sarah2403 said:
If you could briefly say why you posted that link, it would be helpful. With just the link itself, I don't know why you posted it.
NAS5794 said:I think, and this is going by my own childhood as well as what I've seen, that it is not the vaccine that jumpstarts the autistic behaviours, but the stress of the vaccination process. I'm pretty sure I was completely fine after my MMR, or I'd have heard differently from my parents, but I had huge issues with food for a lot of my childhood, which started during a big family holiday celebrating my gran and granddad's golden wedding anniversary. That may or may not have anything to do with it, and I guess I'll never know, but I didn't go a normal baby and come back the changeling these people seem to see us as.
I remember getting a vaccination when I was a few years old. I was being assessed to see how my early development was going, and was given a vaccination at the same time. Unfortunately, my ASD wasn't spotted at the time, and it's only now, roughly forty years later, that I've finally had it diagnosed. But I do remember being distressed by the injection - as lots of young children are - so I wouldn't be surprised at vaccination being a possible trigger of ASD manifesting itself. But the ASD has to be there already for symptoms to be triggered.
I also got fussy with food when I was growing up. I think there were times when I became really quite limited in what I would eat. And I do remember that if there was a slight difference with otherwise familiar food, I would be put off by the difference, and wouldn't want to eat it. Even now, I just tend to stick with familiar food, and am quite the opposite of adventurous.
And I believe I also have Irritable Bowel Syndrome, too.
That bread stuff is excellent!
You might also enjoy DHMO.
The linked article includes the following.
The number of autism cases has soared over the past four decades — at the last count researchers found one in 64 British children have some kind of autistic condition — and there has been widespread speculation over the cause of this widespread curse on so many families. In the Eighties, only four in every 10,000 children showed any signs of autism.
I was still growing up during the Eighties. Do they include me in that "four in every 10,000"? I've only recently been diagnosed as having an ASD, so I doubt they're including me, even though I've had my ASD since birth, or not long after. I also wonder if they're using the term "autism" more narrowly and specifically than the broader sounding "some kind of autistic condition". And they could have said 'one in every 2,500', to be more consistent with "one in 64". Saying "only four in every 10,000" sounds like a way to exaggerate the apparent difference.
The consensus of medical opinion in Britain remains that autism symptoms emerge suddenly and inexplicably around the age at which MMR is administered — making it inevitable that some cases will arise just after the jab.
Most doctors continue to argue that this is merely coincidence and that no convincing mechanism to explain a link has been set out.
If event A doesn't cause condition B, A won't magically prevent B from appearing shortly after A. If you replace MMR jabs with waving a stage magician's magic wand over the child's head, you'll still sometimes get ASDs appearing shortly afterwards. Given enough opportunities - and a huge number of children are given MMR jabs each year - there will be some cases where ASDs appear shortly afterwards, just as a matter of chance.
To see whether or not there is some causal link between MMR jabs and the appearance of ASDs, where MMR jabs are somehow causing ASDs to appear or even causing the ASDs themselves, you'd have to carry out proper statistical research. You can't really determine such causal links when looking only at individual cases, or looking only at all such cases where ASDs appear shortly after MMR jabs. You have to do a proper analysis, where you also look at all the other cases where ASDs appear at other times, where no ASDs appear, where MMR jabs are given and where MMR jabs aren't given. And even then, you have to control for various other variables that might be somehow relevant and might somehow correlate with whether or not MMR jabs are even given, such as improvements in diagnosing ASDs and the introduction of MMR. It's not simple and straightforward.
It would be particularly interesting to see how many cases there are where ASDs appear shortly before an MMR jab is due. If the number is similar to the number of cases where ASDs appear shortly after an MMR jab, that would strongly suggest that the medical experts are right, and the Italian court is wrong.
In this particular case, it's interesting that the MMR jab was delayed because of a bout of gastro-enteritis, and that diarrhoea followed just after the MMR jab, with dietary changes making quite a difference some months later. It looks like problems might have started before the MMR jab.
It is well established that some people do commit the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. There is no particular reason to believe that cases of ASDs appearing shortly after MMR jabs should be mutually exclusive with parents committing that fallacy. So, we should expect some parents in such cases to commit that fallacy, and genuinely believe the MMR jabs cause ASDs when it's really just chance timing.
Sensationalist journalism - of which the Daily Mail is notorious - doesn't help such parents or children. Perhaps Ben Goldacre of Bad Science will have something more helpful to say.
In 2008, a girl called Hannah Poling was awarded $1.5 million damages by the U.S. government when a court ruled that receiving nine vaccines in one day (including the MMR) had caused her autistic condition.
But the court said that Hannah had an underlying cell disorder, mitochondria, which had been aggravated by the vaccinations and manifested itself as autism.
Mitochondria isn't a cell disorder. Mitochondria are parts of our cells. There are disorders involving mitochondria, but they're not called "mitochondria". How much of the rest of the article is similarly sloppy?
I haven't looked at the Italian court ruling or case in any detail at all, but I am certainly sceptical about what this Daily Mail article says.
