Storage and retrieval

A gentleman I know is moderately autistic, and also suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, to the point that he needs some help with his day-to-day life.  He's also brilliant, funny, and sweet, and nearly every time we get together, I learn something new about what it's like to see the world through a neurodivergent brain.

One of the more curious revelations came about because on two days about a week apart, I was giving him a lift in my car.  I drive a blue Honda Element -- the make and model which has sometimes been compared to a toaster on wheels -- so it's a pretty stand-out car.  The second time we went for a drive, as we were walking across the parking lot, I asked my friend, "Do you remember which is my car?"

He said, "Sure," and pointed to it.  Then he said, "I recognized it because I remember the number on the license plate is 4113."

This was a little startling from a variety of standpoints.  First, that he remembered the number on my license plate after seeing it only once before.  I know he's got a pretty phenomenal ability with numbers, so upon reflection, this one wasn't such a surprise.  What I'm still kind of amazed at, though, is how his memory worked.  When I look for my car in a parking lot, I use a search parameter that's entirely visual -- color and shape, whether or not the car has a roof rack, and so on.  For him, apparently the standout feature wasn't my car's color and rather odd contours.  It was the numbers on the plates.  He didn't even mention what are its (to me, at least) more obvious characteristics.

It was interesting to have a momentary glimpse through a mind that is neurodivergent, and also to consider what this tells us about memory retrieval in general.  Some new research that appeared last week in Nature Communications looked at how memories -- at least in neurotypical minds -- are organized, and gives us a little bit of a window into how our brains' filing system works.  And its most fascinating result is that we might want to revisit what we mean by "neurotypical," because the storage-and-retrieval mechanisms between different participants were strikingly varied.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

In "Decoding Individual Identity From Brain Activity Elicited in Imagining Common Experiences," a team made up of Andrew James Anderson, Kelsey McDermott, Brian Rooks, Kathi Heffner, David Dodell-Feder, and Feng Lin (all of the University of Rochester), the authors write:

Everyone experiences common events differently.  This leads to personal memories that presumably provide neural signatures of individual identity when events are reimagined.  We present initial evidence that these signatures can be read from brain activity.  To do this, we progress beyond previous work that has deployed generic group-level computational semantic models to distinguish between neural representations of different events, but not revealed interpersonal differences in event representations.  We scanned 26 participants’ brain activity using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging as they vividly imagined themselves personally experiencing 20 common scenarios (e.g., dancing, shopping, wedding).  Rather than adopting a one-size-fits-all approach to generically model scenarios, we constructed personal models from participants’ verbal descriptions and self-ratings of sensory/motor/cognitive/spatiotemporal and emotional characteristics of the imagined experiences.  We demonstrate that participants’ neural representations are better predicted by their own models than other peoples’.

The regions of the brain activated in the participants were pretty uniform; but the pattern of activation different considerably.  Calling up memories of the last dance several people went to might require their drawing upon similar brain structures, but one person might remember mostly the music, another the lights and the crowds, and a third focused entirely on who (s)he is dancing with -- and between those three you'd see a pattern of neural firing that is dramatically different.

"One of the goals of cognitive science is to understand how memories are represented and manipulated by the human brain," said lead author Andrew Anderson, in an interview with Science Daily.  "This study shows that fMRI can measure brain activity with sufficient signal to identify meaningful interpersonal differences in the neural representation of complex imagined events that reflect each individual's unique experience."

And I wonder what you'd see if you tested someone who was significantly neurodivergent.  Apparently the rest of us are different enough to see on an fMRI, even when we're remembering the same sort of events; what kinds of patterns would come up for someone like my friend, who identifies a car from its license plate number and not from what it looks like or where it's parked?  What it brings home to me is that we're just taking the first steps into understanding how the brain works, and that there's a lot more variation in function between different people that we may have thought at first.  

It bears keeping in mind that in some ways, we're all neurodivergent.

