Autism and Vaccine - the new study.

[faethor]

Out today is the most recent study on the relationship between Vaccines and Autism

"An analysis of 1,000 toddlers showed no differences in exposures to vaccines between autistic and normally-developing children"

This study went a bit deeper looking at anti-gens exposed by 2 year olds. There's no significant difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated children. Also, the vaccines today have about 315 anti-gens compared to over 1,000 anti-gens in the 90s. IF anti-gen count was the contributing factor we should be seeing Autism rates go down. We are not seeing that.

 

[redrumloa]

Anti-gen?

 

[faethor]

Sorry for the extraneous dash in the middle. It should be antigen.

An antigen is a substance that produces antibodies. All of us are continually exposed to substances that cause our bodies to generate antibodies. It's those antibodies which destroy the invading substances, aka antigens. This idea stems out of the Germ Theory of disease. The idea is when we give people a non-infectious antigen their bodies produce antibodies against future exposure to the disease. The non-infectious antigen is often a dead version of the actual disease and therefore can't breed to give you the actual disease. But, the human body still reacts to the dead version and tries to clean it from your system. In the cases of smallpox and polio this works very well, as we've all but eradicated those diseases.

As per Autism causes we've seen anti-vaccine crowd claim it's the mercury. Only to be proven wrong on a large, large scale as Europe first, then the USA, removed that mercury. The results were Autism rates continued to climb. Another item is that it was the large exposure rates from the antigens. We can't get rid of them but we have cut them by more than 2/3rds in the last ~15 years. Again Autism rates go up. Now, we're hearing it's Aluminum. And it's the same - anti-vaccers are guessing and have no evidence for that either. Here's another link talking about the antigens. http://jpeds.com/content/JPEDSDeStefano

As an aside: The anti-vaccine crowd believes making money is the only reward here. Of, course they've been proven wrong from a disease prevention standpoint. And actually they're wrong from the money standpoint too. The return ratio on spending is about 16:1. http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=486191 . The USA spends about $2.5Billion on vaccines and thereby preventing an estimated $43Billion in disease. If making money is the problem certainly those medical companies are doing the wrong thing. I've spoken to this before here comparing the costs of people with measles in California to the amount of people could be given the vaccines. It was nice to find a study that was more in-depth than my quick back of an envelop calculations.