Retracted autism/vaccine study an 'elaborate fraud,' British journal finds
cnn.com
cnn.com
This leaves us with two options for the beliefs of the anti-vaccination crowd.
1. They believe that a dead child is better than one with autism.
2. They are comfortable letting everyone else's children take the "risk" of getting a vaccine while they sit back and rely on herd immunity.
Peace.
Now you've mentioned it I'm trying to think of a third option would be something along the lines of "Vaccines could be applied differently than they are today". I haven't seen any evidence that supports that theory, but primarily I'm focused on people the refuse to vaccinate their kids at all. Not the ones that advocate different methods of vaccination.
I have a form of cystic fibrosis (as does my 23 year old son). I have gotten off 8 or 9 prescription drugs and gotten me and my kids healthier. A great deal of what I know about getting healthy I learned from an anti-vax/alternative health board that believes that vaccines and other sources of metal poisoning cause autism (and related disorders). (EDIT: I don't think it's quite that simple, but I do think that is certainly a factor.) Both my sons fit the profile for ASD. Getting the three of us healthier has dramatically reduced their ASD symptoms. My son with cystic fibrosis has not been on antibiotics for over 12 years -- more than half his life -- and has taken no medication whatsoever in about 4 years. Most people with CF take hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of "maintenance drugs" every month, more when they are "sick" (having an exacerbation).
Most people with my genetic disorder get flu vaccines and pneumonia vaccines and other vaccines religiously. And they get gradually sicker and sicker until they die, usually at tragically young ages. I get a lot of flack off of people in the CF community for advocating non-drug approaches to the problem. I also get treated like I am some kind of irresponsible fruitcake and bad mother because none of us has seen a doctor in several years. We haven't seen a doctor because a) we aren't "sick" like we used to be and b) no doctor can help me improve on my track record of success. Doctors told me flat out to my face "people like you don't get well -- symptom management is the name of the game". I beg to differ.
Thank you for your reasonable reply.
Peace.
I don't agree with not vaccinating as a general rule, but I am not overly familiar with cystic fibrosis so I am not aware of what risks sufferers have and what medications sufferers are asked to use. Certainly this is still relying on heard immunity for things like measles, mumps, polio and the like. Healthy living does not prevent these diseases.
Could you describe why you chose not to vaccinate for anything?
Another position I will agree with, though it is only implied in the comment is doctors seem to over prescribe medication. Whether it is a desire to help, or be seen to do something or just laziness to get onto the golf course. Certainly I have seen this anecdotally, I am often offered antibiotics when I don't really need them. Things like presenting with flu symptoms and being given a script to prevent a throat infection.
:-) Wildly inaccurate assumption. :-)
My oldest son is fully vaccinated. I was diagnosed with CF in May 2001, just before I turned 36. My oldest son was diagnosed the following month, shortly after turning 14. (He was born the day after my 22nd birthday. My youngest was born on my 5th wedding anniversary. When I was married, I went around telling everyone my husband was too cheap to buy me anything. <wink>)
When I was first diagnosed, it was after having been bedridden for 3 1/2 months, after 10 weeks of sinusitis turned to pneumonia. The first few years, I got my flu shot every year. My then teenaged son refused his and was very adamant that he would rather have the flu than the flu shot. I was very slow to join the anti-vax crowd and I don't promote it as a position. But I did eventually stop getting my annual flu shot and my youngest son never got the last of his vaccinations. The reason I stopped getting my vaccinations: Absolutely everyone (including my oldest son) who was helping me get well when most of the wold insisted it couldn't be done were strongly anti-vax. No on tried to talk me out of it. But I eventually decided to skip the shot and see if I did better. I haven't gone back.
As for doctors over-prescribing medicine: I think that bias is built in to the way they are compensated. Drugs offer short-term gains with long-term consequences. The doctors can claim credit for the short-term gains while distancing themselves from the long-term negative consequences and not really owning that -- even though it isn't at all secret and everyone in the CF community refers to drug side effects as "a necessary evil". If you are basically healthy, you can do this to yourself occasionally and it isn't necessarily a big deal. But if you have a chronic, deadly condition, it helps to put you in the grave and you cannot prove it. All the experts blame your genes, there aren't really big samples of groups of people successfully doing something else (just a few "anecdotal"/lone nutcases like me), and doing nothing (which is what people seem to think I am doing) does in fact kill you if you have CF.
As for diet and lifestyle: Life is chemistry. Everything you eat, drink or touch impacts your body chemistry to some small degree. If you are willing to do enough research and make enough changes, the chemical impact is greater than what drugs do to the body. But it's hard to sell people on that. <shrug>
Thanks for your reply.
