Family To Receive $1.5M+ In Vaccine-Autism Award

An anonymous reader, quoting from CBS News, writes "'The first court award in a vaccine-autism claim is a big one. CBS News has learned the family of Hannah Poling will receive more than $1.5 million for her life care, lost earnings, and pain and suffering for the first year alone. In addition to the first year, the family will receive more than $500,000 per year to pay for Hannah's care. Those familiar with the case believe the compensation could easily amount to $20 million over the child's lifetime. ... In acknowledging Hannah's injuries, the government said vaccines aggravated an unknown mitochondrial disorder Hannah had which didn't 'cause' her autism, but 'resulted' in it. It's unknown how many other children have similar undiagnosed mitochondrial disorders. All other autism 'test cases' have been defeated at trial. Approximately 4,800 are awaiting disposition in federal vaccine court.' How did this happen when all the scientific data points otherwise?"

Comments

What?

[Ssherby]

Is it April Fools day already?

Re:What?

[Kilrah_il]

The parent was modded troll, but sadly he has a point. The only research linking MMR vaccines to Autism (or Autistic-like symptoms) was proven a fake, while countless studies have shown that there is no link (correction: no link was shown. I know the difference). Yet, now we have the government admiting that the vaccine resulted in what happened to the girl.
The girl had a mithochondrial disease. Although unspecified, many of them cause encephalopathy that can be aggrevated due to many causes. If she had not been given the vaccine, the same would have happened a week/month/a few month later due to the common cold/gatroenteritis/ear infection/ whatever. To say that without the vaccine she would have been fine to this day is naive at best and deceptive at worst.

So yes, it sounds like a bad April Fools story. Sadly enough, it ain't.

Re:What?

[Ssherby]

Thanks for the vindication.

But unfortunately a few anti-vaccine Nazi types with mod points burning holes in their pockets came tearing through this comment thread not long after I posted that.

When I first read this and I thought almost immediately about April Fools stories on /. primarily because an estimated 20 million award seems punitive and excessively so. And who is being punished here? You and I and everyone else who had nothing to do with this.

While I feel sorry for this girl and her family, it is not my fault this happened. And I cannot see how providing care for this girl could possibly cost this kind of money. It would have made more sense to have a reasonable pain and suffering award up front, plus some reasonable standard of living allowance annually, plus the government picking up the tab on all related medical costs. Somehow I doubt the total of which would come anywhere near 20 million

Re:What?

[Seumas]

Hare dare you question Jenny McCarthy! She has been a playboy model **AND** squirted out a child, so she is clearly far more qualified in the field of science, research, and analysis than any of us!

Re:What?

[Joce640k]

Lawyers have to be paid...it's all part of "medical expenses".

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Death is far cheaper than ongoing survival, and illness is horribly expensive.

Re:What?

[Atryn]

My nephew is autistic and I can assure you the award here is FAR more than care will/would cost. Providing the family with 20% or less of that award and forcing $16M into additional research would be much more beneficial to the public good, would it not?

But then the conservatives aren't in favor of government research and would prefer less government and to let the "private sector" solve this problem.

Re:What?

[m.ducharme]

While I don't necessarily disagree with your assessment of the problem, I don't think your solution - to have doctors police themselves in malpractice claims - is a very just one. Doctors on a committee have a lot of self-interest in seeing that fewer malpractice awards get handed out, whether deserved or not. Besides, don't the professional colleges already regulate doctors, and mete out penalties including training, suspension or revocation of licenses? None of these things provide any remedy to the person who's been injured by a doctor's negligence.

Re:What?

[Invicta{HOG}]

This is not how vaccination rewards are decided. They are a part of the special VAERS program which is decided by a "vaccine" court NVICP (http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/). There are actually experts who decide compensation. This is all a part of an agreement that recognizes that vaccine makers would not make them if they were liable for litigation in the traditional sense. As a result, the US has set up a special system that pays patients out of a pool of money given by the vaccine makers so that they are protected from the litigation.

The trial lawyers would love to break this system - this is why you see so much misinformation on the internet. It is a potential bonanza for lawyers and patients and as a result there is a lot of pressure to allow open litigation. This would obviously drive up vaccination costs and possibly lead to shortages or incomplete coverage due to the higher costs of providing care.

Re:What?

[c6gunner]

Maybe it's those fucking unconstitutional required vaccinations the morons have been experimenting with us for years

*facepalm*

I am sorry that you've managed to breed.

