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.... Then Deer describes exactly how. For instance, before Wakefield ever undertook his infamous study, he and a solicitor named Richard Barr had claimed to have identified a new syndrome consisting of bowel inflammation and regressive autism and aimed to show a temporal association between MMR vaccination and the onset of first symptoms. Unfortunately, Child 11′s case was a disappointment, as his discharge summary from the Royal Free Hospital, which showed that the boy’s regression began two months earlier than claimed in Wakefield’s paper and a month before he had ever received his MMR vaccine. Deer also describes Child 2, whose parents were the first to have approached Wakefield, sent by the anti-vaccine group JABS. This boy appeared in numerous news reports and was one of the four “best cases” used by Barr in a lawsuit. The boy’s mother’s story was vague and she wasn’t clear on how long it was between the child’s vaccination and the onset of his symptoms.
But that’s not all. The more the paper was investigated, the more anomalies were found. For example, only one child clearly had regressive autism, and three of nine described as having regressive autism did not. In fact, none of these three even had a diagnosis of autism at all! There were other anomalies as well. Several of the children clearly had preexisting conditions. For example, all twelve children were described in the paper as “previously normal,” but at least two of them clearly had developmental delay and facial dysmorphisms noted before they were vaccinated with the MMR. All twelve children taken together did not support the existence of a syndrome of bowel problems and regressive autism, at least not the syndrome as described in Wakefield’s paper. Deer summarizes how Wakefield “fixed the link” between MMR and regressive autism with enterocolitis:
The Lancet paper was a case series of 12 child patients; it reported a proposed “new syndrome” of enterocolitis and regressive autism and associated this with MMR as an “apparent precipitating event.” But in fact:
-Three of nine children reported with regressive autism did not have autism diagnosed at all. Only one child clearly had regressive autism
-Despite the paper claiming that all 12 children were “previously normal,” five had documented pre-existing developmental concerns
-Some children were reported to have experienced first behavioural symptoms within days of MMR, but the records documented these as starting some months after vaccination
-In nine cases, unremarkable colonic histopathology results–noting no or minimal fluctuations in inflammatory cell populations–were changed after a medical school “research review” to “non-specific colitis”
-The parents of eight children were reported as blaming MMR, but 11 families made this allegation at the hospital. The exclusion of three allegations–all giving times to onset of problems in months–helped to create the appearance of a 14 day temporal link
-Patients were recruited through anti-MMR campaigners, and the study was commissioned and funded for planned litigation
As Brian Deer so aptly put it, Wakefield “chiseled” the data, “falsifying medical histories of children and essentially concocting a picture, which was the picture he was contracted to find by lawyers hoping to sue vaccine manufacturers and to create a vaccine scare.”
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/ ... elds-scie/
BrandonD » Wed Aug 20, 2014 5:50 pm wrote:What would you consider the strongest evidence to support or debunk this alleged connection?
Plutonia » Thu Aug 21, 2014 1:04 am wrote:Hi Sounder. That's the classic antivax binary trap, that rejecting the notion that vaccines cause autism equates to unthinking allegiance to and support of the pharmaceutical industry - or Big Pharma, as they say. Me, I say that there is no reason to blindly trust the pharmaceutical co's even while vaccines science is sound and do work.
stickdog99 » Wed Aug 20, 2014 10:20 am wrote:The currently recommended vaccine regimen could easily be harmful to a small minority of people who are particularly sensitive to certain vaccine ingredients.
The claim that this idea has been "discredited" is categorically false. There haven't been any trials evaluating the health outcome of fully vaccinated vs. unvaccinated monkeys much less fully vaccinated vs. unvaccinated humans.
Thinking a vaccine caused someone to have autism is pretty much saying that they didn't have it until they got the vaccine which caused them to develop it, is it not?
It couldn't be the chemical laden water that we drink and polluted air we breathe and possible damaged genes (it only takes 1 bit of a chromosome of one parent to be damaged) that both parents have been exposed to in their lives or any one of a thousand other environmental factors that might cause autism. No it's something in the vaccines given to the child after they are born that does it. Find out what ingredient it is that does it then. Don't say it's the vaccine because millions of people have been vaccinated with no problems at all.
