Is is just a coincidence that California is having an epidemic of whooping cough after years of autism-related vaccination freak-outs? Perhaps following the vaccination schedule of an ex-Playboy-model celebrity instead of the CDC’s might not be the awesome plan it appeared to be at first blush.
Coincidence?
by $8 blue check mistermix| 83 Comments
This post is in: Bring on the Brawndo!
Comrade Javamanphil
Science is for those that don’t believe in American Exceptionalism. Also, herd immunity. (Which apparently only gets you so far.)
valdivia
but but but…okay I got nothing. I really do not understand how anyone thinks that doing research on the internet about vaccination will give you better answers than those of the CDC. Isn’t this what climate change denialists do with the science too?
CADoc
Jenny needs to stay away from any gathering of pediatricians or family doctors, she we’ll be beaten by an angry mob.
Actually pertussis has a natural peak every 5-7 years and many adults who were immune as kids due to their vaccinations lose their immunity over time. Everyone needs to get a fresh tetanus shot, which now has a booster to pertussis in it. Whooping cough doesn’t kill adults but it causes you to lose a miserable month out of your life. And you wouldn’t want to be the one who infected a baby who’s too young to have completed their full set of vaccines and are very vulnerable. Those little ones do die. 5 in California so far this year.
jwb
On the other hand, I’ve been diagnosed with pertussis three times in the last four years, and I’ve had the shot. (It now comes as an added bonus with your tetanus shot.) I believe I had whooping cough the first time, but the other two diagnoses were just because it had become the diagnosis of the day. My point being that, unless these diagnoses were confirmed by tests, this epidemic may in part be the result of overaggressive diagnoses by doctors. (All of my tests came back negative, even the first, when I’m pretty sure I did have it; but the health department checked in with me each time simply because the doctor had diagnosed me.)
heydave
Keep it up and you’ll make rubber faced asshole Jim Carey cry.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@jwb: These are confirmed cases, which means that the diagnosis meets clinical case definitions and is confirmed by PCR or B. pertussis culture isolation. Probable cases meet clinical case definitions but are not confirmed by lab work.
ETA: Jenny is a fucking nutcase. Her mammalian protuberances are okay, though.
4tehlulz
Now that the “Autism Community” has moved onto flouride as the REAL cause of autism, expect more rotten teeth as parents don’t want to expose their children to demon flouride.
No really. I’m serious. Communists are stealing our precious bodily fluids.
CADoc
@4tehlulz: that’s just great. I hadn’t heard that theory yet. Sorry for the thumping noise as I beat my head on the desk.
Comrade Jake
Oh c’mon. I love it when McCarthy goes on the teevee and talks up her causes and medical knowledge with Larry King. It’s just like Suzanne Somers, except she’s not as bright.
PurpleGirl
Whooping cough in California explains the commercial I’m seeing for the adult pertussis vaccine.
(Woman holding a child, voice over about baby being safe when held by mommy, etc. etc., and then voice over talks about whooping cough and adults needing to be vaccinated. However they don’t mention the link to adults loosing immunity from earlier vaccination.)
Prof. K&G
@4tehlulz: If they’re gonna be insane, I’d much rather they be insane about fluoride. Tooth rot is not infectious, unlike, y’know, polio.
Emma
I feel sorry for the parents of autistic children. They are desperate to find a reason, any reason, for the child’s problems, other than “we don’t know yet”. And the thing is, some children do react well to certain things, like no wheat on their diet (my sister’s godson is a good example of this). But those things are amelioration, not cure, and they work or nor work on an individual basis. And if something doesn’t work, they go after the next thing, however freakish.
Bill H
Not to mention the measles epidemic that San Diego had last year.
dmsilev
In the paper this morning:
(from here).
That’s one of the so-called chelation therapy compounds, for those keeping track of the different “alternate” autism treatment methods.
dms
New Yorker
global warming denial, 9/11 truth, creationism, MMR vaccines causing autism, homeopathic medicine….
People really need to learn how to keep rational thought going when dealing with complex and/or frightening subjects instead of just jumping on the first conspiracy theory bandwagon that comforts them.
