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If there has been a more harmful urban legend circulating in our society than the vaccine-autism link, it is hard to know what it might be.
Writes Arthur Caplan, Emanuel and Robert Hart Professor of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he co-directs the Ethics and Vaccines Project, in an op-ed in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer. Despite no scientific proof to the contrary—-”thimerosal has been removed from vaccines in this and other countries for many years, with no obvious impact on the incidence of autism“—it seems that a connection between vaccines and autism has become entrenched in the public consciousness; has become the stuff of urban myth. Caplan cites more than a few examples of how anti-vaccine advocates have had an impact on public health, and not necessarily for the better:
When one of my students recently conducted a pilot study of attitudes about the new cervical-cancer vaccine, fears about autism were prominent among the reasons many respondents gave for being wary of the vaccine. Friends of mine continue to tell me of parents in Lafayette Hill, Voorhees, Greenville and Downingtown who won’t have their children vaccinated because of the risk of autism. States continue to allow parents to opt out of vaccines on “philosophical” grounds – perhaps the only arena in American public life where “secular philosophy” is given legal standing in public policy. And even some young health-care workers report that they don’t get important vaccines that would protect them, their families and their vulnerable patients against death because of worries about autism and vaccines.
Not science, but distrust—of “medicine, science, government and experts, a distrust that has little to do with scientific studies or expert opinions”—fuels anti-vaccine fervor. A just-published study by Stanford researchers highlights the disconnect between what science journalists report about autism (environmental causes for autism comprise 48% of their reporting) and what scientists actually study (brain and behavior research accounts for 41% of their research).
It is the extent of this “disconnect”—-between scientific evidence confuting a vaccine-autism link on the one hand, and a continued “populist” belief that “vaccines caused my child to become autistic“—-that puzzles and yet intrigues me. Can it be that the “establishment” of scientists have sequestered themselves so far away up in the gleaming ivory tower white of their research labs that they simply cannot hear the stories of parents who again and again offer the simple evidence of their eyes: One day my child was normal. The next day, after the vaccine, he was not?
That said, I will offer up a bit of my own experience which is, I know a vaccine did not cause my son Charlie to be “become” autistic. Indeed, I think he was as he is from the time he was conceived: Charlie has always been Charlie. Just as Charlie was being diagnosed with autism in July of 1999, Jim and I started to read website after website about a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. We wracked our memories, I checked the journal I have kept from the time I was expecting Charlie, we went over and over the medical records: No.
And yet, when Charlie turned five, we decided not to have him vaccinated. (Despite Jim’s too-obvious statement: “It can’t make him autistic. He already is.”) For an hour I held a sweaty, miserable, screaming, writhing Charlie in my lap as a nurse tried to draw enough blood out of him to have his titres checked. After exchanging some emails messages with other parents, Jim and I wrote a letter seeking a religious exemption against having Charlie vaccinated and even today as I recall the wording of that letter, the lines from the Bible quoted, I know I signed without believing what was on that piece of paper.
“Vaccine” and “autism” had become for me—have become in the public psyche—not merely linked. These two words, which have nothing intrinisically to do with each other, have become equated, and because of coincidence, of a correlation that seems to contain a clue to causation: An 18-month-old child receives her or his immunizations. An 18-month-old child is noticed to not be playing in varied ways, or interacting, or speaking. The parents know they have “done everything” to ensure their child’s health and development, have followed the advice of the pediatrician exactingly, and then some, so it must be some external agent, some mysterious force, that has caused this terrible change in a child. And—-because so much seemed to go wrong when the doctor’s advice and instructions were first followed—the parent, now with not only a “diseased” child but one with hard-to-control behaviors, turns away from traditional medicine and seeks answers elsewhere.
I think, that is, it is possible to understand why so many parents believe in a vaccine-autism link. What I am trying still to understand, is how to dispute such a link; as Professor Caplan’s op-ed suggests, appeals to the evidence of science have yet to be effective.
When I was enrolling Charlie in the school district in the town we now live in back in May, I discovered that a letter stating our “religious grounds” for objecting to his being vaccinated was not going to be accepted without having to take things much farther. We were desperate, not because we have an autistic child, but because we needed to make sure that Charlie was in a school placement as his old school was closing, and the fear he underwent when we kept him out of school in November of 2005 seemed to us much worse than any threated from a vaccine. Late last spring, Charlie received the shots he had not had at the age of 5. He looked at the nurse sticking the needle in his arm, maybe winced a bit. There was no crying and we walked out to the car, and that was that.
Perhaps if more stories of how “a vaccine didn’t cause my child’s autism” were heard, we could start to tease apart the vaccine-autism link and show what strange bedfellows these two have been all along.
