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