The New Home-schooling

It's twice as common today as it was a decade ago. But can "regular" families do it?

Alex Roslin

Today’s Parent, May 2010

It had been snowing for a week straight in Mansonville, a mountain village nestled in the Appalachians, 150 kilometres east of Montreal. But there was no hope of a snow day for 10-year-old Kira Nichols — she’s home-schooled. So she doesn’t even need to get out of her PJs to hit the books.

Besides, Kira doesn’t need cajoling to start school. Before breakfast, she’s already spent an hour engrossed in Allie Finkle’s Rules for Girls. After reading for a while in French, Kira turns her attention to math, practising fractions on some worksheets that her mom, Kim, printed from an educational website. Then she works on a short story that she’s writing about mythical creatures, plays Scrabble with Mom (building Kira’s vocabulary) and plays outside.

School’s done for the day and it isn’t even time for lunch; Kira virtually never needs to spend more than two hours a day on academics to stay ahead of the school curriculum for her grade.

Kira and Kim are part of a fast-growing movement: In Canada, the number of home-schooled kids has doubled in a decade to an estimated 60,000 to 80,000, or two percent of this country’s school-aged population. In the US, 1½ to 2 million kids are home-schooled — about 3½ percent of all school-agers — and that number is growing seven percent a year.

What is home-schooling?

Home-schooling — once considered fringe or “granola” — has come of age. Many universities are now courting home-schoolers and designing special admissions rules to allow them to enter without a high school diploma. And home-schooled kids are showing they can compete with their more traditionally educated peers on the academic playing field. Studies of Canadian and US home-schoolers found they outperform their public-school counterparts by solid margins in math, language ability, reading, social sciences and science. They even tend to beat private-schoolers, whose scores average in the 65th to 75th percentile in these areas, versus the 75th to 85th percentile showings of home-schoolers.

Still not impressed? A study of more than 20,000 home-schoolers found that in grade four they are, on average, a grade ahead academically of their public and private school peers. By grade eight, they’re almost four grades ahead, even though the average home-schooler spends only three hours a day on academic learning, compared to the typical six-hour school day.

Presented with statistics like these, and the idyllic impression made by Kira and Kim, few would argue home-schooling is intriguing. But how doable is it really? And how can you tell if it’s a good fit for your family?

Home-schooling parents and even some education professionals say the first question is easy to answer. “It’s less daunting for parents than they might think,” Kim says assuredly. You don’t need to know how to develop a lesson plan or have any teaching experience. Parents can get all the curriculum materials they need from the Internet, by mail order or through swaps with other home-schooling families. (See Resources for a list of helpful home-schooling websites.)

You can choose an existing teaching philosophy that reflects your family’s values and goals, or develop your own by combining teaching materials from several different sources. Approaches range widely, from the so-called traditional or school-at-home method, using the same textbooks and tests as your child would see in a public school setting, to “unit studies,” which encompass self-directed learning through books, worksheets, online resources and field trips, all the way to “unschooling,” where the idea is that learning opportunities are everywhere; a walk in the woods can turn into biology class and an evening walk, an astronomy lesson.

Abbi Miller’s parents were early proponents of unschooling, visiting places like the Grand Canyon in Arizona and Mount Rushmore in South Dakota to teach their children geography and history. “The world is your school” is how Abbi, now 25, sums up the approach. Looking back on her experience, she believes the more freedom kids are given to learn what interests them, the more likely they’ll be to retain their love of learning. A self-proclaimed “math geek,” Abbi was allowed to teach that subject to herself — something she did with great enthusiasm. “I would be like ‘Mom, I want more workbooks!’” she recalls.

Home-schooling successes

That kind of motivation and energy are a big part of home-schooling success. “The kid has to be not just willing, but highly motivated to do this,” says Gary Knowles, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education who’s worked as a school principal and a teacher of teachers for 30 years. He notes that chances of home-schooling success are better when families draw strongly on learning opportunities in the community — libraries, art galleries, museums, farms — and are open-minded and curious about the world.

Kim Nichols’ approach is to let her daughter, Kira, take the lead regarding what she wants to study. Mom helps set goals of how many hours should be devoted to various subjects each week, and answers questions when Kira gets stuck. Otherwise, she says, “Her schedule is pretty much her own.”

That kind of flexibility can be a boon to kids who like to dig deep into topics that interest them; a class doesn’t have to stop after the usual 45 or 60 minutes if a child is enthralled. And parents can custom-fit learning to nurture a young person’s interests and adapt to special needs, whether a child is gifted or having difficulties. Interestingly, a 2003 study of Canadian home-schoolers with cognitive limitations found they were performing at the same academic level as the average public-schooled kid.

What the critics say

Still, home-schooling isn’t for everyone. Knowles has been keeping tabs on several dozen home-schoolers for nearly three decades, as research for a book. He’s seen that home-schooling does not often work well when parents have major personality conflicts with their kids, or if a child isn’t fully on board for the experience. Cloistered environments in which children are taught intolerance or don’t get to meet a lot of other kids are also problematic.

