(Posted by Patrick Sullivan Jr.)
I haven't been following autism news much lately, but my mom just sent me an email link to an MSN Health story: Kids' Vaccine Ingredient Not Likely Linked to Neurological Problems, reporting on a new study from CDC published in NEJM.
As I read it, I was thinking, "Well, ok so we have a NEW reliable study (ie. not the roundly rejected Verstraten study) that proves a link between autism and thimerasol doesn't exist. At least we finally have some new relevant data to argue over."
"Our study does not support a causal association between early exposure to mercury from thimerosal-containing vaccines and immune globulins and deficits in neuropsychological functioning at the age of 7 to 10 years," concluded the study's authors.
Then I read the next paragraph:
That conclusion, however, seems to contradict some of the study's findings.
Ok, so what the heck does that mean?
The second half of the article goes on with some gibberish from Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, and Dr. Paul Offit (aka. Darth Offit) about how this contradiction is mere statistical randomness. Great. Are you reassured? I am. (Care to explain them in human terms RandomJohn?)
So I hop over to Ginger Taylor's Adventures in Autism blog figuring there will be some sort of rebuttal, and I scan this post of A-CHAMP's eight-point rebuttal. Ginger summarizes it thusly:
Exclusion of low birth weight babies, 70% participant drop out rate, focusing on blood mercury levels and ignoring brain mercury, conclusions not backed up by the data, conflicts of interests with all the researchers and on and on...
It is like a greatest hits of all the bad research done in the last decade wrapped up in one convenient package.
Unbelievable!!
So I see the next post titled: America, Meet Your Unvaccinated Children, where I read:
If you vaccinated your son, they have a %155 higher chance of having a neurological disorder had you chosen not to vaccinate.
The question that we have been screaming at the CDC for years, and they will not answer, is this:
Are we trading curable communicable diseases for incurable neurological diseases by over vaccinating our children, and by not screening to see which children cannot tolerate vaccination.
What the hell??
Ok, so scroll down a little further and read some EXCELLENT news -- Ginger's little man Chandler is doing awesome with CaEDTA IV chelation! (HUGE CONGRATS TAYLORS!! :)
Scroll down a little further to see that Jenny McCarthy was on Oprah talking about Autism...wait, WHAT?!?! When did this happen? Are we talking about that Jenny McCarthy?
After a quick google, yeah, it is that Jenny McCarthy. And her story is about regressive-autism caused by MMR vaccine. Reading the questions she's answered online, it's clear that she's done her homework reading on all the same websites I've been reading/writing.
The point is, all this "mumbo-jumbo-snake-oil-biomedical-BS" worked for her son. Cool.
Well, there's obviously a LOT going on in the world of autism right now and I need to catch up!
UPDATE: David Kirby shares this and several other compelling arguments:
[The study showed that] Boys who received the highest amounts of thimerosal in the first seven months of life were determined by evaluators to be 2.19 times more likely to have motor tics at age 7-10 years, and 2.44 times more likely to have phonic tics, than boys with the lowest exposures.
Any relative risk between exposure and outcome that exceeds 2.0, incidentally, is considered to be proof of causation in US courts of law.
...
It's perplexing that the CDC can report replicating a doubled risk for tics in boys, and an increased risk for speech disorders and attention and behavior problems in other kids, and still insist that this is all "very reassuring news."
I posed the question on the conference call today, and got nothing even resembling an answer (an opinion that was backed up by a producer from ABC News Nightline).
So I will ask it again here.
Given that the CDC has just reported that thimerosal might increase the risk for tics among boys, how is it possible, in addition, to publish the following two phrases within the same report?:
"The findings...suggest a possible adverse association between neonatal exposure to mercury and language development."
AND
"Our study does not support a causal association between early exposure to mercury...and deficits in neuropsychological functioning."