Rathskeller
@4tehlulz: Goddammit. On the other hand, those poor parents could do worse things. That is, if they all switch to fluoride-free water in the vain hope it will help their children, it won’t do as much damage as avoiding all vaccinations.
LiberalTarian
I dunno. You ever read the risks fact sheet they give you when they vaccinate your child? They tell you up front you are rolling the dice that your child won’t be that rare case that has a serious reaction. I know a man who came down with full-blown polio when he was vaccinated as a child–he is 35 now and he won’t live to 50. Maybe the huge rise in autism isn’t from vaccines, but there are still plenty of risks associated with vaccination.
Vaccines are a risk/benefit agreement that parents make with society. But, if your kid is the one in the million who has a life debilitating or fatal reaction to a vaccine, society doesn’t throw you a ticker tape parade for your sacrifice.
Tonybrown74
Wow! Being from a Third World Country, it is a bit of shock to hear this is happening in California, even knowing about the sorry state that CA is in.
Next you’ll be hearing about Dengue Fever or Dysentery …
frankdawg
You certainly do not want to take the word of scientists and doctors in this matter as they have a vested interest in the outcome. Instead you should go with celebrity gut-instinct which as no bias, has never been shown to be wrong and will stand up to the rigorous peer review of other celebrities.
This is all part & parcel of the decline of human development – The Great Endarkenment. The original Dark Ages lasted about 1000 years, from 300 – 1300 C.E. Then came the Great Enlightenment and reason, learning, direct observation and the scientific method broke through for the betterment of all. Assuming humans still exist in 3010 maybe they will do it all again.
BTW – Anyone here remember Laetrile?
Quick – give me some Brawndo then leave me to my ‘batin’!
celticdragonchick
Snark is just fucking hilarious until you are a parent of an autistic child and you have no idea at the time why or how it happened, you goddamned jackass.
yeah, we now have a clearer picture that it is largely genetics with possibly some environmental trigger…but that wasn’t clear at all in 1995 or 2000. Try for one fucking minute to put yourself in that position and see if you would be so sanguine about your kid having inexplicable behaviors, flapping arms, not speaking, and refusing almost every type of food you put in front of him or her.
Just try out the social isolation your family experiences since you now have “one of those kids” and don’t get invited to certain social functions, or can’t go to restaurants because you know your child will badly freak out at the stimulation and noise.
You have no fucking clue how desperate you might be to find a cause…and maybe even a partial cure…when you live through the experience. You would rather mock the ignorance of desperate parents who would trade everything they own for answers.
You are a souless asshole.
celticdragonchick
@Emma:
Thank you for “getting it”.
For all the others here mocking “dark age superstition” parents…you might be surprised at how desperate and frightened you can become when it is your own child involved.
ricky
There is more than enough California to make some great barrier islands off Louisiana. Lots of shovel ready work for
a great nation.
Thanks for the link. I have always looked at Jenny McCarthy for the articles.
frankdawg
@LiberalTarian:
The polio vaccine issue is an interesting case. They switched from a dead virus to a not-dead one because the not-dead one provided a slightly better reduction in polio rates. It turned out that the not-dead one also cause an increase in polio, primarily via transmission of the virus from the vaccinated infant to care-giver. I believe they went back to the dead one.
Science, unlike Mrs. Carrey is self-correcting.
Onkel Bob
@CADoc: I was one of those with it back in ’95 during the last outbreak in Santa Clara County. Not only was I vaccinated as a child, but 10 years military service meant I was vaccinated again and again. Ayup, you lose immunity over the years, but it is not too dangerous to adults.
As for the dangers of vaccines, well you must wonder as many service members get poked early and often. I was on a deployment schedule from hell, and as such was vaccinated every 6 months for plague, and everything else on a yearly basis.
celticdragonchick
@Onkel Bob:
Yep. I had the mandatory flu vaccination in the Army every year along with all the others, although the flu vaccine in 1994 actually made me sick. I had some sort of reaction to it.
frankdawg
@celticdragonchick:
No, I don’t think he was mocking parents for their desperation. I know I wouldn’t. I would however question the thinking of a parent that would chose to take healthcare advice from a playboy fold-out instead of people who spend their lives trying to improve the health of humans.
