Court Rules Against Vaccine-Autism Claims Again 416
barnyjr writes "According to a story from Reuters, 'Vaccines that contain a mercury-based preservative called thimerosal cannot cause autism on their own, a special US court ruled on Friday, dealing one more blow to parents seeking to blame vaccines for their children's illness. The special US Court of Federal Claims ruled that vaccines could not have caused the autism of an Oregon boy, William Mead, ending his family's quest for reimbursement. ... While the state court determined the autism was vaccine-related, [Special Master George] Hastings said overwhelming medical evidence showed otherwise. The theory presented by the Meads and experts who testified on their behalf "was biologically implausible and scientifically unsupported," Hasting wrote.'"
Let me be crystal about this (Score:5, Interesting)
Let me be crystal clear about this, vaccines do not cause autism nor is there any decent study that is statistically and/or scientifically valid which shows such a provable correlation.
And we're running studies of autism here, led by one of my colleagues who has an autistic child herself.
You really need to move on.
The problem is that, for most people, they grasp at straws and try to find some observable "cause" they can link with autism. It's quite possible that it has more to do with environmental and/or emotional stresses on the mother but people try to put the cart before the horse and "prove" that a vaccine - which may have been due to travel (hint - enviro/emo stress) or bad health conditions (same) - was the cause.
Please, move on, you're just embarrassing yourselves.
Re:look at the amish (Score:3, Interesting)
1. there are many other factors that are different in the amish lifestyle that could be the reason
2. they are too much of a small sample size compared to the rest of the nation to be useful.
3. the only reason they aren't being wiped out by preventable illness is because WE are protecting them through herd immunity.
Re:"antivax" people (Score:3, Interesting)
You can still die from chicken pox. Despite the vaccine, about 100 Americans die from it per year.
Blame the Lancet (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with vaccines is that being vaccinated as an individual isn't what makes you safe. It's the vaccination of the herd that protects. That is, for a particular disease that you might be vaccinated against, let's say measles, it's safer to be the only person in a crowd who isn't vaccinated than to be the one person in the crowd who is vaccinated. Vaccines aren't 100% effective and what makes them truly effective, is having everyone take them.
Back in 2006, some girl in Indiana [medpagetoday.com] got measles on a trip to Romania. She came back and shared that gift with the people in her church, simply by showing up. Roughly 10% of the 500 people present weren't vaccinated and 32% of those people developed the measles. One person who got the vaccine also got the measles, but 94% of the cases were unvaccinated people.
The problem these days is that people don't bother to learn history. Anyone who's been to an old cemetery (I live in Arkansas, and we have tons of them) pretty much can't miss the fact that there are tons of kids aged 10 and under buried. Why? In the early 1800s, infant mortality was about 20%. Think about that. One in five infants (1 year old and younger) died. A lot more died before the age of 5. Not all of that is vaccines, but a lot of it is! Before the vaccine, smallpox alone was killing 400,000 Europeans a year.
Personally, I think vaccines ought to be required by law because they're a public safety issue and people who won't do it should go to jail.
Re:So what causes Autism anyway? (Score:3, Interesting)
Tons of research has been done, mostly pointing to combinations of environmental factors and genetics. Last I heard, the big interesting "cause" to look at was Vitamin D -- because while autism isn't more common in Somalia than it is anywhere else, it's much more common among Somalians in Oregon and Sweden than ... Which hints at Vitamin D issues.
Keep in mind that there's no evidence at all that the incidence of autism is increasing, only the diagnosis -- which is to say, obviously, before the notion of "high-functioning autism" or "Asperger's Syndrome" was widely known in the US, obviously very few people were diagnosed as such... So there's probably nothing here to begin with.
Some != Most (except for large values of some) (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that, for most people, they grasp at straws and try to find some observable "cause" they can link with autism. It's quite possible that it has more to do with environmental and/or emotional stresses on the mother but people try to put the cart before the horse and "prove" that a vaccine - which may have been due to travel (hint - enviro/emo stress) or bad health conditions (same) - was the cause.
OK - as a parent of a six-year old with "primary" autism (e.g. low-functioning), I'd like to clear the air on a few points:
Please, move on, you're just embarrassing yourselves.
I have met a number of other parents of autistic kids. Those that are desperate enough to by into these theories are (often) otherwise rational, intelligent people. They are desperate for hope, and feel they owe it to their child to attempt some kind of cure. Whether this is due to denial (of the permanent disability) or unrelenting hope and a moral code that says "anything is better than nothing", I don't know. I do know I can relate to this, to a point, and was frustrated at the limited medical treatments available for my own son. Please have some sympathy for these misguided parents, as the real culprits are the alt-medicine charlatans who claimed to have found the cure, and the DAN doctors who really ought to know better.
Re:Blame the Lancet (Score:3, Interesting)
The Lancet didn't retract that ridiculous paper from 1998 until last month [cnn.com] and it pretty much started all this ridiculous BS. It's absolutely unconscionable that they didn't retract it sooner. Ten of the original 13 authors retracted back in 2004. That should have been a hint.
I heard a nice interview with the Lancet editor on this matter. I can't remember where--some podcast, probably AAAS or On the Media.
Anyway, it wasn't unconscionable at all. It's actually a change in the role of scientific journals, and kind of a sad one.
The idea that a scientific journal has a duty to retract a paper just because it's wrong is new ground. As all scientists know, a lot of papers are wrong. The most interesting ones are the most likely to be wrong. Being published by "The Lancet" (or "Science" or "Nature" or "Cell" or whatever) doesn't mean anyone thinks you're right--not the editors and not even the peer reviewers. It means (in addition to "noteworthiness") that you meet certain editorial standards about what data you've presented and how you've communicated it, and what conclusions you've drawn.
As I understand it, the original paper wasn't convincing, but it was interesting. Small group of patients, a surprising correlation, no real mechanism--exactly the sort of thing that warrants further study but means nothing on its own. And scientists in the field would have known exactly how to interpret it. The simple lack of further confirmatory papers--you don't even need debunking papers--would have been a signal to experts that there wasn't any "there" there.
Unfortunately, in between aggressive lobbying by advocacy groups, poor understanding of the scientific process by laymen, a worship of the phrase "peer reviewed paper" and IMHO horrible scientific reporting standards in most non-scientific outlets, a single peer reviewed paper gets weight in policy debates. Examples of using papers to misinform comes up in global warming, creationism, GM foods, and anything else that gets people riled up.
In this particular case, the primary author apparently committed phenomenally bad work, if not outright fraud, his co-authors were embarrassed, and the Lancet withdrew it a few months after the misconduct/fraud was established. Fair enough.
What's sad is what the editor said about future papers--they've learned their lesson, and can no longer assume they are publishing for a scientific audience. The "interesting but probably wrong" hypothesis can no longer be printed, at least not in certain topics. As that happens, the end result of all this is going to be less visibility into the process and more isolation--scientists will communicate interesting ideas verbally at conferences, over e-mail, and through their social networks. People with groundbreaking hypotheses will find it harder to get published, and the non-expert, the scientist on the margins of the field (maybe in industry, maybe in a different field) will find it even harder to learn about the latest thinking.
Re:I find it funny (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually most parents of ASD kids, once they work through all of the denial and bargaining phases knew the child was different from day one; especially if the child wasn't a first child.
Re:Litigious society (Score:3, Interesting)
"You do realize that in the US more children get sick from the polio vaccine than from the actual disease."
That is hard considering US use of the Oral Polio Vaccine was discontinued in 2004 and even then it was not recommended unless the patient in question was at risk because it's known to carry a tiny risk. IVP has been the recommended way to receive the vaccination which has no significant risk except as an egg allergen.
Re:"antivax" people (Score:3, Interesting)
As a scientist it is likely you work around other scientists. Scientists usually respond to reason.
The types of people who are really against vaccination do not respond to reason. You can show them a scientific paper in a major peer reviewed scientific/medical journal and they will say either "This isn't really a reliable source", "Scientists don't know everything", "Scientists are IN ON IT TOO", or "This video that my friend Matt, who is like so smart, gave me said that this isn't true so it is obviously not true" or "This is just a THEORY. See, it says hypothesis right here. Hypothesis means they are making crap up."
My Sister in law is a really awesome person. She is intelligent, awesome to converse with, and reasonable most of the time. However, she falls for all the "You'll die soon without organic foods", "Vaccines kill thousands", "Don't drink tap water, the government is trying to poison us", "we didn't REALLY land on the moon" or whatever the latest anti-establishment type thing is out there. She is a voice of reason in most discussions but when one of these topics comes up, all semblance of logic fails her. I know another guy with similar tendencies who won't speak to me for weeks if I bring any evidence against his theories.
This is what you are up against with your plan to use argument and reason. Although, I do agree with you that MANDATORY vaccines are a bad thing and could end up being a slippery slope (wildly fictional example: Look! We've found a vaccine to purge the homosexual gene! Put it on the mandatory vaccine list so we can purge this hideous disease from humanity!) At the end of the day I believe individuals SHOULD maintain the right to determine what goes into their bodies, even if they are making what appears to be a poor and misinformed decision.
To tell the truth, I think the constant barrage of scientific studies reported by the mainstream media is to blame. "Eggs are good for you, no wait...Eggs are bad for you, No wait...Eggs are good for you." The content in each of those studies may be COMPLETELY different, but the headlines show scientific studies contradicting each other quite often. This type of thing makes ALL science less credible in the eyes of many. "Bad" Scientists like the idiot who really started this whole vaccine/autism thing make things even worse....especially in regards to what "Peer Reviewed" means. Unfortunately I do not have a solution to this creeping distrust of science.