I wish I knew what I was watching but it was an interview with a doctor discussing the court case. He ended it by saying he didn’t know what was causing the onset of autism and the way it was asked/answered left me with the impression the doctor was acknowleging a sudden onset of the condition (versus the normal association with it starting almost from birth). Put another way, it was like he was saying kids were suddenly becoming autistic and it wasn’t the result of innoculations, but we don’t know what causes it. If this is the case, then the anxiety with early innoculations will not go away.
I was just looking at the recommended innoculation schedule and I have a better idea of the controversy. The age of the innoculations are very young. I didn’t receive a polio vacination until age 3 or 4. By that age it would be more obvious if a child was autistic.
Magiver, I think that Autism is usually not diagnosed before about age 2. I don’t know a lot about it, but my understanding is that it’s not so much that it’s a sudden onset of the condition, but rather that it’s not really obvious or diagnosable until the age when the kid is supposed to be starting to talk. I asked my doctor about this, because I have a son who is about to turn 2. He said that if the kid has always been developmentally normal in terms of his interactions with others and physical skills, he isn’t going to suddenly regress and “develop” Autism. The thing is about the vaccines is that around age 2 is when the development is supposed to be in the stage where they are really learning to talk, and it becomes very obvious then if there is a problem with language development. This happens to coincide with one of the particular vaccines (the MMR), which is partly what has caused the panic.
Studies have shown that kids who later are identified as having autism have some subtle abnormalities as early as six months, albeit none that would by themselves lead to a diagnosis. Those subtle problems blossom sometime during the second year of life as their communication difficulties and difficulty sharing attention with significant others in their life result in their lack of getting basic needs met. Development distorts. Some have the appearance of sudden regression. During that same time frame children are getting vaccinated. At least 1/12th of that year is within two weeks of having had shots and at least 1/12th of all kids will have their developmental difficulties first really “seen” for the first time within two weeks of shots.
Pediatricians are now very primed to look for autism and diagnose milder cases and diagnose them earlier than in years past.
Autism is primarily treated behaviorally but there are sometime medications used for particular associated symptoms.
Macgiver, I am not sure why your immunizations were delayed but to to the best of knowledge the basic schedule of shots at least at 2, 4, 6, 12, and 15 months has been in place for over 40 years. For many of these diseases the greatest risk is to the youngest children so the greatest benefit is to be had by immunizing as soon as possible. Delaying vaccines not only places that child at risk but increases the risks to others by decreasing herd immunity.
Young children are far more vulnerable to serious consequences of the diseases themselves, compared to the slight risks of vaccine reactions (which do not include autism).
Another “talking point” among the antivax crowd is the number of shots kids receive now, which in terms of total injections is greater than in past decades. What they’re missing is that total antigenic load in vaccines (the components of disease organisms that stimulate the immune response) is considerably less than in older vaccinations. The smallpox vaccine alone (which is no longer used) had a large antigenic component compared to what’s in today’s streamlined, more efficient vaccines. And the immune systems of very young children are capable of handling far, far more antigenic stimulus than is contained in vaccines (they have to be, seeing how many environmental bugs and other antigens bombard us on a constant basis).
The whole “My kid got a shot today and all of a sudden is autistic” story, apart from not being documented beyond unreliable anecdote, makes no biologic sense. As others have noted, signs of neurodevelopment disorders have been documented before vaccination in a number of children whose parents believed that the shots caused their autism.
Worse yet, they always wave off the reams of clinical data out there and demand more basic science research, which is exactly the opposite of the way questions are settled in the real medical world. It doesn’t matter what the lab guys say could happen; if it doesn’t happen in the patients in the wild, it doesn’t happen.
The comments attached to this story in the Toronto Star are, I am afraid, typical of what we can expect. I won’t reprint any for fear of copyright violation but half of them look like this:
This is true vis a vis autism, which must be present before age 3, diagnostically speaking, although this does not mean it must be diagnosed by age 3.
Among the Pervasive Developmental Disorders (of which Autism is one), there is, however, Childhood Disintegrative Disorder, which does involve a marked regression in functioning after a period of at least 2 years of normal development. This is an exceedingly rare condition, however, even relative to autism.
Part of the problem is that, if good pediatricians like DSeid aren’t involved, that parents, especially first time parents, generally have very little information regarding general development to compare their own child’s development against. The development of speech varies across children, as does the degree of social interaction (eye gaze, responsiveness to others, etc), so it often is the case that the least subtle or subjective indicator, a significant delay in the development of speech, is the one that ends up bringing a child in for evaluation, when many other indicators were present prior to that point.