Dear Sir,
Vaccines contain ethyl mercury, which is non-toxic and bio-degradeable. I pointed this out to the herbalist Wendy Wilson, but needless to say I received no reply!
1249 days ago
[...] and on and on) left and right, it’s perhaps hardly surprising that the hypothesis—urban myth—of a vaccine-autism connection was ever formulated, and that it has lasted so long in the [...]
I never believed the myth I looked at it and ar worst believed that it aggravated an already existing condition. I wish more people would just look at the facts and use so not so common anymore sense!! great job!
1342 days ago
[...] http://www.autismvox.com/the-vaccine-autism-urban-myth/ [...]
1356 days ago
[...] is a myth about vaccines and autism out there; the myth arose after a certain British doctor published a certain study linking the MMR [...]
1356 days ago
[...] http://www.autismvox.com/the-vaccine-autism-urban-myth/ [...]
1362 days ago
[...] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22542677/ http://www.quackwatch.com/03HealthPromotion/immu/autism.html http://www.autismvox.com/the-vaccine-autism-urban-myth/ http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=308 [...]
1363 days ago
[...] http://www.autismvox.com/the-vaccine-autism-urban-myth/ [...]
google ‘nteu280.org’ to access the EPA’s scientists’ website.
The EPA scientists start their statement on fluoride with the following:
Silicofluorides: unrefined industrial waste
91% of Americans ingesting artificially fluoridated water are consuming silicofluorides1. This is a class of fluoridation chemicals that includes hydrofluosilicic acid and its salt form, sodium fluorosilicate. These chemicals are collected from the pollution scrubbers of the phosphate fertilizer industry. The scrubber liquors contain contaminants such as arsenic, lead, cadmium, mercury, and radioactive particles2, are legally regulated as toxic waste, and are prohibited from direct dispersal into the environment. Upon being sold (unrefined) to municipalities as fluoridating agents, these same substances are then considered a “product”, allowing them to be dispensed through fluoridated municipal water systems to the very same ecosystems to which they could not be released directly. Sodium fluoride, used in the remaining municipalities, is also an industrial waste product that contains hazardous contaminants.
Scarcity of environmental impact studies
This is of deep concern to us. Studies that do exist indicate damage to salmon and to plant ecosystems.3a It is significant that Canada’s water quality guideline to protect freshwater life is 0.12 ppm (parts per million). 3b
99.97% of fluoridated water is released directly into the environment at around 1ppm
This water is NOT used for drinking or cooking.4
Sorry, this should of course have said:
“…some bright but UNscrupulous people hit on the idea of promoting fluoride added to public drinking water supplies as a preventative for tooth decay…”
http;//www.nofluoride.com/presentations/presentation.htm
This link features a fascinating account by Dr John Colquhoun about why he changed his mind about fluoridation. It includes a graph which clearly shows that neither fluoridated toothpaste nor water fluoridation made any difference to declining tooth decay rates.
The similarity between this graph and the many graphs based on offifcial statistics showing that vaccines had no influence whatsoever on declining infectious disease mortality rates is striking.
Here is a little fluoridation history:
Decades ago, the aluminum industry was sued for millions for the damage the fluoride emitted from smokestacks inflicted on crops, forests, animals and people.
To solve this problem, some bright but scrupulous people hit on the idea of promoting fluoride added to public drinking water supplies as a preventative for tooth decay, thus enabling them to get rid of this highly toxic and highly carcinogenic industrial waste product at a profit!
The Mellon family owning the aluminum industry spent huge amounts of money to promote their criminal scheme/scam to governments and dentists. Marketing fluoride toothpaste is an integral part of this brain-washing exercise, to promote the (completely erroneous) idea that fluoride is good for teeth.
Last year, Colgate donated 1000 tubes of fluoride toothpaste to all 6 and 7-year-old school children at the school in Bangkok where I teach English. Theit motto is obviously: “Get them early!”
The fluoride is obtained by hosing down the accumulated deposits from factory chimneys of the aluminum and fertiliser industry where it collects on the scrubbers.
Being contaminated with lead, cadmium, arsenic and even radioactive elements, this industrial grade fluoride (hydrofluorosilicic acid) is unfit for human consumption, yet added to our drinking water! If a pharmacist were to stock and sell it, he would be fined and lose his license!
Fluoridation is mass medication and mass poisoning of the public.
As things are, corrupt and criminal governments, who get election campaign contributions and other backhanders from big business, allow and even promote crimes against the public good such as fluoriation and vaccination, under the pretext of promoting public health.
