Marienee, did you see an MD who is experienced in ASD dx? My heart breaks at your story, and over the precious time wasted getting your child the appropriate support.
In our neck of the woods, a dx is not a ticket to services and support. It is a ticket into a nightmarish fun house of unavailable services, unsustainable and insane schedules, unbelievable costs and unresponsive or actively evil school district “professionals.” I wouldn’t wish it on an enemy.
Whenever I come across an anti-vaccination thread, I have to add my personal experience. I loved my maternal grandfather dearly. After Gramma died, I used to go over to his apartment and bake goodies for him after school. We’d talk, and when I got home my throat was tired, because I had to speak so loudly and enunciate so clearly. The man was nearly deaf, and wore enormous old-fashioned hearing aids.
I thought it was just old-age loss of hearing. When I asked Mom how long he’d been deaf, she said he’d lost his hearing when he was a kid. They were a complication of measles. He was born in 1902, and lived with this disability for 70+ years! As I say, I loved Grampa, and I wonder how much better his life would have been if they’d had vaccines when he was a boy.
I’m very pro-vaccination for all the reasons described above, and I’m quite a vocal advocate for it on several parenting sites. My infant son has been getting all his shots on schedule.
That said, I just read an interesting book called “The Autoimmune Epidemic” which does claim a link between vaccines and autoimmune disorders. IIRC, certain people (whether by genetics or environmental overload) are vulnerable to developing immune disorders when exposed to certain kinds of viruses. It’s not that the virus is truly responsible – it’s just that their immune systems are hovering on the brink and apt to misfire the next time they fight an invader that looks a little too much like their own cells. If the vaccine hadn’t triggered it, some other infection might have, but the end result is that the disorders are more prevalent in vaccinated folk. Of course, the book points out that even with this link, the vaccines are much better than the alternative (uncontrolled outbreaks).
I highly recommend the book and would love to discuss it sometime with folks who know more about this sort of thing. I’m even contemplating a career switch to dive deeper into these sorts of complex public health issues.
(Note: only one chapter deals with the vaccine link. Most of the book focuses on environmental toxins like PCBs, looks at lupus clusters around contaminated properties, etc.)
I think it’s possible that certain children may have a bad reaction to vaccines that could lead to problems. But it’s a very small percentage and the benefits still far outweigh the risks. Parents take risks all the time. You know what’s more dangerous than getting your kids vaccinated? Driving them to the doctor.
Your statement is intolerably ignorant.
The father of genetics was a monk.
Notre Dame was just ranked among the top twenty universities in the country.
The Civil Right Movement of the mid-Twentieth Century had its roots in the church.
Some of our country’s finest hospitals are funded by the church.
Monks preserved the knowledge from one age to another in written form.
Some of the best prep schools in the country are operated by the church.
Your own search for knowledge was warped by your experiences with one denomination – possibly one church.
One of my friends spent most of her life in an iron lung as the result of polio. When we were children, some days she got to join us in her wheelchair and sit in the yard. She was beautiful.
Another friend had polio that affected mostly her arms which are useless. She did learn how to walk again. She has her doctorate and is a college professor.
I had my first opportunity to get my polio vaccination on December 11, 1956 and so that’s when I got it. It’s not that I have written it down in some medical records. I remember it because it was that important. It was like a day of liberation.
No child should be allowed in a public school without vaccinations. If there are enough parents with objections to vaccinatons, they can do joint homeschooling.
Not only are unvaccinated children dangerous to other children, they are also dangerous to pregnant women.
Most of your examples are Catholic institutions, while the modern anti-science movement among Christians is mostly in the fundamentalist cults. While DCMS’s statements were overbroad, they were not untrue with regard to fundamentalists.
Then say fundamentalists, please. Not all Christians are ignorant, cousin-fucking intellectual sloths.
I went to college with a kid from Rwanda, who had polio as a child. He was the same age as I am, (he’d be around 30 now). He had to walk with a pole-his leg was twisted up like a twisty-tie. How many people at my age have had polio nowadays in the US?
Our professor had suffered polio as an adult-the year the vaccine came out, strangely. They were only giving it to children the first year. She used a walker, and her health was still pretty poor. A local anchorman had polio as a child.
I think these assholes should go and be forced to visit, or at least watch footage of areas of the world where these diseases still touch the local population-then turn around and tell us that the alternative is worse.
It is to laugh. Churches are still the most segregated institutions in society to this day. “Eleven o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America.” -Dr. Martin Luther King (and I think he was quoting Billy Graham) If the movement started in the church, it also found the most resistance in that same church.
Not if you’re having trouble having a baby they’re not. My first child was born at a wonderful hospital, devoted entirely to childbirth. It was a wonderful experience. Then the Catholics bought the hospital. My wife’s doctor, who had been stationed there, was forced to leave by the church because a major portion of her practice was fertility treatments. So we had to have our second child at a different hospital, which although it was very nice, it was not as good as the first.
Of course, in just the last few years, did the Pope/church apologize for mistreating that horrible heritic Galileo…so your MMV depending on how and who you piss off…
Blll
Also the way special education works. With a diagnosis is hand, the school has obligations to your kid they don’t otherwise have.
And then there is Aspergers. An autism spectrum disorder - we used to just call these the weird kids. In fact, I’m betting a lot of Dopers were the weird kids. Aspergers has been identified for a long time, but its move to a fairly mainstream diagnosis is fairly new.
