From: Steve Harris <sbharris@ix.netcom.com> Newsgroups: misc.health.alternative,misc.kids.breastfeeding,sci.med, sci.med.nursing Subject: Re: The Age of Autism: The Amish anomaly By Dan Olmsted Date: 25 Jun 2005 11:11:44 -0700 Message-ID: <1119723104.411805.284480@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com> >>IDEA is the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act which governs special education in the US. It *mandates* that the educational system find out why kids are not learning and then do something about it. Obviously, this generates far more diagnoses than just sitting on their hands would. << COMMENT: Indeed. Particularly when two of the more common historically accepted reasons why a child isn't learning (A. "Child is stupid" and B. "Teacher is bad") cannot be used, because now forbidden as bigotry or thoughtcrime. Medical stuff is next. Strangely, we continue to have many stupid adults, particularly on school boards and in government. But in our newly enlightened world, we no longer have a single stupid child. Not one. They have been defined out of existance, rather like bums, tramps and hobos. As for Newspeak medical diagnoses to replace "bad teaching" and therefore discontinue the very linguistic existance of bad teachers, these have yet to be explored. But it may yet be that the NEA/AFT will eventually lose sufficient power that society one day decides there is a need for such new diagnoses in teaching staff, and that not all failures to learn can be ascribed to medical diseases of students. Perhaps Teacher Minimal Dysfunction Syndrome will respond to certain stimulant or euphoric prescription drugs. We shall leave this as political topic for the future. No Minimally Disfunctional Teacher Left Behind, I say. SBH From: Steve Harris <sbharris@ix.netcom.com> Newsgroups: misc.kids.breastfeeding,misc.kids.health,alt.health,sci.med, sci.med.nutrition Subject: Re: New Autism Cases Level Off in California, Data Show Date: 15 Jul 2005 12:14:13 -0700 Message-ID: <1121454853.904156.169930@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> TC wrote: > "Experts" (read allopathic medical people) seem to not know much of > anything. COMMENT: "It ain't the things you don't know that hurt you, so much as the things you know, that just ain't so." -- Josh Billings Here's a fact for you non-medical people who think you know it all, to stick in your craws. If one identical twin has autism, the chance the other will have it is somewhere between 63% and 98%. But if the twins are fraternal (born at the same time but sharing only half their genes) if one develops autism the chance the other will, is less than 10%. You think if parents have identical twins they nearly always vaccinate both of them, but if they have non-identical twins they almost always forget to vaccinate ONE of them?? LOL. It's possible that genetics determines sensitivity to vaccines or mercury, though this large an effect would be very strange. But there's no particular reason to implicate vaccines, except that MMR showed up about the time people started to diagnose autism a lot. You have to do better than that. What happens when a group quits vaccinating? When one section of Japan containing 300,000 people quit vaccinating their kids, the rate of autism in the unvaccinated kids kept climbing. Wups. So much for that theory. SBH From: "Sbharris[atsign]ix.netcom.com" <sbharris@ix.netcom.com> Newsgroups: misc.kids.health,sci.med,misc.health.alternative,misc.kids, uk.people.health Subject: Re: The Age of Autism: 'A pretty big secret' ----No autism in vaccine free kids Date: 9 Dec 2005 13:36:51 -0800 Message-ID: <1134164211.550249.65930@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com> john wrote: > "But thousands of children cared for by Homefirst Health Services in > metropolitan Chicago have at least two things in common with thousands > of Amish children in rural Lancaster: They have never been vaccinated. > And they don't have autism. "We have a fairly large practice. We have > about 30,000 or 35,000 children that we've taken care of over the years, > and I don't think we have a single case of autism in children delivered > by us who never received vaccines," said Dr. Mayer Eisenstein, > Homefirst's medical director who founded the practice in 1973." COMMENT: Sorry, but these people haven't kept statistics, nor published, so this "pretty big secret" amounts to a pretty big urban myth. It's not science. Here's a paper where they did keep statistics on a far larger population in Japan--- 300,000 people who simply stopped vaccinating with MMR until by 1993 they'd stopped entirely. Not only did the rate of autism in the unvaccinated children fail to decline, it actually went up. So vaccination is not a large part of the answer to autism in Japan (similar results have been reported in Europe, finding no link between MMR and autism). Again, these Japanese in Kohoku Ward (population 300,000), Yokohama, Japan, continued to see autism in young unvaccinated children at an increasing rate, after *stopping* MMR vaccination of children in that ward. If anything, stopping MMR is associated with the problem becoming worse. It certainly didn't make it any better. As the authors point out, if the thimerosal/MMR vaccination hypothesis as primary cause of autism has anything to it, this study result is impossible. These people did what the Chicago docs say they did, except on an entire population whose children could ALL be tracked. The results are (moreover) reported, analyzed statistically, and published in a peer-reviewed journal. J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2005 Jun;46(6):572-9. No effect of MMR withdrawal on the incidence of autism: a total population study. Honda H, Shimizu Y, Rutter M. Yokohama Rehabilitation Center, Yokohama, Japan. h...