I think science and doctors are getting better at studying the holistic approach you talk about, and some things will be born out by the facts and others won't. I am glad things are working for you and your family, and certainly I would contend that a sufferer of a disease like CF is a someone who can rely on herd immunity and boost their immune systems in other ways, and not draw critizim for doing so.
Certainly what you eat has an a large impact, but the complexity of our bodies is such that it is very difficult to draw conclusions on what helps people or not.
I strongly disagree with "the chemical impact is greater than what drugs do to the body". If your diet is lacking in vitamin c does getting the vitamin from an supplement (in "drug" form if you like) have a greater effect that getting it from an orange I think you would agree not and I would say it is the same. (I am using vitamin C here as the supplement/drug because it has been shown to be taken up by the body just as effectively in both forms.
My sons are both legal adults, so it is no longer my decision to make for them. I don't have plans/expectations to have more kids. I would be very reluctant to get anymore vaccinations. I have done better without them. So far, I haven't really had to make any decisions regarding some "position" along those lines. I don't recall the last time I had the flu or a cold. I think the things we are doing does provide protection from infection, but you have to stay on top of it. It isn't a nice simple "do it once" solution -- but those solutions weren't working for me anyway.
I took quite a lot of supplements for a long time. I take very few these days. I think it is better to get it from food, if possible. If you do the research, you find, for example, that magnesium is best absorbed when taken with calcium and calcium is best absorbed when taken with a few other things. I think there are also micronutrients in food that have yet to be adequately cataloged and studied. So I think food is, generally speaking, a superior means to get what we need because we can't replicate the complexity of food with our supplements, though supplements definitely had their place for a long time for me while I was trying to undo decades of damage and it simply wasn't possible to get the high doses of nutrients I needed from food alone.
Is it possible yours is just an unusually mild case?
I would also think that if what you say is indeed true, many scientists would be very interested in your case.
I was not offering to give evidence particular to vaccines and autism. I don't even believe that vaccines directly and solely cause autism. (I do believe they are a contributing factor but I think it's more complicated than the two sides want to make it out to be.) I was only suggesting that the two possible characterizations being listed for parents who are anti-vax were not the only two possibilities.
I would also think that if what you say is indeed true, many scientists would be very interested in your case.
You would think so. But my doctor's reaction to me getting healthier was to schedule me with fewer and fewer appointments on the theory that I didn't really need his attention and other patients needed him more, while expressing zero interest in how I was getting well, even though he was clear it was something I was doing, not something he was doing. (This is another reason I haven't seen a doctor recently: My experience is doctors don't really want to hear what I have to say and the only thing they can offer me is drugs, which I have worked extremely hard to get off of and plan to stay off of.)
B) No, an MD is not a scientist. I have a website, have had it for a few years. Very few people of any sort have expressed any interest in it whatsoever. I'm not holding my breathe. I don't expect it to catch on.
For example (I believe in evolution): "some creationists commonly argue that some constructs in biology, such as eyes, are too complex to have evolved from simpler systems. They call this concept irreducibility".
See?
If you're interested in a clean and logical discussion, which you seem to imply that you are, then you need to at least participate first!
So I think most arguments like this boil down to "belief" on both sides and it is usually pointless to try to sway the other side. I didn't stop vaccinating based on "scientific" anything. I stopped because the people who had information that was getting me healthier all were anti-vax. So I stopped based on "social proof", so to speak -- which isn't really any different than most folks who believe their scientists and doctors are correct but they think it is vastly different, so my "social proof" only damns me as it is viewed as further evidence that I am a fruitcake.
So I generally make no effort to argue the science involved.
Peace.
"Most scientific views boil down to 'belief'" this almost sounds like your saying that nothing can truly be knowable. This is the path of nilism, not reason.
Science has a rigorous process, peer review being part of it. One does not have to be an expert in the field to read numerous studies, evaluate their methodology, reason as to whether the conclusion actually matches the data+experiments, and see if the results across the studies were consistent. This isn't an act of faith.
I am not suggesting a path of nihilism. I am only suggesting that I recognize that the reasons I do things and the thinking I use to make such decisions doesn't look very "logical" to quite a lot of people. This is highly likely to be true for people arguing from the "scientific" position. Yet, we are all human, even scientists, and thus even they have their biases, shortcomings, etc. I made the choice I made not due to anecdotal evidence but due to a track record of success: These people were helping me get concrete results in terms of a health problem for which "science" would like to write me off and consign me to a slow, torturous death as my only due in life. These same people had strong negative views of vaccines. I went with the folks who were getting me positive results. My other choice is to go along with conventional treatments for my condition. Everyone who does that gets gradually sicker and sicker until they die, usually at a young age. Science claims it is not killing them, it is their genes that is killing them.