It reminds me of the end of the tenth and final episode of James Burke's tour de force documentary series The Day the Universe Changed, in which he makes a statement that seems to be a fitting way to end this post: "We could operate on the basis that values and standards and ethics and facts and truth all depend on what your view of the world is.  And there may be as many versions of that as there are people."

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I'm fascinated with history, and being that I also write speculative fiction, a lot of times I ponder the question of how things would be different if you changed one historical event.  The topic has been visited over and over by authors for a very long time; three early examples are Ray Bradbury's "The Sound of Thunder" (1952), Keith Roberts's Pavane (1968), and R. A. Lafferty's screamingly funny "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" (1967).

There are a few pivotal moments that truly merit the overused nametag of "turning points in history," where a change almost certainly would have resulted in a very, very different future.  One of these is the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, which happened in 9 C.E., when a group of Germanic guerrilla fighters maneuvered the highly-trained, much better-armed Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Roman Legions into a trap and slaughtered them, almost to the last man.  There were twenty thousand casualties on the Roman side -- amounting to half their total military forces at the time -- and only about five hundred on the Germans'.

The loss stopped Rome in its tracks, and they never again made any serious attempts to conquer lands east of the Rhine.  There's some evidence that the defeat was so profoundly demoralizing to the Emperor Augustus that it contributed to his mental decline and death five years later.  This battle -- the site of which was recently discovered and excavated by archaeologists -- is the subject of the fantastic book The Battle That Stopped Rome by Peter Wells, which looks at the evidence collected at the location, near the village of Kalkriese, as well as the historical documents describing the massacre.  This is not just a book for history buffs, though; it gives a vivid look at what life was like at the time, and paints a fascinating if grisly picture of one of the most striking David-vs.-Goliath battles ever fought.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Pet peeve

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who also happens to be a veterinarian, sent me a message saying, "They're coming for me!" along with a link to a site entitled, "Autism Symptoms in Pets Rise as Pet Vaccination Rates Rise."

The site, which I hardly need to point out is rife with confirmation bias, claims that vaccinating pets against such diseases as canine distemper, feline leukemia, rabies, and Bordetella is triggering behavioral changes similar to the ones seen in humans that have been vaccinated.  The problem, of course, is that there are no behavioral changes in humans due to vaccination; as I have described repeatedly, there is no connection between vaccination and autism (or any other behavioral or neurological condition).  None.  Nyet.  Nada.  Bubkis.  Rien.

But a little thing like no evidence and no correlation isn't enough to stop some people, particularly people with an ideological ax to grind.  The author, Kate Raines, cites a Dr. Nicholas Dodman, who has studied compulsive behaviors in dogs.  Raines writes:

Presenting the evidence from his study at the 2015 American College of Veterinary Behaviorists, Dr. Dodman reported an autism-like condition, noting that “the vast majority of affected dogs were males, and many had other strange behaviors or physical conditions that accompanied the tail chasing, such as explosive aggression, partial seizures, phobias, skin conditions, gastrointestinal issues, object fixation and a tendency to shy away from people and other dogs.”  He and his associates were further able to establish that two biomarkers common to children with autism were also present in the affected dogs.

Which is all well and good, but doesn't establish any kind of correlation between those behaviors or biomarkers and vaccination.  The only evidence she brings out is anecdotal; that some dogs exhibit temporary increases in irritability or aggression following the rabies vaccine, and those symptoms "mimic the ones described in discussions of canine autism."

Oh, and there's the tired old Motive Fallacy argument; that since makers of vaccines profit from sales, they have a motive for covering up any bad side effects, which proves that said side effects exist.  The illogic of which you'd think would be apparent to anyone, but evidently not.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But there is something here to explain, and that's the "autism-like condition" Dodman and others describe -- and which I am in no way trying to dismiss.  Presumably it does have some underlying cause.  Raines kind of gives away the game herself by saying that the symptoms are "idiopathic... or congenital," both of which would imply that vaccines had nothing to do with it.  I have to wonder if some of it has to do with recessive genes affecting behavior showing up in inbred dog populations; Raines mentions that Dodman was studying compulsive behavior in Bull Terriers, which (like most pure breeds) have a very tightly restricted gene pool.  (The most extreme example of this is the English Bulldog, the entire breed of which is descended, over and over, from 68 individuals selected back in 1835.)