There is a big difference between saying vaccines "could easily be harmful to a small minority of people who are particularly sensitive to certain vaccine ingredients." and saying "vaccines can potentially cause autism."
BrandonD » Thu Aug 21, 2014 1:46 am wrote:Plutonia » Thu Aug 21, 2014 1:04 am wrote:Hi Sounder. That's the classic antivax binary trap, that rejecting the notion that vaccines cause autism equates to unthinking allegiance to and support of the pharmaceutical industry - or Big Pharma, as they say. Me, I say that there is no reason to blindly trust the pharmaceutical co's even while vaccines science is sound and do work.
From what I've read, it doesn't appear that the anti-vaccine people have a problem with vaccine science. As I understand it, there are active chemicals that prevent the illness, and there are also additional chemicals added for other purposes such as preservation. It is these additional chemicals that are allegedly causing the autism symptoms. These secondary chemicals are (claimed to be) most prominent in shots where multiple vaccines are being taken together, such as MMR.
Is the argument above regarding the secondary ingredients bogus? Are all the chemicals in vaccines safe for children and babies? This is the area where I am currently unclear.
I'll acknowledge a deep suspicion of large influential institutions such as "big pharma", to me it does not seem implausible that officials would push through questionable ingredients if money is a factor. But I have no conclusions or stance on the subject, I'm still trying to figure it out.
What would you consider the strongest evidence to support or debunk this alleged connection?
Plutonia » Thu Aug 21, 2014 12:26 pm wrote:More, the idea that there is some environmental contaminant that is the cause of autism is predicated on the idea that there is an autism epidemic - because suddenly Wow! there are so many more autistic kids now than in the past. Others have refuted this idea better and more thoroughly that I will now, but this is a Hooey and is entirely dependent on the sustained invisibility of autistic adults and thus the persistent harassment and denigration of autistics, which at it's height a few years ago, was truly despicable.
I'll acknowledge a deep suspicion of large influential institutions such as "big pharma", to me it does not seem implausible that officials would push through questionable ingredients if money is a factor. But I have no conclusions or stance on the subject, I'm still trying to figure it out.
Excellent. Just be careful that you are not unwittingly signing on to the Co$ anti-pharma, alternate health bandwagon.
BrandonD » Fri Aug 22, 2014 4:48 am wrote:Plutonia » Thu Aug 21, 2014 12:26 pm wrote:More, the idea that there is some environmental contaminant that is the cause of autism is predicated on the idea that there is an autism epidemic - because suddenly Wow! there are so many more autistic kids now than in the past. Others have refuted this idea better and more thoroughly that I will now, but this is a Hooey and is entirely dependent on the sustained invisibility of autistic adults and thus the persistent harassment and denigration of autistics, which at it's height a few years ago, was truly despicable.
Thank you for this info. So do you think that there is no autism epidemic? Or do you think that autism is in some way an imaginary disease, like ADHD? The symptoms currently gathered under the name "autism" have a definite physical reality at least in my opinion, as I can attest by the appearance and behavior of my nephew. His head is larger than over 99% of the population and his behavior during development was highly abnormal.
Neurodiversity is also an international online disability rights movement that has been promoted primarily by the autistic self-advocate community (although other disability rights groups have joined the neurodiversity movement). This movement frames neurodiversity as a natural human variation rather than a disease, and its advocates reject the idea that neurological differences need to be (or can be) cured, as they believe them to be authentic forms of human diversity, self-expression, and being. These advocates promote support systems (such as inclusion-focused services, accommodations, communication and assistive technologies, occupational training, and independent living support)[1] that allow those who are neurologically diverse to live their lives as they are, rather than being coerced or forced to adopt uncritically accepted ideas of normalcy, or to conform to a clinical ideal.[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurodiversity
Neurodiversity Rewires Conventional Thinking About Brains
By Steve Silberman
Illustration: Mark Weaver
In the late 1990s, a sociologist named Judy Singer—who is on the autism spectrum herself—invented a new word to describe conditions like autism, dyslexia, and ADHD: neurodiversity. In a radical stroke, she hoped to shift the focus of discourse about atypical ways of thinking and learning away from the usual litany of deficits, disorders, and impairments. Echoing positive terms like biodiversity and cultural diversity, her neologism called attention to the fact that many atypical forms of brain wiring also convey unusual skills and aptitudes.