Even two children from the same family may be differently suited. Kim Nichols’ son, Jordan, 12, wanted to stop home-schooling last fall. Part of the reason for the switch was wanting to spend more time with male pals his age, of which there are few among home-schoolers in their remote area. Now, despite a two-hour round-trip commute by school bus to the regional high school he now attends, Kim says Jordan looks forward to school all weekend, has quickly made new friends there, and is doing “very well” academically. Meanwhile, Kira is still happy to learn at home with their mom, and she hooks up with a group of home-schooling buddies for regular educational and social get-togethers.

Some critics say that this is where home-schooling falls down — in offering fewer opportunities for children to be with other children. “The best place for socialization and education is a public school,” insists Réjean Parent, president of Centrale des syndicats du Québec, the province’s largest teachers’ union.

Education professor Knowles disagrees. Socialization, he says, can be learned and not all school contexts are ideal for gaining these skills. “If you are a 13-year-old, who is to say that 1,300 other 13-year-olds are the best people to be responsible for socializing you?”

Home-schooling parents must work to ensure their kids are in contact with peers, but it can be done. Hamilton mom Kristy Crawford, who home-schooled three of her five children, connected with other families through a local home-schooling association that organized “really cool” outings almost every day of the week — bowling, rock climbing, French lessons, visits to orchards, museums, libraries, historic villages. Similar groups exist in cities across Canada, and they are easy to find online.

Because children’s social — and academic — successes aren’t expressed in regular report cards, parents who home-school also need to take a different perspective on their children’s progress. “Don’t expect linear development,” Knowles advises. “Kids might go a long time without seeming to make progress. Parents who home-school have to take a more fluid or open view of kids’ learning.”

If that thought fills you with parental panic, perhaps home-schooling isn’t for you. But for parents like Kim Nichols, the rewards are numerous. “Being there when they learn something new — it’s like a miracle,” she says. “I want to be there for those times.”

Home-schooled kids, happy adults?

What are home-schooled kids like once they’ve grown up? According to a study by the US National Home Education Research Institute, three-quarters of them will have at least some post-secondary education, compared to half the general population. That’s thanks, in part, to a fast-growing number of universities that accept home-schooled applicants, including Harvard, MIT and the West Point military academy in the United States, and the University of Toronto, York and McGill in Canada.

The study also found that those who were home-schooled are nearly twice as likely to volunteer as others their age.

And a Canadian study found home-schoolers scored an average of 4.9 out of six on a life satisfaction test (with six being the best), compared to 4.2 for public-schoolers.

Home-schooling and the law

Across Canada, it’s perfectly legal to pull your child out of the public school system and teach her at home. However, provincial regulations (and individual school boards) impose varying conditions on home-schooling families.

British Columbia is seen as a home-schooling mecca because its School Act gives parents the right to educate children at home in any way they choose, so long as they follow some kind of “educational plan.” Parents do need to register with a public or independent school, or a distance-learning institution. The province provides funds to the schools for each registered home-schooler, creating incentive for schools to work together with home-schooling families. Home-schoolers can even borrow computer equipment and textbooks from the schools. Policies are also quite liberal in Ontario and Alberta.

At the other end of the spectrum is Quebec, whose provincial Education Act allows home-schooling, but says parents must provide education “equivalent to what is provided in school” and gives school boards power to scrutinize home-schoolers’ progress.

The remaining provinces and territories mostly fall somewhere in between.

RESOURCES

Click on these websites for home-schooling tools and info:

• lifelearning.ca Excellent Canadian home-schooling resource info and articles from Life Learning magazine, started by Canadian home-schooling pioneer Wendy Priesnitz.

• flora.org The Canadian Home Based Learning Resource Page lists hundreds of links for learning resources, home-schooling support groups, as well as province-by-province info on legal issues.

• homeedmag.com Home Education Magazine’s website has hundreds of free articles about home education, several blogs and a nice links library.

• en.wikibooks.org Access nearly 36,000 pages of educational textbooks for free. Click on Wikijunior for books about math, science, social studies and more for babies to preteens.

• happyhomeschooling.blogspot.com Quebec mom Kim Nichols blogs about her home education adventures and offers a great set of links to resources.

US Military Psychics

The incredible tale of how the CIA and American military spent $20 million trying to read people's minds.

BY ALEX ROSLIN

November 23, 2009

MAISONNEUVE

[Read it on the Maisonneuve site here.]

Spies and psychics. They are as different as chocolate and peanut butter, and conspiracy theorists love them both. Throw them together, however, into the same story, and you've got a whole new level of fun and insanity—Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup on a millennial, almost Biblical scale.

So when word got out in 1995 that US military intelligence had been funding efforts to read people's minds for more than twenty years, the strange news inspired all sorts of excitement and derision—particularly when some of these same psychics expressed their belief in UFOs, time travel and alien-human hybrids.

