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Stam: I have an idea. Instead of insisting that, since nobody did the research you want it must be because they’re all trying to hide something, how about you set up, design, and write a proposal for this research project?
Oh yes, and one more thing – The first use of the term Autism as a diagnosis (which was, at the time, called a form of childhood schitzophrenia), was in 1911. That is only a little over 100 years ago. It would therefore not be surprising in the slightest for the rate of diagnosis to have increased 100 times since then. You see, in 1911, there was only 1 person diagnosing people as Autistic, there was not a clear definition of the disorder, and it was not widely recognized.
Incidentally, if you want to talk about skewed research, do a little bit of digging in the CDC report that has everyone jumping up and down about the extreme explosion of the incidence of Autism Spectrum Disorders. (just before you accuse me of being insensitive to people who have to deal with the effects of this disorder, let me set one thing clear: Autism has had a very direct and personal effect on my life, which, incidentally, is why I am so interested in it.)
If you look closely at their published research methods, the study dropped several states from its ‘representative sample’ since it’s last published report. Incidentally, those states that were dropped, tended to be the ones with lower rates last time around. Additionally, when collecting population samples, they clearly focused on the high population centers of the state – in some states they actually entirely left out the rural areas.
Although the collected numbers clearly indicate that Autism is on the rise in heavily populated areas (the state with, by far, the highest incidence was New Jersey), it would be hard to take seriously (for research purposes anyhow) the contention that Autism rates overall have exploded to the degree this study claims they have. Of course, since the purpose of the CDC’s report was to encourage more funding for autism research, that would make sense. it’s kind of like the CSE reports that schools carefully write to make sure that the child appears to be progressing, but also is clearly dependent on special services. This kind of research is meant only to obtain money for other, more sound research.
Interestingly enough, while there are many factors that make living in a high density population area different from more rural settings, prevelance of vaccination is not among them.
To Stam:
keep the following in mind – the field of medicine works on the basis of cost-benefit analysis. There is no such thing as a medical treatment without any risks, any more than there is any such thing as walking across the street without a risk. I will grant you as well, that most medical procedures carry more risk than walking across most streets. When assessing whether a given treatment is advisable, you cannot look at the risks in isolation, because you will never find a treatment without any. You give a treatment when the potential for benefit is greater than the risk involved.
Vaccines, incidentally, have been heavily researched for many different risks. Each vaccine carries it’s own individual risks together with those that are inherint in all vaccines. Those vaccines that carry the highest risk and the least benefit are not routinely given (think – smallpox and live polio, both of which have the risk of causing the actual illness they are trying to prevent), however a situation could arise where the benefit outweighs the risk. There are actually people who are paid to monitor these situations, screening water samples for live polio and staying on alert for bioterrorism, etc…
There may be individuals who carry a higher risk than the general population for a certian (or even all) vaccines, such as people who are allergic to eggs, have a family history of certain severe reactions, are pregnant among others. Unless there is an extenuating circumstance that significantly raises their risk of becoming ill with the disease the vaccine is trying to prevent, they will not be given the vaccine (or, in some cases, only under careful and strict medical observation).
Your simplistic approach that any risk at all means that doctors, researchers and government are being reckless or even purposely attempting to harm others is not only wrong, it is unfair to the millions of people you are insulting. Granted, there are, on occasion, people who will become reckless and endanger people with their faulty research or promotion of bad ideas, but, overall, the competition within the research world routinely picks up on these people and disproves their tenants.
Unfortunately, some of them are quite stubborn in continuing to prey on those without the background in science, statistics and medicine to understand the feeble nature of their arguments. Your anti-vaccine rant is one of the most disproven and rampant of these, and, in fact, has endangered millions of people.
There is significant emerging evidence of two related correlations regarding Autism:
a) there appears to be a positive correlation between maternal prenatal exposure to pesticides and autism in the child when there is reason to believe that a genetic predisposition exists (1 or more relative who is either autistic or falls within the broad autistic phenotype), which is higher than that of children with the genetic predisposition alone.
b) there is an almost perfect correlation between autism and a surplus of neuronal synapse pathways in individuals who had autism, died and were studied under autopsy conditions.
Obviously, more research is needed in both of these areas in order to determine what, if any, effect they have on a child developing autism and what, if anything, can be done about it.
connection: most pesticides are acetylcholine esterase inhibitors. acetylcholine is a neurotransmitter that prevents apoptosis (spontaneous death) of a cell. apoptosis is an important element of proper brain development and weeding out unneccesary or ineficient neural pathways.
it would make sense to think that these two correlations may in some way be related therefore. But, as has been clearly pointed out, there is insufficient research to state causation and more research is needed to figure out what is going on here. This is among the latest research that has been published on the topic and, as such, is still in it’s early stages of investigation and development.