To me, that position lacks logic -- but the overwhelming belief is that it is true, so that makes me a lone nutcase. And it is usually a hopelessly lost cause to attempt to point this out when everyone "just knows" they are right, science and doctors are on their side, and I am "objectively" wrong, nevermind the results I am getting. Those results can be easily dismissed as "anecdotal". I didn't get well to impress anyone or make any kind of point. I only did this to get my life back (and give my kids a life of their own). So it is mostly not worth arguing about. Those folks who do not believe me cannot be convinced. The fact that it is a done deal weighs nothing in their minds.
Peace.
Everyone who does that gets gradually sicker and sicker until they die,
usually at a young age.
Orange.
Currently, the average life expectancy in the US for people with CF is about 37. I have talked to quite a few people online -- there are only about 30,000 diagnosed cases of CF in the US and some lists have hundreds of members, some of whom have more than one family member with CF. I don't know "everyone" but it is a small enough community to know quite a good cross section of such people via the internet. The folks who are doing better than expected generally make a lot of dietary and lifestyle changes and do a lot of research. The details of what they do and what they think may vary from what I do and what I think, but dietary changes are a very consistent aspect of what I have seen work for this population.
This doesn't really have any bearing on the efficacy of vaccines, though. Perhaps certain lifestyle changes do dramatically reduce susceptibility to certain diseases, but that doesn't mean one should also rule out current scientific literature.
For example, I am not aware of any studies concerning making dietary changes to control inflammation in people with CF. However, I am aware of many drug studies that show that controlling inflammation in people with CF does reduce incidence of infection. Those studies are generally conducted by drug companies, whose agenda is to develop products to sell (in this case, drugs). The detail that reducing inflammation in people with CF also reduces infection is useful information to me. The fact that they only seem to study which drugs can be useful in this regard while apparently completely ignoring diet and lifestyle is something I view as inherent bias in the source.
I am not a drug company with an agenda to develop a product and/or find a good reason to sell high doses of an existing product to very ill people. I am an individual who was once extremely ill and wanted to suffer less. (I had no goal of "getting well" initially. I just wanted to take less medication and be less miserable.) So I parse out which pieces of such studies are useful neutral information and which pieces smack of bias and agenda. "Reduce inflammation to reduce infection" is valuable information. "Take boatloads of our drugs (such high doses they have to run liver tests and closely monitor you)" smacks of agenda and bias and, frankly, callous disregard for my welfare in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.
Peace.
As a physics undergrad I was never asked to take an expert at his word. Everything we learnt we tested in the lab, sure I didn't built an electron scanning microscope, but I used one and it fitted with the science.
The science I was presented with was given as a derivation of science I already knew, which was based on things we learn in high school etc etc. There is no taking the word of someone in science, hence the peer review process.
Peace.
The difference between what you are talking about and what I am talking about it the difference between objective and subjective proof. Your social proof easily falls into the post hoc fallacy[1]. While I will happily admit medical science doesn't get it right all the time at least the onus is there to prove the safety and efficacy of the drug.
A great example of this is those power balance bracelets[2], where anecdotal evidence (your "social proof") is provided in the form of celebrity endorsement. So a piece of rubber and a hologram like those you see on credit cards is sold for $30. They've been force to admit there is no evidence they work yet people will swear blue murder they do. Why? Because we are subjective beings, right now to our physical makeup (try plunging a hand into luke warm water then hot water then back again sometime).
We are poor judges of things, especially when it comes to ourselves.
[1] http://www.skepdic.com/posthoc.html [2] http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/12/23/3100270.htm
Let's just say I have less faith in the objectivity of the scientific community than you have and an alternate method for judging what looked like sound advice has, so far, gotten me better results than anything condoned by conventional medicine ever did. Should it fail me, I will reconsider my options. My judgment of these things is rooted in a 10 year track record of steady forward progress against supposedly impossible odds, not celebrity endorsements of things you and I apparently would both agree are hooey.
Peace.
Why we don't have a solid answer to a cause of autism is because it is likely to be a combination of factors, both genetic and environmental (and likely not a single combination of those). There are plenty of other modern environmental factors that are suspects and but the alt-medicine lobby seems to be leveraging this disproven hypothesis for they own ends. Alt-medicine is big business, for example I know a couple of people making "fuck you" money doing it.
I agree that the human element is always a factor in studies which is why scientists go to great lengths to remove them such as double blind studies for example where both the tester and subject don't know which group the subject belongs to (test or control).
While I don't agree with the factual basis on which they are making their decision, it is entirely rational given their belief.
