was " toxic to tissue cells " in

concentrations as low as one part per million -- 100 times weaker than the

concentration in a typical vaccine. Even so, the company continued to

promote thimerosal as " nontoxic " and also incorporated it into topical

disinfectants. In 1977, 10 babies at a Toronto hospital died when an

antiseptic preserved with thimerosal was dabbed onto their umbilical

cords.

In 1982, the FDA proposed a ban on over-the-counter products that

contained thimerosal, and in 1991 the agency considered banning it from

animal vaccines. But tragically, that same year, the CDC recommended that

infants be injected with a series of mercury-laced vaccines. Newborns

would be vaccinated for hepatitis B within 24 hours of birth, and

2-month-old infants would be immunized for haemophilus influenzae B and

diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis.

The drug industry knew the additional vaccines posed a danger. The same

year that the CDC approved the new vaccines, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, one of

the fathers of Merck's vaccine programs, warned the company that

6-month-olds who were administered the shots would suffer dangerous

exposure to mercury. He recommended that thimerosal be discontinued,

" especially when used on infants and children, " noting that the industry

knew of nontoxic alternatives. " The best way to go, " he added, " is to

switch to dispensing the actual vaccines without adding preservatives. "

For Merck and other drug companies, however, the obstacle was money.

Thimerosal enables the pharmaceutical industry to package vaccines in

vials that contain multiple doses, which require additional protection

because they are more easily contaminated by multiple needle entries.

The larger vials cost half as much to produce as smaller, single-dose

vials, making it cheaper for international agencies to distribute them to

impoverished regions at risk of epidemics. Faced with this " cost

consideration, " Merck ignored Hilleman's warnings, and government

officials continued to push more and more thimerosal-based vaccines for

children. Before 1989, American preschoolers received 11 vaccinations-for

polio, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and measles-mumps-rubella. A decade

later, thanks to federal recommendations, children were receiving a total

of 22 immunizations by the time they reached first grade.

As the number of vaccines increased, the rate of autism among children

exploded. During the 1990s, 40 million children were injected with

thimerosal-based vaccines, receiving unprecedented levels of mercury

during a period critical for brain development. Despite the

well-documented dangers of thimerosal, it appears that no one bothered to

add up the cumulative dose of mercury that children would receive from the

mandated vaccines. " What took the FDA so long to do the calculations? "

Peter Patriarca, director of viral products for the agency, asked in an

e-mail to the CDC in 1999. " Why didn't CDC and the advisory bodies do

these calculations when they rapidly expanded the childhood immunization

schedule? "

But by that time, the damage was done. Infants who received all their

vaccines, plus boosters, by the age of six months were being injected with

a total of 187 micrograms of ethylmercury-a level 40 percent greater than

the EPA's limit for daily exposure to methylmercury, a related neurotoxin.

Although the vaccine industry insists that ethylmercury poses little

danger because it breaks down rapidly and is removed by the body, several

studies-including one published in April by the National Institutes of

Health-suggest that ethylmercury is actually more toxic to developing

brains and stays in the brain longer than methylmercury. Under the

expanded schedule of vaccinations, multiple shots were often administered

on a single day: At two months, when the infant brain is still at a

critical stage of development, children routinely received three

innoculations that delivered 99 times the approved limit of mercury.

Officials responsible for childhood immunizations insist that the

additional vaccines were necessary to protect infants from disease and

that thimerosal is still essential in developing nations, which, they

often claim, cannot afford the single-dose vials that don't require a

preservative. Dr. Paul Offit, one of CDC's top vaccine advisors, told me,

" I think if we really have an influenza pandemic-and certainly we will in

the next 20 years, because we always do-there's no way on God's earth that

we immunize 280 million people with single-dose vials. There has to be

multidose vials. "

But while public-health officials may have been well-intentioned, many of

those on the CDC advisory committee who backed the additional vaccines had

close ties to the industry.

Dr. Sam Katz, the committee's chair, was a paid consultant for most of the

major vaccine makers and shares a patent on a measles vaccine with Merck,

which also manufactures the hepatitis B vaccine. Dr. Neal Halsey, another

committee member, worked as a researcher for the vaccine companies and

received honoraria from Abbott Labs for his research on the hepatitis B

vaccine.

