News & Politics - Vaccines didn't cause autism, court rules

**sunnykerr** · 02-12-2009, 10:35 AM

Quote:

Vaccines didn't cause autism, court rules

(CNN) -- A special court ruled Thursday that parents of autistic children are not entitled to compensation in their contention that certain vaccines caused autism in their children.

"I must decide this case not on sentiment, but by analyzing the evidence," one of the "special masters" hearing the case said in denying the families' claims, ruling that the families had not presented sufficient evidence to prove their allegations.

The decisions came in three test cases heard in 2007 involving children with autism that their parents contend was triggered by early childhood vaccinations.

The three families -- the Cedillos, the Hazlehursts and the Snyders -- were notified Wednesday that a decision had been reached, as were the more than 180 lawyers collectively representing the 4,800 families with claims in the Vaccine Court Omnibus Autism Proceeding, said lead plaintiffs' attorney Thomas Powers.

At 14, Michelle Cedillo can't speak, wears a diaper and requires round-the-clock monitoring in case she has a seizure. Her parents say their only child was a happy, engaged toddler who responded to her name, said "mommy" and "daddy," and was otherwise normal until at 15 months she received several vaccinations -- one for measles, mumps and rubella, and others that contained thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative.

The other two families described similar alterations in their children's development after receiving vaccinations in their first two years of life.

The government argued during the 2007 bench trials that the plaintiffs' claims linking the vaccines with autism are not supported by "good science."

Likewise, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization and the Institute of Medicine have found no credible link between vaccinations and autism.

Powers' litigation steering committee is representing thousands of families that fall into three categories: those who claim MMR vaccines and thimerosal-containing vaccines can combine to cause autism; those who claim thimerosal-containing vaccines alone can cause autism; and those who claim MMR vaccines, without any link to thimerosal, can cause autism.

Thursday's rulings will only affect the families that fall under the first category, Powers said.

Since 2001, thousands of parents of children with autism have filed petitions seeking compensation with the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program at the Department of Health and Human Services.

By mid-2008, more than 5,300 cases were filed in the program. Five thousand of those are awaiting adjudication, according to the agency.

Vaccines didn't cause autism, court rules - CNN.com

I have no idea what to think about this. On the one hand, there can't be a direct causal relationship between vaccination and autism, since not all children who are vaccinated "become" autistic.

On the other hand, autism is such a difficult disease to identify and describe - it covers such a varied spectrum of symptoms and challenges - that I don't really know how anyone could realistically expect anyone (at this point in time anyway) to produce evidence of ANYTHING with regards to autism, let alone a direct causal relationship to vaccination. And sometimes science takes time in catching up to the facts. I've had allergic reactions to medicine and the doctors didn't believe me at first, because nothing in my records indicated that I was allergic to that medication. I still was.

So, who knows? I can't personally totally dismiss parents, who live with their specific cases of autism day in and day out. Parents know their children better than doctors. And I trust them.

But this is such a mess...

Anyway, what do you all think?

ceilirose · 02-12-2009, 10:22 PM

I'm not exactly sure what to think either although I am a firm believer in vaccines.

NPR had a report on the doctor who more or less spearheaded this whole idea. Maybe his intentions were less than honorable. Or maybe he really believes it.

Here's a link I found online:

MMR doctor Andrew Wakefield fixed data on autism - Times Online

Quote:

THE doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found.

Confidential medical documents and interviews with witnesses have established that Andrew Wakefield manipulated patients’ data, which triggered fears that the MMR triple vaccine to protect against measles, mumps and rubella was linked to the condition.

The research was published in February 1998 in an article in The Lancet medical journal. It claimed that the families of eight out of 12 children attending a routine clinic at the hospital had blamed MMR for their autism, and said that problems came on within days of the jab. The team also claimed to have discovered a new inflammatory bowel disease underlying the children’s conditions.

However, our investigation, confirmed by evidence presented to the General Medical Council (GMC), reveals that: In most of the 12 cases, the children’s ailments as described in The Lancet were different from their hospital and GP records. Although the research paper claimed that problems came on within days of the jab, in only one case did medical records suggest this was true, and in many of the cases medical concerns had been raised before the children were vaccinated. Hospital pathologists, looking for inflammatory bowel disease, reported in the majority of cases that the gut was normal. This was then reviewed and the Lancet paper showed them as abnormal.

Despite involving just a dozen children, the 1998 paper’s impact was extraordinary. After its publication, rates of inoculation fell from 92% to below 80%. Populations acquire “herd immunity” from measles when more than 95% of people have been vaccinated.

Last week official figures showed that 1,348 confirmed cases of measles in England and Wales were reported last year, compared with 56 in 1998. Two children have died of the disease.

With two professors, John Walker-Smith and Simon Murch, Wakefield is defending himself against allegations of serious professional misconduct brought by the GMC. The charges relate to ethical aspects of the project, not its findings. All three men deny any misconduct.

Through his lawyers, Wakefield this weekend denied the issues raised by our investigation, but declined to comment further.

There has been a great increase in autism in the US but maybe it's environmental or something else. I know that parents who have to deal with this desperately want to know why and how but maybe we're just not there yet. Also I heard today that cases of measles have risen in the US since this whole issue began. Measles can kill - maybe not to a great extent but it still can. I don't know - I had chicken pox as an adult and got it the three days after the vaccine became available in the US so it was useless for me. However given a differnent situation I would have gotten the vaccination. Why chance something when you don't have to?

**TheAngel** · 02-13-2009, 11:43 AM

I don't know if you've seen this, but here's a very interesting article that I think should have been more publicized Jenny McCarthy's son's recovery from Autism

I don't know if vaccinations cause it. I mean, I had vaccinations when I was a kid, but not as many as are being given out right now. Sometimes, I think it's OK for kids to be sick. If they don't build up their immune systems when they're young they're in for a bad treat when they get older, but I'm also not talking about polio or mumps or measles. I'm talking chicken pox or the flu or common colds and the like. I used to get at least two colds a year, now I'm 21 and haven't been sick, at all, for at least the past year or so. It's not that I've changed anything about my lifestyle, it's that I have a strong immune system. That being said, I think everything should be looked at in terms of autism. What I wonder is, as our population is increasing, is autism simply increasing as a result of more babies being born. Is this not a "new" disease but simply one that is now being recognized, or is it the result of something new? Could it be cause by some prenatal care that wasn't being supplied 50 years ago? I think everything, including vaccines, should still be looked at, by independent researchers that don't have an agenda and aren't making money off the pharmaceutical companies.

**sunnykerr** · 02-15-2009, 07:18 PM

Well, I don't have any difficulty assuming that autism wasn't as readily diagnosed, say, 20 or 30 years ago because people, including doctors, didn't necessarily know what it looks like. For one thing, there's a bagillion illnesses that have gone, and are still going, through a similar evolutionary pattern of recognition and diagnosis. For another, we still don't know precisely what autism looks like.

I tend to have a very open-minded attitude towards the choices people make for themselves. Pretty much, as long as it's legal (or, should be legal were common sense applied to the law), I don't have a problem with it. We're all different, and I don't pretend to know how people should live their lives.

So you can imagine how surprised I am to find myself a bit rankled by this whole refusal to vaccinate children against potentially lethal illnesses when the link to autism hasn't been proven.

But, then, I can't find it in me to be too harsh. It must be a hell of a decision for parents to make.


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