One of the first military mentalists to disclose details of the program was David Morehouse. In his 1996 book Psychic Warrior, he recounts how, as a soldier, he started to have strange visions and out-of-body experiences after a stray bullet hit his helmet during a training exercise. Instead of getting psychiatric treatment, Morehouse, a decorated Ranger and airborne captain, was enrolled in the military’s highly secretive Stargate program.

Stargate had begun at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the early 1970s, in conjunction with a couple of laser scientists from the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a body affiliated with Stanford University that did a lot of research for the U.S. government. One of the SRI scientists, Hal Puthoff, had already been dabbling in parapsychology when he was approached by CIA agents looking for a lab that could handle “a quiet, low-profile, classified investigation” outside normal academic lines.

According to Puthoff, the boys from Langley believed that the Russkies might be getting ahead in psychic experiments and felt that the CIA, too, needed to get involved—if only to figure out if the Soviets were capable of mind-controlling American generals.

Puthoff, a high-level Scientologist, claimed that he could “remotely view” things that he couldn’t physically see—such as information on a building directory inside a locked building. The boys at Langley grew interested and, in 1972, the CIA started funding Puthoff and his “empaths” (often fellow Scientologists).

These were heady, psychedelic times. The previous year, a US Army intelligence official, quoting an astrologer, had warned that “there is great danger that within the next 10 years the Soviets will be able to steal our top secrets by using out-of-body spies.” Soviet efforts at mind-reading would later be largely discredited as hoaxes, but fears of a psychic cold war had a receptive audience in the fringes of the US national security establishment. Stargate possessed a veneer of science as well as the possibility of gaining formidable advantage over the enemy.

The military’s foray into crystal-ballism was also part of a broader attempt by US spies and solders to reinvent themselves in the dog days after Vietnam. Within the CIA, there had always been tension between factions accustomed to more hard-edged tactics (such as the Phoenix program, which tortured and assassinated suspected Vietnamese peasant leaders) and those staff who favoured softer techniques—such as dusting Fidel Castro’s shoes with poisonous thallium to make his beard fall off. Now, in the earlier 1970s, the kooky coalition seemed to gain the upper edge.

One of the gurus of this rethink was Jim Channon, an army lieutenant-colonel assigned to study ways of creating a more “spiritual” army. According to Jon Ronson in The Men Who Stare at Goats, Channon attended a retreat at the Esalen Institute for the Advancement of Human Potential in Big Sur. Led by mentor Michael Murphy, a founder of the New Age movement, Channon engaged there in Reichian rebirthing, primal arm wrestling (regular arm wrestling combined with guttural screaming) and naked hot-tub encounter sessions. When he emerged, Channon wrote a confidential report in 1979 that started: “The U.S. army doesn’t really have any serious alternative than to be wonderful.”

Channon’s report proposed the creation of a First Earth Battalion of Zen-master super soldiers with telepathic powers. These “warrior monks” would carry ginseng regulators in their uniforms, divining tools and a loudspeaker to play indigenous music and words. They would also give their enemies “an automatic hug” and carry lambs into hostile countries, a symbol of their peaceful intent. They would learn how to fast, sense plant auras, pass through walls and “stop using mindless clichés.” “It is America’s role to lead the world to paradise,” he wrote.

(Channon’s idea of using loud music to confuse the enemy was tested out a few years later on Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega. In 2003, in Iraq, US Army soldiers forced detainees to listen to children’s songs like “I Love You” from Barney and Friends. The technique continues to be used on al-Qaeda prisoners today—some of them, according to Ronson, locked blindfolded in burning hot metal shipping containers, forced into crouching positions and surrounded by barbed wire while the music plays loudly non-stop for days.)

Far from being ridiculed, Channon’s report deeply moved a group of senior army officers, some brought nearly to tears, writes Ronson, because they held so many pent-up emotions from Vietnam. Channon’s report also would serve as a vision for Stargate.

Mind-reading by psychics was, in a sense, a logical extension of earlier and more invasive mind-control experiments that had been going on since World War Two. The MKULTRA project, started in 1953, attempted to emulate mind-control techniques used on U.S. prisoners by the Soviets, Chinese and North Koreans during the Korean War. Under the MKULTRA aegis, pregnant women were blasted with radiation, US army soldiers were dosed with LSD to study panic, US Navy sailors were exposed to sub-aural frequency blasts to erase memory, and a group of Oregon prison inmates had their testicles irradiated—invariably without full knowledge or consent by the subjects. In all, more than 150 individually funded research sub-projects—most of which, due to deliberately destroyed records, we know nothing about—existed within MKULTRA and related CIA programs.

Soon after being founded, the Stargate remote viewing program was cancelled by the CIA and ended up in the hands of the US military. The transfer was prompted by the 1975 Watergate scandal and ensuing Congressional investigation of the CIA, which scuttled many of its more controversial programs (including MKULTRA).

Many at the CIA were happy to see Stargate go. According to The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, one CIA man tells author Jeffrey Richelson that the official who had approved the program had been “out of his mind.” As a means of intelligence, he felt, Stargate was “useless” and “absolute bullshit.”