Indeed, in the tight circle of scientists who work on vaccines, such

conflicts of interest are common. Rep. Burton says that the CDC " routinely

allows scientists with blatant conflicts of interest to serve on

intellectual advisory committees that make recommendations on new

vaccines, " even though they have " interests in the products and companies

for which they are supposed to be providing unbiased oversight. " The House

Government Reform Committee discovered that four of the eight CDC advisors

who approved guidelines for a rotavirus vaccine " had financial ties to the

pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the

vaccine. "

Offit, who shares a patent on one of the vaccines, acknowledged to me that

he " would make money " if his vote eventually leads to a marketable

product. But he dismissed my suggestion that a scientist's direct

financial stake in CDC approval might bias his judgment. " It provides no

conflict for me, " he insists. " I have simply been informed by the process,

not corrupted by it. When I sat around that table, my sole intent was

trying to make recommendations that best benefited the children in this

country. It's offensive to say that physicians and public-health people

are in the pocket of industry and thus are making decisions that they know

are unsafe for children. It's just not the way it works. "

Other vaccine scientists and regulators gave me similar assurances. Like

Offit, they view themselves as enlightened guardians of children's health,

proud of their " partnerships " with pharmaceutical companies, immune to the

seductions of personal profit, besieged by irrational activists whose

anti-vaccine campaigns are endangering children's health. They are often

resentful of questioning. " Science, " says Offit, " is best left to

scientists. "

Still, some government officials were alarmed by the apparent conflicts of

interest. In his e-mail to CDC administrators in 1999, Paul Patriarca of

the FDA blasted federal regulators for failing to adequately scrutinize

the danger posed by the added baby vaccines. " I'm not sure there will be

an easy way out of the potential perception that the FDA, CDC and

immunization-policy bodies may have been asleep at the switch re:

thimerosal until now, " Patriarca wrote. The close ties between regulatory

officials and the pharmaceutical industry, he added, " will also raise

questions about various advisory bodies regarding aggressive

recommendations for use " of thimerosal in child vaccines.

If federal regulators and government scientists failed to grasp the

potential risks of thimerosal over the years, no one could claim ignorance

after the secret meeting at Simpsonwood.

But rather than conduct more studies to test the link to autism and other

forms of brain damage, the CDC placed politics over science. The agency

turned its database on childhood vaccines-which had been developed largely

at taxpayer expense-over to a private agency, America's Health Insurance

Plans, ensuring that it could not be used for additional research. It also

instructed the Institute of Medicine, an advisory organization that is

part of the National Academy of Sciences, to produce a study debunking the

link between thimerosal and brain disorders.

The CDC " wants us to declare, well, that these things are pretty safe, "

Dr. Marie McCormick, who chaired the IOM's Immunization Safety Review

Committee, told her fellow researchers when they first met in January

2001. " We are not ever going to come down that [autism] is a true side

effect " of thimerosal exposure. According to transcripts of the meeting,

the committee's chief staffer, Kathleen Stratton, predicted that the IOM

would conclude that the evidence was " inadequate to accept or reject a

causal relation " between thimerosal and autism.

That, she added, was the result " Walt wants " -a reference to Dr. Walter

Orenstein, director of the National Immunization Program for the CDC.

For those who had devoted their lives to promoting vaccination, the

revelations about thimerosal threatened to undermine everything they had

worked for. " We've got a dragon by the tail here, " said Dr. Michael

Kaback, another committee member. " The more negative that [our]

presentation is, the less likely people are to use vaccination,

immunization-and we know what the results of that will be. We are kind of

caught in a trap. How we work our way out of the trap, I think is the

charge. "

Even in public, federal officials made it clear that their primary goal in

studying thimerosal was to dispel doubts about vaccines. " Four current

studies are taking place to rule out the proposed link between autism and

thimerosal, " Dr. Gordon Douglas, then-director of strategic planning for

vaccine research at the National Institutes of Health, assured a Princeton

University gathering in May 2001. " In order to undo the harmful effects of

research claiming to link the [measles] vaccine to an elevated risk of

autism, we need to conduct and publicize additional studies to assure

parents of safety. "

Douglas formerly served as president of vaccinations for Merck, where he

ignored warnings about thimerosal's risks.

In May of last year, the Institute of Medicine issued its final report.

Its conclusion: There is no proven link between autism and thimerosal in

vaccines. Rather than reviewing the large body of literature describing

the toxicity of thimerosal, the report relied on four disastrously flawed

epidemiological studies examining European countries, where children

received much smaller doses of thimerosal than American kids.

It also cited a new version of the Verstraeten study, published in the

journal Pediatrics, that had been reworked to reduce the link between

thimerosal and autism. The new study included children too young to have

been diagnosed with autism and overlooked others who showed signs of the

disease. The IOM declared the case closed and-in a startling position for

a scientific body-recommended that no further research be conducted.

The report may have satisfied the CDC, but it convinced no one. Rep. David

Weldon, a Republican physician from Florida who serves on the House

Government Reform Committee, attacked the Institute of Medicine, saying it

relied on a handful of studies that were " fatally flawed " by " poor design "

and failed to represent " all the available scientific and medical

research. " CDC officials are not interested in an honest search for the

truth, Weldon told me, because " an association between vaccines and autism

would force them to admit that their policies irreparably damaged

thousands of children. Who would want to make that conclusion about

themselves? "

Under pressure from Congress, parents and a few of its own panel members,

the Institute of Medicine reluctantly convened a second panel to review

the findings of the first. In February, the new panel, composed of

different scientists, criticized the earlier panel for its lack of

transparency and urged the CDC to make its vaccine database available to

the public.

