Clubbin’
I found your article, “Bar Hopping: Nightspots Doing Booming Business” well done and interesting. However, I found it surprising that there was no mention of Orange County’s largest and most successful currently operating nightclub, Club Vegas in Costa Mesa across from Triangle Square in what used to be the Pacific Bank building.
We have been in operation for four years, and on any given Friday or Saturday evening, we do more business than Landmark, Katina, Detroit and Avalon combined.
Ernie Schneider
Irvine
Schneider is an investor in Club Vegas.
Vaccines, Autism
The U.S. autism rate is one in 150 children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Is there a link between childhood vaccines and autism? The pendulum keeps swinging in opposite directions as this emotional and scientific national debate continues.
Generation Rescue commissioned SurveyUSA, an independent opinion research team, to interview parents in nine counties in California and Oregon.
Methodology closely mirrored that used by the CDC to establish the national prevalence for neurological disorders such as “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,” “attention deficit disorder,” “Asperger’s syndrome,” “pervasive development disorder,” “not otherwise specified” or “autism.”
Roll Call, a leading publication for congressional news and information, recently drew attention to this survey that showed vaccinated boys had a 2.5 times higher risk of neurological disorders than unvaccinated boys, and calling for a national study.
The survey, which interviewed 11,817 households, involved 17,674 children aged 4-17. The data showed:
– Vaccinated boys, compared with unvaccinated boys, were 155% more likely to have a neurological disorder (relative risk 2.55), 224% more likely to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (relative risk 3.24) and 61% more likely to have autism (relative risk 1.61).
– All vaccinated boys and girls, compared with unvaccinated children, were 120% more likely to have asthma (relative risk 2.20).
“For less than $200,000, we were able to complete a study that the CDC, with an $8 billion a year budget, has been unable or unwilling to do,” said J.B. Handley of Generation Rescue.
At a press conference in summer 2005, Dan Olmsted of United Press International asked CDC Director Julie Geberding whether the government has ever looked at autism rates in the unvaccinated population.
“In this country, we have very high levels of vaccination … and I think this year we have record immunization levels among all of our children, so to (select an unvaccinated group) on a population basis that would be representative to look at incidence in that population compared to the other population would be something that could be done,” she responded.
“Listening to the CDC talk about the reliability of parent reporting, we thought there’s a quick way to get a proxy for whether or not there’s any truth to the hypotheses that vaccines and all these neurological disorders are related,” Handley said.
His organization believes that mercury, including a type used for decades in routine childhood immunizations (the preservative thiomerosol) is a major factor in the 10-fold increase in reported autism cases during the past 20 years.
The anxiety that vaccines are linked to the rise of autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders has been largely dismissed by public health officials and mainstream medical groups, especially since a 2004 report by the respected Institute of Medicine found no such evidence and suggested research money go to more “promising” areas.
Affected parents, some of whom say they watched their children regress into autism immediately following physical reactions to vaccines, have continued to press the issue.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., has re-introduced a bill to compel the National Institutes of Health to do a study comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, according to an article in Science Daily last month.
“What is ultimately needed to resolve this issue one way or the other is a comprehensive national study of vaccinated and unvaccinated children. The parents behind Generation Rescue only want information. These parents deserve more than roadblocks; they deserve answers. We can and should move forward in search of those answers,” Maloney said.
To which I add an emphatic, what are we waiting for?
Michael Arnold Glueck
Newport Beach