Indeed, those early experiments had led to mixed results for spying purposes, Richelson reports. The psychics had some accurate visions, but a very large percentage of what they envisioned was vague or plain wrong. In one operation, the early program’s leading psychic, Pat Price, was given coordinates of a Soviet military base in Kazakhstan, which Air Force intel thought could be a centre for particle-beam research. In four sessions spanning four days, Price gave what an evaluator judged to be “an almost perfect description of someone’s first look at the Operations Area” of the facility—low one-storey buildings partially dug into the ground, with a large crane. But other specifics given by Price—a 500-foot antenna, an outdoor pool, a nearby airstrip—were completely inaccurate.

Puthoff later touted the experiment as a success by pointing to the description of the large crane. But CIA officials didn’t agree, saying it amounted to lucky guessing. When Puthoff published some of his unclassified results in the journal Nature in 1974, an accompanying editorial comment called the paper “weak in design and presentation” and “disconcertingly vague” on details about the research methodology. A consistent problem was a lack of controls to ensure there had been no fraud.

The psychic research was a “dumb exercise” that produced “lots of laughing,” according to a senior CIA scientist quoted by Richelson, but it was justified because of the psychic research gap with the Soviets. When the Washington Post reported on CIA support for paranormal research in 1977, Richelson reports CIA director Stansfield Turner acknowledged the agency had had a man gifted with “visio-perception” of places he had never seen—a reference to Pat Price—but, Turner said with a smile, the man had died two years earlier, “and we haven’t heard from him since.”

Stargate’s new master, the US Air Force and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), quietly chipped in funds to keep the experiments going in the mid-1970s and eventually set up its own in-house psychic spying unit, funded by the US Army Intelligence and Security Command. Stargate’s headquarters was a run-down block of buildings at the Fort Meade Army base in Maryland.

By the 1980s, remote viewers had participated in dozens of intelligence-finding missions. Military sessions usually involved five to ten viewers with months of training all focusing on the same target in several sessions in order to make up for the limited accuracy of each viewer. The focus of viewing attempts included foreign buildings, Soviet submarines, Americans held hostage in Iran during the crisis of 1979-80, and in 1981, Brigadier General James Dozier, who had recently been kidnapped in Italy. The unit was praised by President Jimmy Carter for finding a downed Soviet bomber in Africa in 1979 after other spies had failed. Other missions of the psychic unit, according to a 1995 story in the Washington Post, include attempts to locate plutonium in North Korea and Muammar Gaddafi before the US raid on Libya in 1986.

Viewers also apparently tried their hand at some spacier stuff. One psychic took to trying to find the Loch Ness monster when there wasn’t any military work to do. (He determined that Nessie was actually a dinosaur’s ghost.) Another claimed to have killed a goat and his pet hamster by staring at them for days on end. And according to Ronson, a general in the program kept trying to walk through walls.

But members of the program tended to belie the stereotyped image of flaky New Agers. One psychic, Paul Smith, was a young US Army intelligence officer, Arab linguist and a devout Mormon. Analytical and clipped in both his writing and personal manner, Smith had no previous interest in extrasensory perception. As he writes in Reading the Enemy’s Mind: Inside Star Gate, America’s Psychic Espionage Program, Smith was recruited into Stargate in 1983 in part because of his skepticism about remote viewing. The program apparently didn’t want the true believers. Early research had also uncovered something surprising: “remote viewing” (a fancy military term for clairvoyance, or sending your “mind’s eye” to see things far away) wasn’t the exclusive domain of a few gifted psychics. Anybody could learn how to do it.

Although initially dubious, Smith says over the next seven years he became one of the army’s premier “remote viewers” and the main author of its extrasensory training manual. He would later serve as a tactical intelligence officer in the 101st Airborne Division in Operation Desert Storm/Shield. (David Morehouse, also a Mormon, entered the program in 1988 and trained under Smith.)

“My success rate was around 28 percent,” said one spy, Joe McMoneagle, to the Daily Mail newspaper this past January. “That may not sound very good, but we were brought in to deal with the hopeless cases. Our information was then cross-checked with any other available intelligence to build up an overall picture.” McMoneagle’s work eventually earned him the Legion of Merit, America’s highest military non-combat medal.

By one tally, of eighty-one projects between 1979 and 1982, twenty-one produced positive results, six were mixed, another six were terminated or not completed, and twelve were unsuccessful. The remaining thirty-eight received no evaluation or the results were not disclosed, according to Smith in Reading the Enemy’s Mind.

Even investigative journalist Jack Anderson, one of the first reporters to expose Stargate in a Washington Post column as a misuse of government funds, became a believer in the program’s value. “In concept if not always in execution, it was worth taxpayers’ dollars,” he wrote in the foreword to Smith’s book.

But many in the military remained skeptical. Fundamentalist Christians in the Army considered Stargate the Devil’s work. Nor was Stargate a well-supported program: lack of funds for renovations meant staff relied on scrap furniture to furbish much of their office. When one senator toured the program at Fort Meade, he apparently asked “where all the winos were” as he ascended the rickety steps.