My personal opinion is that a certain number of these anti-vax parents just find it impossible to accept that a product of their loins is less than perfect - so it must be someone else’s fault. If it wasn’t the vaccine it’s something in the food or the water or the phase of the moon - anything so long as it’s not a product of the wrong genes lining up at conception, or something going awry during gestation.
I feel bad for them - no one wants a kid with such a problem. The fact that our so-called health care system is so brutal and shitty just add impetus to finding someone at fault who can pay a big award for lifetime care. That doesn’t excuse the harm they do by refusing to vaccinate, or encouraging others to not vaccinate.
I agree with this 100%. I’ve read a lot from the anti-vax crowd, and a lot of their argument goes like this: “I know what I saw with my OWN EYES. My child was PERFECTLY NORMAL until they had this vaccine, and the next day, there behavior completely changed.” They dismiss anything that goes contrary to their observation as part of the conspiracy of the drug companies to make money at the expense of the children.
Think of it like this: on the one hand you have short funny looking docs like me telling them that we really do not know much about what causes autism other than that it is primarily genetic (hear it as “it’s your fault”) and that we have no cure, only all this hard work for them to do in order to limit the disability; OTOH you have pretty Jennie McCarthy pointing a well manicured finger saying “It’s not your fault. It’s the shots and the doctors’ fault! And we can make it all better!” Who do you think they want to believe?
It just goes to show you-life is full of risks-however, the benefits of childhood vaccinations outnumbers the risks, by a huge margin. I wonder how many parents would knowingly risk their infants going blind, becomeing mentally retarded, or deaf for life because of shildhood disease. Yet, these diseases were common 100 years ago.
I would also like to know if idiots like Robert Kennedy were true to their own theories, and kept their kids from being vaccinated!:smack:
I saw the article on this yesterday and am glad of it. It’s something that I think most people who have bothered to actually look into this subject from something other than emotion have known for a while…but it’s good that they have done the leg work and gotten the results.
My opinion on this is that even if Autism WAS caused by inoculations (I hasten to add that it’s not, as this series of studies shows) that we should still do them. It get’s back into how bad people are at risk assessment. The MMR vaccine specifically saves 10’s of thousands (or more) children’s lives A YEAR. A few deaths or a few cases of autism would be the price we pay for that. It would be devastating to the parents of the children who developed problems, and I’d feel bad for them…but sometimes bad things happen.
And before anyone jumps up and says ‘easy for you to say!’, understand…I HAVE lost a child. So I DO actually know what it is like.
I think they want to think that there’s something they can do to make it less likely that their kid will have this potentially devastating problem.
I think there’s also a “back in my day, we didn’t have so many vaccinations, and we turned out OK” element to the anti-vaxers thinking (if it can be called thinking).
It can’t help that you don’t notice it when a vaccine successfully prevents you from getting sick. That makes it seem like the vaccine isn’t doing anything for you.
If they are saying this, they are either not that old (and thus didn’t realize that there WERE a lot of vaccines being distributed in their day) or they are looking back through rose colored glasses. Really old people SHOULD know better as a truly horrifying number of children died or were crippled in the past from various preventable (today) diseases. In my grandmothers family she lost 2 sisters to influenza, a brother to polio and another one to a fever (no idea what it was…he died at 8) and had another brother have all kinds of life long respiratory problems (I don’t remember exactly what he had in this case). This is out of a family of 8 children. Granted, this wasn’t in the US…but still.
I know someone who has a rock-solid reason not to vaccinate her kids. It’s just not an option for her.
The idiots who refuse to inoculate their kids because Montel Williams says it’s not safe are greatly increasing the chance her kids will be exposed to a devastating illness.
I am in this argument on another message board for mothers, but have gotten too angry to continue. Every shred of reliable evidence has been “refuted” by, “Yeah! But we KNOW what happened to our children”. :mad:
Plus, one woman keeps repeating this.
Which, maybe I am taking crazy pills, but this seems the same as saying “It’s not blue, it’s teal!”. A distinction that is meaningless. Am I nuts?
But there HAVE BEEN these comparisons. In multiple countries, over multiple years. For the love of all that’s holy, is this woman really not aware of that fact?
My google-fu is weak, and I cannot find one of these studies. Do you have one bookmarked?
ETA: I think I may have finally found the right combination of words. Not that it will make any difference to this woman, but maybe to others who are reading over there.
The people who remember the days before vaccinations are getting old and dying off. There are fewer and fewer of them around to tell new parents what it was like and how common it was to have a child die or be permanently disabled as a result of infectious disease.