I have a problem that children were given a dose of a toxic drug based on a mouse study.
I don't think this is accurate.
With few exceptions, toxicity often has to do with the dosage than with the substance itself.
For example, extremely high levels of insulin could be considered toxic because it could cause death. Yet, insulin is critical for survival. Extremely high doses of radiation causes cancer and death, yet we are all exposed to low levels of radiation all the time, and our bodies have developed ways to cope with this. Bananas have low levels of radioactivity, but I've never heard a scientist warning the public that bananas are toxic. Even water in extremely high amounts is toxic, but again it is critical to survival.
The interview states that Naviaux used an extremely low one time dosage precisely because he wanted to be extremely cautious.
And while a larger sample would be necessary (as he himself stated) to determine whether there are any uncommon reponses, I think it is significant that besides a minor rash that went away after 2-4 days WITHOUT treatment, there were no other side effects reported. From my understanding, children with autism tend to be extremely sensitive to foods, chemicals, medications, sensory input, etc... so the fact that these 5 kids had such minor side effects seems to support that in such a low dosage, this drug likely did not have toxic effects on them.
Here are 2 quotes from the interview supporting this:
Even though suramin has been around for 100 years, it has never been tested in a pediatric autism population before, so this was really uncharted territory. The rationale for the single dose was to err on the side of caution because high doses of suramin given for prolonged periods of time in cancer patients have been associated with significant side-effects.
It's important to remember though that we were using a very low dose of suramin -- lower than anything that has been tested for any disease in the nearly 100 years that suramin has been used in medicine. To put this in perspective. The low-dose that we used produced blood levels of 5-15 µM. All previous uses of suramin have been at medium doses for African sleeping sickness that produced blood levels of 50-100 µM for 1-3 months, or high doses for cancer chemotherapy that produced blood levels of 150-270 µM for 3-6 months."
From what Niviaux says in the interview, there were strong side effects from Suranim when adults with cancer and African sleeping sickness were given a much higher repeated dosage for months. These children were given a one-time dosage and their blood levels of Sumarin were 1/10 of what the adults had.
Additionally, Suramin has been used in humans for 100 years and is on the World Health Organization's list of most important drugs. The reason he chose this drug is that it is the only drug approved for use in humans that would accomplish what he thought needed to be done. I don't understand why you say that he used it because of a mouse study.
Here is a quote explaining why he used Suramin:
In 2008, I searched the world for any drug that could inhibit eATP signaling. There was only one drug in the world that was known to do this and was available for use in humans. This was suramin. Suramin has many actions. One of its best-studied actions is as an inhibitor of purinergic signaling. For simplicity, we call suramin an “antipurinergic" drug because it inhibits signaling. There are many other antipurinergics under investigation for other conditions, but most are all still experimental. Suramin had the benefit of being a 100-year old drug that could be tested in humans.