In 1995, the program’s enemies finally won. In the throes of downsizing after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the DIA decided to kill Stargate. But remote viewing had a few friends in Congress, who pressed the CIA to take back the program it had started 20 years earlier. Urged on by supporters like Senator Claiborne Pell—sometimes referred to as “The Senator from Outer Space”—Congress mandated the CIA to review the usefulness of the 20-year psychic program, which had cost $20 million. The CIA, unhappy at the prospect of welcoming home the controversial mentalists, contracted out the study to the nonprofit American Institutes of Research (AIR), which in turn brought in two outside experts, statistician Jessica Utts and psychology professor Ray Hyman.

As a visiting scientist in the SRI program in the 1980s, Utts was a true believer in remote viewing, while Hyman was a longstanding debunker of all things paranormal, and a founding member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. They had butted heads over remote viewing before and this study would ultimately only reinforce their positions.

Utts reviewed 26,000 remote viewing trials done in 154 experiments at SRI. Her conclusion: “The statistical results were so overwhelming that results that extreme or more so would occur only about once in every 10 to the 20th such instances if chance alone is the explanation… Obviously some explanation other than chance must be found.”

Utts also studied 445 other trials in six more recent remote viewing experiments overseen by an internationally reputed panel of scientists (including a Nobel winner for physics) at Science Applications International Corporation. She claims to have found statistically significant results supporting psychic phenomena in four of the six experiments and calls the evidence for remote viewing “a lot stronger than for many effects we accept in everyday life. It’s on par with the effect of aspirin in preventing heart attacks.”

Hyman was less charitable to Stargate than Utts. He admitted that the case for psychic functioning seemed better than ever, and conceded that the data was puzzling—“I do not have a ready explanation for these observed effects”—but remained unconvinced, primarily because “it is impossible in principle to say that any particular experiment or experimental series is completely free from possible flaws… especially [ones] that have not yet been discovered.”

English psychologist Richard Wiseman summed up the problem nicely in a recent article in the Daily Mail: “If I said that there is a red car outside my house, you would probably believe me. But if I said that a UFO had just landed, you’d probably want a lot more evidence. Because remote viewing is such an outlandish claim that will revolutionize the world, we need overwhelming evidence before we draw any conclusions. Right now we don’t have that evidence.”

Hyman also noted a practical issue: remote viewers were said to be accurate about 20 percent of the time, but this wasn’t good enough for intel purposes. “Without any way to tell which statements of the views are reliable and which are not, the use of this information may make matters worse rather than better.”

The final report submitted by AIR to the CIA was damning and recommended against pursuing the program. Remote viewing had “failed to produce the concrete, specific information valued in intelligence reporting,” it said. The CIA pulled the plug in 1995.

But far from dying a quiet death, remote viewing gained a new life. Shutting down Stargate meant that formerly employed military psychics could now go public with their knowledge of the program itself—at length and in best-selling books—and set up private practices to continue their experiments.

Paul Smith and David Morehouse have both started private remote viewing training businesses. Remote Viewing Instructional Services, Inc. in Austin, Texas, founded by Smith, offers a 50-hour Basic Remote Viewing Course ($2,000) that includes a lecture from Hal Puthoff, the guy who helped kick off the whole thing back in the seventies.

In San Diego and San Marcos (north of San Diego), David Morehouse Productions offers a series of classes, from two to five days in length ($495 to $1,290). Classes are co-taught by Morehouse’s wife, Patty, and fellow psychic Jason Appleby. Students include police officers, border guards and medical professionals interested in becoming more perceptive about people they deal with on the job. Practising their techniques “heightens your intuition almost immediately. Once you do it more, you start to notice it more in a waking state too, learning to trust your gut more,” Appleby said.

What about using remote viewing for evil—cheating at cards or figuring out a bank’s layout? Appleby says some students start off wanting to use it to make money, but quickly drop the notion because remote viewing has significant limitations and is hard work.

Besides, Appleby said, students are quickly awakened to a spiritual side of remote viewing. “There’s something really profound about looking at the paper record of a session, having proof that there is more than just the physical body. People spend their entire lives in different faiths looking for just a glimpse of something like that, and here it is. It’s really something extraordinary. I think it’s the most profound story of history.”

(Reprinted from Issue 28, Summer 2008)

What’s in Your H1N1 Flu Vaccine?

By Alex Roslin
November 19, 2009
The Georgia Straight
[see the story at the Straight website]

Chris Shaw wasn’t always skeptical about vaccines. The neuroscientist at the University of British Columbia had his teenage son vaccinated with most of the recommended shots. But then he started studying some of the ingredients commonly found in vaccines.

What he discovered caused him to go cold turkey on all shots for his six-year-old daughter. And that includes the vaccine for the H1N1 flu.

“I am not convinced H1N1 is sufficiently hazardous to most people to risk the potential downside of the vaccine,” Shaw said over the phone from his office in the research pavilion at the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority.

