1 Laboratory of Neuropathology, Department of Pathology, University of Washington School of Medicine Seattle, Washington 98195
Dr. McCarl has raised 19 objections to our findings of a vacuolar encephalopathy related to hexachlorophene exposure. We reject each of them.
Dr. McCarl begins by challenging the degree to which our sample was representative of the whole pediatric population. He notes that 70% of the second of our three samples in Table I had to be omitted because the brainstem had been discarded in the five years between the autopsy and our study. He ignores the fact that the first sample had the same prevalence of the vacuolar encephalopathy (11% and 9%, as reported on page 692) and no cases were omitted because the specimens were being brought directly to our neuropathology lab two weeks post-mortem and saved thereafter.