You would have to be harder hearted than I to ignore the anguished search of parents of autistic children for the cause of their child's condition. "I saw it," they say; "one shot, and then the child who had talked and laughed started retreating into himself." It's hard to argue with someone's pain.
Nonetheless, I'm going to. Our brains are designed to learn by associating events that happen at the same time, or in close sequence. When you were a little kid, that's how you learned that if you touched the stove, you got burned, long before you understood how combustion worked. We have other ways of learning as well, but that temporal link is the strongest, most primal association. We go through our whole lives looking for those connections.
This is not a bad heuristic, but of course, it often leads one astray, which is why there are so many ridiculous "cures" for hiccups. The fact that your child regressed after having a shot doesn't mean that the shot caused the regression. It suggests a theory . . . but that theory has been tested, and found wanting.
The anti-vaccination websites sustain their belief by systematically excluding anyone offering counterevidence from the domain of acceptable sources. Pharma studies can't be trusted because they have a profit motive. The CDC is in hock to big business. The "medical establishment" wants to make money giving your children unnecessary shots. In fact, the only person you can trust is the guy writing the website.
This is the sure sign of a crank. It is possible that all these people are wrong--science has had much more spectacular failures in the face of clear evidence. But there is no such thing as a multi-million person conspiracy.
Those sites pick apart the studies that show no link between vaccinations and autism, while ignoring much more glaring problems with the studies supporting that link. The state of medical research is indeed pretty horrifying to people who do other kinds of research, thanks to a combination of human subject problems and generally abysmal statistical practice. But the problems are even more likely to be found in the poorly funded, inadequately staffed, and usually ineptly designed studies purporting to show a link between vaccination and autism.
A doctor who has been working with autistic children for decades offers a very interesting paper on the topic, which I found via Blissful Knowledge. He reports that well before the vaccine theory, parents always identified something to causally link with their child's late onset autism:
On the Children’s Unit at WMHI we had both forms of Autistic Disorder. In some children the clinical signs and symptoms of autism had been present from birth. In others, the child was quite normal (neurotypical) at birth and reached developmental milestones, including language acquisition at the usual times and in the usual manner. But then at age two, three or four, a conspicuous regressive process began robbing the child of all of that natural progress. Interestingly, in these late onset cases the parents all had some sentinel event that, in their mind, accounted for the cause of this dreadful regressive pattern: “ever since he fell off the pier and nearly drowned”; “the time he got trapped in the silo”; or “ever since he went into the hospital to have his tonsils removed”.The point is that there is a natural tendency on the part of parents to seek out and blame some event or procedure for the onset of such startling regression in a child who has otherwise been developing normally. Dr. Down called that regression the “loss of wonted brightness”. Dr. Down attributed this regression to the “second dentition”. Obviously, in seeking causes, one has to separate out temporal relationship to causal relationship.
. . .
I saw cases of late onset autism well before there was an acceleration of vaccine schedules to their present levels. And in each of those cases the parents pointed toward some special event that in their mind was responsible for the onset of the regression. A full century earlier Dr. Down described cases of late onset autism well before there were any vaccination schedules at all. As I pointed out above, he ascribed that regression, temporally at least, to the ‘second dentition’.
Looking for those links is entirely natural. But fingering vaccines has real and terrible consequences. Millions of children die worldwide every year from childhood diseases that we've eliminated here through vaccination. Now, because these websites are frightening people about vaccination, we're seeing a resurgence of those diseases. People are dying from them again, and others are being left with permanent health impairment. Leaving children unvaccinated means going back to
- Leg braces and iron lungs for people with polio (57,628 cases in 1952)
- Encephalitis and sterility for people with mumps (200,000 cases a year in the 1960s)
- Congenital rubella syndrome for children whose mothers contracted the illness during pregnancy.
- Blindness, pneumonia, encephalitis, and death--one per thousand--for people with measles (nearly 1 million cases a year in the US before vaccines).
- Encephalitis and pulmonary hypertension for people with whooping cough--thanks to people who don't vaccinate their kids, in 2001, 17 people, mostly infants, died of pertussis (200,000 cases in 1940).
- Cardiac arrest and paralysis for people with diptheria (207,000 cases and about 15,000 deaths in 1920).
The vaccines scare us because the diseases don't. And they don't because of the vaccines.
The diseases don't scare, and neither do the vaccines. It's the, as you call them, "regressions" after the shots that scare us.
You're right. It looks as though evidence is mounting that vaccines don't cause autism. But do they cause other awful conditions? They do. Isn't that why they're only 99% SAFE and effective, or whatever? There's always that 1% who will react horribly to vaccines.
I don't know or understand the cause. Do you? No. Does the government? No.
But am I REQUIRED to vaccinate my children -- and thereby take that 1% risk -- in order to enroll them in school, etc? Yes!
And that's OK with you, the Great Libertarian, right?
Sheesh.
My kids ARE vaccinated for some things, but not others, and I don't give a damn if the government, or you, considers me a fool. Certain vaccines make me squeamish. They try to control behavior-spread conditions (HPV) or they "vaccinate" against conditions that the shot recipients then contract years down the road, in more fiece forms (chicken pox). Meanwhile, the government intones about how my kids will probably experience fatal consequences from the same bout with chicken pox that we all went through.
THAT'S a risk I'm willing to take. If I regret it, that's my shame and horror to live with. But I don't appreciate the coercion, and the tsk-tsking from doctors who refuse to treat my children because they don't approve of my parental decisions.
This is draconian. And you support it, indirectly. Shame on you.
"The state of medical research is indeed pretty horrifying to people who do other kinds of research, thanks to a combination of human subject problems and generally abysmal statistical practice."
Having slandered a large chunk of science, please elaborate and explain yourself.
Christian,
Hear, hear.
The only thing I have to add is that certain prudent risk management practices can be put in place in lieu of compulsory vaccination that limit the risk both to the child and to others from not being vaccinated.
It is amazing that in this debate, conventional wisdom in the guise of "facts" or "science" is imposed on people who are required to believe it and not entitled to a different opinion based on the "wrong" reasons.
Let's apply this logic to elections and only allow people who have the right science, the right facts, and in the know to vote!
Can't let people who harbor racist or sexist ideas to vote.... or for that matter... ethnocentric ones like Catholics, Muslims, Hindus, etc. vote.
Only those who believe in science and the scientific method should be so allowed.
@Christian
I don't care if you leave your children unvaccinated. Just make sure they stay away from any kids who haven't been vaccinated yet, or kids and adults for whom the vaccine didn't take. Oh, and keep your kids away from adults for whom the vaccine has worn off.
Then your selfishness and disdain for society won't harm society.
Health researchers' data sharing protocols are more than occasionally shocking to, say, political scienctists or economists; I have never heard of a social scientist who could get away with not sharing their data set with critics, or for that matter, anyone.
Their grasp of statistics is often extremely poor, hence the publication of data mining studies that act as if running 20 tests on one trial were the same thing as running 20 independent trials.
Their sample sizes are often tiny, and the confidence intervals too small.
Outside of pharma, they are prone to make adjustments for "real world conditions" that severely degrade the quality of their sample, and then act as if their sample were random.
There are few disciplines in which "fat is good for you--no, bad for you--no, good for you--" is a standard pattern that spans decades, and this stems at least in part from generally poorer statistical techniques than are found in most other fields. As the good research trickles down to doctors, it is routinely ignored in favor of "experience".
This is not a critique that is original to me; most people from other fields who have reason to deal with medical research come away concerned. The problems get larger the more macro the system; public health is the worst, cell research the best.
