FEAT DAILY NEWSLETTER
Sacramento, California http://www.feat.org
“Healing Autism: No Finer a
Cause on the Planet”
March 6, 2001 Search
www.feat.org/search/news.asp
[The paper this article discusses, “Time Trends in Autism
and in MMR Immunization Coverage in California”, is not peer-reviewed. It is unclear why JAMA would want to publish
something so blatantly flawed: the researcher states six different ways how the
data is inappropriate for drawing any conclusions regarding the rates of
autism, yet then speciously does so anyway.
One suspects the true purpose of this document is to generate “There’s
No Connection to Vaccines and Autism” headlines and sound-bites.
The answer to anti-vaccine propaganda is not
counter-propaganda, it’s sound science.
But puff pieces such as this report will only serve to further discredit
scientific method in the long run.
Public health officials need to wake up and smell the titers:
science-as-agitprop isn’t working in the UK, and it won’t work here. The three-page study will be posted here
when it is made available. -LS By Amy Norton in Reuters Health.]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010306/hl/autism_1.html
Despite a possible link between childhood MMR vaccination
and autism found in one well-publicized study in the UK, there is growing
evidence that no such connection exists. The latest comes from an analysis of
California statistics showing that while autism cases in the state grew rapidly
during the 1980s and early 1990s, the increase showed relation to vaccination rates.
In the debate over
vaccination and autism, these findings may be particularly important because
some reports have cited California’s jump in autism cases as evidence that the
disorder may be caused by the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine. The MMR was
introduced in the US in the 1970s and is routinely given to babies older than
one year.
Dr. Loring Dales and his colleagues at the California
Department of Health Services in Berkeley compared the number of autism cases
reported in the state from 1980 to 1994 with rates of MMR vaccination during
the same period. The investigators found that autism cases exploded by 373%,
but the percentage of children who got the MMR by age 2 increased only
moderately, from 72% to 82% over the 14-year period.
The researchers also discovered that the jump in autism
cases started before a small 1988 increase in rates of MMR vaccination, and
that the autism increase steadily continued after MMR rates had leveled off.
These disparate patterns
show that MMR vaccination could not have triggered California’s steep increase
in autism, Dales told Reuters Health in an interview.
“We can say, for certain, that theory is incorrect,”
he said.
Dales and his colleagues report their findings in the
March 7th issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association
In 1998, UK researchers reported that they had found a
possible link between the MMR vaccine and autism in 12 patients with autism and
bowel disease. The UK team speculated that the vaccine had caused the bowel problems,
which in turn led to poor nutrient absorption and impaired brain development.
But autism is a complex developmental disorder, and
researchers believe that genetic and environmental factors conspire to trigger
it.
According to the National Institute of Child Health and
Human Development, there is no good evidence that bowel disease and poor
nutrient absorption can cause autism.
Since the MMR-autism theory was put forth, studies in the
UK, Sweden and the US have shown that patterns of vaccination and autism among
children do not match. In the case of California, Dales explained, people have
looked at the escalating number of autism cases since the 1980s and linked it
to the standard use of the MMR vaccine around that time. But, he said, they did
not investigate the actual rates of MMR use during the 1980s and 1990s.
“There is no correlation to show that (MMR vaccination) is
a major factor, or even a factor at all, in autism,” Dales said.
However, he noted, it remains unclear whether the vaccine
may be behind a “tiny portion” of autism cases.
As for the stark increase in California’s autism cases,
Dales said, experts debate whether it is a “true increase” or the result of
wider recognition and better diagnosis of the disorder.
SOURCE: The Journal of the American Medical Association
2001;285:1183-
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INFORMATION, DATA, AND MATERIAL CONTAINED, PRESENTED, OR PROVIDED HERE IS FOR
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