Shaw isn’t an easily dismissed vaccine conspiracy theorist. He is a leading expert on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease) and Parkinson’s disease. While investigating unusually high rates of ALS and other neurological disorders among veterans who have Gulf War syndrome, he found evidence that the cause may have been aluminum salt, an ingredient in the cocktail of vaccines given to soldiers before deployment [see sidebar, below].

Although aluminum salt isn’t present in the H1N1 vaccine, Shaw’s discovery made him concerned about other vaccines, including the swine-flu shot. He isn’t alone in his thoughts.

Despite a full frontal assault of news about the dangers of the flu and the importance of vaccination, a survey in late October revealed that only 36 percent of Canadians said they would get the shot. Lack of trust in the vaccine was cited as the main reason for vaccine opposition. Another poll in November found that 65 percent of Canadians believe the media has overreacted to the threat of swine flu.

Even many health workers aren’t convinced. In two separate surveys, in the U.K. (Pulse) and Hong Kong (British Medical Journal), published in August, half of health-care professionals said they didn’t intend to get the vaccine.

Canadian health officials and some newspaper columnists have reacted by accusing vaccine opponents of being conspiracy mongers or just plain irresponsible.

Who is right? Is the cure really worse than the disease? Let’s look at some numbers.

First, the disease. Swine flu had killed 161 Canadians as of November 12. That works out to one death per 200,000 Canadians in the past six-and-a-half months. Over the same period of time, major cardiovascular diseases typically claim 240 times more Canadian lives (about 39,000), cancer claims 230 times more (37,000 deaths), pneumonia kills 18 times more (2,800), and accidental falls claim eight times more (1,260), according to calculations based on 2005 Statistics Canada figures.

H1N1 has about the same death rate as hernias. But we don’t see scary front-page headlines for months on end about hernias, pneumonia, or falling down.

“It’s really not causing—and is not going to cause and nowhere has caused—significant levels of illness or death,” Dr. Richard Schabas, Ontario’s former chief medical officer of health, told the CBC on November 12.

Schabas said H1N1 “has ultimately turned out to be, from a pandemic perspective, a dud”.

What about the vaccine? Is it safe? Despite the onslaught of confident pronouncements from health officials and doctors, Shaw says he hasn’t seen enough information on the safety of the vaccine. “If the science were there, we could make a rational decision. But it’s a coin toss.”

Looking for answers, Shaw turned to the 24-page product-information leaflet on the vaccine released by drug giant GlaxoSmithKline. Health Canada used this document in approving the shot.

The leaflet leaves Shaw cold. “You couldn’t turn this in as a master’s thesis anywhere I know of and get a passing grade,” he said, calling the leaflet a “shocking document”.

Shaw said the material lacks basic information. For example, there is no safety data at all for several groups of people—pregnant women, people aged over 60, kids aged 10 to 17, and children under three. For kids three to nine years old, there is only “very limited” data.

“Where is the safety data that the government used to license the vaccine?” Shaw asked.

Health Canada would not talk to the Straight, and the Public Health Agency of Canada did not respond to a request for an interview.

The H1N1 vaccine includes a component called an adjuvant—which is used to boost the drug’s effectiveness—that has raised a lot of questions.

GlaxoSmithKline says the adjuvant has been tested on 45,000 people worldwide and that clinical trials are now being done on children. In an e-mail, spokesperson Melanie Spoore said the company is planning 25 trials of its various H1N1 vaccines before November 2010.

She also said a different but closely related vaccine made by the company, for the H5N1 flu, includes the same adjuvant and “is generally well-tolerated and has an acceptable safety profile” in both kids and adults.

But Shaw has concerns about the company’s trial results for the H5N1 vaccine. The product leaflet mentions a study in which the company injected the vaccine into pregnant rats. It found “an increased incidence of fetal malformations” and “delayed neurobehavioural maturation”. Another study did not produce the same outcome.

But Shaw says the rat results deserve more study. “Anytime you observe such outcomes, it is a concern,” he said.

The leaflet also mentions a study on ferrets. The animals were given adjuvanted and nonadjuvanted H5N1 vaccines and then exposed to the flu. The ferrets that got the adjuvanted vaccine were protected by the vaccine. But those that got the nonadjuvanted vaccine all died.

This result could be a concern, Shaw said, because Canadian authorities are telling pregnant women to get the nonadjuvanted H1N1 vaccine since the adjuvanted version hasn’t ever been tested on pregnant women. Shaw also said the animal-study information in the leaflet lacks many important details and would be “unpublishable” as presented. “Any [medical-journal] referee would kick this out the window.”

The company’s leaflet also paints a picture of the vaccine’s side effects in humans somewhat different than the usual line from health authorities. The Public Health Agency of Canada says on its Web site that the adjuvanted vaccine is as safe as the nonadjuvanted shot. It also says the rate of “serious adverse events” from vaccination is extremely low—typically “about one for every 100,000 doses of vaccine”.

