vaccines and autism

With recent news reports about autism, I've gotten worried lately. I
had previously dismissed the claims of vaccines causing autism, but
now with my son getting shots next week, I'm wondering if I should do
more research.

Does anyone have any reliable data or studies? I've looked online and
found some info on thimerasol and mercury, which seems to be the main
factor that's being looked at. What vaccines contain this and are
vaccines available that don't contain it?

thanks for any info.

Kim

Hi --

You can get good information on vaccines and autism and the risks of not
vaccinating at www.cdc.gov (the web site for the Centers for Disease
Control).

Childhood vaccines currently in the supply do not contain thimeserol.
Vaccines stopped being produced with thimeserol several years ago.
Although doctors were allowed to continue using them until the old
supply was used up, the old ones should be pretty much one by now.

The only vaccine that was ever implicated in autism was the MMR
(measles, mumps, rubella) and the study that implicated it has been
pretty thoroughly trounced at this point. Subsequent studies have
found, for example, that babies showed signs of autism long before
getting that vaccine, that the best correlation to autism seems to be
age of the father at conception, etc. And that original study was, um,
poorly done, at best.

You can also look up keywords such as "vaccine risk", or "vaccine and
autism" on PubMed at the NIH website (www.nih.gov). There you can read
the abstracts of a wide variety of medical studies, although you can't
read the full articles.

One place to NOT look for information is on randomly googled sites on
the web. There's a huge amount of mis-information being touted as
reliable out there. (On many topics, not just vaccination!)

I hope these thoughts help,
--Beth Kevles
-THE-COM-HERE
http://web.mit.edu/kevles/www/nomilk.html -- a page for the milk-allergic
Disclaimer: Nothing in this message should be construed as medical
advice. Please consult with your own medical practicioner.

NOTE: No email is read at my MIT address. Use the GMAIL one if you would
like me to reply.

On Sat, 22 Sep 2007 21:11:47 -0700, Kim wrote:

Does anyone have any reliable data or studies? I've looked online and
found some info on thimerasol and mercury, which seems to be the main
factor that's being looked at. What vaccines contain this and are
vaccines available that don't contain it?

Vaccines work on *the herd immunity principle.* The less people who
are vaccinated, the more likely it is that a disease will rear it's
head again.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/mag..._truth/?page=3

VACCINES HAVE LONG AROUSED resistance and suspicion. In 1901, an
epidemic of 1,600 smallpox cases broke out in Boston, and the Board of
Health required that all residents get vaccinated or face a fine or
jail sentence. Almost half a million Bostonians were vaccinated, some
forcibly. Protests led to a 1905 US Supreme Court case, Jacobson v.
Massachusetts. The court ruled in favor of the state, establishing the
precedent for 100 years of public health law.

Today, American toddlers receive roughly 15 separate shots against a
dozen diseases before they are 2 years old. Because the shots aren't
perfect, most require repeated doses; for example, children get four
shots for tetanus and three for polio over two years. Under certain
conditions, a 15-month-old can get as many as half a dozen shots at a
single doctor's visit.

Perhaps because of the near-universal administration of vaccines,
there have been numerous, ultimately unsubstantiated, claims linking
vaccines with various diseases, including the
diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccine with epilepsy and Sudden Infant
Death Syndrome (SIDS), the hepatitis B vaccine with SIDS and multiple
sclerosis, the Lyme vaccine with arthritis, the Haemophilus influenza
vaccine with diabetes, and many others. Of course, there are some
proven vaccine-related injuries, mostly acute allergic reactions. In
1986, before the thimerosal-autism debate began, the National Vaccine
Injury Compensation Program was created to protect vaccine makers, and
thus the nation's vaccine supply, from costly litigation by people who
were adversely affected by vaccinations. Since its inception, the
program has paid more than $1.5 billion on about 1,900 claims.

