"Clinical observation" != "parents think it's obvious"

Michelle
Flutist

"Cawadias (1953) has said that "the history of medicine has shown that,
whenever medicine has strayed from clinical observation, the result has
been chaos, stagnation, and disaster.""

You obviously didn't understand what my great-grandfather was saying.
Clinical observation is NOT the same thing as parents deciding one thing
happened because of another.  Clinical observation is done by
professionals, people trained to observe in a value-free manner.  Though
two children may have taken the MMR vaccine and ended up with autism, there
could be other factors that caused this.  As no one knows what causes
autism as of yet, I think it's unfair to say that it did or did not cause
it.

So really he was just reporting which vacs the parents blame for their
childrens problems. That's not the same as scientifically proving a link.

Meserlian is an engineer whose specialty is, as best I can determine,
the properties of anti-slip flooring.  His "research report" is a
meaningless mish-mash of garbage and is primarily based on a
not-at-all scientific survey that I gather he did at his church.

As well he might.

 -- David Wright :: alphabeta at prodigy.net
    These are my opinions only, but they're almost always correct.
      "If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants
          were standing on my shoulders."  (Hal Abelson, MIT)

"the survey was non-scientific."

a. Why should anyone be treated with contempt? And, especially, why
should people be treated with contempt simply for questioning the role
of thimerosal? On the one hand, I agree, studies seem to have absolved
thimerosal of causing autism. On the other hand, why would you shoot
any preservative into someone's bloodstream if a good,
preservative-free alternative existed?

My feeling is that some thimerosal defenders (you, for example) really
believe in thimerosal  but that others are vaccine company agents who
try to create a more favorable climate for fighting lawsuits by going
on the Web to shout down thimerosal opponents.

Again: I think thimerosal is fine. I personally would take a shot that
had thimerosal in it. I think that, except in cases where children have
close relatives who've had bad reactions to vaccines, parents who don't
vaccinate their children are foolish. The risks to children from raging
measles epidemics are far greater than those from thimerosal. But
there's nothing flaky about continuing to raise questions and
continuing to collect data.

b. I'm very much in favor of vaccination, but I also think it's
possible that a very small percentage of people could have some kind of
genetic trait that doesn't directly make them autistic but does make
them vulnerable to developing autism sometime after birth.

The triggering factor could be something in vaccine shots. It could be
related to bacterial or viral infections that children acquire when
they go to the doctor, chemicals in the cleaning fluid at the doctor's
office, natural or artificial substances in the lollipops that the
doctors give out, something that happens outside the doctor's office,
or some other external factor.

The genetic vulnerability might be too rare to show up in studies of
the effect of vaccination on the general population.  If that's the
case, studies about the effects of vaccination (or anything else) on
autism in the general population might be irrelevant to treatment
recommendations for children with the vulnerability. You'd have to find
several related children who had problems with vaccines, with at least
one or two having autism/related disorders, then compare and contrast
the children's genomes to see what made them vulnerable. But the thing
is to find children who seemed to develop autism/related disorders in
response to some medical treatment, not just random children who happen
to have autism/related disorders.

Also: just in case anyone out there is really an agent for the vaccine
companies: I don't see why this process should lead to any successful
lawsuits against the companies. The gene testing technology is new, and
any genetic vulnerabilities are, obviously, rare, and might not turn
out to have anything to do with the vaccines themselves. It would
really be in the drug companies' own interest to finance the research
and get to the heart of the matter.

Moreover, this kind of research is a tool the drug companies can use to
develop profitable new drugs. If the vaccine makers/drug companies
found a mutation that made people vulnerable to autism, maybe they
could make billions and billions of dollars by coming up with a drug to
prevent that vulnerability from causing autism.

a. I just read and responded to the original post because it seemed
interesting and I've sometimes wondered if I have a very mild form of
Asperger's syndrome, or some variation on that syndrome. But, just from
reading the New York Times science section, I'm familiar with most of
the studies Mark Probert listed.

Sure, those are great studies, and I agree that they show that
thimerosal-preserved vaccines and other vaccines do not seem to cause
autism in the general population.

But, as far as I can tell without having password access to the
underlying articles, none of the studies focus on children who've
experienced what appears to be sudden onset of autistic symptoms (SOAS)
after receiving medical treatment.

There are some genetic disequilibrum studies, and there are some
vaccine/mercury exposure studies.

But what I would really want to see are genetic disequilibrium studies
that focus on children with SOAS.

Also: Why does it take in-depth knowledge of autism to suggest that
children with SOAS would make interesting topics for genetic research
studies?

It seems to me that, of course, every researcher would want to study
that group. The problem might be finding a bunch of children with SOAS.
If the accounts of the Usenet posters were accurate, then those
posters' themselves might be able to give researchers' contact
information for several children with SOAS.

Of course, that sample would be skewed, but that's fine. The point
would not be to study the effects of vaccines on all children. The
point would be to figure out what's going on with children who have
SOAS.

Thats the most sense I've read on this newsgroup so far

Sarah