Wow! Now experiental knowledge means nothing! I'd better get back to the meetings ASAP - they TELL me I can't think for myself and truly see what is going on. It's okay - not everyone can see the big picture.
No Link Found Between Vaccine Mercury and Autism
by leavingwt 132 Replies latest social current
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mrsjones5
As a mother of an autistic child I'd rather have the facts instead of anecdotal so-called evidence.
This sums it up best for me: "Be skeptical of alleged "causes" of ASD that rest on the premise that we're in the midst of an autism epidemic. The prevalence of ASD has risen dramatically over the past thirty years, at least in part because of broadening case definition and changes in federal education laws, but there is no evidence that the incidence of ASD has changed. So, has there been an "explosion" of ASD? Yes. An epidemic? Not as far as we know." ~ page 110, Making Sense of Autistic Spectrum Disorders
As you can probably tell, I'm loving this book.
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cognizant dissident
Hadit
It's not that experiential knowledge means nothing, but when you are discussing the risks and benefits of mass immunizing millions of the world's children each year, it would not be wise to make that decision based on the experience of a handful of parents, whether they had a good experience or a bad experience. It is crucially important to have a size sample that is statistically significant. The big picture is very important as we are talking life or death.
No one is saying that vaccinations cannot have disastrous side effects for some children (although autism is not one of the proven ones). I know it is of little consolation to the parents of the very rare child who does have a brain damaging reaction to a vaccine, but a look at the infant mortality rates in countries where children are mass vaccinated and in countries where they are not, is in itself very telling.
WHO must choose the lesser of two evils, a few brain damaged children each year from the vaccine, or hundreds of thousands of dead children from the disease itself. Not to do so, would be unethical. It is also of note that children who have had serious reactions from vaccines may also have been the same children, who had they caught the disease itself if unvaccinated may have the very same complications. It is impossible to say in each case for certain. It is a numbers game, I'm afraid.
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cognizant dissident
The analogy of the blood issue with WTBTS is an interesting one.
In fact, there is a higher chance of having a life threatening allergic reaction to a blood transfusion than there is a vaccination. (Human tissue and all).
Yet, when Drs order a blood transfusion it's because statistically, the potential for benefit outweighs the for risk. We can see the wisdom in that for blood transfusions but not for the less risky vaccinations?
Every single medical treatment offered, including alternative medical treatments, carry with them the risk of serious adverse affects. More people die from aspirin overdose every year than from vaccinations. Where is the public outcry against aspirin?
People have died from chiropractic treatments, people have died from herbs bought from the health food store, people have died from almost every alternative medical treatment you might want to name.
Nothing in this life is without risk. However when people single out the "evil" pharmaceutical companies as some sort of conspiracy to poison the public for monetary gain, then they have overstepped the bounds of logic. Are all the alternative medicine practitioners offering their services and products for free? At least with medical doctors, the physicians prescribing treatments to the patients are not the ones selling and profiting from the sale of the prescriptions. They get the same money regardless of what is prescribed or even if nothing is prescribed. A few will even prescribe a cheap natural remedy first for a problem. Diet, exercise, vitamins, etc.
Can the same be said of natural practitioners who invariably also sell and profit from their own "natural" prescriptions.
Sometimes this fear of pharmacological based medicine, stems from a lack of knowledge (and hence fear of) the process of biochemistry..
In actual fact, every single substance on the face of this planet is made up of chemicals, including those found in alternative treatments.
For the record, I'm not coming out for or against any type of medicine or treatment. I speaking solely for informed decision making with emphasis on the "informed" using information from a credible source.
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read good books
Yeah, science and math often are the enemy of old people
Old people? I challenge you to a race.
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Leolaia
The prevalence of ASD has risen dramatically over the past thirty years, at least in part because of broadening case definition and changes in federal education laws, but there is no evidence that the incidence of ASD has changed.