There was a lot of talk in the thread yesterday about the appropriate way to address people when talking about immunization. I agree that we have to be respectful to people who are undergoing difficult decisions regarding their children. But there is an attitude that somehow, the opinions of the parents of sick children should be privileged over everyone else's, because they're the ones who are "living it". In fact, those are precisely the people who you don't want making policy decisions, because they are least able to make a dispassionate, rational assessment of the facts. And like many affinity movements, the anti-vax crowd has tended to adopt a very, uh, evangelical rhetorical voice. Certainly not everyone in the movement, but quite a few.
And we're talking about an issue that has massive public health consequences. My right to swing my arm ends where your personal space begins. If it was simply a question of people deciding whether to increase their own chances of contracting an infections disease, I would support the individuals right to do so. I even support their right to do so now. But if you are going to willfully ignore the vast preponderance of medical science and expert opinion, and in doing so increase the risk to everyone else around you, I believe that you should be forced to make certain sacrifices in exchange, specifically sacrifices that involve your free movement within public spaces-- where you are risk infecting those around you.
Of course, parents of autistic children want answers. But their desire for answers, sadly, seems to be driving many of them to be overly credulous towards unsupported opinions. And the vaccine-autism link is unsupported. There simply does not exist any scientifically compelling evidence to support that theory. You don't have to believe me, random blowhard on the Internet. But you should believe medical science and the opinion of the large majority of the medical community.
The vaccines scare us because the diseases don't. And they don't because of the vaccines.
That's the bottom line. It's only because of the scientific miracle that vaccination represents that people can underestimate the horror of these diseases so thoroughly.
Right. It's anti-libertarian to assert preconditions to the "right" of "free" education as provided by the government. Yeah. Ok. If we're going to accept tax-funded education at all then we have to accept both sides of the equation, not just one of them.
If you are angry about the "coercion" imposed by sensible public safety conditions on public funded services, then don't use them. If you won't, you're not asking us to leave you alone, you're asking the public to not only accept your foolishness and risk, but to actually fund it as well. Cheeky, really.
Same with the doctors, by the way. You proudly proclaim that you have the freedom to act as recklessly, reprehensibly and ignorantly as you wish. Ok, fine. So why do you have such a problem with doctors telling you they're not going to treat such an irresponsible patient? Sounds like freedom for me, but not for thee...
You sarcastically refer to libertarianism, but it seems to me that you just use that as shorthand for unlimited personal freedom. That's not what it is. Hijack someone else's philosophy please.
Freddie Flintstone:
Vaccination is not the only public health miracle.
Here is a list of public health miracles waiting to happen:
- Mandatory, compulsory DNA testing of all individuals twice a year for HIV/AIDs and quarantine of anyone infected until the disease is eradicated from the population. (Ditto for all STDs)
- Quarantine of all persons with TB until they are no longer capable of being a carrier or reservoir.
- Mandatory genetic testing of all persons and mandatory pre-conception screening of all heterosexual partners to eliminate the risk of genetic disorders. Where the risks are high, mandatory sterilization.
- Ban on marriage between Ashkenazi jews to each other to reduce the rate of genetically transmitted illness.
Let's implement these common sense public health measures. We can eliminate the horrors of these diseases.
You do realize that HIV and STDs are spread by direct contact, usually quite intimate, and measles, mumps, rubella, etc, are airborne? You can't give someone HIV by breathing on them. Measles, on the other hand, can be spread that way.
The TB quarantine is already happening, for people who are infectious. Ones who refuse treatment are quarantined against their will. Heck, the tb quarantine has been happening for decades.
as for the rest, I suggest that strawmen should be burnt at the stake.
wireddog!
What a great idea!
The theologians for mandatory vaccination should be tried before an ecclesiastical court and then burned at the stake! Be sure you get a EPA permit for this as that is a lot of carbon emissions per convict.
How about we just tie them up and see if they sank or floated in lieu of this cumbersome procedure?
Oh please D.
The entire approach of anti-vaccine people is essentially a contradiction. They argue that no one, not even science, knows what causes autism. Then they immediately turn around and argue that they know, just absolutely know, that a vaccine caused their child, or someone's child, to have autism.
Who are they kidding? They are trying to beguile us with the garments of to hide the naked fact that they're claiming the true knowledge they deny everyone else. A denial so strong that it reaches even to the level of gargantuan conspiracy theory.
The approach is fundamentally dishonest: They adopt reasonable language about uncertainty to promote a certainty that's wholly unreasonable.
And you seem to be supporting them, with even more flimsy flimflammery. It's transparent. You're only fooling those who are already fools. Wake up and smell the reason.
"Health researchers' data sharing protocols are more than occasionally shocking to, say, political scienctists or economists; I have never heard of a social scientist who could get away with not sharing their data set with critics, or for that matter, anyone."
Certainly a valid criticism. I'm sure you realize that much of the lack of data sharing is due to fear (justified or not) of violating laws regarding release of medical information of identifiable individuals, rather than an unwillingness to submit to scrutiny.
"Their grasp of statistics is often extremely poor, hence the publication of data mining studies that act as if running 20 tests on one trial were the same thing as running 20 independent trials."
You seem to be criticizing only clinical trials here. The problems of multiple testing in randomized trials are well recognized by those in the field. If you need an easy way to separate the wheat from the chaff, look for trials adhering to the CONSORT statement.
"Their sample sizes are often tiny, and the confidence intervals too small."
These are problems, I will grant.
"Outside of pharma, they are prone to make adjustments for "real world conditions" that severely degrade the quality of their sample, and then act as if their sample were random."
Are you referring to observational epidemiology? There's no doubt it's a blunt instrument in many regards. I'm unclear what you would use instead.
"There are few disciplines in which "fat is good for you--no, bad for you--no, good for you--" is a standard pattern that spans decades, and this stems at least in part from generally poorer statistical techniques than are found in most other fields. As the good research trickles down to doctors, it is routinely ignored in favor of "experience"."
This is one well-publicized instance of epidemiologic waffling. No one writes NYT magazine pieces about findings that have stood the test of time, of which there are many.
"This is not a critique that is original to me; most people from other fields who have reason to deal with medical research come away concerned. The problems get larger the more macro the system; public health is the worst, cell research the best."
I'd be happy to read these critiques if you point them out.
Glorious hole:
Geeze, I was not aware that there is a monolithic anti-vaccination conspiracy out there?
Can you direct me to the Central Committee of the People's Front for the Liberation of Vaccines?
I merely speak for parents having a legitimate right to choose, and for public health systems to take reasonable risk management measures to accommodate those people whose choices are for not vaccinating.
Now, reasonable accommodation can mean segregation of vaccinated children..... but in order to get to that conclusion, we need to legitimize parent's choice first.
BTW, if any parent want to take this issue of choice up in court, one of the possible way to do it under current law is to argue that mandatory vaccination rules are in violation of ADA.
MR, yes epidemiology sucks; no, we don't have a good replacement, but researchers are systematically grossly overconfident in the results they derive therefrom. Most of the really small trials should never be done at all; they're statistical garbage. The bigger ones often aren't much better. The problem is not that all medical research is garbage, but that the field as a whole accepts things that would never be published in other fields.
As for confidentiality, again, this is a small sample problem. Other fields easily strip names from datasets before handing them over--indeed, y'all do it yourselves, when you want to publish case studies.
As the father of an autistic son, I agree with your take Megan and would like to offer another factor to this discussion: the sheer desperation and anguish created by the diagnosis and prognosis.
Forgive the invocation of a by-now tired cliche but it really is like Kubler-Ross's stages of grief. You deny, bargain, grasp at straws (how many autistic parents have spent countless dollars on secretin shots that did nothing as I did?) for a while and then you arrive at acceptance and do your best to make the best of a situation your didn't choose.
All along you meet some people who are helpful, a lot who aren't and a few who even make matters worse. The result is a (often-justified) kind of combativeness when it comes to your kid -- a combativeness that is reinforced by the conviction that other people not in your situation don't understand.