As Alan Watt – cuttingthroughthematrix – points out: “The psychopaths at the top impose a psychopathic culture on the rest of us”. I maintain that hanging them from lampposts is too good for them.
Regan, also check out:
http;//www.nofluoride.com/presentations/presentation.htm
This link features, among other information:
Scientist’s Position Papers
-14 Nobel Prize winners opposing fluoridation
-EPA professionals discuss why they oppose fluoridation.
-Dr. John Colquhoun, former Principal Dental Officer for Auckland New Zealand and former advocate of fluoridation, documents why he changed his mind.
-Dr. Hardy Limeback, Head of the University of Toronto’s School of Preventive Dentistry and former fluoridation advocate, documents his reasoning for now opposing fluoridation.
Dr Limeback has publicly apologised for unknowingly misleading the public about fluoridation for many years.
-Dr. Mullinix – discusses research she’s done demonstrating the negative health impact of fluoridation
-List of Top Medical Professionals and Scientists Warning of Fluoridation Dangers
-List of Doctors and Dentists objecting to water fluoridation
From Medical Journals
-AMA Letter – AMA states “not prepared to state fluoride is safe”
-Journal American Medical Assoc. – “Hip Fractures increased in areas with fluoridated water”
-Journal American Dental Assoc (JADA) – “optimal intake has yet to be determined”
-Amer. Journal of Epidemiology – “fluoride damages bones at levels added to public drinking water”
-Australian & New Zealand Journal of Public Health – “five major epidemiological studies show a high rate of hip fractures in fluoridated regions.
-Dartmouth College -”fluoridation is associated with an increase of lead levels in children” – 280,000 children in the study.
-Canadian Dental Association warning that 35-60% of people in fluoridated communities will get dental fluorosis (mottling of the teeth), a sign of chronic fluoride poisoning. Half of ingested fluride accumulates in bones and in other parts of the body.
-Populations who are sensitive to the effects of fluoride
-Annals of Allergy – study showing allergies to fluoride.
-Delta Dental, a large California insurance company promotes and funds fluoridation but refuses to pay for dental work due to fluoridation damage.
In response to Regan’s comment in reply to mine:
“Even quite a number of Nobel Prize winners are outspoken opponents of water fluoridation.”
Yes. N=1.
Google “14 Nobel Prize Winners who object to fluoridation”.
1. Dr Arvid Carlsson, Nobel Prize in Medicine, Oct 2000 for his work on the brain. He also played a very prominent role in banning fluoridation in Sweden
2. Dr Giulio Natta, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1963; Chemical Eng., Director, Industrial Chemistry Research Center, Polytechnic Institute of Milan, Italy.
3. Dr Joshua Lederberg, Nobel Prize in Medicine, 1958 WHO’s Avisory Health Research Council, Received U.S. National Medal of Science, 1989. Former Chairman of the Cancer Panel of the National Academy of Science.
4. Sir Cyril Norman Hinshelwood, O.M., M.A., D.S., F.R.S., Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1956, University of Oxford
5. Nikolai Semenov, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1956, D. Sc., Director, Institute of Chemical Physics, Moscow,; professor, Leningrad Polytechnic Institute and of Moscow State University; member USSR Academy of Science, Chemical Society of England, and Royal Society of England
6. Hugo Theorell, M.D., Nobel Prize in Medicine, 1955, Director, Bio-Chemistry Department, Nobel Medical Institute, President, Swedish Medical Association. Stated hazards of fluoridation in a report to Swedish Medical Board.
7. W. Hess, Dr. Phil. Nobel Prize Winner in Medicine, 1949, Professor of physiology and former Director of Physiological Institute, University of Zurich, Switzerland.
8. Sir Robert Robinson, O.M., D. Sc., F.R.I.C., F.R.S., M.I.C.E., Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry, 1947, Director, Shell Chemical Company, Profesor of Chemistry, Oxford University
9. James B. Sumner, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1946, former Director of Enzyme Chemistry, Dpt. of Biochemistry and Nutrition, Cornell University
10. Prof Arturi Virtanen, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1945, Director, Biochemical Institute, Helsinki; president, Finnish State Academy of Sciences and Art.
11. Adolf F. J. Butenandt, D. Phil, Nobel Prize Chemistry, 1939, Dir. Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry; professor of phisiological chemistry, Munich University
12. Corneille Jean Francis Heymans, M.D., Nobel Prize Winner Medicine 1938. Professor of Pharmacology, pharmacodynamics and toxicology and Director Heymans Institute of Pharmacology and Therapeutics
13. William P Murphy, M.D., D.Sc., Nobel Prize in Medicine, 1934. Lecturer in Medicine, 1934. Lecturer on Medicine, emeritus, Harvard Medical School; consultant in hematology, Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, Boston
14. Hans K.A.S. von Euler-Chelpin, Nobel Prize winner Chemistry, 1929, Stockholm University, President, Chemical Society, Dir. Inst. for Research in Organic Chemistry.