My veterinarian friend had an interesting perspective on this.  She writes:

[D]ogs don't have autism.  Most vet research shows OCD like behavior in dogs does have a genetic component, but these dogs don't have issues with being social with other dogs, being overstimulated, or anything else, and mostly recover if you give them a job to do, like flyball or herding...  Most of it we see in high energy high drive dogs (collies, guard dogs, those sorts) that are in home environments that don't stimulate them much - so they go find their own, whether that's herding small children or licking their legs until they bleed or spinning in circles for hours.  So superficially similar to some autistic behavior, but 95% of those dogs respond very quickly to environmental enrichment, and the rest to anxiolytics.

But once again, it is unlikely that the arguments of a person who is an expert in her field will sway someone like Raines, who clearly has no particular need for evidence or logic to convince her.

So the bottom line: vaccinate your pets.  You're not going to trigger them to develop autism or obsessive-compulsive disorder, but you will protect them from horrible diseases like canine distemper, which is fatal 50% of the time even with the best veterinary care. Your pets depend on you for everything -- love, food, shelter, protection, and medical care.  If you fall for Raines's claptrap, you will fail their trust in you, and in all likelihood, put them at a significant and unnecessary risk.

And, in general, don't be swayed by emotionally-charged, fact-free arguments.  Find out what the experts and researchers have to say, and think for yourself.  Don't forget that we make our best decisions with our brains, not our guts.

Study shows readers of Skeptophilia have above-average intelligence!

One rather frustrating tendency, amongst those of us who have a skeptical bent, is that people tend to believe anything they read if it begins with "Study Proves" or "Research Shows."

Even better if it says "Harvard Researchers Show."

Apparently, it doesn't matter much whether the study actually proved the claim, or who the researchers were, or if the "Harvard research" was peer reviewed.  Merely claiming that some scientist, somewhere, of whatever credentials, said something -- well, that's enough.

Especially if what the scientist allegedly said fits in with what you already believed.

I ran across a particularly good example of this in Natural News, which I will not provide a link to because Mike "Health Ranger" Adams definitely doesn't need unsuspecting people generating any more clicks or ad revenue.  Least of all if they come from here, of all places.  The headline was "Study Shows Unvaccinated Children Are Healthier," and referenced a paper at Open Access Text called "Pilot Comparitive Study on the Health of Vaccinated and Unvaccinated 6- to 12-year-old U.S. Children," by Anthony R. Mawson, Brian D. Ray, Azad R. Bhuiyan, and Binu Jacob.  So I decided to check out the paper itself.  Here's a bit of it, so you can see their basic argument:

Vaccinations have prevented millions of infectious illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths among U.S. children, yet the long-term health outcomes of the vaccination schedule remain uncertain.  Studies have been recommended by the U.S. Institute of Medicine to address this question. This study aimed 1) to compare vaccinated and unvaccinated children on a broad range of health outcomes, and 2) to determine whether an association found between vaccination and neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD), if any, remained significant after adjustment for other measured factors.  A cross-sectional study of mothers of children educated at home was carried out in collaboration with homeschool organizations in four U.S. states: Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Oregon.  Mothers were asked to complete an anonymous online questionnaire on their 6- to 12-year-old biological children with respect to pregnancy-related factors, birth history, vaccinations, physician-diagnosed illnesses, medications used, and health services.  NDD, a derived diagnostic measure, was defined as having one or more of the following three closely-related diagnoses: a learning disability, Attention Deficient Hyperactivity Disorder, and Autism Spectrum Disorder.  A convenience sample of 666 children was obtained, of which 261 (39%) were unvaccinated.  The vaccinated were less likely than the unvaccinated to have been diagnosed with chickenpox and pertussis, but more likely to have been diagnosed with pneumonia, otitis media, allergies and NDD.  After adjustment, vaccination, male gender, and preterm birth remained significantly associated with NDD.  However, in a final adjusted model with interaction, vaccination but not preterm birth remained associated with NDD, while the interaction of preterm birth and vaccination was associated with a 6.6-fold increased odds of NDD (95% CI: 2.8, 15.5).  In conclusion, vaccinated homeschool children were found to have a higher rate of allergies and NDD than unvaccinated homeschool children.  While vaccination remained significantly associated with NDD after controlling for other factors, preterm birth coupled with vaccination was associated with an apparent synergistic increase in the odds of NDD.  Further research involving larger, independent samples and stronger research designs is needed to verify and understand these unexpected findings in order to optimize the impact of vaccines on children’s health.

