The Age of Autism: Allergic responses

WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- A plausible link is emerging between widely used childhood medicines and the risk of developing allergies and especially asthma. But you`d never know it from listening to federal health authorities or reading the mainstream press.

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Just last week researchers reported a possible link between antibiotics and asthma -- 'A new study has found that infants younger than 12 months who have had antibiotics may be more likely to develop asthma when they get older,' the Salt Lake Tribune reported.

This was not some flaky anti-antibiotic study -- it was done by researchers at the University of British Columbia and published in CHEST, the journal of the American College of Chest Physicians. The researchers reviewed seven studies that compared kids who got antibiotics before age one with kids who didn`t get any, and they were careful to report only an 'association,' not proof of a cause-and-effect relationship.

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A related possibility -- warning, here comes the third rail of American public health policy -- is that vaccines may play a role, and for a similar reason. If the immune system gets stimulated too early and too often but never by the real thing -- say, by the chicken pox vaccination rather than by chicken pox itself -- it could get stuck in battle mode and start attacking its own tissues.

On July 19, 2005, the CDC held a Media Briefing on the topic of vaccines and child health. On the issue of government research on autism, a reporter asked CDC Director, Dr Julie Gerberding: "are you putting any money into clinical studies rather than epidemiological studies, to verify or disprove the parents' claim about a particular channel, a particular mechanism by which a minority of genetically suspectable kids are supposed damaged?"

Gerberding replied: To do the study that you're suggesting, looking for an association between thimerosal and autism in a prospective sense is just about impossible to do right now because we don't have those vaccines in use in this country so we're not in a position where we can compare the children who have received them directly to the children who don't.
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In addition to the Amish, Olmsted recently discovered another large unvaccinated group. On December 7, 2005, Age of Autism reported that thousands of children cared for by Homefirst Health Services in metropolitan Chicago have at least two things in common with Amish children, they have never been vaccinated and they don't have autism.

Homefirst has five offices in the Chicago area and a total of six doctors. "We have about 30,000 or 35,000 children that we've taken care of over the years, and I don't think we have a single case of autism in children delivered by us who never received vaccines," said Dr Mayer Eisenstein, Homefirst's medical director who founded the practice in 1973.

Vox sounds pretty convinced that Olmsted's article represents good evidence that vaccines are associated with or cause autism. There's just one problem. It doesn't, as should be evident to anyone with a modicum of critical thinking skills. The article does not show a "large group of unvaccinated children" who are "free of the very issues that the vaccine advocates claim cannot be caused by vaccines." What the article does show is that a few physicians in an unconventional medical practice in Chicago believe that autism is associated with vaccination, a belief that Olmsted's article, ironically enough, unintentionally shows to be based on poorly described and undocumented anecdotal evidence.

"I don't have a single case that I can think of"? Can anyone say "selective thinking" or "confirmation bias"? Sure, I knew you could. I'm sure Dr. Eisenstein sincerely believes that he has never seen a case of autism in an unvaccinated child, but in reality he produces no data to support his assertion. In fact, he even admits as much:



If Eisenstein's observations are not scientific, then why on earth should I take them seriously as any sort of evidence for a link between vaccines and autism? The history of medicine is littered with beliefs based on no rigorous observation that were later shown not to hold water. Also, if Dr. Eisenstein has a bachelor's degree in statistics and a master's degree in public health, then why doesn't he look at--oh, say--the actual numbers in his practice, rather than simply speculating based on his anecdotal observations, which are prone to many confounding biases?