And they don't. Unfortunately, some folks adopt a heuristic that says "other people don't get it and they're wrong."
What I'd like to hear from Megan (or one of her supporters)is a *principled* discussion of where she would draw the line for mandatory vaccination against relatively less and less severe diseases.
To me, mandatory vaccination against diseases that are BOTH (a) likely to be very serious, and (b) highly contagious, makes very good sense. E.G. Smallpox, Polio, Diphtheria, etc.
But I start getting very leery when the concept of mandatory vaccination starts getting extended to diseases that are -- in most cases -- relatively trivial (e.g. Chicken Pox) or those that are easy to avoid by lifesytle choices (e.g. HPV ).
Where would you draw the line? Suppose that some drug company comes up with a very expensive vaccine against AIDS, and the vaccine itself has 'only' a 1:100,000 chance of causing serious side-effects; and the drug company starts aggressively lobbying the Gov't. to have their vaccine made mandatory; are you still in favor of that?
For a great read on how people make systematically bad judgements, read Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases by Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky. It's a great collection of papers and well demonstrates how even intelligent, educated people can make bad judgements.
And for the record, Megan isn't really a Liberterian... she has some liberterian tendencies. I happen to prefer that, I have a similar view.
One major problem with medical research is that your subjects are all different. You can take a thousand subjects and give them a drug or whatever and look at the results... but the results will vary and any given individual may have a different result based on his or her own genetic and developmental makeup. In many sciences, you can essentially exactly duplicate an experiment... in biology, unless you use vat-grown clones, each individual is a slightly different experiment.
D, items 1, 3, and 4 on your list do not affect public health. Vaccinations are (normally) to prevent diseases that spread from person to person through minimal contact.
Personally, I'm opposed to the mandatory HPV vaccine, but I'll probably get my daughter vaccinated at some point (after looking into it more) and if she's old enough, I'll include her in the decision.
There was a study that looked at the 1st birthday party videos of children who were later diagnosed as autistic. These were considered typically-developing children at the time, but by looking at the videos researchers could determine who had signs that they would later be designated as having an ASD. (These videos were coded for specific behaviors by "blind" lab techs, and compared to matched controls - it wasn't just Monday morning quarterbacking.)
One of the big problems with science vs. crankery is that science cannot promise people the moon or a good answer,an answer they like, or even a complete answer yet for something like autism. Cranks can. It must be very frustrating to have a child with autism hoping for help and see that researchers don't even fully agree on causes or treatments. Cranks give you something and someone to blame.
MedicalResearcher:
Let's say there's some test for a type of cancer. One percent of the general population has the cancer. The test is guaranteed to give a positive if you have the cancer. If you don't have the cancer, there is a 20% change it will throw a (false) positive. If a test comes back positive, what is the probability the patient actually has the cancer?
****
When doctors stop getting questions like that horribly wrong, I'll believe they have a good grasp of statistics.
Medical Researcher,
When I asked my ped, are vaccines safe, does thimerosal cause autism, the reply I got was, "Safe and no correlation to autism". When I ask what proof is there, I was told Verstraeten and Denmark, which the Institute of Medicine describes as 'well designed studies'.
AFTER my son was diagnosed with autism (regressed after 18 month shots), I went back and actually read Verstraeten and Denmark for myself.
This is what I found.
Please note that my critique is based on fatal flaws in methodology, not straw men, or post hoc ergo prompter hoc fallacies or "parental anguish".
There is a truck load of support for the vaccine/autism link (how the heck do you think Dr. Poling got the government to concede Hannah's case... because the science was behind him and they knew they could not win when it was actually examined in open court), but bloggers like Megan choose to ignore the actual science and just use the tired and insulting, "desperate and scientifically illiterate parents" arguement as to why mom's like me are so adamant that the medical community stop what they are doing and take this seriously.
I don't reject the CDC research because it was done by the CDC and is subject to bias (which it really, truly is). I reject it because it is crap research and should be retracted.
And don't take my word for it. Read it for yourself and see if my 'anguished' critique holds water or not.
Because the questions in that piece have not been answered by the CDC, the IOM, HHS, the Statens Serum Institute, or Thomas Verstraeten himself who won't come back into the country and won't comment on the study he spent four years doing.
The VCIP court hearing that just concluded took 21 days to hear. What do you think the parents were saying for 21 days, "Judge, my child regressed right after his shots and I really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, (21 days later) really, really, really, really, really, really, really think it was his vaccines. I rest my case)
No. They are actually presenting scientific evidence, that actually exists. Everyone in this debate needs to be reading it for themselves, reading the critiques and stop just swallowing what ever they are hand fed.
I would encourage Megan to start by going to pubmed.com typing in 'thimerosal' and 'mitochondria' and start reading. She will find that thimerosal causes mito dysfunction, which is just the beginning of the story.
Ginger Taylor MS
"Anguished" autism mom
john w,
Perhaps a even better way is to sit down see:
- is there an alternative for each and every disease to mandatory vaccination?
- suppose we are to come up with a surveillance and risk management plan on the assumption that a certain percentage of individuals (in school, church, whatever) will not be vaccinated against xyz. What are the risks? to whom? how can the risks be managed / mitigated?
Isn't it high time we reconsider measures that were introduced in the heydays of the industrial age?
We are now in the information age, and whereas it was not possible to handle large amounts of individual data as recently as the 1980s, we can do so easily and inexpensively.
Having such a capacity allows us to custom tailor surveillance and risk management measures as a viable alternative to mandatory vaccinations of the less virulent diseases.
Then we can give parents a choice.
Earnest,
the point is, who is to say 'good' or 'bad'?
Is a religious ban against blood transfusions 'bad'?
Is a refusal to eat pork 'good'?
Give people the right to choose intelligently, and have the Public Health system take reasonable precautions against 'bad' choices.
It is a fair, reasonable way compared to making everything mandatory. (Note: I do not preclude making some things mandatory.)
False correlations are honest enough mistakes. They are usually isolated through a control mechanism, and discarded as exogenous factors. Interestingly enough the opponents of vaccinations don't do this. Instead they rely on anecdotal evidence "my kid was ok until that shot".
It is funny how, as Megan points out, any evidence to show that vaccines aren't pointed out are met with circular reasoning. This is the same sort of logic that supports conspiracy theories about the moon landing, the illuminati, etc. Crazies should have no voice in public policy.
Vaccines are not behind the rise in autism. One can find more than a little magical thinking at work among parents who hold this belief and who are doing all they can to help their children and understand what does not make sense. The link between vaccines and autism is a fascinating example of a contemporary urban myth and of the power of association.
Kristina Chew
autismvox.com
Flintstonemac and Fannies:
"Crazies should have no voice in public policy"
Let's apply that rule to the White House, Congress, the Judiciary, the civil service, armed forces, committees of the government, lobbyists, etc.!
Now.... what about Hillbilly?
I'd like to point out that not all available vaccines are mandatory in the U.S. We don't vaccinate against TB, for instance, even though use of the BCG vaccine is common in other countries. There is much more that goes into the decision to make a vaccine "mandatory" than lobbying from the drug companies. The flu vaccine is not mandatory, either, just recommended.
Some misconceptions I see in this discussion thread is that some of the vaccinated diseases are really "trivial" (like chicken pox). While true that most kids deal with chicken pox with just a few very itchy days, some cases of varicella can lead to encephalopathy or pneumonia and kids can die from it. So it's trivial in most, but not all cases. The vaccine isn't 100% effective, but the hope is that even your varicella-vaccinated kid gets varicella, they'll have a mild case and it won't progress to a potentially life-threatening illness.