I don’t blame the parents. I blame the evil people who misled them & the inane media that refuses to do the moderately harder task of looking into claims being made and takes the easy route to over-hype claims.
4tehlulz
@celticdragonchick: My child is involved, and I don’t seem to have the urge to expose him to polio, poison him with colloidal silver, or kill him in “attachment therapy.”
I must be a bad parent.
twiffer
@celticdragonchick: that is an acceptable defense when there is no data to counter it. however, as we do now know vaccines are not a cause of autism, continuing to loudly proclaim such a falsehood and trying to convince people to NOT VACCINATE their children is dangerous and wrong.
simply put, while i would do anything to try and help my son were he to fall ill or develop any sort of syndrome, my love and desire to protect and heal him does not give me the right to endanger others. the problem is not desperate parents searching for answers; the problem is people continuing to push a lie and putting others at risk because of their own despair.
Emma
celticdragonchick: I think this is one of those things that remains a very academic issue until it hits your own family. When my sister’s godson was diagnosed it brought the roof down on all of us.
Original Lee
@celticdragonchick: I don’t think he was mocking the parents, exactly. As my nephew has Asperger’s and ADHD, I have been with my sister and her family to help them deal with the whole situation. The search for an answer is indeed heartbreaking.
But it never occurred to my sister for an instant that immunizations were to blame – it was obvious fairly early on that my nephew had issues. She worried about the impact of her prior use of birth control pills, she wondered about every little detail of her pregnancy, labor, and delivery, she had their water, house, yard, toys, car, etc. tested. She researched the vitamins she took while nursing. And so on. So I can understand the desire to latch onto anything that sounds like a reasonable explanation. I just don’t understand why taking advice from a celebrity makes sense.
Evinfuilt
@Emma:
I don’t feel as bad, I know I should. But its nearly certain that most forms of Autism have a genetic link. Some look to be related to having “old sperm” (okay, old men producing faulty sperm.)
And of course, most forms of Autism are simply a learning disorder, which is something that can be managed with proper therapy.
McCarthy is pushing a victim mentality, as her follow-up to her child being a space alien brought to Earth to bring enlightenment to all. Of course, then her space alien became a mortal child who had Autism, but then was miraculously cured of Autism by taking away Gluten… or something like that, her story started insane and got worse over time (and yet, she gets more and more followers.)
She does so much harm, I have trouble understanding what is going on in her brain. I can look at my aunt and see what a lack of vaccines means to our future. She’s alive, she’s intelligent, but she also walks very funny due to childhood Polio (which her youngest brother didn’t survive.) She’s also a retired doctor now, and she worked tirelessly to make sure other people don’t have to deal with those issues, or forget about the harm of those childhood diseases.
Seanly
@celticdragonchick:
Sorry, but uneducated celebritards pushing psuedoscience & other garbage are more of a danger than the vaccines. Three or four anecdotes from distraught parents carry more weight than study after study showing no link between vaccines and autism?
Emma
Evinfuilt: Autism is a complex set of issues, not a single one, and it seems to be a combination of genetics and environmental triggers. Some thing work (my sister’s godson’s attention span and interaction with other people improved amazingly after all wheat products were taken out of his diet, and I mean ALL), some things don’t. But when it is your kid and you’re desperate, you’ll try anything.
The problem comes when those parents create a hazard for other children. I do understand that, and I’m not condoning it. It’s just a matter of empathizing, not approving.
Seanly: celtidragonchick is not saying that she believes this or approves of it. She’s simply reacting to what she felt was the snark implied in the comment. (sorry to speak for someone else, but this was really an unfair knock). And, by the way, scientists did take the vaccine – autism link seriously enough to look into it. Several large studies, iirc. That’s how the link was disproved.
celticdragonchick
@4tehlulz:
I guess it’s nice you didn’t react the way that about 85% of everybody else did at the time… sarcastic, smug, patronizing sneer of a reply notwithstanding.
celticdragonchick
@Seanly:
I wasn’t addressing that issue. I was addressing the tenor of the comment by mistermix.
celticdragonchick
@Emma:
Emma, again…thank you.