Autistic people, for instance, have prodigious memories for facts, are often highly intelligent in ways that don’t register on verbal IQ tests, and are capable of focusing for long periods on tasks that take advantage of their natural gift for detecting flaws in visual patterns. By autistic standards, the “normal” human brain is easily distractible, is obsessively social, and suffers from a deficit of attention to detail. “I was interested in the liberatory, activist aspects of it,” Singer explained to journalist Andrew Solomon in 2008, “to do for neurologically different people what feminism and gay rights had done for their constituencies.”
The new word first appeared in print in a 1998 Atlantic article about Wired magazine’s website, HotWired, by journalist Harvey Blume. “Neurodiversity may be every bit as crucial for the human race as biodiversity is for life in general,” he declared. “Who can say what form of wiring will prove best at any given moment? Cybernetics and computer culture, for example, may favor a somewhat autistic cast of mind.”
Thinking this way is no mere exercise in postmodern relativism. One reason that the vast majority of autistic adults are chronically unemployed or underemployed, consigned to make-work jobs like assembling keychains in sheltered workshops, is because HR departments are hesitant to hire workers who look, act, or communicate in non-neurotypical ways—say, by using a keyboard and text-to-speech software to express themselves, rather than by chattering around the water cooler.
One way to understand neurodiversity is to remember that just because a PC is not running Windows doesn’t mean that it’s broken. Not all the features of atypical human operating systems are bugs. We owe many of the wonders of modern life to innovators who were brilliant in non-neurotypical ways. Herman Hollerith, who helped launch the age of computing by inventing a machine to tabulate and sort punch cards, once leaped out of a school window to escape his spelling lessons because he was dyslexic. So were Carver Mead, the father of very large scale integrated circuits, and William Dreyer, who designed one of the first protein sequencers.
Singer’s subversive meme has also become the rallying cry of the first new civil rights movement to take off in the 21st century. Empowered by the Internet, autistic self-advocates, proud dyslexics, unapologetic Touretters, and others who think differently are raising the rainbow banner of neurodiversity to encourage society to appreciate and celebrate cognitive differences, while demanding reasonable accommodations in schools, housing, and the workplace.
A nonprofit group called the Autistic Self Advocacy Network is working with the US Department of Labor to develop better employment opportunities for all people on the spectrum, including those who rely on screen-based devices to communicate (and who doesn’t these days?). “Trying to make someone ‘normal’ isn’t always the best way to improve their life,” says ASAN cofounder Ari Ne’eman, the first openly autistic White House appointee.
Neurodiversity is also gaining traction in special education, where experts are learning that helping students make the most of their native strengths and special interests, rather than focusing on trying to correct their deficits or normalize their behavior, is a more effective method of educating young people with atypical minds so they can make meaningful contributions to society. “We don’t pathologize a calla lily by saying it has a ‘petal deficit disorder,’” writes Thomas Armstrong, author of a new book called Neurodiversity in the Classroom. “Similarly, we ought not to pathologize children who have different kinds of brains and different ways of thinking and learning.”
In forests and tide pools, the value of biological diversity is resilience: the ability to withstand shifting conditions and resist attacks from predators. In a world changing faster than ever, honoring and nurturing neurodiversity is civilization’s best chance to thrive in an uncertain future.
http://www.wired.com/2013/04/neurodiversity/
stickdog99 » Fri Aug 22, 2014 12:19 pm wrote:Why not do the science? Why not scientifically determine cost and risk vs. benefit, unless you unscientifically presuppose what you should instead wish to prove?
Plutonia » Fri Aug 22, 2014 12:22 pm wrote:Just one other thing: researchers are looking for a genetic marker for autism because autism very clearly runs in families and one of the ways that undiagnosed adult autistics are becoming aware of their own autism is via their child's, or family member's child, autism diagnosis. There are no statistics for adult autistics, as far as I'm aware, but more than one of my friends have "come out" as autistic in this way, in recent years.
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