@yokohama.email.ne.jp BACKGROUND: A causal relationship between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and occurrence of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has been claimed, based on an increase in ASD in the USA and the UK after introduction of the MMR vaccine. However, the possibility that this increase is coincidental has not been eliminated. The unique circumstances of a Japanese MMR vaccination program provide an opportunity for comparison of ASD incidence before and after termination of the program. METHODS: This study examined cumulative incidence of ASD up to age seven for children born from 1988 to 1996 in Kohoku Ward (population approximately 300,000), Yokohama, Japan. ASD cases included all cases of pervasive developmental disorders according to ICD-10 guidelines. RESULTS: The MMR vaccination rate in the city of Yokohama declined significantly in the birth cohorts of years 1988 through 1992, and not a single vaccination was administered in 1993 or thereafter. In contrast, cumulative incidence of ASD up to age seven increased significantly in the birth cohorts of years 1988 through 1996 and most notably rose dramatically beginning with the birth cohort of 1993. CONCLUSIONS: The significance of this finding is that MMR vaccination is most unlikely to be a main cause of ASD, that it cannot explain the rise over time in the incidence of ASD, and that withdrawal of MMR in countries where it is still being used cannot be expected to lead to a reduction in the incidence of ASD. PMID: 15877763 [PubMed - in process] From: "Sbharris[atsign]ix.netcom.com" <sbharris@ix.netcom.com> Newsgroups: misc.kids.health,sci.med,misc.health.alternative,misc.kids, uk.people.health Subject: Re: The Age of Autism: 'A pretty big secret' ----No autism in vaccine free kids Date: 12 Dec 2005 19:06:30 -0800 Message-ID: <1134443190.494028.115800@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com> mike wrote: > On Fri, 09 Dec 2005 13:36:51 -0800, Sbharris[atsign]ix.netcom.com wrote: > > > > Here's a paper where they did keep statistics on a far larger > > population in Japan--- 300,000 people who simply stopped vaccinating > > with MMR until by 1993 they'd stopped entirely. Not only did the rate > > of autism in the unvaccinated children fail to decline, it actually > > went up. > > The article was about thimerosal, not just any particular vaccine. The article was about childhood vaccination. A Chicago group of doctor is claiming that their group of unvaccinated children are nearly free of autism. Historically, MMR vaccines (Wakefield, etc) and mercury as thimerosal in vaccines (not MMR, but others) have separately been blamed for autism, by different groups. They have both been separately studied a number of times, and there's no basis for either claim. http://aapnews.aappublications.org/cgi/content/citation/e2004128v1 The claim that mercury in vaccines causes autism is especially unlikely, given that a lot is known about what mercury does to the brain, and the results aren't at all like what is seen in autism. Nor did the children genuinely poisoned by mercury (as in Minamata Bay, Japan) come down with a rash of autism. Symptoms of genuine mercury poisining in children are completely different from autism, and in line with animal results. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_disease Mercury poisoning kills cortical neurons, and results in small brains and small head circumference. Purkinje cells are preserved in the cerebellum. Most austistic kids have an abundance of cortical cells and normal weight brains and head circumference, and if they have cellular loss, it's Purkinje cells. Duh. Just because you have a candidate general neural toxin and a kid with (some kind of) brain problem, does not mean one is a likely cause of the other. This is a dying argument, in any case. Mercury has generally been phased out of all standard childhood vaccines since 2000 or so, and yet the incidence of autism in kids under 5 has shown no sign of decreasing. The mercury nuts are down to a deperate ploy of blaming the flu vaccine. What that one finally goes, they'll have to blame dental filings, and when those have completely switched to epoxy (as most have), they'll be stuck with the Midnight Merthiolate Monger. Somebody in this article already talks about children fed massive doses of salmon. The horror. Next morning they don't want to be hugged, and off it goes. SBH |