As parents of two severely autistic boys, Kevin and Cheryl Dass of Kansas City, Mo., face a world of heartache and worry.
Last year Kevin, a FedEx driver, and Cheryl, a part-time hairdresser, spent $27,000 on therapy for their sons. Financially exhausted, they are gnawed by these questions:
How will they continue the special help that Dillon and Kyle, their 4 1/2 -year-old twins, so desperately need? Will the boys -- who barely speak, are not toilet-trained and go bonkers when taken out in public -- ever be able to live on their own? If not, what will become of them when Kevin and Cheryl are gone?
"It's torn our life apart, it really has," Kevin Dass says.
And, he insists, it didn't have to happen. The boys were born prematurely and alarmingly small. Yet at 3 1/2 months, Dass says, they were given four shots in a single day, including three containing small amounts of mercury, a neurotoxin.
"They were still in the hospital on oxygen, staying alive, and they put this poison in them," Dass says. "They were fried. They were totally fried."
Like many anguished parents of autistic kids, the Dasses blame the condition on thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that until recently was added to many routine children's shots.
Thimerosal was used to keep bacteria out of vaccines sold in multi-dose vials. But there were no studies beforehand of its possible effects on the developing brains of infants. And health officials, who aggressively expanded immunizations during the 1990s, did not consider that mercury exposure for millions of children would exceed federal guidelines.
Now, in a dispute overflowing with bitterness and rancor, more than 4,200 families, including the Dasses, are demanding compensation to help pay for their kids' special needs. Their claims have inundated an obscure branch of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, sometimes called the "vaccine court."
The parents are pushing a disturbing theory: that their children were casualties of the war on disease, suffering brain damage from thimerosal by itself or in combination with measles virus in the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. They blame mercury from vaccines and other sources for an epidemic rise in autism and related neurological disorders.
They theorize that their children were devastated because they were less able than most kids to clear mercury from their bodies.