Also there is a misconception that vaccines are somehow huge money-makers for drug companies. Um, no, not really. I heard Paul Offit speak once on how complicated it was to get the rotavirus vaccine developed and approved. He spent a decade of his life trying to convince a drug company it would be worth pursuing after the RotaShield debacle.
The rotavirus vaccine would be a good one to discuss in the context of risk vs benefit in the U.S. Rotavirus can cause severe disease in infants but in the US it's relatively easily treated with hospital admission and IV therapy. It represents a large societal cost in terms of parents missing work and hospital days, but most children recover quickly and well. There is now a vaccine for rotavirus available--I know that is strongly recommended but pitifully I do not know if it is required for school admission. It is a live-virus vaccine and therefore risks might be expected to be higher for it than for other vaccines (though the safety studies--published in NEJM in 2006--were quite impressive for this kind of thing--over 70,000 children in the sample size). However, the rotavirus vaccine has the potential to save MILLIONS of children in developing countries, where access to IV fluids doens't exist and kids die daily of rotavirus-induced dehydration. And in our day and age, if these vaccines don't get made in the developed world, they aren't going to make it to the developing world.
Very good post John W. That is my question as well.
To me it is not as clear cut as Vax=good. Some vaccines are very necessary and probably should be required for children in public school. Others seem to be nice to have's but don't rise to level of requiring childred to get them like the Chicken Pox vaccine.
I am generally against ingesting or injecting too many foreign bio engineered substances into my (or my child's) body. Especially relatively new drugs and vaccines that have not stood the test of time. We really don't know what potential side effects may be.
To me the question is how bad and how likely is the potential down side if I don't get the vax vs the inherent uncertainty that goes along with putting drugs and vaccines in my body. If the potential bad side is bad enough (like Polio) I will take the risk, but if it is just Chicken Pox I would rather not introduce a drug or vaccine that may have potential side affects that are unknown today.
Many drugs and products have once been considered safe by "Science" that now "Science" says are unsafe. If the potential benefits of a drug or vaccine are great maybe you live with that uncertainty, but if the benefits apear to be trival or the odds of the disease highly unlikely why take that risk.
Of course, I should also add that the crazies came here because there was a link on another, less honest blog. They like to troll.
Person,
It's my understanding that experienced doctors intuitively understand Bayes Theorem in time b/c of the sheer accumulation of instances of testing they see in their career? Is this not true?
Can any MDs tell me whether or not they learned Bayes Theorem at any point?
I honestly cannot believe that I could be living next door to some of the people who post here. Don't you understand that if you refuse to get your kid vaccinated for, say, the mumps, you increase the probability that I get the mumps. Or, more importantly, you dramatically increase the probability that my Mom (elementary school employee) will get the mumps, especially if immunity wanes as we get older. Like all sane people, both of us were vaccinated at some point.
Only a complete asshole would look at this fact and still make the decision not to get his kid vaccinated. But, if you want to be like that, the government should set up leper colonies where the great unvaccinated masses have to live next too each other, and as a result, not infect the rest of us. I am 100% serious.
"MedicalResearcher:
Let's say there's some test for a type of cancer. One percent of the general population has the cancer. The test is guaranteed to give a positive if you have the cancer. If you don't have the cancer, there is a 20% change it will throw a (false) positive. If a test comes back positive, what is the probability the patient actually has the cancer?
****
When doctors stop getting questions like that horribly wrong, I'll believe they have a good grasp of statistics."
Most doctors are not researchers. Unless they continue on for specialized research training, doctors will get about 20 minutes of statistics during their medical education. This doesn't invalidate RESEARCH, it argues for relieving doctors of their innumeracy.
John W:
Well, which diseases?
HPV is very serious. 25% of American women have it, and it puts cervical cancer risk through the roof. Lifestyle? Yes, people are going to have sex. And condoms don't do as good of a job at preventing HPV as they do HIV. Once vaccinated, a girl can still make the "lifestyle" choice to not have sex, or only have sex with another virgin that she will stay paired with for life, but human history suggests that's not the way to bet.
Chicken pox? If you get it, you're at much greater risk of shingles later in life. Very painful and unpleasant. You want your child at risk for that?
As for your straw man of a "very expensive" vaccine that doesn't work: No, few people would like it if the government forced them to take it. I'm unaware of such an effort, now or in the past, however. Try to stick with real world examples.
P.S. I would like to reiterate that in the case of Hannah Poling, the government did not concede that there was a link between vaccines and autism. There was no evidence presented that her vaccines led to autism. Her dad did not argue that vaccines caused autism. Hannah Poling does not have autism.
I cannot find the link I once found to the official government decision, but this article describes it well:
http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=87667
Megan,
Since I read this blog on an RSS feed, can you please put something in the feed to indicate when there is more to the post "below the fold"?
The feed post ends after the 3rd paragraph, and I only clicked on it to read the comments, but was happy to see more to the post. I'm now wondering how many more posts I've missed reading in their entirety.
" ... Don't you understand that if you refuse to get your kid vaccinated for, say, the mumps, you increase the probability that I get the mumps. Or, more importantly, you dramatically increase the probability that my Mom (elementary school employee) will get the mumps ...."
We understand the *concept* that you are promoting, but we want to see verifiable hard numbers for the various probabilities.
If you can prove that the chances of my child having a serious side-effect from the mumps vaccine is, say, one in one-hundred million whereas the risk that my unvaccinated child will give your Mom a serious case of mumps (i.e. with serious side effects) is, say, one in one hundred thousand; then I would probably agree to get my child vaccinated in order to protect your Mom.
But on the other hand, if the risk to my child is, say, one in a million, and the risk to your Mom is also one in a million, then I'm putting my child first.
In other words, without having realistic probability numbers to work with, we are all just talking past one another.
The point is that the risk from the mumps vaccine is zero. Everything imagined is simply urban legend and conspiracy theory run amok by people running websites. However, the probability of catching the mumps from someone already having the mumps is very great, if you are exposed to them (as my Mom would be). Just ask those people from Iowa who caught the mumps a couple of years back.
Let me make it simple:
Probability of not being vaccinated and catching the mumps > 0 (otherwise the vaccination is worthless)
Probability of catching the mumps if you are around someone with the mumps > 0 (it is what is known as an "infectious disease")
Feel free to subsitute any disease for "mumps".
Probability of getting autism from the mumps vaccine = 0
Number of cases where autism has resulted from the mumps vaccine = 0.
Feel free to substitue any disease of your choice for "autism".
With the above math, vaccination clearly makes sense. However, I don't want to force you to do anything to your kid that you don't want to. Hence, my proposal to carve out some "leper colonies" for the unvaccinated to live. If you have the right to not get your kid vaccinated, then I and my Mom certainly have the right not to live next door to you.
To put it another way, I am completely unwilling to sacrifice my right not to be exposed to infectious disease so that you can exercise your right to be an idiot.
No such thing as a multi-million person conspiracy? Tht is a given. But millions of people were prescribed Vioxx after it passed through trials, and testing, and evaluation, and the FDA, and many other public health organizations - all of whom signed off on its safety. After millions of pills were prescribed - well, it was often seriously bad for you and lethal enough to be pulled from the market.
No conspiracy; just a claim to objective truth that was proven incorrect. Like Fen-phen; like thalidomide; like the vaccine RotaShield; like dozens of other drugs that were researched, vetted, reviewed, and approved only to turn out to be bad or lethal.
Face it - public health can no longer claim to be presenting objective truth; this is an issue of trusting authority. If some parents decide not to, that does not make it irrational, especially in light of the numerous cases public health authority has been proven dangerously incorrect.
