Daily Kos

That seems...less than ideal.

as for me, with a healthy, vaccinated son, I feel like we dodged a bullet. Thanks for the links and the coverage.

I had lot's of vaccinations when I was a little kid back in the late 1960's and early 1970's.

I turned out a little twisted (don't know if it was the vaccines) but I didn't get f*ckin polio or smallpox or a few other crippling nasties that I could have got if I hadn't been vaccinated.

What does the Academy of Science say about it? Or the GAO? I don't know but I need somebody like those orgs to tell me what's up with vaccines before I start taking the anti-vaccination hysteria seriously.

Anyway, what if it turned out that vaccines did cause a higher incidence of autism. What's worse, that or a return to the days when we had polio epidemics?

That's what I think.

This is a relatively small number of kids with a relatively small number of positives (for example, for autism, running 2-5% of under 1000). I want to see the statistical data. Calculations of % of likelihood often bear little relation to reality.

For example, young women who take oral contraceptives have such-and-such % higher chance of heart attack, stroke, clots, etc. BUT the actual risk is only statistically increased with a combination of the pill and smoking.

As Cyrano Jones said in "The Trouble With Tribbles," "Twice nothing is still nothing."

To say nothing of the risk of NOT vaccinating your kids. Measles, rubella, polio, diphtheria, pertussis. Ever seen them? Well, I have. I won't go back to that time, ever!

Because unless this has been published in a recognized, peer-reviewed medical journal, you got nothing but another conspiracy theory.

I'm all for doing the necessary research on autism. I have a friend with an autistic son. There are too many unanswered questions. But the last thing these families need is yet another jerk-off conspiracy theory.

Save your breath and our time.

glad I hung around to read. thanks, folks. I'm keeping my powder dry.

from my own family's experience with autism, i find this very unlikely. my nephew was born autistic, there was obviously something going on with him before he ever had a vaccination. and knowing other families with autistic children...i remain skeptical.

Not buying it.

First, not even 1000 out of over 17,000 kids were located who weren't vaccinated. What's that going to do to your stats ?

Almost every kid in the US is vaccinated. Can't go to public or most private schools without vaccination proof-- or a statement of religious objection to vaccination, and that's pretty rare.

The populations that object tend to gather in certain areas, I suspect, which would further complicated analyses.

Fine they sampled several states and several counties, but its obvious that different parts of the same county have different pollution levels, etc. What did they do about that ?

How did they assess allergies ? What about genetics ? How did they control for that over the phone ?

This survey raises more questions than it resolves.

Too many questions that don't seem to work in a telephone survey. I await further developments, and better constructed studies.

its purpose should be only to inspire more study.

Vaccines have done too much good for too many people to be adandoned because of this interesting, but weak study.

   Autism is a tragic illness of immense proportions leaving their victims trapped in an internal prison of the mind.  The survey followed the model of other surveys done by the CDC and one never knows in research where the next clue for the diagnosis and cure will come from.  The brain is so complex and so is autism that there will be more studies forthcoming which is good news for the families of children who suffer from this dibilitating illness.

reporting nothing more than anecdotal responses to a telephone survey of parents.

Give me a break.

Of course parents are going to find causal links where science has already disproved them (especially when money to be made from law suits is involved).*  That's why intelligent people depend on the scientific method and reports of scientific investigations over anecdotal "evidence" as the means for determining what is true in nature and medicine.

• JAMA Oct. 1, 2003 article in re thimerosal preservative in vaccines didn't tell parents what they wanted to hear, that there is no scientific link to autism.

Come on folks!  We do not know who funded this, which makes me a bit skeptical.

The notion that the study has never been done strikes me as odd, since the assertions that there's no link is based also on data.

Good science is relatively tricky to do.  This doesn't seem to cut it.

I get so fucking frustrated by left wing folks who pick up the latest BS just because it validates their idea of big pharma or some other BS.

Plenty of PEOPLE have pointed to actual studies that so NO link between the two, yet people keep ignoring this and saying ohh we need more study.  THIS IS THE SAME CRAP the right pulls on evolution or Global Warming.  LET IT GO, there are bigger fish to fry and not vaccinating kids is dangerous to EVERYONE!

to more accurately reflect the contents of your diary and to better give potential readers an idea of what they're in for.

if it was claimed as legitimate scientific research. Don't expect to see it in a peer-reviewed journal any time soon.

The author of the www.generationrescue.org summary was not even smart enough to obscure the manipulation of results. It wasn't enough to claim a 61% increase in autism for boys in the vaccinated group - based on finding 12 unvaccinated boys with autism when 18 would have shown no difference in the rate. They went further and took out a county with "unusual results" (with no disclosure what was so unusual, or why one county should be discarded) to find vaccinated boys 146% more likely to have autism in the other 8 counties. It's very clear from such a difference, that the county with a high rate of autism in unvaccinated boys was removed. How convenient!

I don't even need to mention the problems with the methodology, the sample size, self-reporting of health information, and other flaws in this astonishingly poor survey. The commissioning group's willingness to cherry-pick amongst the data to distort its reported results is sufficient to show the "study" was not worth a single dollar. If more questions had been asked, it could just as plausibly have found that autism is "caused" by school attendance (as opposed to homeschooling), or not owning an SUV.