1432 days ago
[...] people were there. But anyone who’s followed the exchanges about vaccines and autism (such as this and this) knows that it is a “debate” of extremes and opposing opinions, and opposing [...]
Just how many names does Mike post under? Mike, Liquid Zeolite, probiotics, now Erwin Alber?
“The discussion about fluoride overlooks a reality in the life of some autistic children—-the difficulty in teaching them to brush their teeth and otherwise take care of dental hygiene. Also, a lot of autistic children—-my son for sure included—-have great trouble going to the dentist. Not attending to necessary dental care can severely reduce quality of life issues.”
——————————
Kristina,
Seeing the amount of passion expended on this thread, it makes you wonder or wish that at least an equal amount of time was devoted to those questions of how to teach those skills and increasing access to dental care for those with specialized needs or lack of access due to inability to pay (In our area there is much easier access to low/free pay medical than dental).
Anyway, we’ve all (me too) gone pretty far afield of your original post. Sorry.
Well, I stopped believing in any Nobel Prizes as meaning anything when Al Gore won over a woman who single handedly saved 2,500 children from the Germans during the Holocaust and even after being tortured she lived and returned as many children as she could to their parents.
Yeah, Al Gore is sure a better winner than her — NOT…. what a freaking joke.
Zero is also a number, as in a number of Nobel Prize winners believe XYZ.
In response to Regan’s comment in reply to mine:
“Even quite a number of Nobel Prize winners are outspoken opponents of water fluoridation.”
Yes. N=1.
Google “14 Nobel Prize Winners who object to fluoridation”, then get back to me with your apology.
1. Dr Arvid Carlsson, Nobel Prize in Medicine, Oct 2000 for his work on the brain. He also played a very prominent role in banning fluoridation in Sweden
2. Dr Giulio Natta, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1963; Chemical Eng., Director, Industrial Chemistry Research Center, Polytechnic Institute of Milan, Italy.
3. Dr Joshua Lederberg, Nobel Prize in Medicine, 1958 WHO’s Avisory Health Research Council, Received U.S. National Medal of Science, 1989. Former Chairman of the Cancer Panel of the National Academy of Science.
4. Sir Cyril Norman Hinshelwood, O.M., M.A., D.S., F.R.S., Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1956, University of Oxford
5. Nikolai Semenov, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1956, D. Sc., Director, Institute of Chemical Physics, Moscow,; professor, Leningrad Polytechnic Institute and of Moscow State University; member USSR Academy of Science, Chemical Society of England, and Royal Society of England
6. Hugo Theorell, M.D., Nobel Prize in Medicine, 1955, Director, Bio-Chemistry Department, Nobel Medical Institute, President, Swedish Medical Association. Stated hazards of fluoridation in a report to Swedish Medical Board.
7. W. Hess, Dr. Phil. Nobel Prize Winner in Medicine, 1949, Professor of physiology and former Director of Physiological Institute, University of Zurich, Switzerland.
8. Sir Robert Robinson, O.M., D. Sc., F.R.I.C., F.R.S., M.I.C.E., Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry, 1947, Director, Shell Chemical Company, Profesor of Chemistry, Oxford University
9. James B. Sumner, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1946, former Director of Enzyme Chemistry, Dpt. of Biochemistry and Nutrition, Cornell University
10. Prof Arturi Virtanen, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1945, Director, Biochemical Institute, Helsinki; president, Finnish State Academy of Sciences and Art.
11. Adolf F. J. Butenandt, D. Phil, Nobel Prize Chemistry, 1939, Dir. Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry; professor of phisiological chemistry, Munich University
12. Corneille Jean Francis Heymans, M.D., Nobel Prize Winner Medicine 1938. Professor of Pharmacology, pharmacodynamics and toxicology and Director Heymans Institute of Pharmacology and Therapeutics
13. William P Murphy, M.D., D.Sc., Nobel Prize in Medicine, 1934. Lecturer in Medicine, 1934. Lecturer on Medicine, emeritus, Harvard Medical School; consultant in hematology, Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, Boston
14. Hans K.A.S. von Euler-Chelpin, Nobel Prize winner Chemistry, 1929, Stockholm University, President, Chemical Sociey, Dir. Inst. for Research in Organic Chemistry.
I’m sorry if I “beat people around the head with my views”! It’s just that from where I am looking at things, they are obviously asleep and need to be woken up!