Fundamentally, the proposed connection between autism and thimerosal
arises from the frustrating lack of known causes for autism and Autism
Spectrum Disorders. The theory joins others blaming various exposures
for baffling diseases; consider discarded notions correlating
cellphones with brain tumors, silicone breast implants with autoimmune
disorders, and water fluoridation with bone cancer. But because of its
history, the link between vaccination and autism has acquired unusual
traction.

****************************

Multiple studies have now convincingly refuted Wakefield's suggestion
that the MMR vaccine causes autism. In 1999, though, just after the
Lancet article was published, the stage was set for the
autism-thimerosal link. It was then that Dr. Thomas Verstraeten, a
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention epidemiologist who now
works for the vaccine maker Glaxo SmithKline, produced conflicting
data suggesting a possible link between thimerosal and speech delay
(though the final version of his paper, published in 2003, concluded
that "no consistent significant associations were found" but
encouraged future study; a more complete CDC study of thimerosal will
finish in 2006).

**********************************
It's now hard to overstate the scientific evidence against the
thimerosal-autism link. Many, many chemicals seem dangerous in test
tubes or in animal studies but have no significance in the real world;
thus, the most useful safety data come from large-scale
"epidemiological" studies of people. In 2004, the prestigious
Institute of Medicine, the federal government's adviser on public
health, reviewed dozens of such studies related to vaccines and autism
and concluded the "evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship
between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism." Halsey sees this
as a powerful statement, since "that's about as strong as the IOM will
come out." In contrast to many massive studies from major academic
centers that found no link, the only epidemiological studies favoring
a link were one unpublished study from Mark Blaxill, a
Massachusetts-based consultant and board member of an advocacy group
called SafeMinds, and five separate published studies from the
home-based father-son team of Dr. Mark Geier and David Geier - and
these were all dismissed by the IOM as "uninformative" or
"uninterpretable" due to poor methods.

As far as mainstream scientists are concerned, the vaccine-autism
question is settled.

***************************

(The risk-benefit ratio on some vaccines may be questionable though.)

***************************

LAST YEAR, MIT PROFESSOR Josh Tenenbaum told Psychology Today:
"Coincidences drive so many of the inferences our minds make. Our
neural circuitry is set up to notice these anomalies and use them to
drive new learning. There is an old saying that neurons that fire
together wire together. So you could say that coincidence operates at
the level of the synapse, whenever neurons fire at the same time."

This "neural circuitry" explains why some parents believe the rise in
autism over the past years has been linked to the higher number of
childhood vaccines. (The same circuitry could also relate the
increasing use of cellphones, popularity of reality television, or
consumption of fast food to autism.) Consider that almost 90 percent
of children receive vaccines at 15 months of age, the same time that
many cases of autism are diagnosed. Inevitably, many autistic children
will be diagnosed immediately after receiving vaccines - and, like the
Hansens, parents will suspect a causal connection.

*****************************

If given the choice, many parents vote with their feet. In Britain,
for example, vaccination is optional, and MMR immunization rates fell
to 80 percent overall after the Wakefield report, and 62 percent in
parts of London. According to the journal Science, measles began to
spread twice as efficiently as before. In 1987, Japan allowed parents
to decide whether their children should be vaccinated against several
diseases, including measles. Many opted out, and now more than 100,000
cases of measles occur each year, with an estimated 50 to 100 deaths.

The secret truth about vaccines is that they don't have much of a
benefit for the individual child who receives them. They're mostly for
the good of the community. My sons got multiple polio shots, for
example, for little personal benefit. The same goes for flu, measles,
whooping cough, chicken pox, and almost every other immunization. The
reason they'd be fine without the shots is that most everybody else
gets them. This concept is called "herd immunity," and it is the
foundation for disease control. Essentially, it means that once a
critical "tipping point" for vaccination coverage occurs - say, about
90 percent of the population - the probability of getting a disease
suddenly falls, since it can't spread.

Following a 1957 influenza pandemic, the Japanese government began
vaccinating all schoolchildren, since they spread flu efficiently.
After mandatory vaccination ceased in 1994, a report in The New
England Journal of Medicine found that the vaccination campaign had
prevented as many as 49,000 deaths annually among the Japanese
population. That is, one older person's life was saved for every 420
children vaccinated.

