Accepting Autism is Like a Traffic Jam

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Well, Angel, you can always go with the old-school explanation - that you're a changeling, left by the elves when they stole a human baby. (That is, after all, how they excused it before MMR...)

I have to add, I've had personal experience with this.

I get the flu shot, because I'm asthmatic and therefore in a high-risk group. While the flu shot contains thimerosol, I'm not allergic or reactive to thimerosol so that's not a problem for me, and the flu shot I get does not have live virus so it can't possibly cause a flu. It can cause other problems which they're legally obligated to tell me about (and explain how to react to them) every year, but I've never had them, although I've known people who have.

At one point, I got a flu shot in October or November of a particular year. Then in late December there was this cold (and yes, it was a cold, even on those checklists of "Is this a cold or is it the flu?" everything checked out as a cold) going around my building. And I caught that cold from a friend who had it just before I got it. During prime cold season, at that.

And this one anti-vax person online kept trying to tell me that the cold was really a flu, and rather than being a cold going around my building, it was a flu I got from the (non-live-virus) flu shot. And that yes, reactions could show up that late, and therefore, despite every scrap of evidence pointing towards this being a cold, I really had the flu, caused by the vaccine either giving me the flu (impossible) or weakening my immune system (er, against a cold I would've caught anyway?) etc.

Of course, I do have a mildly weakened immune system this year, but it's not from the flu shot, it's from a long dose of Prednisone to get over an asthma crisis triggered by another cold that was going around last year. (On a cold vs. flu checklist, it still checks off as a cold, and only recently they've discovered there was this evil cold that was going around and even killing people last year at that time, which was springtime. Which is scary. But I'm not surprised, because I ended up at the hospital a few times during that one, and the ambulance was constantly at our building that spring, the paramedics kept saying there was an "evil respiratory bug" going around that was overworking them, but that it didn't seem quite like flu either. So now we know, it was an evil cold.) So I'm trying to be careful because of that. But that's sort of off-topic. The on-topic thing is that I've actually had experience of some of the anti-vax people trying to claim that a simple cold was a flu I caught from the flu shot, and not taking "Nothing at all points to that, not even the timing" as an answer.

Politics can be a special interest among autistic people. Possibly a rare one, but one nonetheless. I know an autistic woman with an almost lifelong political special interest, who learned to speak intelligibly because of that special interest. Before that, she had very "mangled" (in her words) speech (could say maybe a word or two and then had to resort to gestures). She got interested in politics, and reasoned that she would have to learn to make speeches, so she took a radio and a tape-recorder and practiced imitating the speeches on the radio. After that point, she still had trouble with conversational speech, but could make speeches very well (aside from the non-verbal aspects -- she still made speeches staring out the window and with the wrong facial expressions and such until much later). Even now where she's usually fluent, her conversational speech has aspects of actual speech-making rather than usual conversational speech, when you listen to her style. And she's definitely autistic, there's nothing else that even applies to her combination of strengths and weaknesses and the times they happened and stuff.

That said, diagnosing the long-dead with things as complex as autism can be tricky business.

This is not accurate and based on a flawed understanding of natural selection. Human beings are a social species, and there is fossil evidence of people taking care of severely disabled human beings well into adulthood (i.e. childbearing age, which is all evolution cares about, if a process can be said to care about anything) back to caveman days. While there has been great hostility and fear toward disabled people, there has probably also been people willing to assist and include us for at least as long as modern humanity and probably since earlier. This is because (among other things), as a social species who depend on each other for survival, our ability to survive has always been based on our ability to take care of each other, including those who modern humanity (in too many and extreme kinds of arrogance to be fully described) considers to have been useless.

Additionally, conceptions of disability change with time and culture. Just a few generations ago, my family had many people who would be classified as autistic, Asperger's, Tourette's, intellectually disabled, and other things, now. In those places and times that my family existed, people might be looked upon as "simple" or "tetched", but not so much that they did not have families and run their own farms and do everything else they were expected to do, and they were not regarded as having a disability in the modern medical sense of the word (and only two of them of them, one who would now be considered paranoid or experiencing dementia, and another with "cretinism", ever experienced any medicalization of the way they were, and both of them were married). They were not considered totally typical, but they were not considered outside the realm of normal either, even though many of them would now be considered to have moderate to severe disabilities. If such a change in classification of people can occur over such a short period of time and within the same country I live in (although in different regions, times, and social classes), people have no business assuming that over an even greater span of time and space, people would automatically have been considered to have what modern people consider a medical problem. That's a degree of (among other things) ethnocentrism that just isn't borne out by reality.

It's probaby more likely than not, that the people you're talking about, especially people who are today considered to have Asperger's, found a niche of some kind of another in the societies they lived in, than that somehow none of them would have survived until the modern day.

