A dangerous myth that won’t go away

[Guest guest]

I can't find a web link for this article that was published in the National Post, but if you'd like to write to Kay, the journalist who wrote this 'article', his email address is jkay@....My comments are below;As someone who claims to support science and oppose those whose only reason for believing that vaccinations were implicated in their child's descent into autism was simply because they saw that connection with their own eyes, your article does a lot of criticising without any attempt to provide evidence for the opposing view. Where are the studies that demonstrate conclusively that vaccinated children are less likely to fall within the autistic spectrum then the unvaccinated? Where are the studies to compare the overall health of the vaccinated vs the unvaccinated? That's right - those studies haven't yet been done!And where is the concern tha in the US today, one child in 67 is now autistic according to the DSMIV - and that figure is 1 in 38 when we look at boys? If vaccinations are not implicated in this huge increase, what has caused it? You can't say vaccines aren't causally linked until you do the studies and that simply has not been done.How many more children have to be lost to this dreadful disorder that destroys not only the child - but their entire family - before you say perhaps we should stop criticising the parents and the many, many good doctors who are helping their children to recover - and start looking at what is stopping the basic research that needs to be done to answer this question once and for all? And by science, I don't mean retrospective or epidemiological studies - those branches of science are close to useless when it comes to this issue. We need good clinical data - and we need doctors to be investigating the families whose children became autistic after vaccination - listening to the parents instead of treating them like fools as you most assuredly are. Parents are not fools and when it comes to their kids - they are the ultimate expert. Kay, it is time for you to pull your head out of the sand and to start looking at the disaster that is occurring around you. Stop making excuses and start doing what you're supposed to do - report openly and research thoroughly.Oh, and one more thing, you are wrong about the outbreak of pertussis that is now occurring in the US. You know, the biggest outbreak for 50 years? You are saying that this is due to lower vaccination rates but even the government is saying that's not the case. The incidence of pertussis is not affected whether you look at areas with high, low or median rates of pertussis vaccination. The vaccine is simply not working - and in fact, it may be causing the bacteria to become more virulent in much the same way as the overuse of antibiotics causes resistant strains of bacteria to emerge. So please, if you do support science, how about using some in your writing and put the blame where it belongs; with the vaccines that aren't protecting and the doctors and government officials who are seeing the flames rise all around them but just keep throwing more fuel on the fire.Meryl DoreyAustralian Vaccination Network**************************************************************************Mainstream media are complicit in sustaining the debunked theory that vaccines cause autismOn April 2, 2008, World Autism Awareness Day, Larry King devoted his nightly CNN program to “ McCarthy’s Austism Fight.” As soon as McCarthy was introduced, anyone who’d followed the debate over the devastating neurological condition instantly knew what to expect: Since 2007, the former Playboy model had become the world’s most influential spout of autism misinformation.Sure enough, a few minutes into the broadcast, McCarthy began telling King about the astounding autism “discoveries” she’d made on alternative-health websites, which, she claimed, had allowed her own son to “recover” from the incurable condition. She then launched into the familiar, discredited theories linking autism to vaccines:McCarthy Parent after parent after parent says I vaccinated my baby, they got a fever and then they stopped speaking and then became autistic. King Is your link scientific or statistical?McCarthy Well, I believe that parents’ anecdotal information is science-based information. And when the entire world is screaming the same thing — doctor, I came home. He had a fever. He stopped speaking and then he became autistic. I can’t — I can see if it was just one parent saying this. But when so many — and I speak to thousands of moms every weekend and they’re all standing up and saying the same thing. It’s time to start listening to that. That is science-based information. Parents’ [anecdotes] is science-based information.Of all the medical conspiracy theories that traffic on the Internet, one of the most durable and widespread is the notion that vaccines cause autism, and that pharmaceutical companies and the government are plotting to cover it up. Since 1998, when the theory was first put forward in a (since debunked and retracted) study published in the Lancet medical journal, millions of parents across the Western world have avoided vaccinating their children, leaving them exposed to deadly, and entirely preventable, diseases such as measles, pertussis and Hib influenza. A disproportionate number of the parents opting out are from wealthy