Yes, the autism/vaccine link was taken seriously at the time, and studies eventually disproved it.
Daddy-O
My daughter has autism.
I was concerned that the vaccine issue was true for a long while, but reality set back in. Now we can’t blame it on that.
But we can certainly blame the whooping cough epidemic on parents dumb enough to not be able to understand science and statistics…well, dumb is too harsh.
Human medicine is an art as well as a science, but it’s by far MOSTLY science. Trust your doctor, for crissakes.
Daddy-O
What’s causing the recent-years epidemic of autism?
Probably, most likely, kids are being diagnosed today that just slipped under the radar in the past as being ‘different’ or strange…now we finally know WHY they’re different.
That’s my best answer.
chopper
@Rathskeller:
funny thing is, aren’t kids of all stripes drinking tons of bottled water instead of tap? i’m betting fluoride intake across the board is lower now than it was a decade ago. you’d think that autism rates would have plummeted at the same rate as tap water consumption.
Ken
Lately I’ve been reading old comic books, in reprint collections. These often include the ads, and it’s sobering to see the ones for the March of Dimes polio campaign. They also sometimes had little PSAs (or whatever they called them in the 1950s) telling kids how to avoid polio. I’m just glad that thanks to vaccinations, kids don’t have to see these in their comics today.
Let me check – yes, they’re on line. Do a Google image search with keywords “March of Dimes polio” for the campaign ads; or “polio precautions” for the PSA (it’s the small cartoon, starting with the warning “DON’T mix with new groups”).
Seanly
@celticdragonchick:
My bad.
I had an uncle with MS who began getting more & more desperate as it ravaged more & more of his body. He began trying all sorts of quack remedies – from pyramid power to removing all his fillings to dangerous diets. None of it helped one damn bit. Makes me hostile to psuedoscience.
And the slow slide of Americans to more & more magical thinking and pride in their ignorance doesn’t help my cynicism (see Palin, Sarah).
chopper
@celticdragonchick:
sorry dogg, but if you can’t handle snark about shit without wigging out, this blog isn’t for you.
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“yeah, we now have a clearer picture that it is largely genetics with possibly some environmental trigger…but that wasn’t clear at all in 1995 or 2000.”
Now ex-Dr. Wakefield’s (spit-pttuft) now-known-to-be bogus paper linking autism with the MMR vaccine was controversial when it was published, and IIRC by 2000 most of his co-authors had dissassociated themselves with the paper. Similarly with timerosol – there was enough data for experiences with non-timerosol vaccines to rule it out. Maybe 1995 there would have been reason to not rule out a connection, but not by l2000.
I do blame the quacks: they’re taking advantage of the distress of parents with autistic kids to gain reputation and $$.
thatgaljill
My niece was diagnosed with Aspergers when she was 12, right after I gave birth to my son. There are few things that strikes fear in a new parent’s heart more than having a possible genetic link to a diagnosis on the Autism spectrum (and since my son was born with a club foot, I do know what it’s like to have to take a tiny baby to lots and lots of doctors appointments, etc.)
That being said, my tack was to immediately alert my pediatrician to my niece’s diagnosis and ask or her guidance. While I am fairly expert in my line of work, I do not have the benefit of years of scientific and medical training (nor am I a mechanic or electrician or plumbler), so I rely on the knowledge of those who have had such training.
A dear friend of my husband’s has two children on the spectrum, one far more severe than the other. It’s heartbreaking to watch and challenging to socialize (for me, I find it difficult to discuss what my child is doing at school, etc. because I worry that I will make them uncomfortable) but we also recognize that to not is unfair to everyone, including my son who will invariably have a large number of contacts with people on the spectrum in his lifetime.