Re:What?

[DurendalMac]

Seeing as how mercury was almost entirely removed from childhood vaccines 10 years ago (about the only place you'll find it is a flu shot) and there was no accompanying drop in autism rates, I don't think you'd need to bother with that mercury test.

Re:What?

[commodore64_love]

Has anyone noticed the summary repeats itself?

WOW. I had no idea such a system existed. Thanks for the information. A special "vaccine damage" court is a good idea, because it prevents the 1 billion awards we might otherwise see in the normal courts. Also 20 million doesn't sound high to me. If the kid lives another 80 years, that's only 250,000 a year - which is probably how much it would cost to keep the girl alive. I had no idea such a system existed. Thanks for the information. A special "vaccine damage" court is a good idea, because it prevents the 1 billion awards we might otherwise see in the normal courts. Also 20 million doesn't sound high to me. If the kid lives another 80 years, that's only 250,000 a year -

PENN & TELLER ripped a giant hole in the "vaccines are dangerous" theory using balls and bowling pins. Basically they said, even if we assume the vaccine causes autism, that's still just 1 autistic death per approximately one million children versus ~10,000 dead from communicable disease if they were Not vaccinated. Like gambling you play the odds and take the vaccine because it's less dangerous than going without.

Long Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aky-sRri-NQ
Short Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfdZTZQvuCo

Re:What?

[d3matt]

To me it just doesn't make logical sense to have a $50/hour doctor doing appendectomies when a $25/hour tech could do the job just as well.

what are you smoking? there's a damn good reason you don't have people with a bachelor's degree doing surgery! (nurses make $25-$30/hour) there are so many things that can go wrong, so many complications, so many drug interactions and allergies...

your example only holds if the technician is working on a live circuit where people DIE if he messes up!

Re:What?

[nbauman]

This is not how vaccination rewards are decided. They are a part of the special VAERS program which is decided by a "vaccine" court NVICP (http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/). There are actually experts who decide compensation.

Yeah, that I understand, but what I don't understand is why the NVICP makes irrational decisions that favor the people who claim that their injury was caused by a "plausable" mechanism.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0802904

Unfortunately, in recent years the VICP seems to have turned its back on science. In 2005, Margaret Althen successfully claimed that a tetanus vaccine had caused her optic neuritis. Although there was no evidence to support her claim, the VICP ruled that if a petitioner proposed a biologically plausible mechanism by which a vaccine could cause harm, as well as a logical sequence of cause and effect, an award should be granted. The door opened by this and other rulings...

No case, however, represented a greater deviation from the VICP's original standards than that of Dorothy Werderitsh, who in 2006 successfully claimed that a hepatitis B vaccine had caused her multiple sclerosis. By the time of the ruling, several studies had shown that hepatitis B vaccine neither caused nor exacerbated the disease, and the Institute of Medicine had concluded that “evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship between hepatitis B vaccine and multiple sclerosis...."

What is this NVICP and why do they accept these unscientific claims of "biologically plausible mechanism"? Are they ignorant of science? Or are they required by the words of the legislation to accept claims like this?

Re:What?

[MachDelta]

You can't buy your life back after a low-grade "doctor" with poor judgment fucks up and you bleed to death.

Again, FTFY.

I guess my point is that people falsely equate wage with skill, particularly when the profession is poorly understood and held in high regard by society. I suppose it's soothing to the ego to think that there's a breed of ubermensch running around tackling the "really difficult" things in life, like medicine. We have so many "voodoo professions" in society where their mystery makes them appear difficult: Doctors, Mechanics, Computer techs, Engineers, etc. I know a guy who, in junior high cooking class, was asked to soften some butter, and subsequently put the tinfoil wrapper in the microwave too. He lit the microwave on fire and panicked because he didn't know what to do. Teacher put it out with a handful of baking soda. You know what this young man does now? He's a high-pressure pneumatics engineer. Builds big devices that run on thousands of psi of air pressure. "Ohmigawd that's dangerous and difficult, surely he is a genius!" Back in high school, this guy impressed everyone by putting his pants on the right way in the morning and not tripping down the stairs. Suddenly he's a valuable asset to society because he has a certificate in 'X'? Likewise, the best mechanic I ever knew (I used to work as one) had only two years of official training. But that didn't stop our 4 year "expert" journeyman (who made twice as much) from frequently deferring to his judgment because, quite frankly, the man knew his shit better than anyone in the shop. So just because wage is supposed to represent skill, I can assure you that in the real world it does not.