In the United States, getting your kids vaccinated is like paying your
taxes: Cheating a little doesn't really hurt anyone as long as
everyone else pays up. But left to their own devices, parents may balk
at subjecting their children to the needle when there's no significant
risk of disease. So the United States decided in the favor of greater
good and not individual rights, making certain vaccinations compulsory
for admission to public schools and day-care centers. As a result,
despite well-publicized small outbreaks of whooping cough and even
polio recently, vaccination rates in the United States are higher than
ever. Today, about 90 percent of Massachusetts children and 80 percent
nationwide are fully immunized - and millions of people enjoy some of
the world's lowest rates of devastating but preventable infections.


--
Dorothy

There is no sound, no cry in all the world
that can be heard unless someone listens ..

The Outer Limits

Kim wrote:
With recent news reports about autism, I've gotten worried lately. I
had previously dismissed the claims of vaccines causing autism, but
now with my son getting shots next week, I'm wondering if I should do
more research.

Does anyone have any reliable data or studies? I've looked online and
found some info on thimerasol and mercury, which seems to be the main
factor that's being looked at. What vaccines contain this and are
vaccines available that don't contain it?

None of the childhood vaccines have thimerasol int hem.

However, after thimerasol was removed from childhood vaccines, the rate
of autism did not go do, so that is more evidence that thimerasol does
not cause autism.

Here is some information from the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention on this: http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/faq_vaccines.htm

The Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences also
studied the possible relationship between vaccines and autism. No
relationship was found. In addition, several studies were done to look
for any link. None was found.

The bottom line is that there is very little evidence that vaccines
cause autism and the benefits of vaccines out weight the risks.

Jeff

thanks for any info.

Kim

Kim wrote:

With recent news reports about autism, I've gotten worried lately. I
had previously dismissed the claims of vaccines causing autism, but
now with my son getting shots next week, I'm wondering if I should do
more research.

In some cities (some in Japan and elsewhere), for
10 years now, there has been no thimerosol in their
vaccines, and yet the autism rate has kept going
up. The original Wakefield study has been thoroughly
discredited (conflict of interest, small non-statistically
valid sample size, etc.), and yet because people feel
the need to grab onto anything to blame, they keep
perpetuating this myth.

Get vaccinated and feel comfortable.

-- Anita --
Pillbug, 4yo, classically autistic before vaccines

Kim wrote:
With recent news reports about autism, I've gotten worried lately. I
had previously dismissed the claims of vaccines causing autism, but
now with my son getting shots next week, I'm wondering if I should do
more research.

Does anyone have any reliable data or studies? I've looked online and
found some info on thimerasol and mercury, which seems to be the main
factor that's being looked at. What vaccines contain this and are
vaccines available that don't contain it?

In the US, all the vaccines on the regularly scheduled
pediatric vaccine list are thimerosal free. (It's just the
thimerosal to worry about--it's a preservative that has mercury
in it, so when they talk about mercury in vaccines, they're
talking about the thimerosal.) Some of the vaccines never
come in contact with thimerosal. A couple of them have some
thimerosal used during the manufacturing process, but then it
is removed before the end so that the final product doesn't
contain thimerosal. The CDC website will tell you which is
which. Some formulations of the flu vaccine contain thimerosal,
but there are versions available that are thimerosal free.

Best wishes,
Ericka

"Kim" wrote in message
ps.com...
With recent news reports about autism, I've gotten worried lately. I
had previously dismissed the claims of vaccines causing autism, but
now with my son getting shots next week, I'm wondering if I should do
more research.

Does anyone have any reliable data or studies? I've looked online and
found some info on thimerasol and mercury, which seems to be the main
factor that's being looked at. What vaccines contain this and are
vaccines available that don't contain it?

thanks for any info.

Kim


Here is some reliable reading:
http://www.fda.gov/cber/vaccine/thimerosal.htm

You can also read the book by Arthur Allen, here is his website:
www.vaccinecontroversy.com