Autism NY Times FRONT PAGE HEADLINE 6/25

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Just woke up and saw that the front page of today's New York Times has a front page headline (not some little article on the bottom...the big article at the top of the front page, with big photos) about the whole debate of whether mercury in vaccines causes Autism.

The headline reads "On Autism's Cause, It's Parents vs. Research"

The basic premise of the article is that, according to the Times, almost every scientific study done to date shows that Mercury and Thermiserol (the mercury-containing preservative used in vaccines) does NOT cause autism, BUT so many parents are so adamant about believing that it does, that they've formed what the article describes a "potent national force", which one doctor was quoted in the article as saying it's "like nothing I've ever seen before." That doctor, who believes that Thermiserol is not linked to autism, went on to be quoted as saying "it's an era where it appears that science isn't enough."

The article is on the front page of TODAY's (Saturday, 6/25/05) New York Times, and is online at www.nytimes.com (scroll down until you see the link) today. nytimes.com often requires registration for most of their articles, but for some reason right now I was able to get it without registration.

A controversial issue indeed! I just thought I'd post it here for everyone to know about.

As the article points out, Thimerosal was removed from the immunizations in Denmark and the autism rate kept on rising instead of falling. The USA cut the Thimerosal component of immunization shots in 2001, so if these parenta and their "voodoo science" are correct, the autism rate in the USA should be collapsing right now.

If the parents were REALLY interested in finding the cause, maybe they should open their minds to other possibilities instead of spending all their energy lobbying politicians and threatening scientists and doctors who disagree with them. For example, many babies are born with an allergy to the proteins in chicken eggs and grow out of that allergy within the first few years. Many common immunizations are created using chicken eggs....

Hey! What watch you say about Voodoo science! It is nowhere near as baseless as the mercury/Autism claims!

Bokor Lucas put a hex on you! Got my doll right here..

feel anything yet? No? You might get a twinge tomorrow morning.

This issue is also not helped by the parents comparing symtoms of Mercury Poisoning to their own observation of Autistic behaviour, believing them to be the same. I'll go see if I can find a Mercury Poisoned person who loves lining cars up.

Autism is prevelant even where those vaccines aren't used...

So logically if autism is caused by a chemical... it's saturated the ecosystem...

Would make a good movie...

Quite scary to think that vaccinators might feel safer surrounded by Malaria in Kenya than Autistic children's mothers in America. Angering and out right disagreeing with the majority of the Science/Psychology field is something ignorant parents shouldn't consider doing.



I'm starting to feel how concerned these parents could be worried, but they're probably over-reacting some.



Interesting...



Aha! The Science community admits that there's something (unknown) that can influence the prevalence of Autism. They just don't know what it might be, and parents are just getting ahead of themselves by assuming it's Mercury.



How do you become Autistic? Does a speech delay suddenly happen? Does your IQ suddenly jump? Answers please...



If these people are experts, I'd like to hear from students in these fields. How many 2 year olds get dental fillings???



This guy is said to be parents's main testimony and source of info. It sounds to me like the man who started all of this is an unqualified nutjob bent on wasting people's time.



They really are. There's so many things he doesn't take into account, it's saddening really to think that any parent would trust his info.



I state again, Geirs' findings are what parents use most to back up their statements. That alone should void the entire debate all together. As you can see through this article, any well trained professional can see his mistakes.



Contradictory evidence from a slightly more credible source. Why is this even an issue still? There's so much against it.



Shall I repeat myself?



Am I the only one confused by how many stupid parents this world has?!



Lets all pray that it falls, because it's based on badly planned and outdated research.

I'm disturbed to think that parents could believe such bull, especially after reading that when other countries removed thimerosal nothing changed in the rate of Autism other than an increase in some cases. Very well written article, bookmarking it.

Nice point-by-point review, SarcasticName!

I really wonder. I mean, I don't doubt for even one second that the parents of these children love them and only want the best for them, but I really do wonder about their assertion. Vaccines are an easy target because they're made by big corporations, with deep pockets. And when parents are run ragged trying to find the best treatments, special programs, etc., for their children (and many of them are), and are stuck with the bill, as many of them are, it makes a cause where one can sue to pay for those treatments that much more appealing.

I'm not trying to say all these parents are making this assertion solely for money, though I wouldn't doubt if it played part of the role. Like I said, I believe all of these parents really love their on-the-spectrum kids, and only want the best for them, but some of them may be drawn to this scientifically-unproven cause because, to them, it would work out well if this could indeed be the cause.

I think what the article failed to point out, though, was that you would also exceed the government guideline for mercury if you ate more than one tuna sandwich a week.

I think part of the problem is just that mothers want to be able to blame *something* because they don't like the idea that God rolled the dice or that it was the result of something they did to their baby. I was diagnosed with AS at age 39, and when I told my mother the very first thing she thought of was the lead-based paints that were everywhere when I was a baby - when I was teething I used to gnaw on painted wood surfaces and actually ingested quite a lot of paint. The symptoms of lead poisoning have very little to do with autism, but everyone knows heavy metals can cause brain damage and therefore, in a bad case of reverse attribution, they think that brain damage must have been caused by heavy metals.

I heard about this autism + thimerosal thing first from a friend who blogged about it. Obviously first thing that crossed my mind was if I, as a kid of the 1970s, was used as a guinea pig of sorts by the big name pharmaceuticals of the time. You see, thimerosal is essentially mercury, which is now known to do more harm than good to the human body...

