Study finds no association between autism and vaccination
BMJ 2013; 346 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.f2095 (Published 03 April 2013) Cite this as: BMJ 2013;346:f2095
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Hugh Mann's comment would make sense except for the fact that vaccines are not big money makers for Big Pharma. In fact the US government has to provide financial incentives to get drug companies to manufacture vaccines.
Competing interests: No competing interests
I wonder how critics of the vaccine-autism hypothesis respond to the fact that the exponential growth of vaccines appears to parallel the exponential growth of not only autism, but also allergies, autoimmune diseases, and cancer, thus resulting in astronomic improbabilities, which raise vexing questions about the potential pathogenicity and iatrogenicity of Big Pharma’s sacred cash cow - vaccines.
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Brian Hooker’s excellent criticism of the flawed autism and vaccination study by DeStefano et al, ( in particular lack of neurologically normal, never vaccinated controls) reminds me of the same flaw in many epidemiological hormone use studies – few never exposed controls. (1), (2).
In the US, autism increased from 1 in 2500 in 1970 to 1 in 88 children (1 in 54 boys) in 2008 in a study of 300,000 8-year-old children. (3) Relative increases were 200-600% from the 2003 autism estimates to the 2007 ASD estimates. Lifetime individual care costs can be over $US3m. Autism impacts many systems in the body, including metabolic, mitochondrial, immunological, gastrointestinal and the neurological systems. (4)
Besides increasing numbers of infant vaccinations, longer and earlier age maternal hormone use may also have contributed to the dramatic increases in autism which is claimed to be the fastest growing developmental disorder in the world today. It makes sense that impairments to a mother’s health are likely to affect her children.
John McLaren-Howard analyses a very extensive range of chemical and metal genomic DNA adducts in leucocytes. He finds toxic DNA adducts in some women taking hormones, some cancer patients and some autistic children. Commonest adducts are malondialdehyde, probably from lipid peroxidation secondary to poor superoxide dismutase activity and copper/zinc upsets; also nickel complex on the hormone receptor enzyme adenylate cyclase gene; nickel which part-blocks the expression of cytoplasmic superoxide dismutase; and, also cadmium and mercury adducts. Preliminary results are summarized in a lecture presented at a British Society for Ecological Medicine and available at www.harmfromhormones.co.uk.
Autism is increasing as infant exposures to vaccines containing antibody-stimulating proteins, polysaccharides, and adjuvants including AS03, aluminium and/or mercury increases. It seems that having a big head, colic, old grandparents and immediate reactions to the vaccines are high risk factors.
I also qualified in 1958 and think the continuing dramatic increase in autism is very alarming.
1 Hooker B. Re: Study finds no association between autism and vaccination. BMJ 7 April 2013
2 DeStefano F, Price CS, Weintraub ES. Increasing exposure to antibody-stimulating proteins and polysaccharides in vaccines is not associated with risk of autism. J Pediatrics2013, doi:10.1016/j.jpeds.2013.02.001.
3 Schieve LA, Rice C, Yeargin-Allsopp M, Boyle CA, Kogan MD, Drews C, Devine O. et al. ASD estimates. Matern Child Health J. 2012;16 Suppl 1:S151-7.
4 Randolph-Gips M, Srinivasan P. Modeling autism: a systems biology approach. J Clin Bioinforma. 2012;2:17
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In response to Sam Lewis: The Danish study which is widely quoted to dismiss MMR vaccine as a cause of autism (Madsen et al. NEJM 347:1477, 2002) found an excess of 2 ASD cases per 10,000 MMR-vaccinated children compared with children who never received MMR. These were children born between 1991 and 1998 when the overall prevalence of ASD in Denmark was 14 per 10,000 children. In follow-up letters the article was severely criticized (NEJM 348:951, 2003). One was written by the distinguished epidemiologist, Walter Spitzer, who suggested that a relative risk of 4-fold in a vulnerable subgroup could have been masked by the study's methods.
A cross-sectional study by Gallagher suggests that neonatal hepatitis B vaccination triples the risk of autism in boys (J Toxicol Env Health A 73:1665, 2010).
These are the kinds of numbers that led to my view that vaccines have not been properly excluded as a cause of autism and my casual guess that any autism risk reliably attributed to a vaccine or vaccines is likely to be less than 5%. Perhaps I should have said less than 1% or 2%.
The Pandemrix-narcolepsy parallel puts this in perspective. In Finland receipt of the vaccine increased the risk of narcolepsy 13-fold in children and young people aged 4 to 19 years, and caused one case for every 16,000 doses in this age group. (Nohynek et al. PLoS One 2012; 2012:e33536). The association might never have come to light without astute clinical observations and attention to vulnerable subgroups.