What we don’t often hear is that the adjuvanted vaccine caused dramatically more side effects than the nonadjuvanted version. Ninety percent of 62 subjects reported pain (versus 37 percent of 62 people for the nonadjuvanted vaccine), 34 percent had muscle soreness (compared to 8 percent with the nonadjuvanted shot), and 14 percent experienced a headache (as opposed to 8 percent for the nonadjuvanted shot), according to the product-information sheet.

Although these reactions are minor, the leaflet also says four of 253 people studied experienced “severe adverse reactions”. Three of the four were deemed to be unrelated to the vaccine, but one case of hypersensitivity (which can mean anything from an allergic reaction to autoimmune disease) was determined “to be related to vaccination”.

That one serious reaction might not sound like a lot, but it actually translates into a rate of 395 cases per 100,000 people. That’s more than 50 times the rate of hospitalization due to H1N1 itself: 7.3 per 100,000 Canadians.

Sucharit Bhakdi is concerned some serious vaccine reactions could go unnoticed. He is a professor of medical microbiology at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany. In October—in a coauthored paper in the journal Medical Microbiology—he warned of a possible increase in the risk in heart problems due to mass H1N1 vaccination.

Speaking by phone from his office, Bhakdi cited the higher rate of heart problems when 1.4 million U.S. soldiers were vaccinated for smallpox before the 2003 Iraq war.

Soldiers who received the vaccine had almost 7.5 times the rate of heart inflammation of nonvaccinated personnel, according to a study by U.S. military medical researchers in 2004 in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

“Unexpected serious adverse effects thus may follow in the wake of a general vaccination program,” Bhakdi’s paper said.

Yet health authorities and doctors are urging people with heart problems to get the H1N1 vaccine on a priority basis and do not appear to be monitoring them for possibly elevated risks, he said.

Shaw is also concerned about Canada’s monitoring of the side effects of vaccinations, calling the system “flimsy”.

What especially worries Shaw is the possibility of longer-term side effects from the vaccine. Most vaccine safety studies monitor patients for a few days or, at most, several months.

That isn’t enough, Shaw says. With some vaccines, the most serious reactions have taken years to surface. “Neurological problems don’t happen overnight,” he said. “It took five to 10 years to see the bulk of the Gulf War–syndrome outcomes.”

One of the best examples involves a controversial ingredient present in the H1N1 vaccine: thimerosal. Thimerosal is a form of mercury used in some vaccines as a preservative. Drug makers agreed to phase it out of most vaccines after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration found in 1999 that mercury levels in children who had gotten multiple shots often exceeded safety levels set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Nonetheless, thimerosal still remains in many flu vaccines.

Controversy has raged for years about whether or not thimerosal is behind soaring childhood autism rates. While that debate continues, a 2008 study in the U.K. journal Toxicological and Environmental Chemistry found that boys who were given a vaccine containing thimerosal were nine times more likely to have developmental problems than unvaccinated boys.

The Public Health Agency of Canada says on its Web site that thimerosal is safe and that the amount in the H1N1 vaccine is below Health Canada’s daily safety limit set for mercury. “There’s significantly less mercury in the vaccine than you would find in a can of tuna fish,” the site states.

In fact, the amount of mercury in the nonadjuvanted H1N1 vaccine does actually exceed the daily safety level for pregnant women. Health Canada has established the safe dietary level of mercury for pregnant women at 0.2 micrograms (millionths of a gram) per kilo of body weight. The nonadjuvanted H1N1 vaccine contains 25 micrograms of mercury.

Simple math tells us an average Canadian pregnant woman—weighing 80 kilograms at term—gets about 56 percent more than the daily safe level of mercury when given a dose of the nonadjuvanted vaccine. By the EPA’s stricter standards, that same dose is actually triple its daily safe level.

What’s more, Shaw notes, those daily safety levels were set for consumption of mercury in food, not for injection directly into the body. Injecting a neurotoxin like mercury has much more impact than eating it, he said.

Squalene is another controversial component of the swine-flu vaccine. It’s an oil found in animal livers and is used as an adjuvant in vaccines and also as a moisturizer in cosmetic products. It is primarily gotten from shark livers—a fact that has upset conservation groups worried about endangered shark populations. Some companies, like Unilever and L’Oréal, have agreed to stop using squalene in cosmetic products.

Debate has raged for years about whether or not squalene is responsible for Gulf War syndrome. Most research suggests that’s not the case, but in recent years much more solid evidence [see here, here, here and here] has found squalene can cause autoimmune diseases like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis in animals.

Still other questions have been raised about polysorbate 80, another component of the H1N1 vaccine adjuvant. Studies have found it can cause severe allergic reactions and hypersensitivity [see here, here and here].

In the end, we might only get a good picture of the vaccine’s side effects long after swine flu has run its course. Then again, with Canada’s lax monitoring system for side effects, we may never know which was worse.