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
Glad there’s a post on this. I’m on a parents mailing list in CA and there’s regular whining from granola hippies about the “dangers” of vaccines, usually resulting in a big flame war. So now we have 5 dead babies who wouldn’t be dead if people fucking vaccinated their kids.
Chiropractors are key enablers of this anti-vaccine bullshit: about 30% of chiros (so-called ‘straight chiros’) don’t fully believe in the germ theory of disease.
Chiros campaigned against the Salk polio vaccine when it was introduced: it kinda screwed up their theory about disease caused by spinal fluxations when a disease *affecting the spinal cord* got prevented by a vaccine.
It’s enough to swear not go to a chiropractor, despite having bad neck pain. Give me a physiotherapist over a chiro anytime. Unfortunately, because chiros have the “Dr.” designation, they can take patients directly, but to see a physiotherapist need a doctor’s referral.
4tehlulz
@celticdragonchick:
Only in your deluded fantasies did 85% of parents of autistic children run to the nearest quack peddling comforting lies that Big Pharma/Flouride/Etc. caused their child to be autistic and that everything would be OK if the poison of the week was purged.
No, actually, most probably got pissed off then figured out what actually would help their children, not cling to pseudoscience that puts others in danger.
Mnemosyne
@celticdragonchick:
I am sympathetic to those parents right up to the point where they insist on putting other people’s children in danger by clinging to their belief that Vaccination Is Bad despite all of the evidence otherwise.
I’m actually less annoyed with the parents of autistic children — who at least have an excuse for being freaked out and paranoid — than I am with the parents who heard those stories and decided that vaccination was much too dangerous for their precious little snowflakes and thereby made 11 other children sick, too.
What you’re defending is the parents of non-autistic children who say things like this:
4tehlulz
@Mnemosyne: WTF this just made me rage:
A MEASLES PARTY? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?
chopper
@Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan:
where i live there’s a bit of anti-vaccination going around. lots of parents here want to at the very least change the vacc schedule, but many don’t get their kids vaccinated at all. i’ve given up arguing against both.
luckily my kid has never had a reaction to any of her vaccines. i’d be pissed as shit if she couldn’t get vaccinated because of an allergy and i had to rely on a non-existing herd immunity caused by pseudo-scientific garbage.
Mnemosyne
@Emma:
I don’t know if you have any food intolerances, but as someone with fairly severe lactose intolerance, that makes perfect sense to me. Not that removing wheat from his diet has fixed something with his autism, but that not being distracted by stabbing abdominal pains tends to improve one’s concentration and attention span.
That’s what bugs me sometimes when people talk about changing their autistic child’s diet as somehow improving the autism. It doesn’t. It removes a source of physical pain that the child is experiencing that is distracting them and making it more difficult for them to interact. When they’re not distracted by that pain anymore, they “magically” can interact better.
Bill H
@celticdragonchick:
I realize the pain, dear friend, but it wasn’t you. It was the millions who had perfectly unaffected kids who freaked out at the thought of what might happen. People who had the equivalent to the thought that they could never leave the block they lived on because they might get hit by a car crossing the street.
Emma
Mnemosyne: I don’t want to go into too much detail, but he was given a massive battery of tests for allergies, many not covered by insurance (and that’s a story for another time, Jeebus knows), and nothing showed up, but his mother noticed that his repetitive behaviors got really bad after she had fed him rice or bread. Their doctor agreed that it wouldn’t hurt to try. They tried it, and it worked.
But, as you say, not a cure. That’s what is sometimes terrifying about these quacks. They are peddling “cures” that sometimes kill to people who have reached the end of their rope and will try anything.
Emma
4tehlulz: Actually, that is a time-honored way of getting a healthy kid to catch a low-level of a particular disease in Latin America. It was done to me and it worked. When my best friend had the measles I was allowed to play with her for a day or so. I developed a very mild version and immunity. But this was back in the day…
Peter VE
My late mother was a pediatrician, and was still practicing when the first wave of anti vaccine hysteria came through. Her comment on many of her younger colleagues who were ambivalent about vaccination: “They’ve never seen a child die of whooping cough. I have.”