Personally, I know that vaccines for measles, mumps, polio, etc. have been around for a long time; I also know that these are potentially lethal dseases. I still did research to eliminate the types most likely to cause a reaction before they were given to my kids. Does this make me a *cough* "Bobo", or someone with a knowledge of risk assessment? Chickenpox is virtually never lethal and the research is conflicting over whther you are more or less likely to get singles with the vaccination, so I declined it for my kids - does that make me an *ahem* "sociopath" or, again, someone making a risk assessment? If I decline the HPV vaccine for a 9 year old daughter because A) I think she is rather low-risk currently and B) I want 3-5 years of a new vaccine on the market to see if it goes the way of RotaShield, amd I risking her life, or mitigating her risks?
"My kids ARE vaccinated for some things, but not others, and I don't give a damn if the government, or you, considers me a fool."
I don't consider you a fool, I consider you someone (mis)educated beyond their natural intellectual capacity. Your "partially vaccinated" children are cog in a growing and far larger threat to the health of others - children and adults alike - and all because you, frankly, don't have the grey matter to get past your magical thinking.
(I don't see evidence sufficient to place you into either the major alternative group of relevance here, which is the "I'm more intelligent than LITERALLY everyone else" group, or into the minor alternative group, which are engineers -- highly skilled people who just can't grasp that their affinity for numbers/statistics/data in a technical setting does give them a reasonable understanding of biological/medical cause and effect.)
Deep Thought,
Good points, but Phen-Fen was a non-prescribed use, and Thalidomide WAS caught by the FDA, but not by European regulatory agencies.
As for Vioxx, there are sample size effects. No drug company can afford to test a drug on tens of millions. It was pulled b/c of these newly discovered problems, but these vaccines are well understood and have been used by millions.
I'm with you on non-esssential vaccines, but this all started with people refusing the MEASLES vaccine, not chicken pox.
[Vioxx] was often seriously bad for you and lethal enough to be pulled from the market.
No. Though I can't find actual numbers, even the FDA says the cardiovascular side effects were rare. Frankly, they probably don't justify not taking it for many people. But the risk of lawsuits was too great, so the pulled it.
Vioxx is a safe drug; just not perfect enough for Merck to want to take the risk.
I guess Megan has an ax to grind which is
unvaccinated children. Mercury kill. Formic acid
maim. Let see how good you are in Chemistry. Al,
Fl (I do not mean the states in America.) are bad
for you. Yet you go on harping about vaccination.
To vaccinate is the WMD. Please do not vaccinate.
God bless you all and America.
"If I decline the HPV vaccine for a 9 year old daughter because A) I think she is rather low-risk currently "
Nobody here is complaining that you aren't giving your 9-year old daughter the HPV vaccine. Most of the insults are directed to not vaccinating your kid against highly infection and dangerous diseases that put the public at risk. Especially those that are too young to be vaccinated, the immunocompromised, the elderly and even adults who work with the kids who's immunity has lapsed.
There are good arguments for the HPV vaccine, mainly that 1 in 4 teenagers have HPV and it increases the risk of cervical cancer. Too many parents assume that their kids would never sleep around when the statistics show that parents are wrong about their kids sex habits. However, I would never force somebody to get the vaccine because non-airborne diseases are generally easy to avoid for people who choose to.
Here again parents are told that their eyes are deceiving them. Seeing normally progressing children regress into autism after being vaccinated is just an unsubstantiated theory according to the Atlantic. We're told that parents have cited false claims in the past and that fears are being fueled because "the anti-vaccination websites sustain their belief by systematically excluding anyone offering counterevidence from the domain of acceptable sources."
Such parents are dangerous the writer further comments bacause "fingering vaccines has real and terrible consequences. Millions of children die worldwide every year from childhood diseases that we've eliminated here through vaccination. Now, because these websites are frightening people about vaccination, we're seeing a resurgence of those diseases. People are dying from them again, and others are being left with permanent health impairment."
According to the article, we can just ignore the mounting evidence of a vaccine-induced epidemic.
Here's what the Atlantic failed to mention:
The explosion in the autism rate from one in 10,000 in the 1970s to one in every 150 today, including one in every 94 boys, directly corresponded to the dramatic increase in the vaccine schedule from 10 vaccines in 1983 to 36 today. Those vaccines contain a host of toxic ingredients like mercury, aluminum, formaldehyde, ether, MSG, and anti freeze.
There has never been a study done to assess the cumulative effect of so many vaccines on a developing baby.
The studies that are always used to "prove" that vaccines don't cause autism are epidemiological ones. They're also known as "tobacco science" because this type of study was used extensively by the tobacco industry in the 1940s and 50s to show that smoking didn't cause lung cancer.
We continue to go to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency that runs the vaccine program, to ask if vaccines are safe. No one ever notes that they have everything at stake in denying a link. They approved, mandated, and vigorously promoted vaccines as safe, and it's highly unlikely that they'll announce that through complete oversight failure, a generation of children has received damaging vaccinations.
We not only have an epidemic of autism, but one in six schoolchildren has a diagnosis of attention deficit or some other learning problem. Soaring rates of diabetes, asthma, life-threatening allergies, bowel disorders, epilepsy and children cancer can't simply be explained away as "better diagnosing."
What we're missing here is that we're always talking about children when it comes to autism. If this new and unexplained health care crisis isn't real, then where are all the adults with autism at a rate of one in 150? There has never been a study could find them. A once rare disorder is now so common that everyone knows someone with an autistic child and no one can tell us why.
Anne Dachel
Member of the Board of A-CHAMP
(Advocates for Children's Health Affected by Mercury Poisoning)
RotaShield is a great example to discuss on this forum in terms of risks and benefits. It was a "good" vaccine in the sense that it protected kids against rotavirus, which is rarely lethal in the US but is overseas and which even in the US causes a lot of morbidity and societal costs. It had a real but very rare side effect of increasing the incidence of intussusception, which can be severe but can be treated surgically. The side effect was sufficiently rare to be missed in FDA testing (didn't show up in 10,000 sample size) but was evident when it was given to a million kids (a good example of the government VAERS working well). In the US, this rare, treatable, non-fatal side effect was of sufficient concern that the vaccine was pulled because the risks didn't outweigh the benefits in the US. However, hundreds of thousands of kids die yearly from rotavirus in other countries, and if you do a risk/benefit analysis, it might actually have made sense to use RotaShield in other countries. Yes, a few children would probably die from the increased risk of intussusception but hundreds of thousands wouldn't die from rotavirus. Even though Wyeth offered to give the RotaShield vaccine free to countries where the risk/benefit analysis was different from that in the US, the other countries wouldn't take it.
So i wouldn't class RotaShield as having been "bad" or "lethal." I'm not sure than any of the 15 infants (of 1.5 million vaccinated in the US) with intussusception died; can't find it on a quick google search. And if we were losing 10,000 children a year to rotavirus, we might accept the risks of RotaShield and call it a "good" vaccine.
Please note that the two rotavirus vaccines currently in use--RotaTeq and RotaRix--were evaluated in >60,000 children each and were supposed to be powered to detect the rare incidence of intussusception seen with RotaShield before being allowed on the market.
Be Unvaccinated wrote: Let see how good you are in Chemistry.
Ann Dachel wrote: Those vaccines contain a host of toxic ingredients like mercury, aluminum, formaldehyde, ether, MSG, and anti freeze.
You both signed the petition to ban dihydrogen monoxide, didn't you?
And possibly someone should warn you about the horrifying effects of consuming elemental sodium and chlorine, both of which are quite dangerous, after which you can crank your way about the conspiracies of Big Salt.
Seriously, do not pretend to know anything about chemistry or its effects when you are so clearly ignorant. There are two ways you can literally poison yourself with water: one is to drink so much in an extremely short time span that your brain swells (often fatal); the other is to drink completely purified water with no Group I metal salts in it, at which point it will strip those salts right out of your normal body chemistry, with short-term side effects of dizziness, incoherence, and nausea, and long-term effects of bone and other organ damage.