MMR are [edit] usually temporary and can typically be effectively treated by the medical systems of industrialized nations, whereas autism is permanent and generally untreatable.
It is analogous to purchasing a large heavy vehicle (e.g. SUV) based on the superior crash protection it provides passengers and despite the increased risk to other vehicles in a collision and the potential for increased long term environmental degradation.
Measles has a death rate of healthy adults of 3 in 1000. It is deadly for people with compromised immune systems, such as someone with AIDS. Mumps is less of a threat but can still lead to other complications such as testicular infection and possibile sterility in young men. Rubella is generally benign but if a pregnant woman contracts the disease in the first trimester it has a 1 in 5 chance of miscarriage, and in the remaining surviving cases the infant can be severely handicapped including sight, heart, bone and organ problems. You absolutely do want Rubella immunity amongst all women of childbearing age.
So I don't understand the anti-vaccine crowd either. Because the range of possible outcomes can be also very bad, and the chances are much higher of contracting one of the diseases than of developing Autism.
With a mortality rate of 3 in 1000 and an incidence of ~.2 cases per 1,000,000 per year in the US, one would predict a death from measles about every 5 years or so.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5331a3.htm
Given claims in the media that 1 in every 150 people is effected by Autism, a reasonable person might calculate that their child is 33,333 times more likely to be autistic than to die from measles.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-02-08-autism_x.htm
Even if one believes there is only 0.1% chance that there is a causal link between MMR vaccines and autism, the probable risk of autism is still orders of magnitude higher than dying from measles.
It is only if one believes that the probability of a causal link between the MMR vaccine and autism is approximately zero that the risk of death from measles is greater than that of autism.
Once one believes that there is even a slight possibility of a link, then there can be a justified belief that the benefits of no vaccination outweigh the risks.
Even if I believe otherwise.
Besides, a 'claim in the media' of 1 in 150 isn't a strong enough number for this debate.
All I'm saying is that the decision of people who forgo vaccination is often a justified rational belief, even if it is incorrect. Keep in mind that most parents know a child with autism and very few know a child who died from MM or R.
To use a different analogy, imagine I believed carpet was lava and stepping on it would burn me and break my mother's back. While this would explain why I'd avoid stepping on carpet, it would hardly be accurate to describe it as a justified, rational belief.
Sure, but forgoing the MMR vaccine to prevent autism makes as much sense as forgoing baths to prevent brain tumours.
I really don't see symptomatic treatment as "effectively treated", I see it as a barely more effective treatment than placing leaches on a plague victim as they have to face the disease alone. Given that acute measles has a 15% mortality rate, I'd say it isn't effective treatment at all given that the measles mortality as a whole is 3 in 1000.
I find the blissful ignorance these people live in to be baffling. Do they not comprehend the statistics that there were hundreds of thousands of infections per year before vaccinations began and that this was attributed to deaths in the ten-thousands and countless more blindnesses.
I guess I'm rare in that I would rather see my kid alive and not suffering an agonizing death in childhood above my inconvenience of taking care of an autistic child and feeling like I have to blame someone else above simply accepting genetics.
To put it another way, even if a person believed that there was only a 1% chance that there was a 1% increase in risk of Autism due to the vaccine, that would still be significantly more risk than death from measles. Although epidemiology is a science, vaccine sales are a business, and it is not unreasonable to weigh pharma's economic interests in vaccines that scale to the degree that MMR does. Pharma is not in general a philanthropic endeavor and a healthy skepticism regarding their products is not unreasonable.
Healthy skepticism is certainly good and reasonable, but what we're seeing is unhealthy skepticism. The science is in and overwhelming, but antivaxxers consistently latch on to debunked, unreliable, or outright loony evidence to support the increasingly discredited claims.
The contracted cost to the US CDC for MMRII is $1.86/dose (at which Merck is profiting) and $5.01/dose on the open market at an even greater profit.
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/programs/vfc/cdc-vac-price-list....
Having been around since the 1970's development costs have long since been recovered. In addition with the recommendation of a second dose the number of doses delivered per year has almost certainly increased.
The contracted cost to the US CDC for Proquad (MMRV) is $8.57/dose (at which Merck is undoubtedly making a profit) and Merck charges $13.93/dose on the open market (additional 62% margin).
It is very simple: they don't understand much about science. If you are ignorant of science, then it is easy to believe that autism symptoms that develop in your child after they get a vaccine are caused by the vaccine. The obvious flaws in this claim just won't appear to you just like bugs are often invisible to the developers that write them. Unless you've spent a fair bit of time thinking through causation claims and how they've been wrong, you won't have the practice to get this sort of analysis right, especially on such an emotionally fraught topic.