This is EXACTLY what I said about about incidence and prevalence. Look, I am one of those people who was born at a time when the diagnostic criteria for autism was much narrower than it is today. Had I been born in 2000, there isn't any doubt that I would've been labeled as autistic from the start. I would have been part of the "explosion" in cases. In fact, I was officially diagnosed in the year 2000 by a child psychiatrist who specializes in PDDs. But I was born thirty years earlier. I was never officially diagnosed because I didn't meet the criteria for a diagnosis for Kanner's autism. Even though I didn't talk aside from a few words until I was 4 (and then not fairly normally until I was 6), I had hugely long attention spans that would last for hours (my uncle once timed how long I played with my dad's belt buckle, amazed that I didn't have a short attention span), I was often expressionless and did not express appropriate emotions (like joy and excitement when opening presents or fear when in dangerous or scary situations), often I seemed to be in my own world, I didn't interact with other kids well, I was very upset at differences and changes in schedule or if things are done differently, my mom needed to develop her own ad hoc system of signs and pictures to communicate with me because I was far more visual than verbal, my parents thought I was deaf because I was often unresponsive and I had my hearing tested many times, I was preoccupied with self-stimming like spinning or spinning things or digging or twirling my fingers near my eyes or flapping my hands, I would generally play with toys the "wrong way", I had trouble remembering rules and how things are done (and so it took many years for me to be toilet trailed, learn to dress myself, learn how to tie my shoes, etc.), I had many sensory sensitivities and sensory-related phobias, etc. etc. But when I was evaluated at age 4, I was more socially able than would be expected with classic autism (e.g. I would smile and laugh albeit in inappropriate situations, I would show empathy, etc.), and so I was described as "autistic-like", and I had special education with other kids who were diagnosed as autistic (before I was mainstreamed), but I never was labeled with autism. Instead, I was simply described as having difficulties in auditory processing, as having poor auditory memory, as having poor motor coordination, as being a late talker and needing speech therapy, as needing structure in the classroom and being sensitive to changes in structure, as having a difficult time learning rules to games or accepting the differences of my peers, as needing teaching of social skills, etc. etc. But if I was born in the year 2000, the fact that I wasn't talking or connecting with my mom or having social difficulties would have probably been picked up much earlier by my pediatrician or by preschool staff.
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Leolaia
Another problem for the purported vaccine-autism link is that there is good reason to be suspicious of claims for an autism epidemic. A number of factors can account for the dramatic increase in numbers, including the expansion of diagnostic criteria in 1994, and changes in criteria for inclusion in child-count data for children with autism. Remember that 273 percent increase over a decade in autism spectrum disorders in California? Consider, as did the authors of a recent paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14 that this increase could be due to an expanded diagnostic definition of autism. The authors found that a similar expansion in the definition of “tall” — from 74.5 inches to 72 inches — generated in one county in Texas a 273 percent increase if these two criteria were applied a decade apart.
More importantly, autism is not even a “thing” that can be clearly correlated with any other thing. Unlike cancer or a broken bone, there are no discrete physical, biological, or genetic markers on which to base a diagnosis. Instead, autism is a diagnostic label based on the presence of a number of behavioral excesses and deficits. The diagnosis is subjective and subject to great variability. When you consider that many resources are made available only to those children with some formal diagnosis, it is easy to see why some diagnoses might be made with scant supporting evidence. The physician or psychologist notices some obvious learning delays and behavior problems in a patient and recognizes the need for intensive services, but the only way the family can obtain those services is if the child fits a certain diagnostic category.
Correlations are tenuous things under the best conditions. Degrade one of the variables, and you are in serious trouble. Such is the case with the autism-vaccine correlation.
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read good books
F. Edward Yazbak M.D., F.A.A.A.P. Autism in the United States a Perspective States with the largest increase in the number of cases of autism 1992-93 2002-03 Illinois 5 5080 Maryland 28 2962 Missisippi 0 537 Nebraska 4 481 Nevada 5 684 New Hamshire 0 491 Ohio 22 4017 Oregon 37 3339 Wisconsin 18 2739 D.C. 0 179 "Once rare autism has reached epidemic porportions in the United States. The increase cannot be attributed to changes in diagnostic criteria which have actually become more restrictive." http://www.whale.to/vaccine/yazbak.pdf
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bohm
RGB:
You once had me really good on 9-11 where i claimed catagorically there had only been one impact assessment of a small airplane where fire was not taken into account. You claimed there was two. It turned out you was right and i appolegized and retracted the thinks i had said that made me look rather stupid.
I think there are very large difficulties with much of what you have said about autism, and i dont think you take any of the gabing holes into account. Please consider the things i have asked you previously:
1) Is a non-random sample size of 12 and the following lying and dicking with the data sufficient statistical material for a study on the autism-vaccine link? If no, are you going to retract your support for Dr. Wakefields research?
2) Is Gary Null the HIV/AIDS denialist without scientific training REALLY worth quoting as support for not vaccinating?
3) Since autism is inherited to a high degree, will that make you back down with respect to the mercury claim?
4) Since mercury has been REMOVED from vaccines allmost a decade ago, AND number of autism cases continued to climb unaffected, will that make you back down on the mercury claim?
5) Do you still stand by the scientific value of the research paper you quoted back on the previous page after reading Leolais links?
6) Consider this quote:
Concerns have also been raised about thimerosal, a preservative in multidose vaccines that was removed from routine vaccines in 2001 in the US and in 1992 in Denmark and Sweden. Despite the removal in Denmark and Sweden, autism rates have continued to increase there. Other studies have failed to find a link as well. Finally, in February 2009, the U.S. Court of Federal claims found that the MMR vaccine and thimerosal containing vaccines were not causal factors in the development of autism. - http://www.enotalone.com/article/10440.html (List of studies on the autism-vaccine link)
As in 4) the vaccine was removed and the cases continue to rise in a very homogeneous population. 20 years after it has not begun to drop. Does that signify that the the thimerosal in the MMR vaccine has nothing to do development of autism?