There is nothing that is not somehow poisonous in appropriate form and sufficient quantity. The correct approach is knowing when, where, and how much, not merely spreading scare stories on the basis of urban legend.
Ms Duchel,
I note that autism diagnoses are not decreasing, even though thimerosal is no used in vaccines, so it's probably safe to assume there's no link between autism and thimerosal.
As far as the presence of mercury, aluminum, formaldehyde, ether, MSG, anti freeze, etc, have you looked around your kitchen? Garage? Trust me (or go to kitchen and auto parts stores yourself), kids are far more likely to be exposed to those chemicals in the home than the doctor's office.
Looking over the vaccine schedule I see that most of the diseases vaccinated against are either airborne transmitted, contact transmitted, and very dangerous. The only ones I see that are reasonable to object to are chicken pox and hpv. The first isn't particularly dangerous, the second is harder to get. But if a person hasn't had chicken pox as a preteen then the vaccine would be a good idea.
Really, I object to people not getting their kids vaccinated against measles, mumps, and other highly contagious diseases which are severe and often fatal.
At least we don't have to do the smallpox vaccine anymore. That one can have really nasty side effects. I got it twice, the second time in the Army.
Just so the lot of you know, not all parents of autistic children blame vaccines for autism. Not all autistic adults blame vaccines for autism (I've yet to come across any who do). There are many who will vehemently argue that vaccines cause autism no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented but they do not speak for me.
I've come to the conclusion that the current fear of vaccines will lead us into a new age of disease epidemics. Given our current level of medical technology it won't (I hope) be anything as bad as the medieval plague but still. A lot of people are going to have to die before we remember what past generations knew. Vaccines save people's lives.
Some other thoughts here.
The rates of autism at the moment, (1 in 150, more for boys,less for girls)effecting a larger portion of the population than any epidemic we vaccinate against.
And no one wants to see those epidemics come back and children paralysed from polio.And no one wants to see their child non verbal, incontinent,screaming in frustration,and going to need a minder for the rest of their life. Just as devestating.What is the risk versus benefit ratio? and for whom?
There are biological studies that indicate that heavy metals (mercury/aluminium etc found in vaccines effect boys more than girls testosterone the "boy hormone" effects heavy metal removal from the body.(thats the quick version, if you are scientifically minded, please look at the original studies of glutathione pathways).It is also possible that too much immune stimulation( ie several vaccines = several illnesses for the body to fight off at once) can damage some children.
And the only study done actually comparing non vaccinated to vaccinated children (done using the same company and telephone method that the CDC used) showed there was a relationship between autism and vaccination..Interestingly, the family in the Hannah Poling case is happy to release the their childs'records,and the studies they used, but the government refuses to release them..why is that, do you think?
For those who don't want to live next to unvaccinated kids: well if your kids are vaccinated, chances are they are safe..however those brave souls who you dispise may be the ones who save your grandchildren from the same fate that has happened to some autistic kids.
I have to wonder, if you watched your child regress after a vaccination: would herd immunity matter so much to you for your next child, or would you decide to try and save your child as best you could?
Hera,
Until you can show there's a risk-reward trade-off for vaccinations regarding autism, you're incurring extra disease risk with no autism protection reward.
"For those who don't want to live next to unvaccinated kids: well if your kids are vaccinated, chances are they are safe.."
You, like other anti-vaccine types, do not understand immunology or Bayes' theorem.
I'm very sorry that your child has autism, but we need to find real causes and treatments, not illusory ones.
Scientists at the Department of Health and Human Services determined that vaccines contributed to Hannah Poling's autistic symptoms, not the vaccine court's Special Masters.
The first observations from Hannah's neurologist father and nurse/attorney mother were ultimately validated by HHS and the Department of Justice.
This issue isn't about parents' observations -- it's about children's lab tests. Measles in lesions lining the intestinal mucosa. Antibodies to myelin basic protein. Toxic levels of mercury. Immune dysfunction. Mitochondrial damage.
These are not abstractions to wave away with rhetoric. These ailments affect living, breathing children also suffering from medical professionals' reluctance to accept the paradox that a product intended to improve health is having the opposite effect in some children.
The CDC has no protocol for handling vaccine injury other than the impotent VAERS database, the clogged NVICP, and bullet points on denial.
All this online posturing and pejoratives are preventing vaccine-injured children from receiving proper testing and medical treatment. What a despicable chapter in medical history, and what an ignoble mismanagement of vaccines' lifesaving legacy and promise.
The anti-vaccination websites sustain their belief by systematically excluding anyone offering counter evidence from the domain of acceptable sources. Pharma studies can't be trusted because they have a profit motive. The CDC is in hock to big business. The "medical establishment" wants to make money giving your children unnecessary shots. In fact, the only person you can trust is the guy writing the website.
The guy writing the website = Dan Olmsted, ageofautism.com . Just try debunking one of his loony posts. Nhokkanen, who left the last comment, is a regular contributor there. Hey Nancy, how about allowing some responsible, sourced, evidence-based comments at AOA?
Nancy?
It is known that non-familial autism is associated with older paternal age. If there were publicity and public health warning to father babies earlier in life there would be much less "autism". Vaccinations is also covered in this blog: http://autism-prevention.blogspot.com/
It is known that non-familial autism is associated with older paternal age. If there were publicity and public health warning to father babies earlier in life there would be much less "autism". Vaccinations is also covered in this blog: http://autism-prevention.blogspot.com/
you both signed the petition to ban dihydrogen monoxide, didn't you?
And possibly someone should warn you about the horrifying effects of consuming elemental sodium and chlorine, both of which are quite dangerous, after which you can crank your way about the conspiracies of Big Salt.
---- here is nothing that is not somehow poisonous in appropriate form and sufficient quantity. The correct approach is knowing when, where, and how much, not merely spreading scare stories on the basis of urban legend.
Posted by anony_mouse_
anony mouse, that show how little you know about
chemistry. I sure you love your salt in the
processed food like chips or potato wafers. I
sure you do not believe that salt lead to
hyper-tension therefore you are so annoyed. Kewl
down.
Coming the topic of unvaccinated children. Please,
do not vaccinate your children as vaccination are
the WMD.
It is known that non-familial autism is associated with older paternal age. If there were publicity and public health warning to father babies earlier in life there would be much less "autism". Vaccinations is also covered in this blog: http://autism-prevention.blogspot.com/
Posted by Les | March 25, 2008 5:03 PM
This canard is based on one study of 70,000 Israeli soldiers. The study has serious statistical problems, because of the small sample size. If each soldier fathered two children, one would expect only 840 ASD children from the sample population.
There seem to be some assumptions here that trouble me. One is that vaccines are 'safe and effective' and it's only scaremonger moms of kids with ASD who are the problem. Another is that there is simply no evidence that vaccines can cause autism. Another is that if it weren't for vaccines, all hell would break loose, since they are all that is standing between ch. disease control and massive epidemics with all manner of fatalities.
(1) Before the internet was ever invented, I did my homework, and discovered that the adverse effects of vaccines include: allergies & asthma & anaphylaxis; arthritis & arthralgia; ADD/ADHD & dyslexia & dyspraxia (& yes, ASD); CFS/ME; convulsions & seizures; type 1 diabetes & MS & other autoimmune diseases - you get the point: we have not been told the truth about the side effects of vaccines, because we wouldn't be able to handle the truth, ie, we would start to back off from lining our kids up for their shots, and that would blow the whole herd immunity thing that the authorities are trying for; so wedded to their mindset that nothing must stand in the way of the accomplishment of that goal - not even the truth about the full downside of vaccines.