Bella Q
If any of these people were old enough to have had their little friends die of measles when they were kids, before there were vaccines for that, they’d be a lot less casual about fucking up the herd immunity based on their “beliefs.”
El Cid
Wait ’til all the hip youngsters try this new “variolation” fad! All the kids’ll be doin’ it!
RedKitten
Yeah, this topic can definitely piss me off. It was one thing when the rumours first came out. But any link between vaccines and autism has been THOROUGHLY debunked. And yet people are still anti-vax! And a lot of them just don’t understand how they are putting everybody else at risk, because they say, “Well, how would your kid catch something from my kid, if your kid is immunized?” They have no concept of herd immunity, nor do they seem to want to acknowledge that there are a lot of kids out there who CANNOT be vaccinated, either due to age or an allergy. I can tell you now that before Sam got his shots, if he had caught something from some anti-vaxxer’s kid, I would have been out for blood.
Wile E. Quixote
@celticdragonchick:
Fuck off. Despite what you believe bad behavior and stupidity aren’t justified just because you’ve suffered a tragic event. Any parent of an autistic child who’s stupid enough to listen to Jenny McCarthy or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and pump their kid full of quack remedies is an asshole, pure and simple and is no better and no smarter than any fear-crazed tea-bagging dipshit babbling about how Obama is a socialist Muslim who was really born in Kenya. These people deserve to be shit on, not only because they’re fucking up their own kids by pumping them full of all kinds of nasty and dangerous shit but also because they’re endangering others by spreading their bullshit.
Kered (formerly Derek)
@Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan:
That is literally the stupidest thing I have ever heard.
Kered (formerly Derek)
@Wile E. Quixote:
This. So much this.
Sebastian
@Wile E. Quixote:
This.
celticdragonchick
@Wile E. Quixote:
You are really are a worthless, sociopathic waste of a human being.
Maybe Stormfront would be a better venue for you.
celticdragonchick
@Kered (formerly Derek):
The same to you, but please do it with barbed wire you noxious fuck.
celticdragonchick
@Sebastian:
See the above.
FDRLincoln
My four year old has autism. We never bought into the vaccine theory, and both him and his 11-year-old brother are fully up-to-date on their shots.
That said, parents of normal children or people without children CANNOT POSSIBLY understand how stressful it is to raise an autistic child. Aside from the daily heartbreak of watching your son struggle to say a simple word, it is damaging to the family, damaging to your marraige, damaging to your finances, damaging to everything. It destroys families. Something like 80% of parents with autistic children end up getting divorced due to the stress involved.
Thank God my wife and I have been strong enough to get through this so far. But you just try spending 10 hours tending your autistic child, day after day, then going to your regular work for another 8-10 hours, the parents switching off responsibilities. A good night’s sleep is a rare luxury. Vacations are a thing of the past. And good luck maintaining a normal sex life.
Some people get desperate and go in for quack remedies. We haven’t done that. But I understand why people do.
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
Don’t know if you were referring to what I wrote or what the , but see this article (two of the coauthors are ‘Mixer’ chiropractors) in the Journal of Pediatrics on the history of Chiropractics:
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/105/4/e43
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
Another culprit of anti-vaccination attitudes is Waldorf education: Waldorf schools discourage vaccination because the founder of Waldorf, the mystic and racist Rudolf Steiner, believed that kids needed to experience fevers: never mind a proportion would be killed or impaired by measles or pertussis.
There’s been several outbreaks of pertussis in Waldorf schools in the U.S.
crowepps
There is a collateral risk here – the epidemic of whooping cough that hit here a few years ago mainly affected unvaccinated children AND the elderly people in our nursing home exposed by those members of the staff who were also parents of ill children. All the staff and regular visitors to the patients had to go get booster shots to be allowed through quarantine. Whooping cough is serious stuff for infants and small children and can also be deadly for the ill elderly.
neil
Just reading the article makes it obvious that unvaccinated children can’t possibly be the cause of the outbreak–the vaccine doesn’t work 100% of the time and stops working within 10 years. This website (which isn’t anti-vaccine) says that for herd immunity to eliminate outbreaks of pertussis, a vaccination rate of 94% would be required. So it seems that anybody who hasn’t had a pertussis vaccine in the last 10 years and is mocking parents who don’t vaccinate is a hypocrite. I suspect (but don’t know) that the former group is larger than the latter. I know I haven’t had a pertussis vaccine in the last 10 years and I’m not a refusenik.