I get that you don't agree with anti-vax people but it can't be too hard to see where those directly affected are coming from—can it?
I know, you're not saying that, no one is, but it seems about as silly.
I might sound a bit harsh, but I was vaccinated against polio and that was the only thing that saved me from becoming a cripple for life when the stupid bug insisted on infecting me when I was 5 years old - the vaccine didn't quite take, but it took enough to dampen the bug's spirit, but I still had to spend 8 years on physiotherapy and I still suffer the effects from it to this day - all because someone shared a spoon between me and another child one afternoon. These people are the new Darwin Award winners, only they're doing it to their children. It's a shame.
Although I certainly don't condone the anti-vaccine crowd, I do at least understand them: most of the "crowd" has only vaguely heard the idea that vaccines may be linked to autism. A distant relative (who had a seven year old and was pregnant with baby #2) repeated her worries about vaccines to me over Thanksgiving, and when I told her there was no real link to autism she reacted somewhat skeptically, so I told her to read _Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure_, which discusses why people want to associate vaccines and autism.
The shortest, most obvious version is that most people have trouble disentangling correlation and causation: kids tend to develop obvious signs of autism around the same time they get vaccines. So people think one causes the other when they don't.
Furthermore, most people don't have the training or inclination to really study the data. Journalism, in the meantime, promotes the "two sides of the controversy" school of writing, which often works well for politics and other areas without clear right answers. This works appallingly poorly in matters of science, where right answers are often demonstrably right but non-scientists have trouble distinguishing between competing claims, especially when multiple credentialed sources make compelling-seeming arguments. For more on this, see James Fallows' recent discussion in another context: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/year-e... .
You can see the same kind of thinking in reporting on global climate change, which is almost certainly happening and being caused or accelerated by things we're doing. Yet you often see a climate scientist discussing this, on which there's widespread consensus (and consensus that more study is still needed) followed by a bogus climate skeptic. Same thing for vaccines. People hear this stuff in the air and repeat vague claims at family gatherings, but most of them (and us) don't really understand them.
[1] Even sadder is that they cite Wakefield being exposed as a fraud as evidence of tampering by "Big Pharma".
And to get a VISA for some countries you need to bring that card.
The National Conference of State Legislatures maintains a list of exemption statutes by state:
Unlike HN commenters constantly promoting dangerous psychiatric drugs that are no more effective than placebos, extrinsic rewards for children who read/exercise, Bill Gates' KIPP-based school reforms, the conflation of homeopathic and naturopathic medicine, using GPA for hiring, etc.
For example, if I had a dollar for every time I saw someone on HN criticizing the methodology of a study they haven't actually read then I wouldn't be doing a startup right now. And yet these posts rarely get downvoted.
As much as I'm convinced this guy is scum and perpetrated a cynical fraud for his own professional and monetary gain, I have to admit this is a fair accusation if you replace "Big Pharma" by the medical community as a whole. It was done with good intentions, but the way they treated the study (and Wakefield) proves that the science is subject to non-scientific considerations. Wakefield's study was accepted and published and didn't immediately cause a scandal, so there must be hundreds of published papers just as shoddy, many of them containing fraud perpetrated for an author's professional gain. Far from ending careers and discrediting ideas, the vast majority of those papers will continue to boost careers and promote their conclusions in some small way until the journals are dusty and forgotten.
Wakefield's study was singled out for special justice in order to manipulate the public debate on vaccines. It was done in the name of truth, will certainly save lives, and didn't inflict on Wakefield anything he didn't deserve. However, it was "tampering" with the normal process, it was done as propaganda, and it was also done for PR motivations, to compensate for the impression that the medical community was complicit in Wakefield's fraud by holding his science to such low standards. It isn't sad if people notice that. It's just sad that the medical community was forced to stage a show trial to put an end to Wakefield's deadly and self-serving BS.
The net result: vaccination rates dropped, and measles cases have gone up sharply.
Here's a quote from the senior clinician on the project, after the journalist presented information from one of the parents that conflicted with the data in the study: “Well I can’t really comment,” he said. “You really touch on an area which I don’t think should be debated like this. And I think these parents are wrong to discuss such details, where you could be put in a position of having a lot of medical details and then try to match it with this, because it is a confidential matter.”
no wonder why so many people are losing trust in science ...
Also worth reading is Roald Dahl’s account of his eldest daughter’s measles infection at http://www.blacktriangle.org/blog/?p=715 .
There is a big difference between fraud and making mistakes. Mistakes in study methodology or in drawing conclusions are expected to happen in science, hence the peer review process. Fraud on the other hand usually ends a scientist's career.