A study on autism conducted by an independent opinion research firm.  I'm sooooo impressed.

/snark

"The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'."

This isn't "the only study we have." This isn't science. It's an undocumented phone survey conducted by a freaking advertising firm.

This is not a study. It's self-selected, paid-for, agenda-promoting bullshit. It does not show a need for further research. It does not suggest anything. It does nothing of any value whatsoever, unless you were the company that got paid to do it, in which case it added to this quarter's P&L statement.

That you completely fail to see that this survey shows nothing and supports no conclusion indicates either a profound ignorance of science, or a "my mind is made up, don't confuse me with facts" attitude of willful ignorance.

It's about as scientific as phlogiston chemistry or Lamarckian evolution.

--Shannon

Actually I already did that 20 years ago.  But I would urge them to vaccinate theirs.  I believe any other choice is irresponsible-to them and to others.

THIS IS DANGEROUS STUFF.

Be grateful that in the US vaccinations are generally required for school entry.  Over here in the UK, they are not...so when the 'vaccinations cause autism' meme was being put about a few years ago (talk about a viral infection), worried and caring (and gullible?) parents avoided vaccinating their kids in large numbers.  Result?  Increased incidence of the diseases that vaccination programs were designed to reduce to manageable levels.  There was a lot of concern that vaccination levels were reducing to the point where major epidemics could occur.  It took a major re-education effort to turn the problem around, and I'm guessing vaccination rates are still lower that I'd like to see.

For what it's worth, I'm covered by and am a strong believer in the UK's National Health Service.  Although I also have good US health insurance via a former employer, I recently had a heart operation 'on the Health', rather than deal with the aggravation and cost of using my health insurance.  Treatment and outcome were both excellent.  Cost to me, £0.  But when I see the precious resources of the NHS having to be used to combat the junk science and scare-mongering about the evils of vaccinations it makes my  blood boil.  Money and time spent on dealing with the fallout could have been spent caring for patients with less avoidable problems than mumps, measles, rubella and whooping cough.

Let's spend our health care dollars where they can make the most difference, not the least.

The link here is not a vacine. The clue to the problem is that it affect 4x more boys then girls. When you have a side effect from a shot it is not sex selective.
The fact is autism is most likely a genetic trait. The fact that the rates are going up (or seem to be) is misleading. Problems that in the past were labeled mental retardation, behavior problems, child abuse ect could have had a large number of misdiagnosis. We are probably now more appropriatly labeling them.

BTW I have twin grandsons with high functioning autism. Identical twin.....both autistic.

I predict in 10 years they will have identified a marker gene for autism.

but count me out of the anti-vaccination crown.  I'm open to all credible reports of causes of autism, but the quality of the study does not contribute to the discussion.  Serious large-scale scientific studies have shown no relationship between vaccination and autism.

It's good to see so many posts with science and data instead of emotional rants on this subject. A child with special needs is a challenge and so many parents of these children seem more concerned about blaming something for their kids problem than enjoying their kid and fighting for apprpriate education ect.I personally think diagnosis is a huge part of the increasing rates of Autism-until civil rights legislation in the 1960's special needs children weren't welcome in public school and there was very little reason to get an accurate label for them.And until the 1980's Asperger syndrome was pretty much unknown in this country.

There was in fact an actual scientific study, conducted in Japan with 30,000 subjects that established banning the MMR vaccine didn't halt the rise in autism cases.

Also, we had our first child death from measles in quite a few years recently in the UK - which is a pretty good reason, I think, to hold scaremongering crap such as this diary in contempt.

First off, vaccinations do NOT cause any of this. What has been considered possible is that the mercury used as a preservative in vaccinations might have caused problems. My understanding is that also has been debunked. But even if true, it is NOT the vaccination that causes problems. It is the preservative and that has been changed anyway.

Vaccinations save lives. You have not presented any scientific evidence to the contrary.

But it is the only study in the whole world, ever, comparing autism rates of vaccinated and unvaccinated kids.

We need a sound solid study.

Dear "Financial":

Thank you so much for publicizing the results of our survey, and sticking to your guns in the face of many criticisms from your readers.

In fact, the community of responses here is a microcosm of what we have seen since we released our results:

• Many will confuse the issue and claim the science has already been done to disprove the vaccine-autism link, despite the fact that it doesn't exist, as you rightly and frequently point out
• Others will criticize the methodology we used, despite the fact that we copied the approach the CDC uses to guaging the prevalence of autism - a phone survey!!
• Few will acknowledge that the vaccine schedule has increased from 10 vaccines in the mid-1980s to 36 vaccines today, with ZERO testing of vaccines in combination (meaning they only study a single vaccine and its effects for 6 weeks after they give it during testing - they would never catch autism!!)
• Few are willing to consider less severe things like ADHD and other learning disabilities as potentially caused by the same thing, despite the fact that our RR numbers for ADHD were OFF THE CHARTS.
• A commmon, and understandable, criticism of our study is that there was a "response bias" meaning parents with a child with autism were more likely to respond to our phone call, for which we offer the following:

If there was response bias, we should have received a disproportionate share of our responses from parents of boys, who represent 80% of NDs, and we did not. Boys were 51.9% of responses and girls were 48.1%. (We hope there was some response bias, because our numbers show a prevalence of autism of 1 in 43, far higher than the CDC's reported number of 1 in 150.)

