the vacceine/autism connection

[mercurious]

hello. i am autistic. my parents said that i was a vibrant, social, energetic baby. then i received the dpt vacceine, and they said afterwards i became withdrawn and lethargic.

 

soon afterwas i was diagnosed with autism.

 

my parents are a member of a growing number of people who are convinced that the mercury preservatives used in vacceines are the cause of autism.

 

this was a very interesting article i thought:

http://www.mercola.com/2005/may/4/amish_autism.htm

 

autism is not present among amish people. at all. and they do not believe in vacceines or technology.

 

reviewed data from the cdc suggest that children who receive mercury vaccines are 27x as likely to develop autism.

 

like the guy in the article says, does anyone out there really need more evidence than this?

[rakuenso]

no offense but that article regarding the link between vaccines and autism seems to be near rubbish on its amish basis.

 

Why? Several possibilities:

 

Because it is far more likely that the Amish don't tend to outbreed, meaning that if its founder population don't have the autistic gene, its descendents won't either.

 

It simply just may be their lifestyle, the fact that they aren't fat and do everything without the aid of heavy machinery or technology gives them a higher fitness. Not being autistic might just be a side effect

 

Besides, we need vaccines more than it hurts us. If we didn't have vaccines polio and other viruses would do far more damage than autism

 

Also can you cite your CDC source?

[bascule]

I'll be the first to call:

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36703-2004May18.html

 

Experts Find No Vaccine-Autism Link

Panel Says More Research on Possible Connection May Not Be Worthwhile

 

By David Brown

Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, May 19, 2004; Page A02

 

The Institute of Medicine, a highly influential adviser of the government on scientific matters, said yesterday there is no credible evidence that either the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine or vaccines containing the preservative thimerosal cause autism.

 

The conclusion came in an 81-page report requested by two federal agencies to address the doubts raised by a small but vocal group of parents who question the safety of childhood vaccines.

 

A 14-person panel of experts urged more research on autism but said further pursuit of possible links between vaccines and the devastating neurological disorder is probably not worth the money and effort.

 

Reports published in 2001 by the same committee found no connection between the MMR vaccine and autism, and insufficient evidence to draw conclusions about thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative added to multiple-dose vials of vaccine. Since then, enough new studies have been published to confidently reject both theories, the panel said.

 

Especially convincing were a Danish study showing no difference in the rate of autism between children who got thimerosal-containing vaccines and those who did not and a British study showing no relationship between the introduction of MMR and autism rates, or between the timing of a vaccination and the onset of autism symptoms.

 

"The vaccine hypotheses are not currently supported by the evidence," wrote the panel, which consisted of physicians, neuroscientists, epidemiologists, statisticians and a nurse.

 

In a telephone news briefing, the chairman of the committee, Marie C. McCormick of the Harvard School of Public Health, said her advice to parents is that children "should be getting their vaccines" because the life-threatening infections they protect against "are only a plane ride away."

 

After decades in which vaccines were generally considered certified miracles of medicine, the preparations and their safety have been openly challenged in recent years as the number of routine childhood immunizations has risen, along with the prevalence of several behavioral disorders.

 

The debate has been acrimonious. Some vaccine opponents have accused the government of covering up damaging information, while some public health officials are exasperated by what they view as the equal weight being given to small, poorly designed studies supporting the vaccine-autism connection and large, well-designed ones refuting it.

 

In Britain, public doubts about the MMR vaccine pushed the measles immunization rate from 92 percent in 1996 to 81 percent in 2003, and led to a tripling of measles cases. In the United States, MMR immunization has held steady at about 92 percent from 1998 through 2002.

 

The Institute of Medicine panel said five observational studies "consistently provided evidence of no association" between thimerosal and autism in Sweden, Denmark, the United States and Britain. A similar number of studies that do suggest a link are small, uninterpretable, unpublished or poorly designed, it said.

 

Fourteen studies, including nine controlled ones, found no association between the MMR vaccine and autism. Three that found a connection are poorly designed or offer very indirect evidence that could be explained in other ways, the authors said.

 

Much of the support for the idea that vaccines may cause autism arises from the fact that the neurological illness usually becomes evident after age 3 -- sometimes with dramatic social regression and loss of language -- at a time when children are getting multiple immunizations.

 

In the case of thimerosal, the underlying biological mechanism was thought to be that some children are unusually sensitive to mercury, a known neurotoxin, even though the amount in shots is minuscule. (Since 2000, thimerosal has been taken out of all routinely given childhood vaccines.)