They are valid arguments to either side and nothing is conculsive. I think it is best to do your own research from medical journals/studies etc and do what you think is best for your children.
I think that is one thing everyone here has in common, we all want to do what is best for our children.
Erroneous consensus or agreement to disagree is NOT superior to objective truth.
These parents do what they think is best for THEIR children.
But the cost for doing this is that OTHER children that rely on herd immunity will start dying of measles.
So by having every parent do a local "optimization", the net result, an unvaccinated world, is much, much worse. And then to add insult to injury, it's just plain wrong that vaccines cause autism, so the parents that believe this are only making the world a worse place for everyone and not really doing what's best for their children in any way.
At the same time there have been massive targeting of parents of autistic children by quack therapists.
Mitochondrial dysfunction, impaired oxidative-reduction activity, degeneration, and death in human neuronal and fetal cells induced by low-level exposure to thimerosal and other metal compounds Authors: D. A. Geiera; P. G. Kingb; M. R. Geierc
Abstract Thimerosal (ethylmercurithiosalicylic acid), an ethylmercury (EtHg)-releasing compound (49.55% mercury (Hg)), was used in a range of medical products for more than 70 years. Of particular recent concern, routine administering of Thimerosal-containing biologics/childhood vaccines have become significant sources of Hg exposure for some fetuses/infants. This study was undertaken to investigate cellular damage among in vitro human neuronal (SH-SY-5Y neuroblastoma and 1321N1 astrocytoma) and fetal (nontransformed) model systems using cell vitality assays and microscope-based digital image capture techniques to assess potential damage induced by Thimerosal and other metal compounds (aluminum (Al) sulfate, lead (Pb)(II) acetate, methylmercury (MeHg) hydroxide, and mercury (Hg)(II) chloride) where the cation was reported to exert adverse effects on developing cells. Thimerosal-associated cellular damage was also evaluated for similarity to pathophysiological findings observed in patients diagnosed with autistic disorders (ADs). Thimerosal-induced cellular damage as evidenced by concentration- and time-dependent mitochondrial damage, reduced oxidative-reduction activity, cellular degeneration, and cell death in the in vitro human neuronal and fetal model systems studied. Thimerosal at low nanomolar (nM) concentrations induced significant cellular toxicity in human neuronal and fetal cells. Thimerosal-induced cytoxicity is similar to that observed in AD pathophysiologic studies. Thimerosal was found to be significantly more toxic than the other metal compounds examined. Future studies need to be conducted to evaluate additional mechanisms underlying Thimerosal-induced cellular damage and assess potential co-exposures to other compounds that may increase or decrease Thimerosal-mediated toxicity. Keywords: autism; glial; lead; mercury; mercuric; neurodevelopmental
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a910652305~...
The PDF of the paper is on the page.
This is a peer reviewed article.
Here is another one:
"Vaccines May Cause Brain Changes Found in Autism" - Journal Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis 2010
http://www.autismny.com/2/post/2010/08/vaccines-may-cause-br...
Nether of these papers were written by Wakefield. Just because we have a bad scientist doesn't mean the science is flawed.
In fact, the "vaccine doesn't cause autism" scientist have been caught creating fruad as well: Scientist who "debunked mercury vaccines" caught in fraud, steals $2 Million, skips town A Danish scientist who was a key researcher in two studies that purport to show that mercury used in vaccines and the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine do not cause autism is believed to have used forged documents to steal $2 million from Aarhus University in Denmark according to reports in the Copenenhagen Post Online and a statement from Aarhus University.
Poul Thorsen, MD PhD, headed up a research unit at Aarhus University that was hired by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to prepare a series of studies that would exonerate thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative and adjuvant used in vaccines, and the MMR vaccine from any role in causing autism. The veracity of the two studies he co-authored is now in doubt.
These studies formed the foundation for the conclusions of several Institute of Medicine reports that claimed that it was highly unlikely that thimerosal or MMR were implicated in autism.
In a statement Aarhus University officials said that believe Thorsen forged documents supposedly from the CDC to obtain the release of $2 million from the University. Thorsen resigned abruptly in March 2009 and left Denmark. Since then Thorsen has held several jobs in the US, first at Emory University in Atlanta and then at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Documents show that as late as January 22, 2009. Thorsen was employed at Drexel. Any reference to Poulsen has now been deleted from the Drexel website. http://info-wars.org/2010/03/11/researcher-who-said-mercury-...
http://www.casewatch.org/civil/geier.shtml
> Dr. Geier, who is a geneticist and an obstetrician, is not qualified to give a neurological diagnosis.