(2) The role of vaccines in ASD makes sense/has plausible biochemical pathways, as investigated by numerous researchers. (I don't really care much what epidemiological studies say; they are so susceptible of fiddling as to be pathetic. And deliberately so, as seen eg in the Denmark study & the one out of Canada so ballyhooed by the vaccine-cause scoffers. There were deliberate moving of the goalposts in both of them.) A main link: the mercury and aluminum and MSG in them, esp. in a subset of children who can't process heavy metals as well as other kids. (The glutamate affecting the ability of glutathione to do its primary job, of effecting that elimination.) Another: the myelin basic protein found in affected kids. (MBP can come as a contaminant from the chick embryo cells that the MMR is cultured on.) And so forth. Studies show these links, including mercury at nanomolar levels affecting nerve cells.
(3) There are a number of natural substances that can be used to treat & eliminate the ch. diseases, which don't have the damnable side effects to them that the vaccines - as currently constituted - have. These include large doses of vitamin C for polio (see Dr. Klenner's pioneering work on this), vitamin A/cod liver oil for measles, colloidal silver for the DPT bugs; and anti-virals and -bacterials like olive leaf extract, grapefruit seed extract, astragalus, various mushrooms - the list goes on. WE ARE NOT HELPLESS AGAINST THE CHILDHOOD DISEASE PATHOGENS WITHOUT THE VACCINES.
I'm not totally anti-vaccine. I am for looking hard and without bias at the true risks-vs-benefits balance of them. But without them, we can get back to true immunity, lifelong immunity, which mothers can then pass on to their babies via the placenta & their milk, to help protect them before their own immune systems start to kick in. As to this point: haven't we noticed that the authorities are aware that our immune systems are not matured properly? One wonders when the penny will drop for them...
[i]you both signed the petition to ban dihydrogen monoxide, didn't you?[/i]
We can't ban that stuff fast enough, anony_mouse, it is polluting everything, even the water supply.
This entire thread has sent me into dispair about education in this country. How do people get out of high school unable to identify the most basic logical fallacies? Correlation is not causation. Annecdote is not evidence. Math is, apparently, hard. This may present a second reason I don't want the children of anti-vax parents in school with my kids.
The answer is simple: We need a very large study of vaccinated versus non-vaccinated and compare the numbers who develop autism.
No, not a small controlled CDC study in Denmark. A large quantitative study here by an independent entity.
There seems to be no shortage of people who have no problems not vaccinating, it should be easy to set this up and it would resolve this issue.
I respect what vaccines have done but the absolutism here is a bit frightening.
That was a well written article, I have to admit. It lacks, however, real substance and, more importantly, an accurate conclusion.
You not only have to be hard-hearted, but also irrational and ill-informed, to ignore the anguished parents of autistic children who tell you "I saw it." They say; "one shot, and then the child who had talked and laughed started retreating into himself." It's especially hard to argue with this because there's so many thousands of them who testify to this truth, and also because the so-called "miracle" men in the medical profession aren't even clever enough to invent a decent excuse. "Idiopathic" they call it; which means they don't know what causes it - but certainly not their precious, profitable, vaccines
Oh, they've tried other explanations. There were refrigerator moms that were blamed, and I've read of even more rediculous ones, too.
The fact is that the medical profession has produced no miracles at all, not even their sacred cow of a drug, vaccines.
Hell, mercury, in various forms, was the miracle cure-all for most of "modern" medicine's ugly past. Then there's trepanning, Thalidomide, Vioxx, DES, the lsit goes on. The medical profession, in all their stranger-than-fiction wisdom, have a long history that resembles torture more than anything remotely likened to healing. It continues today through vaccination.
I have debated "expert" public health officials and many medical doctors on the subject. It's always embarassing for them. Thier pro-vaccine studies are seriously flawed and the entire system that supports vaccination is corrupt; most of their evidence is revealed as fabricated fearmongering
Dan Schultz
President of World Association for Vaccine Education
www.novaccine.com
Person, I'm a doctor (in residency) who is not a researcher. Ballpark figure - I don't want to do the precise math - is that in your situation the probability of disease given a positive test is a bit less than 5%. Close enough?
We don't get a lot of statistics in medical school -- the school I graduated from gets 24 clock hours under the current schedule, roughly equivalent to 1.5 college credit hours. Most doctors aren't as good at it as I am, because I had a lot more statistical training in undergrad than they did (I was a chemistry major, not biology). Medical journals worth their salt employ statisticians to worry about such things, just as companies employ economists and accountants to worry about numbers. The better question is, why aren't those people bringing up the methodological weaknesses of these studies?
As a geneticist and plant breeder I am very well versed in "cause vs correlation". As a father who held his child when they received multiple vaccinations and watched him regress horribly into "autism" I can tell you my experience tells me otherwise.
In the science I use one is often trying to ascertain whether what they are seeing is a cause or just a coincedence in what is being expressed.
When you see something multiple times in different places with different individuals it throws up a red flag as to something is going on. This is the case with autism and vaccinations. Too many parents are observing what we observed (when I dont even tell them our story they repeat the same sequences of events occurring). You can do all the statistics in the world and one can never 100% determine "cause". But you can tease out that what you are seeing is there and determine to some degree whether its environmental, genetic or a combo of both.
Too much of the epidemiological science used to "rule out" autism and vaccines is nothing more than manipulation of data. The people doing the work have conflicts of interest and in some cases (VSD data) won't even share their data to see if it is "testable and repeatable". It's pretty ease to get the result you want when you cherry pick the data or stack the deck as the CDC study, Denmark Study and British studies have done. As epidemiological studies they cannot rule out completely that vaccines arent implicated. That is the weakness of the studies. By these studies alone one cannot completely rule out vaccines as a "causation". Even the authors studies point that weakness out but too often journalistic reports such as this do not inform their readers of this fact.
Something is going on. You cannot just rule out these observations with "tobacco science" and "parents want to blame". Not onloy is it not correct but it is condescending and misleading.
When openly disclosed data sets of double blind studies comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated populations are finally done (none exist). Then and only then can anyone come close to really knowing. But apparently there is reluctance to do so just as there has been reluctance to show the complete Vaccine Safety Data to outside researchers without conflicts of interest.
Parents BEWARE.
I have debated "expert" public health officials and many medical doctors on the subject. It's always embarassing (sic) for them.
Dan Schultz
President of World Association for Vaccine Education
___________________
They were probably just embarrassed to be in the same room as you. Little of what you are saying makes sense, starting with your point that the more people believe something is true, the more likely it it is to be true. But that's OK. Please keep posting. The more you speak up, the plainer it is to educated people such as Megan that the public health debate over vaccines is being hijacked by community college drop outs with Google PhDs.
Jgttom,
That double-blinded study doesn't exist b/c most people want their kids to be vaccinated and won't consent to leaving their kids unvaccinated for a study. Further, among the people who choose not to vaccinate their children there is likely to be non-random differences in behavior from people who do vaccinate their children. None of these studies can possibly be perfect; welcome to the behavioral sciences.
In any case, I feel for you and your situation, but the argument that all of these studies are corrupt is very unpersuasive to me. If anything, a health researcher who uncovered this autism-vaccine link, and proved it, might win a Nobel prize and would certainly have their pick of lucrative gigs for the rest of his or her life.
Dan: No miracles? Smallpox killed about 10% of each generation in Europe for centuries and wiped out entire tribes of American Indians. It is now extinct except for a few samples in laboratories, because doctors just once managed to get nearly everyone in the world vaccinated. Isn't that a miracle?