Okay.  So, boiled down to its essence, (1) they admit that vaccines save lives, given that hardly anyone dies of diphtheria, polio, or tetanus anymore; (2) they claim that there seems to be an increased risk amongst vaccinated children of learning disability, autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, allergies, and asthma.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Here's the problem, though.  Virtually all of the increased risks they describe are for conditions in which there is a huge spectrum of severity.  About 30% of adults and 40% of children are allergic to something, but these vary from sneezing during ragweed season to dying of anaphylactic shock if you consume a crumb of residue from a tree nut.  ADHD, in my experience as a teacher, ranges from kids who are a little fidgety to students who seem to be physiologically incapable of concentrating for more than five minutes on anything.

Hell, I have a learning disability in decoding written material myself; if I were in school today, I'd probably qualify for special services.  But I get along just fine, and in fact love to read even though I'm a bit slow at it and tire quickly.  I've had students, however, whose learning disabilities profoundly impacted their ability to manage most of the tasks they were expected to master in school.

So self-reported (or, in this case, mom-reported) conditions for which there is tremendous variability already makes the study a little questionable, especially given that those data are being compared to ones which are unequivocal -- such as whether the child in question ever got measles.

But there's a deeper problem still, and that is that the authors come into this question with an axe to grind.  As physician and blogger David Gorski points out over at his wonderful blog Respectful Insolence, the lead author of the study, Anthony Mawson, is an anti-vaxxer and had shopped around without success for a home for his paper in peer-reviewed journals, and finally had to post it at an open-access site because it couldn't pass review.  He did get an abstract accepted at Frontiers in Public Health -- but they retracted it only days after it was published, saying it was "under re-review."

Hardly a ringing endorsement.

Another problem is that homeschooled children are not a representative sample, nor are their parents.  There are lots of reasons for homeschooling -- one of my best friends homeschooled her daughter for the best of reasons, and she came out of the experience with a finely-honed mind and a deep passion for learning.  But there's a significant correlation between an homeschooling parent and being an anti-vaxxer, especially given the crackdown in many states on allowing belief-related exemptions for unvaccinated children to enter public school.

So right away there are some questions about the legitimacy of the data.  As I point out to my Critical Thinking students, sample bias doesn't mean the conclusion is wrong, necessarily, but it does cast it in a rather dubious light.

Last, and perhaps most damning, is the fact that Mawson's "study" was funded to the tune of $500,000 -- by an anti-vaxx group.  You'll note that nowhere in the paper cited above was any mention of a conflict of interest vis-à-vis financial support.

Which is a major no-no for a peer-reviewed study.

So mainly what the "Study Shows" is that if you walk in with your conclusion already in hand, you can bend the data whatever way you want to support it.  Especially if your pocketbook is being filled by people who would like very much for you to prove that their pet theory is right.

The bottom line: be careful when you see anything that claims that "Researchers Prove X."  Go to the source, and ask yourself some hard questions about the veracity of the study itself.  (Especially if you're inclined to believe its conclusions; confirmation bias plagues us all, and we're much more likely to accept something unquestioningly if it squares with what we already believed.)

And that goes double if it's Harvard researchers.

The Sesame Street vaccination conspiracy

A lot of you might have heard about the newest character on Sesame Street -- a little girl named Julia who is autistic.