As a side note, i'm hopeing to get modded "-1 troll" for this post too. I love how that option is always used as a "I disagree but i'm a mod so fuck you" option. Probably too many words to fit in a drop menu. Ah well.

Now you know

[tsotha]

If you ever wondered why drug companies would rather work on yet another allergy medication instead of vaccines with a much bigger potential to help people, well, look no further.

Re:Now you know

[phantomcircuit]

Manufactures of vaccines are granted immunity from lawsuit. The money for this will come out of tax payers pockets. Incidentally it means that nobody involved had any benefit to fight paying these people.

Re:Now you know

[Joce640k]

Nope. It's because you need allergy medication every day of your life. Vaccines are (mostly) single-use.

Dear Federal Government,

[mdenham]

My doctorb has proof that I have a previously unknown mitochondrial disorder that does not cause, but results in, a deep-seated need to receive large quantities of money.

$2.2 billion dollars would be appreciated as compensation.

Previous condition

[Epeeist]

As was noted in the article, the girl had an underlying condition which the vaccine aggravated. It was a very specific case.

This does not validate the views of the anti-vaccination brigade.

Re:Previous condition

[WarJolt]

Don't be so sure. Think about it. Without a test your child too may have a rare mitochondrial disorder. Without a study no one knows how prevalent the disorder might be. When it comes to parents even vaccines that have a higher chance of saving a life than causing autism become something to worry about.

Re:Previous condition

[Psychotria]

This does not validate the views of the anti-vaccination brigade.

I wonder how often and loudly you'll need to repeat that in order for it to maintain its buffering effect against reality...

-FL

I have no idea what your comment means, but it's modded insightful so I have to respond. The reality is that the diseases that vaccinations prevent are far more horrible than you can imagine, probably because you've grown up in a world without them. Parents who do not vaccinate their children are irresponsible. They are blind to what these diseases do because when they grew up the diseases barely existed in countries with vaccination (if at all). By not vaccinating your children you not only risk their lives but you risk the lives of countless others. The reasoning behind the choices of not to vaccinate are largely based on pseudoscience and absurd.

Re:Previous condition

[Psychotria]

Well, your statement is couched in terms of the absolute, so I'll reply in the same way. [...] My children aren't vaccinated (12 and 8 respectively), and they're slender, highly active kids - the older was swim club champion last year. Actually, I can't fatten them up - I cook nearly all their food, and they don't often leave much on the plate.

It's got more to do with healthy lives and healthy immune systems than vaccines.

Well, I'll reply in the same way also. You're wrong. You're irresponsible. And it's parents like you who endanger the lives of others. Healthy lifestyle and healthy immune systems are more important than vaccines? Yes, they're important but they don't stop the disease, although they might help you recover from the disease (if the disease is actually recoverable from). You talk about healthy immune systems -- what do you actually think that immunisation does?

Re:Previous condition

[bertok]

It's called Herd Immunity. While you and your children aren't well protected against the infections that moderns societies vaccinate against, everyone else is, providing indirect protection. The people around you aren't sick, so they can't pass on infection to you, even though you are vulnerable. You live in a country where the negative impact of you foregoing vaccination is minimised because everyone else did get vaccinated. Hardly a solid argument against vaccination.

Most vaccines don't provide total protection to any one individual anyway, so many people that think they are protected aren't, and get by, just like you, because of the immunity of the population as a whole. As long as enough people are immune, diseases won't spread. The problem is that some vaccines are only just barely effective enough to establish herd immunity. If enough people decide to forego vaccination, there could be a real problem. Diseases that have been nearly wiped out could make a comeback, imported by tourists or immigrants from the third world. Even people who been vaccinated might die or become paralysed by their thousands, because of a small, foolish minority of people like yourself.

Re:Previous condition

[DarwinSurvivor]

First of all, the number of people who get sick from a vaccine even closely to the degree they would have with the disease it is so unbelievably small it's not even worth considering.

Second of all, you are completely ignoring the social side of this. If nobody gets vaccinated, some people will get sick. Without vaccines the disease spreads quickly and eventually (it doesn't take long) a large majority of the population starts getting sick. With vaccines however, the disease is not able to survive further than a few victims and eventually (5 years or so) if nearly everyone is vaccinated, the disease DIES.

This is exactly what they did to smallpox in North America. They vaccinated so many people (pretty much everyone over 30-40 has the scar from it) that the disease is almost unheard of in North America. In fact, if it's so much as suspected at a hospital, the entire place is put into lockdown.

