her son is autistic, which is why she is against vaccines. I myself haven't done any research with the relationship connecting autism to vaccines so no idea about it...but I know that is the reason she speaks up about the issue.
The information they have is primarily anecdotal and circumstantial (i.e. I vaccinated one of my sons and not the other and the vaccinated one has Aspergers, etc.) certainly the incidence of Autisim spectrum diagnoses has increased but I wonder if that has more to do with our sensitivity to it than anything else... My son's pediatrician is pretty crunchy (only the best for my little hippie baby!) and he offers an alternate vaccination schedule and all that. But even he says that the correlation between the two is thin at best. All that to say, I jammed a needle into my kids legs and he seems to be doing just fine. ;)
There's also the time correlation. Symptoms of autism usually show themselves around the same time that the infant round of vaccinations is complete.
The big thing that HAS changed, aside from vaccinations being common now, is the definitions and diagnoses of autism. Autism isn't like Downs Syndrome in the sense that you either have it or you don't. It's a very broad spectrum from pretty much completely normal to full-blown Rain Man. The threshold for attaching the label "autistic" dropped in the late 80s/early 90s I believe. I am of the opinion that the desire to do this was partially because this qualifies the more borderline cases as "special needs", allowing them to receive funding and assistance under those programs.
In addition to having a reason for the increased statistics that doesn't resort to some sort of science==black magic argument, the one argument they had in their favor has evaporated. Up until the early 90s, vaccines contained Thimerosol as a preservative, which contains trace amounts of mercury. This was claimed to cause the autism, even though the quantity of mercury in the vaccines was much smaller than the amount you get from eating fish on a regular basis. In the public relations disaster, the pharmaceutical companies removed Thimerosol from their vaccines. 15+ years later, the autism rates have not decreased.
And in an interesting if not unexpected twist, with the number of parents not vaccinating their kids out of fear of autism, measles incidence rates have gone up significantly. There's nothing quite like trading a small, tenuous at best, risk for a much larger well understood real risk.
her son is autistic, which is why she is against vaccines. I myself haven't done any research with the relationship connecting autism to vaccines so no idea about it...but I know that is the reason she speaks up about the issue.
ReplyDeleteThe information they have is primarily anecdotal and circumstantial (i.e. I vaccinated one of my sons and not the other and the vaccinated one has Aspergers, etc.) certainly the incidence of Autisim spectrum diagnoses has increased but I wonder if that has more to do with our sensitivity to it than anything else...
ReplyDeleteMy son's pediatrician is pretty crunchy (only the best for my little hippie baby!) and he offers an alternate vaccination schedule and all that. But even he says that the correlation between the two is thin at best.
All that to say, I jammed a needle into my kids legs and he seems to be doing just fine. ;)
There's also the time correlation. Symptoms of autism usually show themselves around the same time that the infant round of vaccinations is complete.
ReplyDeleteThe big thing that HAS changed, aside from vaccinations being common now, is the definitions and diagnoses of autism. Autism isn't like Downs Syndrome in the sense that you either have it or you don't. It's a very broad spectrum from pretty much completely normal to full-blown Rain Man. The threshold for attaching the label "autistic" dropped in the late 80s/early 90s I believe. I am of the opinion that the desire to do this was partially because this qualifies the more borderline cases as "special needs", allowing them to receive funding and assistance under those programs.
In addition to having a reason for the increased statistics that doesn't resort to some sort of science==black magic argument, the one argument they had in their favor has evaporated. Up until the early 90s, vaccines contained Thimerosol as a preservative, which contains trace amounts of mercury. This was claimed to cause the autism, even though the quantity of mercury in the vaccines was much smaller than the amount you get from eating fish on a regular basis. In the public relations disaster, the pharmaceutical companies removed Thimerosol from their vaccines. 15+ years later, the autism rates have not decreased.
And in an interesting if not unexpected twist, with the number of parents not vaccinating their kids out of fear of autism, measles incidence rates have gone up significantly. There's nothing quite like trading a small, tenuous at best, risk for a much larger well understood real risk.