> Dr Geier's testimony is not reliable, or grounded in scientific methodology and procedure. His testimony is merely subjective belief and unsupported speculation.
> Because Dr. Geier has made a profession of testifying in matters to which his professional background (obstetrics, genetics) is unrelated, his testimony is of limited value to the court.
And that's a court order.
I generally see a more hesitant view here on HN than anywhere else when it comes to doctors and pharma companies, generally because their advice and drugs are not highly scrutinised or peer reviewed.
However, what I see a lot of here on HN is basic common sense. Smallpox killed ~400 million people in the 20th century, that's not even accurate statistics as we largely wiped out the disease in the latter decades. It was also the cause of 1/3 of all blindnesses.
I fail to see how "not wanting to believe" vaccinations 'causing' autism is even relevant to the debate. I don't even see how a proven causal link between vaccinations and autism would even be relevant to the vaccination debate. I god honest don't give a fuck if vaccinations cause autism unless it's >1/2 because my child's risk of dying in an unvaccinated world is about 50/50 if I'm lucky.
IIRC measles mortality in the US currently stands at 4 in 100 million because of vaccinations. Before the vaccine was licensed measles cases averaged around 450 thousand per year. Within five years of the vaccine being licensed the number of reported cases dropped to ~20 thousand (note: a 22-fold drop in cases), when the second dose was recommended the cases dropped to the current baseline of a statistical zero thousand within five years.
This is equivalent to 68-thousand lives saved per year for the measles vaccination.
If you want to live without vaccination, sure go ahead. However I think you should be forced to pay for the 19 other vaccinations it requires to keep herd immunity that keeps people like you safe from deadly diseases like measles.
None of what they posted is useful in making a decision one way or another on the subject.
I can't understand the title of the study they posted let alone the contents and I have never heard of the journal which maybe is the preeminent publication of its field or a dirty rag which the publisher's mate "peer reviews". I have no way of knowing from the comment and posting the abstract provides nothing.
The second one is a blog of an Autism organisation in New York that doesn't link to anything that I can use to gauge its authority.
And the third is talking about a single scientist in the opposing side of the debate (there is only one person refuting these claims? Really?) who was caught with his hand in the till. Hardly proof or otherwise on the debate at hand.
So I stand by my downvote.
Just because an argument isn't made out of unsupported hand-waving doesn't mean that it isn't recycled garbage. Citations and glib technical language can be copied and pasted just as easily as mindless rants.
It is not enough to hold debates. One must also have the guts to draw conclusions.
Meanwhile, what's conspicuously missing from this particular cloud of chaff is a concise summary of the most recent epidemiological data. Should we not have plenty of that by now? Thanks to Wakefield, we have conducted an "experiment" over the last decade or so: Hysteria is up, and the vaccination rate is down. As a result, the incidence of preventable disease is measurably higher. Surely, if there is a correlation between autism and vaccination, the autism rate must now be significantly lower in these new unvaccinated populations? Or can we at least try to establish how many more kids have to suffer or die before we can draw that conclusion?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1782355
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1935416
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1994504
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2041013
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2027532
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018434
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018405
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1881991
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1935387
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1919731
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1914963
I think the best response here is to down-vote and not engage beyond the sensible rebuttal that has been posted.
For example, it's pretty clear that you are anti-vaccine. It's fine to hold that opinion, but as I'm sure you've seen the overwhelming evidence against your point of view I don't see any need in re-hashing the arguments.
In cases like this you may not be consciously trolling, but in my view arguing a dissenting view in the face of such overwhelming evidence exhibits the same damaging behavior patterns that a troll engages in. Given that, I think the appropriate response is exactly the same as the response to a troll, ie: a perfunctory link to counter evidence on Wikipedia (for the sake of casual readers), and a downvote.
Something along the lines of this but from the opposing viewpoint: http://sciencebasedpharmacy.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/more-ev...
And to address your concerns re Thimerosal. Apart from the fact the general scientific consensus is it isn't dangerous it was removed from almost all vaccines around 2001. For more information: http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/Vaccines/Questions...
I'm not anti-vaccine at all, just anti-mercury in the vaccine. Also they did not remove Thimerosal from vaccines. In fact, the swine flu shot had Thimersal and if you remember, children and pregnant women were encourage to take it first. This caused a 700% increase in miscarriages. http://hubpages.com/hub/thirmerosal_in_vaccines
Also the figure of 700% increase in miscarriages alone doesn't actually prove anything on its own, a virulent disease was also abroad at the time. A detailed study of the medical histories of the women who had miscarriages during 08/09/10 would be needed to establish what the cause of the increase was (and I hope is being done?).
