Cause of Autism
by curious on Apr.02, 2009, under Politics, Technology
At dinner yesterday someone mentioned that Vaccine usage is going down. When we talked about the reasons it was going down, I brought up the fact that parents are increasing afraid to give their kids vaccines because of the autism fears the anti-vaccine camp is putting on parents. Well that opened up a can of worms… and I got to see how far and wide this fear has been spread.
So, lets start off with the big ugly monster: The MMR vaccine “controversy”
THE STUDY:
-the claims were first raised by a study done by Andrew Wakefield
-The study was funded by a lawyer who was looking for trial evidence
-He had filed a patent on a rival vaccine which
-He did not publish reports that contradicted his findings
-10 of the 12 coauthors have since retracted
-Sunday Times claimed that they manipulated data and misreported results
There were lots of studies done after Andrew’s study that contradict his claims. For more details go here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy
What ultimately causes Autism? We don’t know… genetics appear to be a risk factor… Wikipedia has page that covers most of the popular theories and provides footnotes to studies (if any) connected to them:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_autism
Beyond looking for a cause or a cure – it is important to understand that people who have autism are just live everyone else. The way that they perceive and communicate with the world around them is normal to them. Unfortunately for them, most of the people in the world perceive it in a non-autistic way. Just because we may not understand each other, doesn’t mean they need to be cured to become people. They are already people.
PS. Check out this video by someone with autism talking about how they communicate with the world
February 20th, 2010 on 10:00 pm
Here’s something to ponder: Amanda Baggs, the woman who many think suffers from Dissociative Personality Disorder, really has something even more interesting, which is psychogenic autism, possibly one of her personalities. It is also possible this is a factitious disorder, as she is reported to have ’studied” other severely autistic cases in order to adopt mannerisms…Very interesting case. You Tube video: “autism epidemic out of control” and “autism spectrum seems out of control” go into this subject a tad…this is definately something on the horizon. A new phenomenon, sparked by the autism explosion and creating mass hyteria and psychogenic factors within unstable minds to adopt such a diagnosis, as they feel this will bring them attention and nurturing they so deeply need, due to often traumatic upbringings (ie…Donna Williams, a most interesting case as well). The trouble is, when these psychogenic autism cases are featured on CNN (as in case of amanda baags) then you have a case of avoidance, where the media that once promoted or featured such a person, is now unwilling to realize or accept that this was all a fraud, or fabrication of such. This is not helpful for neither the patient or the community at large.