• Finally, we are happy to ship the Excel file of primary data that we recived from SurveyUSA to anyone who would like to analyze it, just email us at info at generationrescue dot org and we will send it.

Also, someone implied in the comments that I'm a vaccine litigant and we just did this survey to help us in court. For them, 3 comments:

1. Prove it

2. That's 100% untrue

3. This is a common tactic of people who don't like the answers our survey produced - portray us as greedy parents. It's sad, pathetic, and wildly unfair.

Oh, and finally, I need to re-print the response of Julie Gerberding, the head of the CDC, after she was asked why the study comparing vax/unvax has never been done (unlike many of you, she didn't try to misrepresent that the work had been done because she knows better):

Q: "Has the government ever looked at the autism rate in an unvaccinated U.S. population, and if not, why not?"

Ms. Gerberding's answer:

"In this country, we have very high levels of vaccination as you probably know, and I think this year we have record immunization levels among all of our children, so to (select an unvaccinated group) that on a population basis would be representative to look at incidence in that population compared to the other population would be something that could be done.
But as we're learning, just trying to look at autism in a community the size of Atlanta, it's very, very difficult to get an effective numerator and denominator to get a reliable diagnosis.

I think those kind of studies could be done and should be done. You'd have to adjust for the strong genetic component that also distinguishes, for example, people in Amish communities who may elect not to be immunized (and) also have genetic connectivity that would make them different from populations that are in other sectors of the United States. So drawing some conclusions from them would be very difficult.

I think with reference to the timing of all of this, good science does take time, and it's part of one of the messages I feel like I've learned from the feedback that we've gotten from parents groups this summer (in) struggling with developing a more robust and a faster research agenda, is let's speed this up. Let's look for the early studies that could give us at least some hypotheses to test and evaluate and get information flowing through the research pipeline as quickly as we can.

So we are committed to doing that, and as I mentioned, in terms of just measuring the frequency of autism in the population some pretty big steps have been taken. We're careful not to jump ahead of our data, but we think we will be able to provide more accurate information in the next year or so than we've been able to do up to this point. And I know that is our responsibility.

We've also benefited from some increased investments in these areas that have allowed us to do this, and so we thank Congress and we thank the administration for supporting those investments, not just at CDC but also at NIH and FDA."

Is Ms. Gerberding genuinely interested in getting an answer? We will let the reader decide.

Warmest regards,

JB Handley
co-founder
Generation Rescue

Dear Financial:

I thought your readers would benefit from the writings of a scientist-parent who is a specialist in toxicology:

Consider this recently published letter by Michael Wagnitz, a scientist and father of an autistic child:

Research supports mercury-autism link
By Michael Wagnitz

It was reported repeatedly in 2006 that the link between mercury-containing vaccines and autism has been disproven. Yet if one looks at the most recent research coming from some of our major universities, one may draw the opposite conclusion.

What we have learned in the last couple of years is that the underlying medical condition of autism is neuroinflammatory disease. In a study conducted at John Hopkins University, brain tissue from deceased autistic patients was examined. The tissue showed an active neuroinflammatory process and marked activation of microglia cells. Neuroinflammatory disease is synonymous with an activation of microglia cells.

A study done at the University of Washington showed that baby primates exposed to injected thimerosal (50 percent mercury), at a rate equal to the 1990s childhood vaccine schedule, retained twice as much inorganic mercury in their brains as primates exposed to equal amounts of ingested methylmercury. We know from autometallographic determination that inorganic mercury present in the brain, following the dealkylation of organic mercury, is the toxic agent responsible for changes in the microglial population and leads to neuroinflammation.

Recently it was shown that in more than 250 examined patients, atypical urinary porphyrins were almost three times higher in autistic patients than controls. Porphyrins are precursors to heme, the oxygen-carrying component of blood. Mercury inhibits the conversion of porphyrins to heme. When the patients were treated to remove mercury, urinary porphyrins returned to normal levels.

In a study done at the University of Arkansas, autistic children were found to have significantly lower levels of the antioxidant glutathione. Glutathione is the major antioxidant needed for the elimination of mercury at the cellular level. This may explain why some children are more severely affected by thimerosal in vaccines than others.

While all the government-conducted epidemiological (statistical) studies show no link between thimerosal and autism, the clinical studies examining brain tissue, blood, urine and human cells show a completely different picture.

Michael Wagnitz is a Madison resident with more than 20 years of experience as a chemist working with trace metal analysis.

Michael Wagnitz is a lab technician for the State of Wisconsin. He's the guy that tests your blood for alcohol if you're arrested for DWI. You'll have to do way better than that.

And liberals have vaccines and autism conspiracy theorists.

It's a pity that anti-intellectualism isn't isolated to only one branch of the political spectrum.