The Age of Autism: The Amish Elephant - NO AUTISM IN UNVACCINATED POPULATIONS ~ A specter is haunting the medical and journalism establishments of the United States: Where are the unvaccinated people with autism? That is just about the only way to explain what now appears to be a collective resistance to considering that question. And like all unanswered questions, this raises another one: Why? What is the problem with quickly and firmly establishing that the autism rate is about the same everywhere and for everybody in the United States, vaccinated or unvaccinated? Wouldnt that stop all the scientifically illiterate chatter by parents who believe vaccinations made their children autistic? Wouldnt it put to rest concerns that -- despite the removal of a mercury-containing preservative in most U.S. vaccines -- hundreds of millions of children in the developing world are possibly at risk if that preservative is in fact linked to autism? Calling this issue The Amish Elephant reflects reporting earlier this year in Age of Autism that the largely unvaccinated Amish may have a relatively low rate of autism. That apparent dissimilarity is, in effect, a proverbial elephant in the living room -- studiously ignored by people who dont want to deal with it and dont believe they will have to. Here are a few cases in point. Earlier this month the National Consumers League conference in Washington held a session on communicating issues around vaccine safety. I was on the panel and talked about the Amish and autism. In the Q&A session that followed, the first question was for me. Is this a proper role for a journalist, or is this just a straw dog set up there with a preliminary answer? It not only showed up where you wrote it. It was all over the place. You did very, very well for UPI (at which point I said, Thank you -- please tell my bosses that!) but the question is, did you do very, very well for America? Is it appropriate for a journalist -- you werent reporting, you were investigating. And I just wonder if you think its an appropriate role for you to play. My answer: Theres different roles for the press. Thats certainly a reasonable question. That is investigative reporting. This idea is something thats already been discarded -- that theres any reason why you would want to look in an unvaccinated population. One of my favorite comments about journalism is that its the wild card of American democracy. The First Amendment says we can do (in the sense of reporting about) whatever we want. So one of our privileges is to get an idea in our head and go look at it. My questioner was not finished. I wasnt questioning whether you have a First Amendment right to do it. I think this is more of a question of the ethics, of what value we are bringing to the debate. My response: Thats probably not a good one for me to answer. Obviously I thought it was ethical. At that point a fellow panelist, Dr. Louis Cooper, former president of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a staunch vaccine defender, spoke up. I would jump in and say I thought it was ethical and I think it was useful, said Cooper, a courtly and unfailingly courteous Manhattan pediatrician. As youve learned, it was annoying to many people. I wasnt annoyed by it because I thought you kept the process and the debate and the discussion going forward. And we have to do that for one another. That did not end the discussion. A few minutes later a public-health professor from -- where else? Harvard -- did her own version of Jeopardy!, offering the correct answer in the form of a question. This question is for Dan. Did you mention the outbreak of polio that happened in the Amish community in the Netherlands that caused widespread problems there, and also the fact that thered been some context with respect to history in our country in trying to reach out to the Amish to actually encourage them to try to benefit from some of the vaccine technology to the extent that we could? So theres been a long history in this country of the CDC trying to reach out to them to the extent that they could. Also with respect to polio, I think whats really amazing is its such a great story, this is such an exciting time, in the sense that we are very close to global eradication. What that means is weve gone from 1988 when we had 350,000 estimated paralytic polio cases in the world every year to roughly a thousand. Its very exciting that in fact we dont have the terror or the hysteria and all of the fear that surrounded disease. I just want to remind everyone that one thing thats very important in the context of reporting these stories is making sure that people do remember and also realize with infectious disease is these things can come back, and until they are eradicated they can come back and devastate us just as much as they did before, except now there are a lot more people. Theres some related news that people might find interesting. A headline in the Washington Post today, Polio outbreak occurs among Amish families. So I thought people might be interested in that. At that point the moderator, Dr. Roger Bernier of the Centers for Disease Control, said time was getting short -- why was I not surprised? -- and asked for the next question. One thing Ive noticed is the more that people want to lecture instead of learn, the more they speak in breathless run-on sentences that are hard to stop, slow down or even diagram. They leave one with the unspoken idea that dialogue -- opening the door to new information -- is somehow dangerous. These exchanges reminded me of the response I got from Dr. Julie Gerberding, the CDC director, when I asked her this summer, verbatim: Has the government ever looked at the autism rate in an unvaccinated U.S. population, and if not, why not?... Continues @ upi/Health_News/2005/10/29/The-Age-of-Autism-The-Amish-Elephant/UPI-44901130610898/ By DAN OLMSTED
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 07:15:19 +0000
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