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Thankyou Allan for a clear calm and factual response to this overheated issue, especially in the UK now we have declared a Measles epidemic.
I have long struggled to find hard data on the national annual incidence of autism in the UK, and the related data on vaccines received in our nation's children. Such a massive dataset should furnish a fairly clear upper and lower measure 'vaccine-attributable' autism, of vastly greater credibility than the current statistacally-naive science with wide confidence intervals which characterise both sides of the argument to date. But as you say, Public Health and the vaccine industry have much too much at stake. There is no such thing as interest-free science, nor ideology-free thought.
How did you arrive at your 5% upper-limit for 'vaccine attributable' autism, may I ask ?
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It is very easy to indulge in such rhetoric but the voices of those damaged by vaccines and their families should also have a right to be heard.
Moreover, this kind of rhetoric - of which we have had far too much - papers over important issues, such as whether vaccines are as safe as they should be, and how far it is reasonable to expand the programme.
After the last week of bullying, empty rhetoric of this kind in media I am very fed up.
Competing interests: Autistic son
Having graduated in 1958, I had the opportunity to witness the, admittedly rare, but horrifying effects of Measles encephalitis, in-utero rubella, and chicken-pox meningitis, not to mention the devastation of polio epidemics.
The fact that these conditions have all but disappeared in developed countries, render it easy to demonize vaccination.
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My guess is that if any responsibility for autism is ever assigned to vaccines by a high-quality epidemiologic study the attributable risk will be less than 5%. Of course, even if only 1% of autism is reliably attributed to vaccines this would terrify the vaccine establishment and the general public. Consequently, the CDC and academic pediatricians, mostly funded by the manufacturers, churn out low quality studies that show "...no association between vaccines and autism." These studies produce sound bites that are publicized in newspapers, television and the internet as antidotes to the questions and assertions of vaccine skeptics. In the latest article by DeStefano et. al.there is not much raw data, but they get their conclusions from odds ratios derived by conditional logistic regression models. For autism or ASD with regression their tables show odds ratios with confidence intervals between 0.31 and 5.72. This means that vaccine antigens might decrease risk by 69% or increase risk by 472% or somewhere in between.
Meanwhile, evidence for the Pandemrix-narcolepsy link continues to accumulate. For young children the risk is 10 to 15-fold, and we have just learned that some risk extends to adults age 40. We have also seen the devastating effects of vaccine-induced narcolepsy reported in the Swedish and British press. The vaccine adjuvant AS03 appears to be the big causal factor in these cases, which are clear examples of vaccine-induced autoimmune disease.
We don't hear much about Pandemrix-narcolepsy in the U.S., but the CDC and other members of our vaccine industry must find it worrying from a public relations point of view since it is a tangible example of the negative and non-specific effects vaccines sometimes have on our immune systems. Autism also has an autoimmune component, and the DeStefano article may be part of industry's response to this concern.
I am not against vaccines in general, but I don't think industry and public health officials have been honest about risks and benefits.
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As John Stone says "the problem is staring everyone in the face" - an autoimmune reaction induced by vaccines in a genetically susceptible child destroys the parietal cells in the stomach thereby inhibiting the formation of intrinsic factor thus preventing the absorption of Vitamin B12 resulting in the formation of Methylmalonic acid which causes CNS demyelination and Autism. James Watson and Francis Crick pointed out it is not the stars which control our destiny it is our DNA and there is no excuse for not testing DNA sensitivity by a simple scratch test before deciding to vaccinate. And save the child.
Competing interests: No competing interests
Re: Study finds no association between autism and vaccination
While it may have been true in the past, Ms. Yorks, that vaccines were not big money-makers for Pharma, that has apparently changed.
For example, according to a 2009 article, vaccines, long regarded as an "unattractive market," have "re-emerged as [a] successful growth driver for Big Pharma."
The success of "novel, high-price products such as Wyeth's Prevnar or Merck & Co's Gardasil, along with the emergence of novel vaccine technologies and favourable legislation have brought vaccines back into the main focus of pharmaceutical and biotech companies."
"Vaccines - the new money maker for Pharma!" http://bx.businessweek.com/ims/view?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffuturebiopharma.blo...
Here's another: "Strategic Overview of global preventable vaccine market 2012-2016" with a 111-page pdf available for purchase.
http://bx.businessweek.com/ims/view?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bharatbook.com%...
With virtually no liability for vaccine-induced injuries, with government support including millions for vaccine promotion, http://www.prweekus.com/cdc-allocates-up-to-65-million-for-vaccine-pr/ar...
and with the number of required/ recommended vaccines increasing each year, it is no wonder the vaccine industry predicts continued growth.
Competing interests: No competing interests