Item 1 is what gets me in particular. Statisticans often shake heads at medical litteratures use of statistics, but the Lancet or whoever puplized that crap have fired whoever had their hands on the study and let it pass.
Boehm I have already stated I am basing my opinion on the fifty plus years I have lived on this planet and the increase in vaccines and autism I have seen. Yes I have read studies. But I have also read about people around the world who disagree with them.
I just read an article about China and a large number of people there are refusing the vaccines because of the damaging side effects they believe that their kids have gotten after taking them.
Its still Bohm. 4 letters and your getting it wrong again and again, but if you could just get basic science right i would be happy. Here is the deal:
If you collect a lot of data sets, and you plot those random data sets against each other, you are going to see trends. Those trends are going to look statistically significant, and your intuition is going to tell you: "Oh look! this graph suddenly drop as THIS graph start to spike! Thats not just something which happends at random!". In this manner, i bet i could easily provide material which link autism with internet speed, with number of Kiwis (or some other random fruit) imported to the US, with introduction/removal(!) of certain pesticides, etc.
But just because there is a correlation does not imply a causation. Its very important to keep that in mind.
Causation has to be proven explicitly. If there is no obvious plausible cause (as in this case!), what one do is formulate a hypothesis on the data - for example, one would say that the thimerosal cause autism, and try to give a numerical estimate of the extra occurances of autism given thimerosal from that data material. ONLY after that is done does one has a scientific hypothesis that can be tested. In this case, it would be: Given two equal group of children A and B, and given B has been given thimerosal vaccines, i expect there to be X% more occurances in group B than in A. That is, it is now possible to make a predictions about what one will measure in group B.
Then you find those groups and check the hypothesis. It didnt work in sweeden, it didnt work in denmark, and it didnt work in the US. Actually, it didnt work anywhere in the world. That should be a pretty good indication that it is NOT the thimerosal, and what is going on here is that autism is on the rise for one reason or another (consider Leolais explanation) and at the same time advanced in medical science is being made which make more vaccines avaliable.
The fact there is a gazillion pseudo-scientists like Gary Null who will tell you that vaccine cause autism and you just got to eat some stuff he sell from his shop to cure your cancer and everything else does not suspend the scientific method.
Secondly you mention china, but lets not go so far away. It is a fact that after Dr. Wakefield puplished his amazing emperical 12-person study and usefull idiots propagated said study wrapped in pseudo-science and paranoia, a lot of parents has become (understandable) scared of vaccination. I can understand the psychology in that; its a lot worse to actively subject the child to a persieved danger from a vaccination, or run a risk from a measel infection which seem like a very remote and random thing.
But the fact is that Dr. Wakefield and the usefull idiots has had an amazing success. Many diseases which was stamped out have come back. And since many kids have to rely on herd immunization, there is not a linear relationship between vaccination and cases of these diseases. That has caused some of them to become endemic again, and that has actually lead to a lot of children dying.
And thats really the bottom line here. Vaccines are not risk free, and it is important to minimize this risk and ask if there is unwanted side effects from vaccines; no definite thing can be known about such risks, but all emperical studies show it is very low.
However, it is possible to say something very definate on what will happend if children are not vaccinated: they will die from these things in the thousands like they did before vaccines was introduced, and even more will be crippled.
THATS the bottom line here.
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bohm
Mrs Jones wrote:
Again - I know this is a heated topic but ones should not assume that because people don't vaccinate that they are ignorant, gullible or crackpots.
I wrote on page 2:
And its not only the children of gullible parents who are in risk, there is a certain percentage of children where the vaccine is not working and they have to rely on the patogene being extremely rare.
First off - im very sorry about your sons condition. I think can understand why this topic strike close to home and that i dont have the understanding of what autism mean.
I use gullible in the sence of being easily tricked, and i think everyone who has not studied the subject is easily tricked when experts and "experts" go out and proclaim there is a link and solid evidence to back it up. When that happends i can understand why many choose not to have their child vaccinated because they would rather rely on herd immunization than actively subjecting their child to a danger they feel they cant assess, often because the "experts" are often interested in headlines like "autism epidemic". A few years ago i would myself be quite hesitant to get a vaccine for my child because i had only heard about the subject in terms of such headlines and didnt know what they was based on.
As for the ignorant, crackpots and crooks, i think those words should be attributed to any person who actively try to influence the public through media using scare tactics, paranoid reasoning and absolutely no foundation in emperical studies.