Abubakar Tariq Nadama

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Abubakar Tariq Nadama (2000-2005) was an autistic boy residing in Batheaston, England who died of cardiac arrest while undergoing chelation therapy with EDTA at the Advanced Integrative Therapy Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The death of Abubakar caused a stir within autistic culture and the autism rights movement, increasing the culture's sense of being at war with the movement to cure autism. At the heart of the case was the fact that chelation is not approved in the United States or any other country unless heavy metal poisoning has been adequately identified by blood tests, and even then it is considered an experimental therapy. Chelation, which removes such metals, when present, from the body, is used as a supposed cure for autism based on the speculative and spurious hypothesis that mercury poisoning is either the cause of, or one of possible causes of, or one of many factors in inducing autism.

Howard Carpenter, chief executive of the Advisory Board on Autism-Related Disorders, claims that chelation quacks have long been taking advantage of parental fears by offering unproven and often dangerous false cures to their children's autism.