Stomping Through A Medical Minefield

I think many people are looking in the wrong places for one right answer. As a mother with a child who was diagnosed with Autism at the age of 2, I looked many places for answers. Mine came a little over a year ago when my husband got sick. We had to dramatically change our home diet to purely organic with nlo preservatives. Within three months of going on this diet, my formerly Autistic son started talking and now 1 year later is completely developmentally on track. Do I believe this is the cure for everyone?? NO. Do I beleive that all cases of Autism are caused by the same thing? No. I think we as a society would like to wake-up one morning and have the cause for every unpleasant disease and then cures dropped in our lap. Life doesn't work that way. In order to find help for all these children we must remain open minded and try new things. Best wishes.

Maybe we would start believing ANY MSM article about the subject. If big Pharma wasn't one one your biggest contributors financially. Go figure. DUH...

Loriw and jafaires: To follow up my last comment, I don't think there's an accurate answer regarding hand-washing and preventing polio spread. As a statement of fact, yes, hand-washing would help prevent spread of polio from an actively infected person to someone else without immunization. As a practical matter, the chances of acquiring polio in such a manner, given the extremely low prevalence of active polio infections (in the US) is quite low. And addressing my prior point, given the fact that someone who is administered the oral polio vaccine can actually immunize others by 'infecting' others with the vaccine virus, you could,in theory argue that washing your hands might 'prevent' immunization in this fashion, thus making somoene more likely to get polio. However, given the very low chances of this happening, and the myriad benefits of handwashing, handwashing is a good idea.

Loriw:

Polio is spread by the fecal-oral route, not by an air droplet. An initial polio virus infection can cause a gastroenteritis, and in some, actually, relatively few, progress to neurologic symptoms. This is the path of spread exploited by the oral Sabin polio vaccine-- it uses a live but attenuated virus that uses the gut's immune system. The fecal-oral spread can actually help immunize others who do not receive the vaccine directly by using the natural spread of the attenuated virus.

The heart of the matter is that GOVERNMENT SHOULD NOT MANDATE VACCINES. Government has no right to say people have to put something in their bodies, NO MATTER WHAT.

In addition, kudos to the mainstream media for setting up a straw man of a minority of those who write death threats. What is this exact percentage of the whole, who mostly just passionately oppose vaccines?
Last, it will ALWAYS be a common sense matter that mercury should not be injected into an infant, bypassing the skin barrier.

Given the recent revelations about the data used in pharmaceutical studies for drugs like Vioxx and the statins, it behooves us all to insist that someone other than pharmaceutical companies replicate studies. Big Pharma has proved itself suspect, and dismissing people's fears with arrogance is not helping.

Vaccines seem an unlikely cause of autism - they've been around a long time, and autism is not on the rise in other countries with vaccination policies - and like trying to find the cause and cure for cancer, I suspect autism has multiple risk factors, multiple causes, and multiple treatments. Autism is too complex to have just one cause.

But it may be that for a small percentage of children with a genetic predisposition, tinkering with the immune system may trigger a cascade of events that result in autism. And even my veternarian cautions about problems with immunity in dogs who receive too many vaccines too young - in a developed country such as ours where most childhood viruses are rare, spacing out vaccines doesn't seem like a dangerous approach.

The real need here is better research on the cause and treatment of autism but as long as we are focused on to vaccinate or not to vaccinate as the sole cause, we won't get very far.

A little humility on the good doctor's part would be a good thing. A little less hysteria and hatred on the part of the anti-vaccination crowd would also be helpful.

Ms.Clark:

Please reconsider your criticism of those families that question vaccine safety and have a healthy fear of mercury, one of the most toxic elements in our universe.

As to your flat earth comment, please remember that Galileo was tried and persecuted for helping to put that to rest over 400 years ago. He is a considered by some to be the father of modern science with his approach of question, observe, measure, and prove.

And today we question the role of vaccines in autism, and we observe that Thimerosal goes into bloodstreams of children and pregnant women, and we have proof that mercury is a neurotoxin (it destroys brain tissue), and we have the measurement in Thimerosal of 49 percent mercury by weight. Thus each person on this nearly round earth has the right to know about and question its use in vaccines. It has not been proven safe.

And over this weekend while we post on this site, there will be 140 children diagnosed with autism ??? based on the 1 in 150 statistics given by CDC. So it is an issue of both good science and moral duty that we question and consider all evidence of harm and try to stop this horrendous epidemic on our most precious resource ??? our children.

Claudia, you wrote The notion that vaccines cause autism, he writes, has been clearly disproved.

Regarding disproved this is an absolutely horrendous misstatement based on fantasy not fact. Dr. Verstraeten stated The CDC screening study of thimerosal-containing vaccines was perceived at first as a positive study that found an association between thimerosal and some neurodevelopmental outcomes. See PEDIATRICS Vol. 113 No. 4 April 2004, pp. 932 at http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/113/4/932

Dr. Verstraeten then states that a second study on a different group of children did not show the same results. Now since one half of the study for one set of children shows a risk of autism and the other one half of the study for another set of children is unable to find a risk - then half of the children studied still show evidence of a link. Dr. Verstraeten concludes that more study is required.

So this is evidence of harm. Certainly it is not evidence of safety. Meanwhile at least one of every 150 children today is at risk of Autism in this current epidemic. And yet mercury is still in vaccines as Thimerosal!


Claudia you wrote What I ve learned in all this is to stick to the truth, talk about the science, says Paul Offit.

Regarding the truth Tennyson wrote that a half truth is the blackest of all lies. The black half truth here is the failure to disclose that ½ of the study of children evaluated by Dr. Verstraeten of the CDC indicated a risk of autism.

Regarding the science, the USEPA banned mercury in 1990 from use in latex paint to protect children from mercury poisoning.
See http://www.epa.gov/ttn/atw/hlthef/mercury.html To simply pretend that mercury is less harmful injected into the bloodstreams of children or a pregnant woman certainly begs many questions. The first being just how dumb do you think the public is?


And Claudia you quote Dr. Offit saying Its not about me, its about the data.

Regarding this quote, its about both. Any claim of proven mercury safety is not based on data. And scientists and medical professionals with integrity will fully disclose potential conflict of interest. In the past we have seen to many say anything for buck scientists defending the tobacco industry.