1 person out of 5000 getting sick from a vaccine (generously bad number) is nothing compared to what happens when people don't get vaccinated and the disease hits everyone. Remember, if you don't get vaccinated for something, the main reason is probably that most people around you DID. So stop being selfish and help SOLVE the problem!

Re:Previous condition

[TapeCutter]

Anecdotes are useless. The diseases you mention are all killers, over half a million kids die every year from measles alone. Your infectious spawn should be kept out of public schools.

Re:Previous condition

[Antique Geekmeister]

You said something fascinating that caught my eye:

> So there is actually a higher chance that the vaccine could make you worse off than you were before you got it.

This doesn't seem to be correct. Applying any medication to someone who is already ill is riskier than applying it to a healthy person: between allergies, mistakes in dosage, infections from visiting a hospital or mishandling needles, and allergic reactions that are far more dangerous in an ill person, the risk seems higher.

The problem is in the "benefit" side. The risk of getting polio or German measles today is small, so for an individual to refuse the vaccine significantly reduces their risk of such negative consequences, and creates only a miniscule risk for them of infection. The problem is when enough personally cautious people refuse the vaccine that a threshold of vulnerability is crossed and the disease becomes far more common, and the risk is increased, and especially if the disease mutates slightly and becomes drug-resistant or requires new vaccines. We do not want to see polio or German measles become rampant again.

And we had the opportunity, several times now, to entirely eliminate polio. The vaccine was ready, the last active strains of it could have been wiped off the planet (with digital storage of the DNA, just in case a sample was hidden somewhere). The remaining nations with transmitted cases are Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, according to WHO. Why does the disease still exist there? Because of war and fear of poison, especially of sterilizing poisons administered by foreign governments to control native population. By the time natives who understood enough biochemistry to attest to the vaccine's effectiveness and safety could be gathered, the stockpiles of vaccine for Nigeria, for example, had expired and were a complete waste of UN money.

Parents in the US refusing vaccines are doing the same thing. They're actually extending the lifespan of the particular diseases by leaving infectable children as a significant part of the population, enough to keep the diseases active.

Re:Previous condition

[Qzukk]

Or take whooping cough

Funny you should mention that... the vaccine for whooping cough does not prevent the spread of whooping cough, it simply allows the immune system to destroy the toxin it produces that attacks the lungs, so you don't whoop. Everyone skipping the vaccine for this one in hopes of the "herd" protecting them is in for a nasty surprise.

Legal outcomes include luck

[Mathinker]

> How did this happen .... ?

Every time you go to court, there will be a certain amount of randomness in the outcome, because the legal system isn't run by mathematical logic, it is run by humans (lawyers, judges, juries) and they are notoriously unpredictable.

Re:Legal outcomes include luck

[phantomcircuit]

They didn't sue the drug company. They sued in a special court where the payout comes from the tax payers.

They won because nobody had any incentive at all to fight them.

Re:All scientific data?!?

[Dahan]

Yes--all of the ones that are published in peer-reviewed journals, at least.

Another great step backwards...

[Anonymous Coward]

I truly feel for people who have complications as the result of taking any medicine, but if you consider the vast numbers of people who receive vaccinations with no issues at all, the side-effect cases are extremely minute. Like everything else the American health care system ails from these days, all these successful lawsuits will do is push researchers and pharmaceutical companies to cease development and production of vaccinations as their insurance rates etc go up. Only when people have to see their child die from what would have been an easily prevented disease, or watch his/her body broken by something like polio, will they realize how much vaccines are needed and how f'ed up our lawsuit happy country has gotten.

Re:Another great step backwards...

[Kilrah_il]

Well apperently those sums can lump up to quite a fortune:

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services set up the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) in 1988 to compensate individuals and families of individuals injured by covered childhood vaccines. The VICP was adopted in response to a scare over the pertussis portion of the DPT vaccine. These claims were later generally discredited, but some U.S. lawsuits against vaccine makers won substantial awards; most makers ceased production, and the last remaining major manufacturer threatened to do so.

From: Vaccine court.
It seems, that if you open up the flood gate, you can get to the point where it is not financially possible to continue producing the vaccine. And then we have problems.