So far, though, only two scientists have managed to gain access. Dr. Mark

Geier, president of the Genetics Center of America, and his son, David,

spent a year battling to obtain the medical records from the CDC. Since

August 2002, when members of Congress pressured the agency to turn over

the data, the Geiers have completed six studies that demonstrate a

powerful correlation between thimerosal and neurological damage in

children. One study, which compares the cumulative dose of mercury

received by children born between 1981 and 1985 with those born between

1990 and 1996, found a " very significant relationship " between autism and

vaccines.

Another study of educational performance found that kids who received

higher doses of thimerosal in vaccines were nearly three times as likely

to be diagnosed with autism and more than three times as likely to suffer

from speech disorders and mental retardation. Another soon-to-be-published

study shows that autism rates are in decline following the recent

elimination of thimerosal from most vaccines.

As the federal government worked to prevent scientists from studying

vaccines, others have stepped in to study the link to autism.

In April, reporter Dan Olmsted of UPI undertook one of the more

interesting studies himself. Searching for children who had not been

exposed to mercury in vaccines-the kind of population that scientists

typically use as a " control " in experiments-

-Olmsted scoured the Amish of Lancaster County, Penn., who refuse to

immunize their infants. Given the national rate of autism, Olmsted

calculated that there should be 130 autistics among the Amish. He found

only four. One had been exposed to high levels of mercury from a power

plant. The other three-including one child adopted from outside the Amish

community-had received their vaccines.

At the state level, many officials have also conducted in-depth reviews of

thimerosal. While the Institute of Medicine was busy whitewashing the

risks, the Iowa Legislature was carefully combing through all of the

available scientific and biological data. " After three years of review, I

became convinced there was sufficient credible research to show a link

between mercury and the increased incidences in autism, " says state Sen.

Ken Veenstra, a Republican who oversaw the investigation. " The fact that

Iowa's 700 percent increase in autism began in the 1990s, right after more

and more vaccines were added to the children's vaccine schedules, is solid

evidence alone. " Last year, Iowa became the first state to ban mercury in

vaccines, followed by California. Similar bans are now under consideration

in 32 other states.

But instead of following suit, the FDA continues to allow manufacturers to

include thimerosal in scores of over-the-counter medications as well as

steroids and injected collagen. Even more alarming, the government

continues to ship vaccines preserved with thimerosal to developing

countries-some of which are now experiencing a sudden explosion in autism

rates. In China, where the disease was virtually unknown prior to the

introduction of thimerosal by U.S. drug manufacturers in 1999, news

reports indicate that there are now more than 1.8 million autistics.

Although reliable numbers are hard to come by, autistic disorders also

appear to be soaring in India, Argentina, Nicaragua and other developing

countries that are now using thimerosal-laced vaccines. The World Health

Organization continues to insist thimerosal is safe, but it promises to

keep the possibility that it is linked to neurological disorders " under

review. "

I devoted time to study this issue because I believe that this is a moral

crisis that must be addressed. If, as the evidence suggests, our

public-health authorities knowingly allowed the pharmaceutical industry to

poison an entire generation of American children, their actions arguably

constitute one of the biggest scandals in the annals of American medicine.

" The CDC is guilty of incompetence and gross negligence, " says Mark

Blaxill, vice president of Safe Minds, a nonprofit organization concerned

about the role of mercury in medicines. " The damage caused by vaccine

exposure is massive. It's bigger than asbestos, bigger than tobacco,

bigger than anything you've ever seen. " It's hard to calculate the damage

to our country-and to the international efforts to eradicate epidemic

diseases-if Third World nations come to believe that America's most

heralded foreign-aid initiative is poisoning their children.

It's not difficult to predict how this scenario will be interpreted by

America's enemies abroad. The scientists and researchers-many of them

sincere, even idealistic-who are participating in efforts to hide the

science on thimerosal claim that they are trying to advance the lofty goal

of protecting children in developing nations from disease pandemics. They

are badly misguided. Their failure to come clean on thimerosal will come

back horribly to haunt our country and the world's poorest populations.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

July 11, 2005

Dear Caterina Di Palma,

Thanks for posting this article by Robert Kennedy Jr. Could you let me know your

source? Was this letter/article puplished and if so where? I would like to try

to get some parts of this published in the U.K. so this would be helpful.

Yours

Richard Bleckman

-

Caterina Di Palma

Sunday, July 10, 2005 4:42 PM