Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control show that autism is rising in this country at a rapid rate. Here is a recent chart from them documenting this rise.
So, the question becomes -- are Jenny McCarthy and her band of True Believers right? No -- it does not follow that there is a link between autism and vaccines. This rise in autism is explainable by several factors, including environmental, genetic, greater parental awareness, and better diagnosis.
Halef, in this comment, argues that there are a lot of unanswered questions about autism and that we should therefore not exclude vaccines. He noted that there was a special vaccine court set up for the specific purpose of assessing vaccine damages. However, the very vaccine court that Halef appeals to found that there was no link whatsoever between autism and vaccines. But this is a typical tactic of True Believers when trying to establish such a link -- say that there are a lot of unanswered questions when they really mean that they Believe that since children are routinely vaccinated and they are subsequently diagnosed with autism that vaccines are somehow responsible. This is a thought pattern left over from the days when religion and superstition ruled the world -- the belief that because A happened and B happened that A therefore caused B. In the case of vaccines and autism, the question has already been settled -- there is no link.
To say that there are a lot of unanswered questions about autism is beside the point -- that is true about anything. But it doesn't mean that we should use unsound science to claim whatever we want to and try to start some sort of religious movement over it. That is what Jenny McCarthy and her crusade amounts to -- a religion. She admits (on her own website) that she is not a scientist; therefore, we have to accept her claims of a link between vaccines and autism on faith. In the meantime, the Constitution mandates that we not establish religion; therefore, we have no business basic public policy on junk science that has already been discredited. Given the fact that the biggest pusher for this notion, Andrew Wakefield, has been discredited and exposed as a fraud, that is all she has to go on.
Halef continues by citing the Hannah Poling case. However, her case has nothing to do with autism at all, because that is not what she was diagnosed with. Instead, she had a Mitochondrial disease and the government admitted that her shots aggravated her condition to the point where she developed "autism spectrum disorder." But this is not evidence that vaccines cause autism at all -- this is evidence that vaccines can aggravate Mitochondrial disease, which is a rare genetic disorder. In fact, this case suggests that autism is genetic and not caused by vaccines. In other words, it does not support what Halef says it does. One can use this case to make a strong argument that we need better screening of children for Mitochondrial defects. But that is not a valid argument that we should not vaccinate our children out of fear of autism.
Now that we've ruled out vaccines as a cause for autism, let's see what the science actually says about the rise in autism. There are four reasons why that is the case. The first possibility is that it might be environmental. This was the conclusion of a recent UC Davis study. However, there are some flaws in the study, suggesting that while environment is a possible factor, it is not as big of a factor as the study would suggest. The first was admitted by the researcher:
Hertz-Picciotto, the researcher, notes that her study does not account for one potentially huge artifact: The fact that today's parents are vastly more aware of autism than they were a decade ago.
Autism can't be diagnosed unless you're looking for it -- so parent awareness has a huge potential effect on the rise of autism, says Gary W. Goldstein, president and CEO of the Kennedy Krieger Institute and professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins University.
"There is an enormous increase in awareness. Everybody knows about autism now, and they didn't 16 years ago," Goldstein tells WebMD.
And as Lisa Jo Rudy points out, there is a reason for this rise in awareness:
In addition, autism has become an increasingly well-known and well-funded disorder. In the last three years, celebrities have appeared on Oprah, Larry King and numerous other talk shows to discuss their children with autism. Sanjay Gupta hosted day-long specials on autism, featuring family after family coping with the disorder. Autism Speaks is covering the nation with public service ads, star-studded events, and even Starbucks coffee cups - all intended to raise awareness of autism. Twenty years ago, autism was a blip on the medical horizon. Today it's front and center, discussed on every TV, radio, and computer monitor. Is it really possible that such media saturation has no impact on rates of diagnosis? And assuming there has been an impact, is it really possible to measure that impact?
And I would note that the condition of autism was not known until the 1990's -- before then, children who were autistic were diagnosed with speech or behavioral disorders -- not autism. That would account for about a quarter of the cases:
Participants in the study were drawn from a pool of children who had participated in a series of studies of developmental language disorder conducted during the period 1986 to 2003 and about whose conditions detailed information was known. All attended special schools or classes for children with language impairments, and would have been diagnosed by educational psychologists, paediatricians or speech therapists as having developmental language disorders and none had previously been diagnosed as autistic. However, when reassessed by Professor Bishop and colleagues using current criteria, around a quarter were identified as having autistic spectrum disorder.
And the UC Davis study does not establish any links between autism and vaccines because it does not narrow down the number of environmental factors. That means that it could be caused by something the mother eats or some kind of medication that she takes. In fact, there is a link between epilepsy drugs taken during pregnancy and autism in children. It could be explainable by pollution or increased UV rays. The UC Davis study does not give any direction whatsoever beyond the general statement that more research is needed into environmental causes.
We know, for instance, that there is a link between parents' mental health history and children who are autistic:
Parents of children with autism were roughly twice as likely to have been hospitalized for a mental disorder, such as schizophrenia, than parents of other children, according to an analysis of Swedish birth and hospital records by a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researcher and colleagues in the U.S. and Europe.
We have now found some of the genes that lead to autism:
The consortium used "gene chip" technology to look for genetic similarities in autistic individuals culled from almost 1,200 families. They also scanned the DNA to search for copy number variations, which are submicroscopic insertions and deletions of genetic material that scientists believe may be linked to autism and other diseases. The researchers found neurexin 1, part of a family of genes that plays a role with the neurotransmitter glutamate, which has been previously linked to autism. They also found a gene on chromosome 11 that may be linked to autism susceptibility. That gene has not yet been pinpointed.
Researchers speculate that there may be five or six major genes and as many as 30 other genes involved in autism. If a child has more of these genes, there is a higher chance of being born with autism or a more severe form of the disease.
We can now diagnose autism at 9 months of age.
The Early Autism Study, led by Mel Rutherford, associate professor of psychology in the Faculty of Science, has been using eye tracker technology that measures eye direction while the babies look at faces, eyes, and bouncing balls on a computer screen.
"What's important about this study is that now we can distinguish between a group of siblings with autism from a group with no autism -- at nine months and 12 months," says Rutherford. "I can do this in 10 minutes, and it is objective, meaning that the only measure is eye direction; it's not influenced by a clinician's report or by intuition. Nobody's been able to distinguish between these groups at so early an age."
Currently, the earliest diagnostic test for autism is reliable around the age of two, and most children in Ontario are diagnosed around age three or four. The earlier the diagnosis the better the overall prognosis, says Rutherford.
There are many other possible causes of autism as well, such as older fathers, sperm mutations, and a protein. However, as noted above, vaccines have been ruled out as a possible cause of autism.