The Book is Hardly Closed on the Autism-Vaccine Issue
February 7th, 2011 10:52 am ET
Over the past two months, I have read many articles exclaiming that journalist Brian Deer's article in the British Medical Journal is the final deciding "evidence" that vaccines do not cause autism. As I have written in prior articles, we know that Brian Deer's document does nothing of the sort.
My initial undersanding of autism and biomedical symptoms begins with a 2004 study at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in Baltimore. According to an article in the November 15, 2004 Independent, Carlos A. Pardo-Villamizar, M.D., at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, stated that his 2004 study's findings "...open possibilities for understanding the dynamic changes in the brain. Although they may lend themselves to the development of new medical treatments for autism, much more research is needed." Pardo and fellow researchers conducted post-mortem examinations of the brains of 11 people with autism aged from five to 44, who had died in accidents. Specifically, they found that proteins called cytokines and chemokines were present in higher amounts than in those of normal controls, which indicated inflammation. Professor Pardo related, '"This ongoing inflammatory process was present in different areas of the brain ... The pattern of cellular and protein findings indicate they are part of the innate immune system in the brain and do not appear to be caused by immune abnormalities from outside the brain." All of this research can be found online in the Annals of Neurology. Most of the information cited from the Annals article can be seen here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-s...y-be-linked-to-autism-study-finds-533258.html
This research does not have anything to do with vaccines, per se. It just shows that something in the brain had occurred in the research subjects that is related to an immune reaction. Considering that vaccines affect the immune system, as a layperson, I am intrigued. The study is not and never has been connected with the vaccine issue, to my knowledge.
What I am referencing now is really the burden of proof, combined with consideration of the Hippocratic oath, which reads, "First Do No Harm." What of this--no harm clause? Many children receive vaccinations using the current schedule and have no discernible side-effects. That said, the courts have already awarded millions to compensate families of vaccine-injured children. So it seems that we do not know which children will react to which vaccines, and which will not. Until science can detect which children will not be able to tolerate the vaccines, should we be mandating their widespread use for all children? If you are a parent with a vaccine-injured child, your answer may differ from that of a parent who does not have a vaccine-injured child. I cannot stop thinking about what caused the immune reaction in Pardo's 2004 study.
Then I read that Deer's and other "studies" have shown that vaccines do not cause autism. After taking many logic courses, I know that this is faulty reasoning. We supposedly do not know what causes autism. If this is the case, how do we know that vaccines do not cause autism? This does not make logical sense. More relevantly, there are plenty of well-educated people with letters after their names who can explain the systems in our bodies that are affected by vaccines. There are plenty of well-educated people with letters after their names who can explain the systems that are affected by the toxins in our environment. People are still studying the effect of the combination of vaccines and the toxins in our environment on the systems in our bodies.
The jury is still out on this one--and for this reason, we should not only fund more research to understand the neurobiological symptoms that are recognized as the characteristics of autism, but also on the genetic markers that would show which children may be more prone to vaccine injury. Nothing is impossible, and our children are worth every cent of the research's cost. To echo Dr. Pardo's sentiment about his own study's findings, much more research is needed.