 

With MMR, the theory is that the vaccine -- which contains a live, very weakened strain of the measles virus -- promotes the production of neurotoxins, or causes damage to the immune system, which in turn leads to brain damage. An English researcher, Andrew J. Wakefield, found fragments of the measles virus in the intestines of a small number of autistic children with severe digestive problems. Other scientists are only now trying to confirm this observation.

 

In the telephone briefing, McCormick and Steven Goodman, a Johns Hopkins physician and biostatistician who also served on the panel, did not rule out the possibility that some autistic children may have disorders of immunity or of digestion that explain the findings.

 

They noted that autism is a neurological disorder, and that the human gut is now known to have its own, largely independent nervous system. Both the brain and the gut might be damaged by the developmental catastrophe that appears to occur before birth, or just after it, and that leads to autism.

 

One of the nation's leading vaccine skeptics, Rep. David Joseph Weldon (R-Fla.), who is a physician, criticized the report as "premature, perhaps perilously reliant on epidemiology, based on preliminary incomplete information."

 

Rick Rollens, a former secretary of the California Senate who became an advocate for autism research when his son, now 13, developed the disease, said he thinks "this report represents the will of the powerful public health community, CDC and vaccine manufacturers." He predicted it will not put the issue to rest.

 

The Institute of Medicine committee has produced eight studies on vaccine safety at the request of the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This is the last one, and the committee will now disband.

 

my parents are a member of a growing number of people who are convinced that the mercury preservatives used in vacceines are the cause of autism.

 

I'm sure you're very desperate to discover the reasons behind autism. I have an autistic spectrum disorder myself. But they do not lie in vaccines containing thimerosal.

 

this was a very interesting article i thought:

http://www.mercola.com/2005/may/4/amish_autism.htm

 

autism is not present among amish people. at all.

 

It sounds like there were three instances among a small population, not zero.

 

and they do not believe in vacceines or technology.

 

Have you ever considered that heredity may have a role to play, and this is the reason why Silicon Valley is currently undergoing something of an autism 'outbreak'? I would conjecture that there are a number of genes which afford certain attributes of higher intelligence which, when combined, also produce autistic-like tendencies.

 

Maybe the "geek genes" which the BBC article conjectures contribute to autism aren't particularly prevalent among the Amish?

 

reviewed data from the cdc suggest that children who receive mercury vaccines are 27x as likely to develop autism.

 

That's nice. Have a link?

 

like the guy in the article says, does anyone out there really need more evidence than this?

 

Clearly the Institute of Medicine does.

[rakuenso]

I'll be the first to call:

 

you mean you'll be the second one to call

[bascule]

you mean you'll be the second one to call

 

Yeah, beaten to the punch

 

Anyway, regarding this little tidbit:

 

reviewed data from the cdc suggest that children who receive mercury vaccines are 27x as likely to develop autism.

 

I thought I'd post this:

 

http://www.cdc.gov/nip/vacsafe/concerns/thimerosal/faqs-thimerosal.htm#7

 

Does thimerosal cause autism?

 

There is no conclusive evidence that any vaccine or vaccine additive increases the risk of developing autism or any other behavior disorder. Rather, evidence is accumulating of lack of any harm resulting from exposure to vaccine containing-thimerosal as a preservative. In a 2004 report, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) concluded that there is no association between autism and vaccines that contain thimerosal as a preservative. Nonetheless, given the level of concern among parents and others regarding vaccines and autism, the CDC is committed to investigating this issue to the fullest extent possible, using the best scientific methods available.

 

For more information on autism and vaccines go to http://www.cdc.gov/nip/vacsafe/concerns/autism/default.htm

 

http://www.cdc.gov/nip/vacsafe/concerns/autism/autism-research.htm

 

What were the major findings and conclusions of CDC's study on the age of first MMR vaccination for children with autism compared with children who do not have autism?

 

The study findings showed:

 

• Children with autism received their first MMR vaccination at similar ages as children without autism.
  
• The majority (84%) of children with and without autism received their first MMR vaccination before they were 24 months old
  
• Children who received their first MMR vaccination before they were 24 months old showed no increased risk for autism regardless of their age at the time of study, sex, race, maternal age or maternal education.
  
• There was no increased risk for autism or any forms of autism including children whose condition included a loss of developmental skills (regression) associated with vaccination before 24 months of age.
  
• There were slightly more children with autism who were vaccinated before three years of age. It is likely that these results were influenced by factors related to the treatment of children with autism at this age. For example, children with autism might have been more likely than children without autism to have been vaccinated as a requirement for enrollment in preschool special education programs that start for children who are 3 years old. The majority of children (98%) with autism, between 3 to 5 years of age in this study were enrolled in these programs.