I have never understood why this debate has to devolve so quickly into bashing parents for their private parenting decisions. So you think not giving a vaccine to your kid is stupid? What business is that of yours? Tens of thousands of kids die in car accidents every year but nobody says that parents who put their kids in cars are murderers. Some parents believe that you shouldn’t give meat to children. I don’t think they have the right to tell me what to do with my children and I doubt any of you do either. Let’s not even get into how I’m dooming my child by not taking him to church.
Nell
Late to this, but what the hell. I don’t think the anti-vaccine folks are to blame for this. It seems (from the report I read) to be concentrated in the Central Valley among Latino families. My guess is the outbreak stems from lower access to medical services, poor economy, and fears related to immigration status.
celticdragonchick
@FDRLincoln:
Best wishes to you. I understand all too well.
celticdragonchick
@Bill H:
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I appreciate it.
FDRLincoln
@celticdragonchick:
Thanks Celtic.
As bad as our situation is, it could be worse. He does make eye contact, sometimes. He seems to understand what we are saying, and he does respond to commands, sometimes. His underlying intellect seems robust, and he is otherwise healthy. His teachers think he will probably end up in a regular classroom….eventually, but there is no guarantee, and it will be a lot of work to get there.
The guilt is the worst part. Both my wife and I have IQs over 130, and my eldest son (while showing some Aspie tendencies) is even smarter than us. Autism no doubt has a strong genetic component, and we worry that perhaps the genes that make me a good writer and my wife a brilliant musician combined to give us one genius child and one child with serious issues. We have guilt about that. We have guilt about whatever environmental thing might have contributed without us knowing. We feel guilty that the only thing he’ll eat are Cheezits and Flintstone vitamins.
Worst of all is the guilt about feeling angry at him sometimes. It’s not his fault. But sometimes you get angry anyway.
People who criticize parents of autistic kids for seeking weird solutions need to change diapers on a squiggly four year old for a week.
Ruckus
@Bella Q:
I am old enough to have been born before the use of the polio vaccination and have known a number of people who had polio. Kids I went to school with and friends parents. I’m pretty sure that a number of people on this blog are my age or older and may have similar experiences. I remember the rejoicing when the vaccine came out, I remember the lines we all stood in to get the shots but most of all I remember the people who had a horrible disease and how it affected not only their lives but the lives of everyone around them.
I myself suffered a major after effect from either measles or chicken pox as a child because no vaccines were available to avoid these diseases either and it has affected me my whole life.
Without vaccines many more people would have suffered and died. You are putting yourself, your children and everyone else at a much greater risk by not getting vaccinated than the very minimal risk from the vaccines.
northquirk
Jenny McCarthy’s anti-vaccine crusade deserves ridicule not because it’s wrong for parents to search for explanations about the causes of Autism but because it’s IDIOTIC to think that someone who’s famous for posing nude and hosting programs on MTV is a more reliable source of information about how to raise healthy children than the thousands of doctors and scientists who contribute to our public health policies.
My older sister has what would now be diagnosed as Asperger’s syndrome. I vividly recall traveling around the country as my mom sought guidance about my sister’s behavioral challenges. Thankfully, my mom was also a science teacher so she looked to medical professionals for answers rather than churches or (FSM forbid) celebrities. My sister ended up seeing a psychologist who helped us, as a family, understand my sister’s unique humanity. While my sister only saw the psychologist for a couple of years, my parents saw psychologists for couple decades and brought those lessons into our family. We didn’t so much try to change my sister’s behavior as we learned how to adapt and change our own. My life would be much worse today if my mom disregarded her belief in science in favor of what ever the woo-peddlers were selling in the 1980s. Sadly, I wouldn’t even realize it because my brain would be filled with woo rather than scientific curiosity and critical reflection. While I’m definitely sympathetic to the plight of families with autistic children, the anti-vacc nonsense makes me livid.
quiet1
@RedKitten:
As someone who frequently cannot be vaccinated due to a genetic auto-immune condition, thank you for reducing the chances that I’ll be exposed to something that I wasn’t able to be vaccinated for and will have difficulty fighting off.