..but if that were true, then most of my generational peers should have become autistic too, so these parents' arguments won't hold much water in that respect. Seems to me they are just getting too carried away for the announcements, the need to have someone to blame, and -yes- money.

Now let's note they are talking specifically about "regular" autism not AS. However if you want to make a stretch...

I think most of the time what they are referring to is a sudden regression in speech. Most accounts are more or less the same: the baby babbled and learned a few words like NT babies, but then stopped using those words and became mute rather than moving on to word phrases and expressive language.

The problem with these accounts is that they never tell you what the baby was *really* like prior to the immunization shots. All these mothers will ever tell us is that the baby used to babble and then it "got" autism. I'm guessing there were probably other signs of autism that they and the doctors dismissed as harmless.

Actually, that kinda leads on to something which I have always wanted to ask the WP community at large, which is what do everyone here think are the reason(s) behind the surging numbers of people being diagnosed with AS and ASDs?

For what it's worth, my two cents (and two theories) are (a) better knowledge. We know more about AS, ASDs, and the like now than ever. A LOT more. Two decades ago, AS wasn't even officially listed as a potential disorder in the DSM-IV. While many still don't understand a lot about ASDs and AS, there is a MUCH larger community of people who do.

(b) is a lot more complex, and a lot more tied into AS and HFAs than lower-functioning autism. I think that society's expectations for social aptitude, and tolerances for abnormal/awkward behavior, have changed dramatically over the years. While many people's minds may have been engineered in the AS/HFA way all along, they used to be able to get along fine. Whereas now, they are seen as having a problem.

A rather extreme example would be someone who is AS and has a special interest in, say, buildings. They just love buildings...it's their hobby, their passion, what they love to study. They go about, collecting facts, specifics, and technical details of buildings. They go about photographing skyscrapers, asking detailed questions, and the like. For years, this was seen as not a problem at all by others--people would just figure the person loved buildings, which in the case of the Aspie is really all there is to it. Now, in the post-9/11 age, someone wanting to learn (or collecting photographs and detailed information) about buildings (or any other system in society) is looked at with suspicion. And if confronted, (say, by a security guard of a building after noticing he/she was walking around the perimeter, taking photos, etc.) doing something suspicious, they're likely to end up in a confrontation where their social/interpersonal/communication deficits may become exposed in the most unfortunate of ways. Since so many AS have interests in the systems of society (engineering, transportation, etc.), this could be said for a lot of AS interests. And I'm not saying it's 9/11 and everything afterwards that alone changed society's expectations, though I do believe it is a contributing factor.

Just my two cents...Maybe I should ask this question to WP as a seperate thread?

Last edited by AS_Interlocking on 25 Jun 2005, 3:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.

my .02 is quite simply, that the AS people are both being recnonized earleir and that more and more of them are being born due to socio-economic reasons. A person with "ghost" AS or one that has been able to overcome most of their social problems could have a virtually unlimited life IMHO. I suspect many women want a good deal of the traits associated with AS and are subcoincoiusly propagating AS into the world?

This mercury stuff, IMHO, is BS.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, the shots were cut in 1999, one year after the incredibly small study came out about autism linked to a bowel disease and the bowel disease linked to mercury in the vaccinations. But apparently they only used 12 subjects and no zealot parents who are proponents to the Mercury Hyposthesis seem to be mentioning that their kids also have this particular bowel disease either...

Imagine that.

Wakefield's MMR study linking bowel disease and Autism is often misrepresented: you can't dismiss clinical evidence with epidemiology, otherwise imagine going to your doctor with chronic back pain and having them tell you "Only one in two million in your age range get back pain, so you can't have back pain"(as depending on where you live, there may not even be two million people in your age range nationally)

But other gut experts have looked at his samples and said there is no reason to believe this is a 'new' form of bowel disease that he claims to have discovered.

I do have one theory, little chance of it being true but interesting none the less, a different version to the parents' : What if Autistics are being born and THEN damaged by vaccines, only then is Autism noticed. Going on some of the sensitivities many have, it might be worth considering. But there is no decent evidence already suggesting it and no one is looking.

If the vast majority of cases of Autism Spectrum Disorders were contingent on the mercury vaccines in order to be triggered, there would have been a severe decline in occurance rates following 1999. But instead, rates have continued to go up instead. I would say this is heavy evidence to dispute the mercury "epidemic" among the parents.

What's more, some researchers have been considering that Autism is linked to brain growth and also possibly the lack of pruning which takes place a little before and after the time of the childhood vaccines, providing even more possible evidence to the contrary. Thus, Autism isn't quite as obvious at the time of birth and instead becomes blatantly so most of the time by the toddler years.

AS_interlocking,

I think your two reasons for an increase sound about right. I'd like to add one more cultural change.

Because computers can do more of the "grunt" work, there are more jobs that require social skills. For example, accounting and bookchecking used to be very much about adding up numbers and telling the boss how much he made last year and how much he had to pay in taxes. Fairly cut and dried. Now that computers do that, most of my time is spend explaining sophosicated handouts to the boss which help him manage his business better. There is much more face to face time.

I think a lot of jobs have changed like this meaning its more difficult for the HFA or AS to go unnoticed/undx'ed.

BeeBee

Not to make jokes or anything but I've just gotta ask, are they chasing you arround the block or something? As far as I can tell maybe they want the intelligence traits in their kids but they definitely don't want the social ends in em and they definitely don't want partners with AS (especially through their 20's and earlier).