Stan: (1) Before the internet was ever invented, I did my homework, and discovered that the adverse effects of vaccines include: allergies & asthma & anaphylaxis; arthritis & arthralgia; ADD/ADHD & dyslexia & dyspraxia (& yes, ASD); CFS/ME; convulsions & seizures; type 1 diabetes & MS & other autoimmune diseases
Did you discover the rate of such complications? Did you compare it to the rate of death, brain damage, blindness, etc., from the diseases the vaccines protect against? For instance, it's downright idiotic to subject your children to risks of death over 1/1,000 from measles to avoid vaccination risks of a few per 1,000,000.
Autism 1:150 kids?
Bullshit. Unadulterated bullshit. As bad as the BS incidence rate statistics the homeless advocacy crowd spouts.
markm:
My point is that the authorities did not institute the long-term studies on their new medical modality that they should have, esp. for such an invasive medical procedure. They say that the encephalitis rate for one vaccine or other is 'one in a million'; but they have preferred not to look at how much subclinical encephalitis might have been caused by it, ie, 'just' Minimal Brain Damage/Disorder (MBD), which they recognize as a (poorly defined) class of damage, but don't acknowledge its origin, or run the studies for quantity - presumably because they don't WANT to know how much MBD damage they have been causing by just looking at the benefits of vaccines and not in detail at their risks. That's what I object to: they have not been honest in this matter, of the TRUE risks/benefits ratio of various vaccines. (They still won't acknowledge the work of the Classens demonstrating that the Hib vaccine, in its causation of? correlation with? type 1 diabetes, is clearly of more risk than statistical benefit.)
Some more thoughts.
George, the 1:150 was based on the governments' figures.I wish you were right though.
I think it was Kathryn that wanted the science.
So ,for the science types...
Mitochondria disorders and autism..
"Linkage and Association of the Mitochondrial Aspartate/Glutamate carrier SLC25A12 gene with autism"
"two single nucleotide polymorphism that showed evidence for divergent distibution between austistic and non autistic subjects were identified both with SLC25A12, a gene encoding the mitochondrial aspartate glutmate carrier ( AGCI)...Conclusion a strong association of autism with SNPs within the SLC25A12 gene was demonstrated
"Confirmation of Association Between Autism and the Mitochondrial Aspartate /Glutamate carrier SLC 25A12 gene on chromosome 2Q31"
These findings provide replication of the association between autism and SLC25A12..
""Mitochondiral dysfunction in autism spectrum disorders, a population based study"
( found a 7.2% rate)Conclusion:classified with definite mitochondrial respiratory chain disorder, suggesting this may be among one othe most common disorders associated with autism..
Which seems to indicate that some but not all cases of "autism" may be related to mitochondrial dysfunction..Would be interested Megan in your critique of the credibility of these studies..
I deliberately picked peer reviewed journal studeis that could accessed by anyone using Google scholar, since I always like to read the studies for myself, and figured that other interested people may like to do so also.there is a whole lot more out there though.Then we come to studies of effects of heavy metals on mitcohondrial function..
Chris, thank you for your kind response, though I am not the mother of the child I was talking about.Would be interested in you explaining the theorem to me, though.Knowledge is always good.
Your article treats the question of whether vaccines might contribute to autism with the same lack of intellectiual rigor that your attribute to those who believe that vaccines cause autism. There is good science for the hypothosis that MMR vaccine or mercury in vaccines contibute to autism -- not overwhelming evidence but good evidence. Just as importantly, there is no evidence that children are suffering polio (polio vaccines have never been linked to autism) post-measles encephalitis, mumps meningits, or pertussis related neurological illnesses because parents are not vaccinating their children (becuase of concern about a possible relationship between vaccines and autism or otherwise). If this happens, (and, unfortunately, it could)it will not be because of those who raised this hypothosis, but because the public health community has lost its credibility because it dismissed the possiblity that vaccines might contribute to autism without an honest investigation. In most cases the value of vaccination far outwieghs the risk. There are exceptions, and they should not be ignored -- and that is what many vaccine advocates seem to suggest we do.
I wonder how many people leading the fight against vaccination are more than one generation away from the infectious diseases that vaccines help prevent.
I am not. My mother contracted polio as a child. My father had a young sister die from one of the earliest diseases that was prevented by vaccine— he was too young to remember which it was, but it was common. My mother also contracted rubella during the first trimester she was pregnant with my older sister and was offered a medical abortion years before they were available electively. She was lucky and my sister fell into the category of the fewer than half of infants who escaped the effects of maternal rubella.
But what about the time post-vaccines? My husband contracted whooping cough as a child despite having the vaccine. He's asthmatic. It's not hard to imagine how it could have been worse.
One thing is for sure. Yes, there is a minimal, non-escapable risk to vaccinations. There is, to my mind, a much larger risk to letting the vaccinated pool which protects us all against these horrible diseases drop below the safe level.
I will do my part. If others do not do theirs, I dread the coming pandemic.
To all of the people who say "It's my choice", no, it damn well isn't. You are making a choice to gamble with your child's life and all the other children around them. You are endangering others and your own child through your foolish stand on "freedoms". Through this stand you are neither proving freedom to be a good thing nor are you helping your child.
Quite frankly you are no better then the religous nuts (and yes, they are nuts) who pray over their children to cure them of cancer. All you're doing is replacing (misguided) faith with arrogence, hysteria, and a clear lack of knowledge in the field of science and life in general.
What I don't understand is why there are required medical procedures for children at all.
What happened to parents being parents?
The ultimate reward and punishment for parents is how well there children do in life.
If you don't like the consequences of vaccination then live somewhere low enough population density that the disease vectors become epidemic.
I happen to believe that childhood diseases serve a purpose beyond the fevers and sniffles.
Has anyone looked at the fever autism relief seriously, if a withdrawn child gets a fever that draws them out for a while they come to like that and continue to come out more until the symptoms are gone or under control.
It also takes away a right of passage, these are important in life. School doesn't count because you practically can't fail anyway.
For someone to soar it must also be possible to fail, not for them to fail but to able to fail.
I manage childhood diseases for my children the same way people have from time imorial before large cities, with limited "Disease parties" where a few healthy children are exposed and treated for the symptoms from exposure and no rampant runaway epidemics of random exposure.
It is the random exposure that is the real problem especially among the sedentary.
If oyu say that in the city there is no where to run and play then I ask why you are in a city at all? Why expose your child to the toxins and noise of a city when there are suburbs and outlying towns where life is less stressful.
Vaccine for Polio, YES, Mandatory NO!
Vaccine for ???? depends on disease.
Health does not come in jar, needle or gym, it comes from living life not just existing through it. These are almost all the same questions having many of the same answers, ask them.
Even rats limit population density, be a person, don't be a rat.
Hey everyone, it's great to see a proper discussion on vaccines.
I'd like to contribute by sayin that not all HPV strands cause cervical cancer and the FDA has known about this for four years, yet pharmaceuticals have been pushed these vaccines on us worldwide (I live in Finland) as if it is a dire necessity.
Also, in relation to all vaccinations and their effect, one common tool is to display graphs that show dramatic decreases in diseases once vaccinations are introduced. But if we look at a longer timeframe, we see that these diseases are at a sharp decline before vaccines had anything to do with the picture. Click here for examples.
Thank you all for such a wonderful discussion, I hope you will continue to try and sensibly find fresh information and perspectives to further our knowledge as mankind in this regard (no exaggeration).
If everyone else vaccinates their children, and I do not, I win: my children are still safe from the disease, which won't spread, and my children have avoided any possible risk from vaccination. But now everybody does it, and they lose: they die from some preventable disease.
That's why we have vaccination laws, because there are some diseases making a resurgence because of too many people 'grazing on the commons'. Commonwealth is tied to common health.
You may choose to vaccinate your children or quarantine them.
(And much of the increase in autism levels is due to a re-definition of what constitutes autism, I suspect).