And another point, according to the above article, The VICP will compensate every case in which a condition listed in the Vaccine Injury Table is proven to have happened after a vaccine was given (by showing a casual connection). The table does not list autism, so my question is: how did they get the claim to be accepted? I guess maybe it was by being regarded as encephalitis/encephalopathy and not autism, and it is only tauted as autism to draw headlines. So we may have another case of bad reporting? If any one has a link to the original ruling, it may be interesting to find out what is being compensated - encephalopathy or autism.

Re:Another great step backwards...

[moortak]

According to the NEJM it is encephalopathy. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0802904#ref2 The catch is that the ruling mentions autism in the heading as that was the allegation. http://www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/CAMPBELLSMITH.%20DOE77082710.pdf The government settled with calling it encephalopathy with features of autism spectrum disorder.

does not contradict previous studies

[mayberry42]

All other autism 'test cases' have been defeated at trial. Approximately 4,800 are awaiting disposition in federal vaccine court.' How did this happen when all the scientific data points otherwise?"

I'm certainly not a doctor and may be misunderstanding this, but the way i think of it is this: when you execute someone, you provide with them a "lethal dose" of poison. In reality, there is no such thing as a "lethal dose", but rather it's defined as something that is 99.9999% (or whatever) percent likely that you'll kill someone given his/her physical conditions. Yet naturally, some survive - but that doesn't make it any good for you. Same with vaccination: yes, some rare people may have developed some condition that counteracts the benefits of the vaccines, but that doesn't mean it's bad for you.

So, ultimately, this in itself doesnt contradict previous studies - in this case we're dealing with an isolated case (the so-called statistical "outlier"), whereas before you were (presumably) dealing with a random selection of individuals, representative of the general population

what really concerns me more, however, are the possible repercussions of this asinine decision. They get so obsessed over isolated cases that they completely neglect the larger picture. To quote another poster:

If you ever wondered why drug companies would rather work on yet another allergy medication instead of vaccines with a much bigger potential to help people, well, look no further.

Re:All scientific data?!?

[Sir_Lewk]

That's not how you properly challenge that claim. This is a subject that a lot of people care about, and have spent a lot of time (failing) trying to find studies that support a connection between Autism and Vaccination. If you want to do it correctly, you find a peer reviewed study that 1) shows a connection, and 2) hasn't been already shown to be a crock of shit. The ball is in your court.

Go ahead, we're waiting...

Re:Vaccines are a great idea.

[Sir_Lewk]

But a rational examination and sifting through all the mountains of history and empirical evidence tells us that we simply cannot trust the people who make, promote, sell and administer these drugs.

Right. All that documented history of vaccines wiping out smallpox, and nearly wiping out polio, and all those mountains of empirical evidence showing no correlation between vaccines and autism really suggests that we can't trust vaccines. Gotcha.

Re:vaccines

[Sir_Lewk]

who knows what shit's in there?

Anyone who can be irked to actually research it. These things are highly scrutinized by countless people during their development process. You might not understand it, but that doesn't mean you should try to burn it for being a witch.

Re:vaccines

[Kilrah_il]

Hey, there are stuff in there with many letters and more than 3 syllables. Many of them contain Duhydrogen monooxide, which is a known "bad stuff". Anything with that many letters must be bad.

Oh, and on a more serious note:

chances are with a few minutes of research you are smarter than your doctor...

You might be smarter than your doctor, but I assure you that even after an hour of intensive googling, he is better informed than you are in medicine. Yes, you should not blindly do whatever the doctor says - you should ask questions, ask for a second/third/... opinion, research for yourself, etc. But to think that after a few minutes' research you would be more knowledgeable than him is a bit insulting.

Every parent wants some explanation

[mykos]

There are book authors, researchers, and television commentators who build their entire careers on the fears of parents.

When someone, anyone, comes along and offers a cut-and-dried explanation to a common problem ("Tour child is autistic? It was vaccines!"), they cling to the idea. The author/commentator/researcher has given them a target for their fears and misunderstandings. Like and angry lynch mob, they will accept the first target they can, regardless of the facts. They are blinded by their desperation to know what went wrong with their child's health, and their threshold for truth is set very, very low.

Background on the case

[jaffray]

The following article from the New England Journal of Medicine has a good summary of why the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program exists, and why some of its recent decisions, including the award in the Poling case, have been problematic. Basically, since 2005 the policy has been to concede cases where petitioners establish a plausible theory by which their injury could have been caused by the vaccine, rather than requiring proof or even scientific evidence that the vaccine caused said injury.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0802904

See also the Wikipedia article on the program, which also discusses the Poling case.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_court

Bullshit

[RenHoek]

Recently on Penn & Teller's Bullshit, how the anti-vaccination movement is bullshit.