"One point that was repeatedly stated was that except for the flu shot, all vaccines that have been offered to parents since 2003 have been thimerosal free. This is not the case.
Because parents in the autism community are very concerned about the prospect of their children getting mercury in their vaccines, many of them routinely ask to see the packaging before their child gets a shot. What some parents are finding is that vaccines with the full 25 micrograms of mercury are still being distributed in doctors offices, some with an expiration date of 2007."
http://adventuresinautism.blogspot.com/2005/08/still-finding...
Edit. didn't downvote you btw, did up vote after the downvote as your comment is fair and contributes to the debate. :(
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:H.R.881:
(5) Considerable progress has been made in reducing mercury exposures from childhood vaccines, yet 8 years after the July 1999 statement, thimerosal remains in several nonroutinely administered childhood vaccines and many pediatric and adult influenza vaccines.
(6) There is no law or regulation to prohibit the reintroduction of thimerosal into any products from which it has been removed, leaving open the possibility that it may be reintroduced at some point in the future in new vaccines or vaccines from which it has already been removed.
As there has been none there is no like, causal or otherwise.
But please keep going, this is almost as fun as playing Battlefield . . .
Perhaps go back and read my comment you grossly misquoted [1] where I say "removed from most vaccines" if you are going to try to quote me at least do it right.
You should read the quote you posted then revise what correlation and causation mean in respect to science and biology in particular.
What you quoted explicitly states "thimerosal remains in several nonroutinely administered childhood vaccines". Note it says nonroutinely, which I will translate for you means not often. So even if only a fraction of the routinely used childhood vaccines had thimerosal removed in the past decade (and it sounds from your quote that none of the routinely ones did have it still in there in 07) we would see a corresponding drop in autism diagnosis rates.
We haven't.
Ball is in your court cowardly sir if you really believe in what you say you'll use your real account, no one is left on this thread to downvote you.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2073702 (Note i posted that a day ago and HN lock comment editing after a short period of time just in case you are wondering).
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/expert.q.a/11/02/h1n1.thimero...
Hooray for meaningless anecdotes!
http://www.montrealgazette.com/story_print.html?id=2408084&#...
So riddle me this. Why did a peer reviewed Polish Study find that the MMR vaccine actually showed decreased autism rates over a standard measles vaccination, when the anti-vaccination groups constantly talk about 'vaccine overload'. A triple vaccine should seriously be harder on the system than a single, so why is the evidence suggesting it is either wholly irrelevant or actually beneficial by decreasing autism rates?
Autism-vaccination link researches have the god awful stench that cold fusion and perpetual motion physicists had several decades ago. The original evidence was wholly and undeniably fabricated, but you're posting links to articles that tout they're proving Wakefield right... I'm sorry but all they're showing is that they're producing results that show an unintentional bias because they obviously care that they prove Wakefield right.
You don't have good science until a scientist does it that is happy whether or not he is right or wrong. The anti-vaccination scientists are consistently producing bad science and are consistently bad scientists.
In addition, the authors of the first study you cited appear to be involved in vaccine litigation and in a business that purports to treat autism by "chelation therapy" and would thus seem to have a vested interest in research findings that show heavy metals cause pathology.
Your second link doesn't go to a paper - you linked to some anti-vaccine website which itself doesn't link to a paper.
There actually is a paper in JANE here:
http://www.ane.pl/pdf/7020.pdf
You can read the paper for yourself - but I am personally not at all impressed by an N=16, with N=3 in the control group. Complete MRI data in this study were obtained on N=9 in the treatment group, and only N=2 in the control group.
Another discussion of the posters that preceded this second paper's publication can be found at:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=100 http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=1989
and the second paper itself at:
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/new-paper-vaccines-cause-auti...
You rather carefully chose to note that neither paper was "written" by Wakefield. However, the authors of the second paper noted that Wakefield reviewed their paper and actually helped design their study:
"We thank Drs. Saverio Capuano and Mario Rodriguez for veterinary assistance; and Dr. David Atwood, Carrie Redinger, Dave McFarland, Amanda Dettmer, Steven Kendro, Nicole DeBlasio, Melanie O’Malley and Megan Rufle for technical support. Special thanks to Dr. Andrew Wakefield for assistance with study design and for critical review of this manuscript; and to Troy and Charlie Ball and Robert Sawyer. This work was supported by the Johnson Family, SafeMinds, The Ted Lindsay Foundation, the Autism Research Institute, the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, the late Liz Birt, David and Cindy Emminger, Sandy McInnis, and Elyse Roberts. Prior to 2005, Carol Stott was involved in vaccine litigation."
Papers aside, some anti-vaccine folk seem to have a great deal of emotion invested in the issue: