Okay, so this is an argument that I have heard before. In fact, during my teaching degree, we had a woman of a profoundly autistic boy come and talk at one of our Special Education lectures. She told the story of her son, who up until the age of about eighteen months, was a happy and communicative child. A few weeks after his two year old vaccination injections, her son began to change. First he stopped talking. Then he stopped making eye contact and began endlessly twirling things. The parents were naturally concerned, so took him to doctors, and to cut a long story short, he was eventually diagnosed with autism. This story ended up being common in her autism support group.
At the time, my first thought was not, oh I guess vaccines cause autism, but instead, maybe the vaccination starts the autistic process in children already genetically prone to autism. That is pretty much the point that I left my thinking about it. That is, until I read 'House Rules'.
I apologise that the next few paragraphs will mostly be quotes from the book, but it is important to the story, as Jodi Picoult puts forward the argument that you tend to hear from parents with autistic children.
Ask the mom of one autistic kid if vaccines had anything to do with her child`s condition, and she will vehemently tell you yes. Ask another, and she`ll just as vehemently tell you no. The jury`s still out, literally.
Here are the facts: 1. In 1988, the Centers for Disease Control recommended a change to infant immunizations schedules in America, adding three hepatitis B shots (including one at birth) and three haemophilis B shots, all given before the baby is six months old.
2. Drug companies stepped up to the challenge by providing multiple-dose containers of vaccines preserved with thimerosal, an antibacterial made up of 49 percent ethyl mercury.
3. Although the effects of mercury poisoning had been identified in the 1940s, the Food and Drug Administration and the CDC didn`t consider the effects of the dosage that newborns would receive because of these shots. The drug companies didn`t raise a red flag, either, even though the new regimen meant an average two-month-old at a well- baby checkup got a single-day dose of mercury one hundred times greater than the government`s long-term safe exposure level.
4. The symptomology of autism looks an awful lot like the symptomology of mercury poisoning. To give you an example: when scientists studied the migration of mercury into primate brains, they noticed that the primates began to avoid eye contact
5. Between 1999 and 2002, thimerosal was quietly removed from the majority of childhood vaccines. There`s the opposing argument, too. That ethyl mercury--the kind in the vaccines--leaves the body faster than methyl mercury, the kind that is a poison. That in spite of the fact that most vaccines are now mercury-free, autism is still on the rise. That the CDC, the World Health Organization, and the Institute of Medicine completed five large studies, none of which have found a link between vaccines and autism. Those facts are compelling, but the next one is all I needed to convince me there`s some sort of connection: My son looked like any other two-year-old until he had a round of shots that included DTaP, Hib, and hepatitis B.
I don`t think it`s a causal link. After all, out of 100 children receiving the same vaccine schedule, 99 will never become autistic. But just like we probably all have markers for cancer in our genes, if you smoke two packs a day you're more likely to develop it than if you don`t. Kids with a certain predisposition in their genes can't get rid of mercury as easily as most of us can and, as a result, wind up on the spectrum.
So what Jodi Picoult was saying fitted into the idea that I had come up with myself. Emma, the mother of the boy, then went on to say that she is not one of those mothers who rejects vaccination, as she got her second son immunised, because she still thinks immunisation is a good idea.
After reading what I have quoted above, I couldn't get the idea out of my head. For some reason, having Picoult agree with what I thought made me suddenly doubt it was actually true. Being a nerdy still-student-at-heart, the next few hours involved a lot of research. I wanted to know if there really was a link between autism and vaccinations, and if so, what was causing it and why?
Out there in the information world, there are a lot of articles claiming that there is a link between children's measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccination and the onset of autism. Millions even. One of the biggest supporters of the idea is ex-Playboy model Jenny McCarthy, whose claims to have cured her son of the autism the vaccine gave him. Ex-Playboy model you say? Yes, that got my attention too, so I dug a little deeper, and lo and behold, there is many problems with this claim; none of which are related to her career. It seems that her son's 'autism' may actually be Landau-Kleffner syndrome (to read more about the misdiagnosis: Fanning the Vaccine-Autism link)
But finally, after long searching, I got my answer from an article in the Journal of Psychology and Psychiatry which showed, that the suspension of the MMR vaccine in Japan did not have an effect on the number of autistic children. If you can't be bothered reading the whole article (I admit, it is quite dry and statistical) then here is the conclusion:
So at this point I began wondering if autism was more genetic than I had previously suspected. As it turns out, it is. Research has shown that siblings of children with autism quite often have language delays and show autistic characteristics, which made a lot of sense when I thought about children I know. While the older brother is diagnosed with autism, it has always seemed to be that his younger sister might have a slighter version. Her tantrums are legendary in the child care centre, and while tantrums are typical of three year olds, hers are something special, which I have only usually witnessed with autistic children.Accordingly, it is possible to conclude that it is extremely unlikely that MMR has been responsible for the rise over time in the incidence of diagnosed autism. It follows that it is similarly unlikely that it causes autism frequently or at all. It cannot have caused autism in the many children with ASD in Japan who were born and grew up in the era when MMR was not available. Because this frequency is at least as high as in populations in other countries in which most children were vaccinated, it implies that MMR could not cause a substantial proportion of cases of autism.
Epidemiological data, however, cannot test the very different hypothesis that MMR might involve an increased risk of ASD in a very small number of children who, for some reason, are unusually susceptible to damage from the vaccine. There is no evidence in support of such a hypothesis and no indication of how such a postulated susceptibility might be manifest. Hence, the burden of proof must be on those who favor such a hypothesis.
(Not actual child. Child for display purposes only)
Of course, this debate I am putting forward is largely by the by. It has now been conclusively proven that there is no link between autism and the MMR vaccination. In fact, the truth is the appearance of the link was constructed in a London medical school, and that no study since has been able to replicate the results that the Lancet study did. If you are still in any doubt, (and even if you're not) please read this article by Eileen Costello, which I think beautifully sums up the whole debate for me.
Yes, it is true that autism appears at the age around children receive their MMR vaccination, so the idea is linked in parent's heads, but it is also true quite simply that around two years old is the age that the signs and symptoms of autism start to become more prominent. Like Eileen Costello says, if you know what you are looking for, you can see the early signs of autism in small babies. The vaccinations are the equivalent of the kid who gets blamed for talking in class, who just happened to be sitting next to the kid who actually was the gabbler.
(Baby chosen for 'what the?' expression)
What it all comes down to for me is that autism is a challenging enough syndrome for children and families to live through, without misinformation making it more upsetting. I can completely understand why parents would want to jump on the MMR vaccine causing autism bandwagon, just like Jodi Picoult's character Emma did. All most parents want for their children is to have happy, easy and healthy lives, and autism doesn't make living in the everyday world easy. As the woman who came to talk to our Special Ed tute said, she pretty much had to throw her plans for her son's life out the window with the diagnosis of his autism.
The point is, now we know for sure that it isn't the vaccine, time, money and resources should be put into genetic research, instead of scare campaigns blaming a vaccination that is protecting children and adults from the horror of having measles, mumps and rubella. I speak from personal experience about the horror of having measles. I had mild dose of measles as a child, and even that mild dose was horrible and left me only able to sit in a chair all day being spoon fed.
But more on that in the second part of my thinking about vaccinations.
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Alright. So the next blog I make will be about my opinion of vaccinations in general. Probably I should have started with the general one first, but it was really Jodi Picoult's book that got me wondering about autism and vaccinations, and then about vaccinations in general. I hope to have it up within the next few days, but in the meantime, please comment on this blog and tell me what you think. I would love to hear feedback.
Until next time!
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