Anbuend -

I've seen reactions (and experienced them myself) to flu vaccines - or in my case, another oral pharmaceutical 'preventer' drug - and you're right, that wouldn't have been one at all. The reactions I've seen amongst my friends/family/myself who've had them all happened within 12 hours of them having the jab. They felt a bit off after the jab (non-live-virus ones) and then within hours were seriously ill with the flu, or in one case pleurisy. This happened to literally every person I know who's had the flu shot - in different countries and over several years, and in people who've never had the flu in their lives but became seriously ill or hospitalised with this - which is why there's no way in hell I'd have that one, haha!!

Oh, and to whoever pointed out the dosage... ANY mercury is too much mercury.

On that topic, I have a friend who had suffered migraines for years and years, which nothing would cure. She recently (6 months ago) had her mouthful of mercury amalgam fillings removed (by a qualified specialist) and replaced with white composite fillings for cosmetic purposes. Her mouth is now prettier, but within a day her usually dribbly nose had cleared up, her breathing problems disappeared, and she hasn't had a migraine since. Nothing has changed except that - her dentist is convinced the fillings were leeching into her system. Interesting.

I take it you don't eat fish then, LeKiwi?

Only fresh, wild, free-range and organic from places a good way away from 'civilisation' (read: pollution), and only once a week m'dear!! None of that glowing pink fish-farm crap with all its additives and dyes and rubbish...

Fish is the only meat I'll eat; besides that I'm vegetarian.

I am very sorry to have to be the one to tell you, LeKiwi, but wild fish, particularly from the Atlantic Ocean, is going to have a far higher mercury content than farm-raised, due to centuries of runoff and medieval waste-disposal methods (not to mention the naturally-occurring levels of heavy metals in seawater). As for freshwater varieties, lots of luck finding a freshwater source that's "a good way away from civilisation" - humanity has been occupying this planet too long, and has had any awareness of the dangers of pollution for too short a time for that.

Hmmm - is autism caused by fish? <conspiratorial smirk>

That's why I don't eat Atlantic fish.

Wild fish has a far higher Omega 3 content due to the availability of sea plants like algae and plankton they feed on, which is where the Omega 3 comes from. Fish farms are cruel, generally pretty toxic, and don't have that same availability of natural 'food' so are therefore a lot worse.

Hm...kind of hard getting away from mercury. It's in the environment naturally, in building materials, in fish of all kinds, in far greater numbers than is found in any vaccine. The only vaccine that has any significant amount of thimerosol is the flu one, and if so many people get the flu after having the shot, how come no-one I know has gotten the flu after the shot? And I worked in a hospital where it was mandatory for patient care staff to have the flu shots...so out of thousands of shots, and the only reaction that was ever mentioned in a handful of cases was injection site irritation.

The other thing is that most people don't know what the hell the flu looks like. Someone gets a cold or a stomach bug, and they have the "flu." I have had the flu. It can be life threatening. I had it for three weeks, and two of my friends ended up in the hospital, one for two weeks. I will not be screwing around getting the flu. No-one has to get the flu shot (well, except when it's required--like in hospitals), but I am not screwing around with it. I can understand why people died in the millions. The evidence says it works, the studies (not done by "Big Pharma," what ever that is) shows vaccines work, and I would really not be that sick again if I can help it.

From someone who remembers measles and polio, and the people who were crippled or killed by them.

Farmed fish, such as rainbow trout, have a much lower mercury content than ANY wild Pacific or Atlantic fish. Period.

I little mercury never has hurt anyone. Top predators have a higher level of mercury. You can eat them, but you should not eat them everyday. Bottom feeders and shellfish pose no risk.

Ahh, but they don't have Omega 3 on any beneficial level. Which is the only reason I eat fish, otherwise I'm an organic vegetarian.

All fish contain mercury. No exceptions.

It is not possible to get the flu from a vaccine. For every person I've heard claim that they got the flu from a vaccine, I've heard another person cliam that the flu shot prevents them from getting colds.... figure that one out.

Flu vaccine saves lives. Period.

And your statement about ANY mercury being too much makes absolutely zero sense.

Because alcohol can kill people at a high dose does that mean that any alcohol is too much alcohol? Because aspirin can kill people at a high dose does that mean that any aspirin is too much aspirin.

EVERY drug is a poison. Every single drug is a poison. Every drug is a poison. Every single drug on earth is a poison.

Everything on earth is a "neurotoxin" at the right dose. Water is a neurotoxin on cells in a petri dish.

mercury is in everyone's body. We all have on the average 8 mg of mercury in our bodies. Aluminum is the most or one of the most common elements on earth.

You can not eat ANYTHING without ingesting a little mercury because it is in everything. People only comment on fish because lots of it is concentrated in some fish. But mercury is in everything we eat.

Our bodies are adapted to dealing with mercury, if they were not thus adapted we'd all be dead. We'd ALL be dead. Because mercury is every where and in the air we breath and in the water we drink and it's not all from industrial sources. It's in volcanoes and it's release in wildfires.

It is just plain stupid to be paranoid of the amount of mercury and aluminum in vaccines. Period.

Yes they do.

And people are omnivores for a reason. Meat is good for you.