Part 1/2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aky-sRri-NQ
Part 2/2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gnxci5tezZY

I strongly suggest you have a look at it.

Case settled before trial - no crazy jury involved

[sartin]

According to the fine article the case was settled. There was no trial. There was no jury. This is what the government agreed to in order to avoid a trial.

Personal attacks have no bearing

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, a Slashdot reader believes that a personal attack will pass muster with this community. We are too smart for that. When doctors talk of obesity they often state, our genetics didn't change, so environmental factors must be contributing to the rise in obesity. The same must be said for Autism. Our genetics did not change, so there must be an environmental factor (or factors). The thing that bothers me is that people become polarized over the issue.

The parents of Autistic children (I am one) tend to focus too much on one environmental factor (Vaccines) when there are plenty of other factors. They also discount the benefits that vaccines have provided to our society in general. The "informed" community ignores research that does not concur with their point of view while making character attacks by associating those parents with Playboy.

Both groups have some valid points, but will never make progress while pointing the finger at each other. My hope is that a group will come together with open minds to research Autism no matter where the evidence leads them. For instance:

The industry that I work in (computers & electronics) seems to be the worst at contaminating the environment. According to National Geographic, electronics account for less than 2% of landfill waste while contributing 70% of landfill toxicity.

http://s.ngm.com/2008/01/high-tech-trash/computer-interactive

Funny how the rise in Autism closely matches the rise of this industry. Are there any statisticians interested in looking into this?

There is also a factor of chemical contamination, which is largely undocumented in public records. Companies can register various chemicals as perfumes, apply for trademark protection, and withhold the chemical composition based on trade secrets.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2010/01/by_scott_hensley_debates_rage.html

When it comes to vaccines, however, I am still wary of the methods of sterilization, including the addition of Formaldehyde, Aluminum, and Mercury (still in the multi-dose flu shot). Although I am not a health professional, I understand that many diseases have been mitigated through vaccination, and that vaccines have been very effective. Personally, I would hope that vaccine sterilization is best achieved through gamma radiation of single dose vials. Then again, some people go crazy with the word "radiation".

I have followed Dr. Wakefield's ethical case, and understand that his methods were at question, and his results have not been duplicated in humans. Although there is a new study which calls the vaccine regimen of the 1990s into question.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20628439

I also understand that it is not in the interest of vaccine manufacturers to find a link with Autism.

http://www.askdrsears.com/thevaccinebook/labels/Vaccines%20and%20Autism.asp

I also suspect that there is a link to the bowel. I don't know an Autistic kid who doesn't have bowel problems, but that is a limited view. For my son, treatment for Candida and the use of probiotics has helped enormously.

http://www.pnas.org/content/107/33/14691

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/peds.2009-1862v1

When he stops taking probiotics, however, his symptoms reappear. Stool samples have been used to verify the issues. A gluten free / casein free diet helps both Stephen, and the family member with MS.

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2010/07/21/toxic.trio.identified.basis.celiac.disease

http://www.jimmunol.org/cgi/content/full/182/7/4158#TI

I seem to recall a recent Slashdot article about Gluten, but cant find it anymore.

So what this really comes down to for me is, "You are what you eat, drink, breathe, etc." Autism appears to have both a genetic and environmental component. We have to stop bickering over this crap and start working to resolve the issue. Anybody interested?

Re:Personal attacks have no bearing

[Dragonslicer]

hen doctors talk of obesity they often state, our genetics didn't change, so environmental factors must be contributing to the rise in obesity. The same must be said for Autism. Our genetics did not change, so there must be an environmental factor (or factors).

You're forgetting a third possibility, that it's being diagnosed more frequently (whether correctly or incorrectly is an issue that I'll leave to biological and medical experts). A hundred years ago, we didn't know that Pluto existed, but that doesn't mean that it didn't exist before then.

False and false

[tgibbs]

Funny you should mention that... the vaccine for whooping cough does not prevent the spread of whooping cough, it simply allows the immune system to destroy the toxin it produces that attacks the lungs, so you don't whoop.

False in two respects. First, it is not true that the pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine only immunizes against the toxin. Second it is not true that immunizing only against the toxin does not reduce the spread of the disease. (hardly surprising that preventing a symptom--coughing--that spreads disease would reduce the spread of that disease)