I totally agree with all of this. Autism is the new ADHD. I spent a couple of hours talking to someone last year who claimed she was autistic. From what I saw, it looked like she had just learned the autistic responses and trotted them out whenever she didn’t want to do something. (This is based on a two-hour conversation, though, so I could be totally wrong.)
I have seen children dying. Most of them were dying of diseases like cancer and sickle-cell anemia–totally unpreventable diseases. I saw the anguish on their parents’ faces as they watched their children waste away. I can’t imagine what it would be like for someone to watch their child die of a preventable disease because they or someone else didn’t take adequate precautions. It’s so totally irresponsible I don’t have words for it.
I’m going to have to check out that book. I have an autoimmune disorder and I strongly suspect that the tendency to get a hateful immune system is genetic in my family (great-grandmother had scleroderma, one of my sisters is having thyroid trouble). Although I will say that my own experiences with autoimmunity have strengthened my faith in the medical system–for certain diseases. Preventable ones, especially.
For a good book that delves into vaccine history as well as shedding some light on the anti-vaccination worldview I recommend Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver.
Just wanted to say how nice it is to see overwhelmingly thoughtful, rational responses on this topic. So many parenting and alt med forums are clogged with antivaxer nonsense, and evidence-based replies are discouraged or prohibited as being “nonsupportive”. :rolleyes:
Such an attitude would disqualify someone as an “expert”.
Actual expert opinion holds that a vaccine-autism connection is somewhere between extraordinarily unlikely and flat-out disproven. Note in particular that the decision to remove a mercury-based preservative (the bogeyman blamed by some for autism) from vaccines occurred in 2001, yet reported autism rates have kept rising since then (if the preservative was at fault, autism rates should have shown a marked decrease by now).
What I find most despicable about the anti-vaccine movement is not the misguided and misled parents of autistic children, or parents who’ve been pushed to “play it safe” and not vaccinate their kids (though they get their share of blame for outbreaks of preventable infectious diseases). The worst are the hard-core antivaxers, who for various reasons (hatred of government “control” through mandatory vaccination, promotion of anti-medical agendas, nonsensical conspiracy theories or other bizarre reasons such as needle phobias) have glommed on to the autism issue and are gleefully promoting cherry-picked “facts”, out of context quotes and flat-out lies to promote their agenda.
All of us stand to lose if these people are allowed to get the upper hand, most of all our children.
By the way, both Presidential candidates have foolishly given credence to a link between vaccines and autism, probably for fear of offending a small but loud contingent of anti-vaccine autism advocates (John McCain has been the worse of the two, claiming there’s “strong evidence” of a link between thimerosal preservative and autism). I’d love to have the opportunity to ask either of them if they realize the damage they can do by pandering to ill-informed antivaxers.
Hell, in Spain there isn’t even such a thing as a vaccination card. Everybody who hasn’t managed to hide his existence from everybody in a white coat is fully vaccinated, period. There may be unvaccinated kids in cardboard shacks, but only because the nurses haven’t been able to catch them so far.
I got my vaccination card (which I have no idea where the hell it is anyway) when I was living in the USA, had to go to Brazil and my employer insisted in giving me three vaccines that my Spanish doctor and WHO do not reccomend for the area I was going to visit. After having a bad reaction to the first two, I skipped the third - note that this was taking into account the reccomendations of WHO and of my GP; if my GP had considered I needed those vaccines, I would have gotten them from him and not from a company nurse who later refused to admit there could be a relationship between a vaccine whose paperwork indicates “may cause joint pain” and five days when I could point out every joint in my body from how they hurt and could not set foot on the floor 
Having met one of the last people in Spain to suffer polio, a woman who spent 40 years blind and bedridden, I would absolutely vaccinate any kid of mine even if it wasn’t free and compulsory.
Which Catholics? Opus Dei is as far right as you can go, outside of the USA (I’ve mentioned before that by the time the Diocesis of Chicago asked the Pope for permission to have altar girls, there had been altar girls in Spain for over 500 years), and their hospital in Pamplona does fertility treatments.
The US Conference of Catholic Bishops put out a set of guidelines for institutionally catholic hospitals several years ago. Here’s a copy for the curious. There are, amoung other things, limitations on fertility treatments to be allowed.
And I am not at all sure I agree WRT Opus Dei. I mean, they are pretty weird but the Big RC is a big tent and there are a couple groups I might count as weirder. Regnum Christi and its associated Legion springs to mind. Though none of them has got a novel written yet with them as Teh Evul.
Two of the three we have seen – the neurologist when he was six and the child psychiatrist a couple weeks ago – were. Indeed, we were sent to them each because they are each (separately) noted for their ability to accurately diagnose ASD’s at young ages. We would have gone back to the same neurologist, except that he recently retired. It was rather disheartening, we took him several hours away to a place here that specializes in language and communication disorders in the hopes of getting something other than, “That’s really interesting, never saw anything like that before”. (Couched in medical language of course).
However, he is presently at a school specialized in speech, language, and communication disorders so we shall see how that goes.
The irony is that some part of my work in the US was indeed working with special needs kids in schools. So I knwo what you mean by the fun house, but I was quite good at threading that particular needle. This led actually to more confusion regarding him, not less, because the systems for dealing with special needs kids are entirely different here while appearing to be much the same. This led to epic level misunderstandings and confusion. Everything I could have done wrong, I think I did wrong.
Sometimes you need more than a simple translation, you need a cultural broker. And of course sometimes what you really need is a scotch, neat. 