Idiots, Savants and Celebrities

In what can usually be ascribed to a slow news day, CNN has dramatically
increased their coverage of autism. They even made a special section for it.
Except that it's not just some random slow news day, today was Autism
Awareness Day (which I didn't know until I was writing this blog). For too
long, autism was ignored or seen as just a developmental problem. When it
wasn't seen as that, it was seen as little more than a cool party trick,
since so many autistic people can do complex mathematics quickly, or play
music at a virtuoso level without training or many other feats that boggle
the average mind. In either event, it was misunderstood in a lot of ways,
much to the detriment of the people with autism and those who had to care
for them. Now, as autism rates rise to record levels (from less than 1
person per thousand in 1996 to almost 5 people per 1000 in 2007), people
have started to re-examine the causes and diagnosis of the disease. Parents
who are trying to become more medically savvy, in the face of shows like ER
and House, have now begun to question some of the facts they have been fed
and have also begun to notice the sharp rise in autism. This has been
coupled with a sharp rise in the number of recommended immunizations for
infants. Some have suggested that the rise in autism is linked to the
increased exposure to thimerosal as a preservative in immunization. Doctors
are disagreeing and parents are blaming the doctors. And the children still
suffer.

To be fair, both the doctors and the parents are concerned about the
children. Doctors care about children and children's disease and want them
to be safe from some of the nastiest things that attacked their
grandparents. There is an immunization for chicken pox, which in my
venerated generation hit almost all of it and was an accepted part of
childhood. Now, there's a vaccine for it. There are flu vaccines that are
recommended. There are vaccines for infants for viruses (viri, if you speak
the original Latin) that many have never heard of and improved vaccines many
of us had as infants. While there are those parents who are against
immunizations, the rational autism advocates are not against all
immunizations. They merely question the amount of immunizations,
specifically pointing the increase of recommended immunizations, from 10 to
36 before age 6. Comparing them both until age 4, it's 10 recommended in
1983 to 34 recommended in 2007. A lot of the new recommended immunizations
are better immunizations than the stuff that was available in 1993, and some
of them are totally new immunizations. Immunizations are tricky business, as
any epidemiologist will tell you. Most of the important ones are not one
shot and done, instead they have to be boosted many times. But, let's run
down the list MidnightRanter style.

Influenza vaccine (prenatal, 6, 18, 30, 42, 54 and 66 months). This is the
vaccine that is most likely to contain thimerosal, so it's the most
controversial. It is available without the thimerosal, but one generally
needs to pay extra for it and tell the doctor you want it. Note, this the
same flu adults get and the vaccine is the same one that doesn't cover
everything. Since there are many strains of the influenza virus, one vaccine
can't cover them all. In a healthy adult, the vaccine can take up to two
weeks to take effect, which means while your body is fighting off the
vaccine (to train it to fight off other viruses), you can get sick with
something else. And, well, a lot of kids get the flu and recover. Then there
are multiple Hepatitis B vaccinations. Read the description of Hep B. Are
small infants in ANY of these groups? Yet, the CDC recommends FOUR
vaccinations in the first 6 months. Hepatitis A is recommended twice, once
at 12 and again at 18 months, even though, again, children are not at risk.
IPV is the new and improved polio vaccine, and polio was once the scourge of
small children, until the work of Dr. Jonas Salk. Polio was a disease that
really affected children, and needs to be stopped as soon as possible. PCV
is a fairly nasty virus, but if you read the information, it says that it's
approved for children over 2, but the CDC recommends a vaccination at 12
months (1 year for those who flunked math) and also fewer doses are needed
for older children. Rotavirus vaccine is recommended 3 times, but it kills
60 children a year, and in the developing world, most of THOSE are
preventable with a hospital visit in time. So, if you cut out Hep A, Hep B,
Rotavirus, and influenza, that's most of the vaccinations right there, and
most of those can be done a single injection after 3 years of age.

While thimerosal isn't in all of these, it's in some of these. And while
some studies have proven that individually no one immunization causes
autism, there is a lack of studies about the combined effect of all these
immunizations have on the infant body. The problem with thimerosal as a
preservative is that it contains mercury. The FDA says it doesn't contain
much and well below the limits, but reading this again, even the FDA admits
that the number of vaccinations a child should receive might push the
mercury limits into toxic levels. After all, mercury is not like bad Chinese
food, you don't just pass it if it makes you sick. Mercury stays in your
system and can build up over time and become more toxic. Note, the CDC
didn't want to go into all this or seriously look at exactly how much damage
can be caused by injecting that much mercury and that many live viruses into
a baby. Mostly because that would be hard to do and might even be cruel to
experiment on. Note, not SO cruel to not recommend all parents inject the
hell out of their kids. Let's face it, we don't know much about infant
epidemiology because either they live or they don't and they can't report
symptoms well. So while one vaccine probably won't kill the average baby,
and hell, a dozen probably won't, but over 30, especially with many
multiplying the same virus, that can't be good for an infant.

I am not a doctor. Jenny McCarthy, strong advocate of autism concerns, isn't
one either. But she speaks up since she has a son who has autism and many
doctors wouldn't give her a straight answer about a lot of these things. She
discovered other resources online that helped her treat her son and found a
new treatment that might help. Doctors said she was nuts, she tried and her
son got better. Not autism free, but a lot closer to average. Doctors then
though that the initial diagnosis must have been wrong, or at least somehow
mistaken. They say it is impossible to treat autism by detoxifying (which is
what she did) the child's system. But, she did, and no doctor wanted to hear
about it. No doctor wanted to follow up and no doctor wanted to examine the
boy and try and replicate the procedures. Note, this is how science usually
advances: someone notices something, they try to make it happen again, try
to figure out why and then try to make a prediction and theory about it.
Science shouldn't reject something out of hand, but that's what is
happening. It's happening because there's a theory that contradicts a
current fact of science: immunizing children saves lives. There's a thing
called "herd immunity", which basically is the idea that if you immunize
enough of a given population, then the population is effective immune to
that disease. It works, but it's not a trump card. Herd immunity is
important and a good goal, but not caring about the possibility of autism is
not the way to go about it.

Because destroying lives is not the way to save lives.

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