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The Lancet Recants Study Linking Autism To Vaccine
JamJam writes "The Lancet, a major British medical journal, has retracted a flawed study linking the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine to autism and bowel disease. British surgeon and medical researcher Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues originally released their study in 1998. Since then 10 of Wakefield's 13 co-authors have renounced the study's conclusions and The Lancet has said it should never have published the research. Wakefield now faces being stripped of his right to practice medicine in Britain. The vaccine-autism debate should now end."
Maybe you want to just understand why, and when you find a common denominator possibility, you jump on it, wanting to be a simple answer.
Like Mencken said, complex problems have easy and understandable answers, and they're wrong.
I wanted to find why a relative of mine has autism. Sure would be nice if we could blame it on the vaccine he got in 1963. But it wasn't. Like the retractions, many many things have been bandied about and none of them appear to be the cause. Was it his mother's smoking? Bad diet? He was a normal toddler, then it all went away. Years later, he can't live on his own. Do I want to know why?? Sure. But the Lancet published bad research that lots of people latched onto as a probable reason without knowing how low the sample size was, and so on. We still don't know. I wish we did.
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Oh, and it's "Autism Spectrum Disorder" now, which includes everything from very slight Aspergers to the very profoundly autistic. This is a good measure of the increase, if not most of it.
The problem is that most people don't understand statistics, numerical significance or even the scientific method. This leads the unwashed masses to jump to conclusions that are based on anecdotal evidence, un-normalised data comparisons and non-causal correlations which sound quite reasonable on the surface.
When a study is properly performed and analysed to remove various biases and incorrect assumptions, it usually involves counter-intuitive statistical analyses.
Unfortunately, due to a lack of understanding of the scientific method, and despite the fact that a denouncement has been widely reported, many people will still be given media time to promote their ignorant contrarian claims.
When discussing high profile scientific studies like this one, I keep hearing people argue with reasoning like 'well that is just another point of view'. I intentionally used the word 'claims' and not 'view point' in the above paragraph. A view point implies that a contradictory, but valid alternative explanation exists. In the case of scientific study, a falsifiable hypothesis can be shown to be true or false. If it is deemed false it may still be correct in some of it's underlying elements. In that case it would be revised and a more accurate hypothesis developed.
Some people seem to think that if they personally don't understand the complex reasoning process behind a peer reviewed scientific conclusion, then they should feel free to jump to their own. Because of this, many kids have not been immunised over the last ten years, and now we are seeing the fall out of what happens when too many people decide against the recommendations of the medical establishment.
This should be old news. Wakefield's hypothesis has long since been jumped on, ground into the dirt, ignored, badmouthed and laughed at by a lot of autism caregivers (unfortunately, not all... and the new big thing in autism care is "alternative" treatments, which is a whole other can of worms). The argument's not going to end, though. As another poster said: people need something to blame, and this is one thing that everyone's "heard" from someone, reputable or not.
As someone who works with autism on a daily basis (I am a behavioral therapist in early intervention wraparound services), it frustrates me endlessly that we're focusing on something so trivial as finding a single cause for autism when it's beginning to look more and more like there are a constellation of causes, each one probably dependent on the presence of several others and a genetic predisposition toward autistic behaviors. I'd rather see funding go toward long-term care; more and more of these kids are growing up without the right care and intervention, and those kids when they reach adulthood will be the ones you'll see on the news: vagrants because the state won't provide care any more, filling our jails because of misunderstandings caused by a lack of socially appropriate behavior, or worse - violent and hospitalized because their caregivers can't or won't take care of them any more. What happens when that cute kid with autism grows up to be that 6' tall, 250lb adult with autism? I know one of those kids. He's in and out of the hospital because he can't take care of himself and abuses his spineless mother. When she dies, he'll be a constant drain on the system. And here we are debating the vaccine link.
Waiting for the news that more states are approving funding for Autism care and proven wraparound services under mental health/disability guidelines...
as someone who has done research in this problem, there are tons of things in vax's that don't need to be there.. Aluminum? Did you know that was in your vax?
Oh noes! Not the metal that is present in all the food you eat and the water you drink! That's obviously what's causing this problem with vaccines!
There are tons of preservatives that in small doses are fine, but when your kids get 3 - 8 vaccines in one visit, that starts to add up. Where does it stop? When do we let the human body do what it does?
When does it stop? It stops when our children are safe from measels, mumps, and rubella. It stops when we are assured that the diseases that ravaged our ancestors -- who would look on you with HORROR that you think you're better off risking getting these diseases -- will no longer plague us.
And hello? Letting the human body do what it does is what vaccines are all about. Let the immune system train itself to fight off the disease naturally. Oh, but you meant "let the body do what it does" without the influence of modern medicine. Well, in that case "what the body does" is maybe go blind, become sterile, or catch pneumonia and die.
And I'd say "you go on ahead and do that", but the problem is that your stupid choice affects me and my children. It affects everyone. You've done the research, eh? Ever come across the term "herd immunity"?
What about the kids who GET the vaccine and the infect other children (because the vaccine itself is contagious)????
Thankfully not much of a problem when everyone is getting vaccinated. Since rises in increases in incidents of measles and other disease can be directly associated with falling vaccination rates, I'm thinking maybe getting vaccinated is the better idea!
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Don't even give it a second thought. I've got a friend who didn't give her kid any vaccines and yet he's still placed on the autistic spectrum. Anyone who thinks it's due to the vaccines is, quite simply, wrong.
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Studies have pretty convincingly shown that people who work with children with autistic spectrum disorders (such as my wife) are about 95% accurate at diagnosing the disease based upon video of their 1st birthday parties. In other words, they where showing symptoms before the vaccines in question were given. Parent may not recognize the symptoms until their child hit 30 months, but the symptoms where there all along. Parents often will deny the diagnosis (and get mad at the diagnosing physician) after it is made. It's understandable why they do so. It's also understandable why the need to find someone or something apart from their own genome to blame for the disease.
One study is at this site. It is by no means the only one, but just the first one that showed up in a Google search.
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I know it's WAY off topic, in that it has nothing to do with vaccines or autism, but I really wanted to focus on this point you made:
"Peer review, like the market, only works with honorable actors. Scientists are presumed to be honorable, so the way peer review is structured doesn't attempt to look for deliberate forgeries or falsehoods."
This is SO important, it bears repeating. It bears framing, and should be put on the inside cover of every peer review journal.
I wasn't the only person who fell into that trap, when Michael Drosnin published "The Bible Code". Having a mathematics background, I read through the paper by Eli Rips and genuinely could not find fault with it. And the results were so conclusive, I gave serious consideration to becoming Jewish based on the results of what appeared to be an air-tight mathematical proof. (I still use this example now, as an atheist, to say that if someone ever shows me convincing evidence of gods existence, i'll accept it. Atheists follow the evidence, we don't "hate" god.)
Anyway, it later transpired that Rabbi / Professor Eli Rips was a lying son of a bitch, who clearly thought that lying was okay if it spread the word of his god. There was nothing wrong with the maths paper. Only the assumptions it relied on were false, and my assumption (that a maths paper wouldn't be submitted based on deliberate false precepts) was wrong.
(For those interested, it had to do with multiplying the probabilities of 50 independent events, thereby getting an extraordinarily low probability. Only the events were not independent at all, so multiplying the probabilities doesn't work.)