As it is I spend more time than I wish I had to figuring out which vaccines I should get even though I know they’ll make my condition worse, because the alternative of actually getting sick would cause even more problems.
mere mortal
A dear friend of mine got whooping cough last year, after being vaccinated 30+ years before.
Whooping cough in the USA is caused by immigration from a third world country with no vaccination, for a disease whose vaccination has been known to wear off eventually.
But nice job sticking it to those horrible, horrible parents who are trying to understand the highest rate of autism in the history of the world.
You are verily a prince among men.
mere mortal
From the actual, cited article:
“All of the deaths in the state involved babies younger than three months old. Infants are particularly vulnerable to the disease because their respiratory systems are still developing and because they have not completed the first three rounds of pertussis vaccination. Those are recommended at 2, 4 and 6 months of age.”
Note, that is “All of the deaths.” mistermix, you are a horrible, disgusting creature, blaming lack of immunization for deaths before much of the immunization is even suggested.
There are no suitably harsh words.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
” This website (which isn’t anti-vaccine) says that for herd immunity to eliminate outbreaks of pertussis, a vaccination rate of 94% would be required. ”
You’re misreading the site. For, say seasonal influenza, a 50% vaccination rate gets herd immunity, or at least seriously retards the spread. For a more transmissible disease like pertussis or measles, even a few defectors from vaccination degrades the protection of vaccination markedly.
“Tens of thousands of kids die in car accidents every year but nobody says that parents who put their kids in cars are murderers.”
But not vaccinating is not just putting your kids at risk. It’s putting *other kids at risk* also.
“Note, that is “All of the deaths.” mistermix, you are a horrible, disgusting creature, blaming lack of immunization for deaths before much of the immunization is even suggested.”
You’re failing to understand the epidemiology: it’s not the parents of the kids that died that are at fault: it’s the parents of the *other kids* that decided they didn’t want to take the risk, which increases the risk of infection of kids too young or who because of allergies or immunodeficiency can’t tolerate the vaccine.
The lower the immunization rate, the more likely that there will be an outbreak of pertussis that will , and the swifter that outbreak will spread. Even attenuated immunity will reduce the length of time and amount of shedding of bacteria from an affected individual. Multiple shots are needed because the pertussis vaccine, for safety reasons, is a subunit vaccine, which doesn’t always induce an immune response
Corky
celticdragonchick: “Mooo, mooo, mooo…You are a souless asshole.”
You sound retarded.
(Guessing from how eager you sound to assume the role of the martyr, I’m guessing it ain’t the retarded kid keeping you from getting invites to parties.)
chopper
@mere mortal:
you’re an idiot. note that all the deaths were of infants too young to be immunized. now think of the fact that those infants needed to catch the disease from someone else.
mass immunization creates a herd immunity. which benefits those who are either too young, or allergic, to get vaccinated.
so yes, he can put the blame on those who refuse to vaccinate their otherwise-healthy children.
and you are a buffoon.
and celticdragonchick, sorry, but fuck off. you’re as much a waste of a human being as anybody else for your gross overreaction. you don’t speak for all parents of autistic kids, and the fact that your kid is autistic doesn’t mean you can overreact like a motherfucker when someone snarks about jenny mccarthy and idiots who follow her medical advice.
mere mortal
Chopper, the overwhelming majority of those non-immunized against whooping cough in this country are immigrants from third world countries.
From whom, exactly, do you believe these infants are getting whooping cough exposure? A parade of young, non-immunized children coming through their homes? Their time at day care for 2 to 6 month old children?
The mind reels.