Meir,
Thanks for this! I know several parents of children with autism who have
torn themselves up for years over having vaccinated their children, and
later wondering if that caused their son's or daughter's disability.
Kendall
On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 6:00 AM, Meir Weiss <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Lying+about+autism/4073328/story.ht
> ml
>
> Lying about autism
>
> .National Post . Friday, Jan. 7, 2011
> Parents of autistic children face a multitude of special challenges. In
> recent years, this has included the challenge of sorting out legitimate
> medical advice from debunked quackery.
> The most infamous hoax was perpetrated by a now-disgraced doctor named
> Andrew Wakefield. In 1998, he published a flimsy study purporting to
> suggest
> that common childhood vaccinations against measles, mumps and rubella could
> cause autism. The study was based on anecdotal accounts concerning just 12
> children, but millions of anxious parents seized on it. As a result, a
> small
> but significant number of parents in Western nations are now refusing
> life-saving vaccinations for their children.
> Last year, the 1998 Wakefield study was definitively withdrawn by The
> Lancet, the British medical journal that originally had published it. And
> Mr. Wakefield's licence to practice medicine was justly revoked. Yet on the
> Internet, where medical hoaxes and junk-science find fertile soil, Mr.
> Wakefield has remained something of an alternative-medicine cult hero -- in
> large part thanks to the activism of former Playboy model Jenny McCarthy,
> who has been allowed to preach her autism misinformation on Larry King and
> Oprah.
> Now we have fresh evidence that Mr. Wakefield was not just an incompetent
> doctor and researcher, but a liar and a fraud as well: The British Medical
> Journal has published an investigation showing that the disgraced doctor
> willfully altered key facts about the 12 studied children in order to
> advance his vaccine-autism thesis. For instance, Mr. Wakefield claimed that
> all of the 12 children presented normally before vaccination. In fact, five
> children had pre-existing developmental problems.
> Will the new revelations finally put an end to the vaccine-autism hoax? We
> hope so. But we have our doubts: This urban legend has seeped so deep into
> the West's collective lore that it now even permeates parts of the
> mainstream media.
> Consider, for instance, the Toronto Star, which recently published a
> splashy
> feature called "A shot in the dark," giving vague credence to the idea that
> vaccination might cause more harm than good. As of this writing, on the
> afternoon of Jan. 6, the article remains on the Star's website. Under it,
> the Star has included a list of "publications that offer a solid grounding
> in childhood immunization." These include a junk-science website
> misleadingly called the "Vaccine Risk Awareness Network," whose banner
> greeting to web surfers trumpets "evidence" supposedly showing that
> "vaccines can damage a child's developing immune system and brain, leading
> to debilitating and life-threatening disorders like autism."
> Autistic children and their parents deserve our support. This includes
> doing
> everything we can to debunk Andrew Wakefield's hoax, and the bogus reports
> of gullible journalists and celebrities who've been taken in by it.
>
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--
Kendall
An unreasonable man (but my wife says that's redundant!)
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress
depends on the unreasonable man.
-George Bernard Shaw 1856-1950
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