areas of the country, such as Marin County in California, where McCarthy’s brand of quackery has gained a foothold among web-surfing soccer moms.Vaccines typically are administered to small children in the first two years of life, at around the same time that the first behavioural symptoms of autism manifest themselves. Many doctors believe autism is a genetic disorder programmed into a child’s brain before birth. But parents cannot see their child’s genes. What they can see is the steel needle that penetrates their thenapparently-perfect bundle of joy, injecting a mysterious foreign substance that (according to strangers wearing white lab coats), prevents an as-yet hypothetical medical condition. When this experience is closely followed by a devastating diagnosis, a link is forged between the two experiences in the minds of many parents — a link that, as many will confess quite candidly, can never be shaken by science. “I know what happened to my son after he got his [measles, mumps and rubella] shot,” the mother of an autistic child told science writer Arthur . “I have no doubt. There’s no way they’ll convince me that all these kids were not damaged by vaccines.”All of which to say, one can understand why parents buy into such myths: They are psychologically traumatized people wrestling with a devastating medical condition. The people I blame are their media enablers — including not only Larry King, but also Oprah Winfrey, who has given air time to similar misinformation. These people are not traumatized. They should know better.So, too, should Gordon, the “Family Issues Reporter” for the Toronto Star. Earlier this month, Gordon was given much of the Star’s “Weekend Living” section for a splashy feature called “A shot in the dark: Are the benefits of vaccination worth the risks? A new generation questions the status quo.”Writers don’t pick their headlines. So I can’t blame Gordon for the words that appeared over her article — words that falsely (and dangerously) suggest that scientists are “in the dark” about the wisdom of vaccination; and that “a new generation” of parents is rejecting the conventional wisdom. In fact, most Canadian parents — something close to 90% according to available data — vaccinate their children. The ones who don’t are the ones who lack access to state-of-theart medical care, or who have become confused by exactly this kind of equivocal he-said/she-said approach to the vaccination issue.The centrepiece of Gordon’s article was a mother named Nadine Silverthorne, who is refusing to provide scheduled vaccinations for her daughter Lucy. Nadine, we learn, is torn. On one hand, the medical establishment is telling her that vaccination is the way to go. On the other, she is getting conflicting information from “friends and family,” from “her followers on Twitter,” from her “homeopath” (i.e. placebo doctor), and from various unspecified “websites.”Gordon is no McCarthy or Larry King: To her credit, she supplies a lot of legitimate scientific information in her article, including data about recent polio, measles and pertussis outbreaks caused, at least in part, by a failure to vaccinate. And for all I know, Gordon herself gives no credence to medical conspiracy theories. But by suggesting that Silverthorne’s dithering about whether or not to vaccinate Lucy reflects two legitimate medical doctrines, the Star writer is giving undeserved credibility to peddlers of junk science. And she is doing so on the eve of flu season, when families are considering whether to get their shots.Then it gets worse: In the “to jab or not to jab” sidebar to Gordon’s Star piece, the newspaper listed off the “Vaccine Risk Awareness Network” (VRAN) as one of the “publications that offer a solid grounding in childhood immunization.” Really? Go to the VRAN site and you will find, front-and-centre, the completely discredited claim that “An emerging body of evidence indicates that vaccines can damage a child’s developing immune system and brain, leading to debilitating and life-threatening disorders like autism.” Yet VRAN now can claim that a large Canadian newspaper has stamped this nonsense with its seal of approval.How many children will go unvaccinated because their parents read Gordon’s article? Few, I hope. And even those likely won’t develop deadly illnesses. That’s because of a phenomenon called “herd immunity”: When the vast majority of a population is vaccinated against an illness, even the non-vaccinated minority is protected because there are few potential carriers they can contract the disease from.In other words, parents who do not vaccinate their children are, quite literally, parasites of the herd. While the likes of Nadine Silverthorne get to indulge the trendy, dilettante soccer-mom medical theories they read about on Twitter, their children are (mostly) protected because of the responsible decisions made by the majority of parents who quietly follow the sound advice provided to us by pediatricians. But let’s all remember that herd immunity only works when the ratio of vaccinated to non-vaccinated individuals is high — 9:1 or thereabouts. If it drops far below that, epidemics can start. Then, tragically, parents will learn that the answer to that spurious Star headline — “Are the benefits of vaccination worth the risks?” — really was never in doubt.• 26 Nov 2010• National Post (National Edition)• JONATHAN KAYNo web link