Chris Shaw's Key Findings
UBC neuroscientist Chris Shaw’s research raises serious questions about a substance used in many vaccines for decades and long thought to be safe—aluminum salt.

Shaw started out looking for an explanation for high rates of ALS among soldiers with Gulf War syndrome.

He found that mice injected with aluminum salt showed symptoms similar to ALS—motor-neuron loss and neuroinflammation in parts of the spinal chord.

His studies [see here and here] conclude the soldiers may have gotten ALS from the aluminum present in the cocktail of vaccines they were given before being deployed to the Mideast in 1991.

Aluminum salt isn’t present in the H1N1 vaccine, but it is present in nearly half of all vaccines licensed in Canada.
Yet, Shaw said no one has followed up on his study to his knowledge. “It’s one of those topics that’s seen as problematic,” he said. “The lack of official curiosity is kind of disturbing.”

Creeping Desert

Will climate change push fertile prairie to desolate wasteland?

By Alex Roslin
Canadian Wildlife, September/October 2009

Water is the lifeblood of the Canadian Prairies—essential for its ecosystems, drinking and economy. But water experts say life could be turned upside down there as climate change brings severe drought, dried-up rivers and near-desertification to the Prairies in coming decades. Some of the impacts are already well underway.

“There is going to be tremendous stress on ecosystems,” says James Byrne, chair of the geography department at the University of Lethbridge. “It’s going to require substantial adjustment.”

“There will be a fair amount of problems in terms of agricultural production,” says Suren Kulshreshtha, an agricultural economist at the University of Saskatchewan. Impacts could include a 10 to 30 per cent drop in crop yields across the Prairies, according to Environment Canada.

Temperatures across the Prairies have already gone up by between one and four degrees Celsius in the past century, depending on the region. By 2100, they’re expected to go up a further 6.5 degrees under a median climate-change forecast in a landmark study coauthored by University of Alberta biologist David Schindler in 2006. He found that temperatures in northern Fort McMurray will be warmer than they are now in Lethbridge, 1,000 kilometres to the south.

Warmer temperatures, in turn, are behind a few parallel trends that are combining to imperil the Prairie water supply: melting glaciers and diminishing snowpacks in the Rocky Mountains, and increased evaporation of soil moisture.

Some of the hardest hit glaciers are in Montana’s Glacier National Park, which also sprawls into British Columbia and Alberta. Ice fields there help feed the South Saskatchewan River, whose waters meander across the Prairies and ultimately drain into Lake Winnipeg. This watershed is the main source of freshwater in a vast expanse of the southern Prairies.

But high up in the Rockies, rising temperatures over the past century have slowly melted 67 per cent of Glacier National Park’s icesheet. Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey now estimate the last glaciers there will disappear by 2020—a decade earlier than initial estimates because warming is happening faster than expected.

“All of a sudden the park needs to be renamed because there are no glaciers,” says Stefan Kienzle, a University of Lethbridge hydrologist who studies climate-change impacts in the Prairies and in the mountain headwaters of the region’s rivers. Kienzle worked with other leading Canadian scientists to coauthor a landmark review of those impacts for Natural Resources Canada in 2007. They concluded that rising temperatures will bring widespread drought to the Prairies, especially in late summer, and that there will also be more frequent severe droughts.

Many rivers and streams will dry up, and wildlife that depends on them will be devastated. “A large number of Prairie aquatic species are at risk of extirpation,” the review said.

Byrne, who was one of the lead authors of the study, says the Prairies will eventually turn into an arid tropical zone like Arizona, especially in summertime, with near-desert conditions in some areas. “Overall, the biggest concern is we’re going to see a big increase in variability (of the Prairie climate),” he says.

River flows in the three Prairie provinces are already down substantially. A severe drought in 2001 and 2002 caused an estimated $5.8-billion drop in Canada’s gross domestic product and 41,000 lost jobs, mostly in the Prairies. A study commissioned for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada tied it to climate change and called for better preparedness to counter “the increasing threat of drought risk."

One of the key unanswered questions is the fate of the massive Columbia Icefield straddling the Alberta and B.C. border. This 365-metre-thick chain of glaciers is the largest mass of ice and snow in the Rockies and helps feed a watershed that spans the central and northern Prairies.

But this icefield is also retreating. One of its main components, the Saskatchewan Glacier, which is the primary water source for the North Saskatchewan River, has retreated 1.4 kilometres in the last 100 years. Another component, the Athabaska Glacier, has lost half its volume.

Low river flow in the late summer will have significant implications for wildlife in the watershed, says Kienzle. “It will put more stress on the ecosystem and on all species that depend on the rivers.”

LOW FLOW

Climate change is already affecting rivers in the Canadian Prairies. Summer river flows are 20 to 84 per cent lower than 100 years ago, according to a 2006 study coauthored by University of Alberta biologist David Schindler, which appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We were shocked by how extreme the changes in river flows had been,” a profile of Schindler in the journal quoted him saying. He added that the decline of Canada’s freshwater “might be the largest crisis facing that nation in the upcoming century,” the article said.