It's a gutsy move by a show long known for its efforts to teach children about fairness and compassion and the effects of social stigma.  Its goal statement has included right from the beginning the intent to encourage children to "appreciate cultural diversity by modeling people who differ in appearance, action, or point of view playing together, working together, making friends, and resolving conflicts."  From its inception, there was a deliberate decision made to have minorities and people of various ages deeply represented, and not simply to have a token minority character or two.  They also never shied away from helping children to deal with difficult topics -- unusual in a kids' show.  For example, Sesame Street deliberately (and tactfully) addressed the concerns and fears children had after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.

So the move to include an autistic character was perhaps to be expected from the directors of such a thoughtful and forward-thinking show.  The author of the story introducing the character, Leslie Kimmerman, wrote, "More than 20 years ago, my beautiful son received the diagnosis of autism, and my world changed instantly and profoundly.  I knew nothing about autism, and it seemed that those around me — even the professionals — didn’t know much either.  Today, happily, that has changed."

She and the others involved in the creation of the character hope that this will bring awareness and understanding, given that non-autistic children watching the show will inevitably interact with autistic children in school, and also to help autistic viewers to feel more accepted.  Jeanette Betancourt, Sesame Street's senior vice president, said, "Children with autism are five times more likely to get bullied.  And with one in 68 children having autism, that’s a lot of bullying.  Our goal is to bring forth what all children share in common, not their differences.  Children with autism share in the joy of playing and loving and being friends and being part of a group."

Hard to see what's to criticize about that.  I have several friends with autistic children, and the response from them has been uniformly positive.  So imagine my surprise when I found out that the anti-vaxxers are saying that the move is actually an end run by "Big Pharma" to make autism seem normal, so that we'll continue to get vaccinated.

It'll probably come as no surprise that the person spearheading the claim is Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams, founder of Natural News.  Adams has repeatedly demonstrated that he doesn't have a very firm grasp on reality -- a quick perusal of the headlines on Natural News is usually sufficient to confirm that.  But this has revealed an uglier side of his narrative, one which the glitzy, health food polish of the site might hide.

Adams writes, "The rollout of autistic Julia is Sesame Street’s attempt to ‘normalize’ vaccine injuries and depict those victimized by vaccines as happy, ‘amazing’ children rather than admitting the truth that vaccines cause autism in some children and we should therefore make vaccines safer and less frequent to save those children from a lifetime of neurological damage."

Well, Mike, let's start out with the obvious.  (The more sensitive members of the studio audience might want to plug their ears.)

VACCINES DO NOT CAUSE AUTISM, YOU ANTI-SCIENCE, IRRATIONAL, WILLFULLY IGNORANT LOON.  What they do is they protect children from devastating diseases that used to kill or permanently injure thousands every year.  Just because every scientific study done on the topic has confirmed results that run counter to the mission statement of your company does not mean that there's a conspiracy to discredit you.

It simply means that you are wrong.

But second, and more encouragingly, I think Adams may have miscalculated this time.  To discredit an attempt to "normalize" autistic children -- his words, not mine -- puts him in serious danger of alienating the very people he's dependent on for support, namely parents of autistic children whom he has hoodwinked into believing that their kids' health issues were caused by vaccination.  Even if you are a parent of an autistic child who believes that modern medicine is responsible for autism, calling a television show that is trying to heighten awareness and understanding of your child's condition a conspiracy by the pharmaceutical companies doesn't seem like it would strengthen the anti-vaxxers' credibility.

More likely, it would bring up thoughts of, "Wait, I thought he actually cared about autistic children.  If so, why is he condemning a show that is working towards seeing them treated fairly?"

So as a PR move, it stands a good chance of backfiring, which is all to the good.

But it's also a bit puzzling, even coming from a guy who shows every evidence of having spent too much time doing sit-ups underneath parked cars.  Okay, in Adams's BizarroWorld, "Big Pharma" has fucked things up royally by creating vaccines that cause neurological damage in children.  If so, then why on earth would they respond by spending millions of dollars on a campaign to "normalize autism" on a children's show instead of simply making the vaccines safer?

Maybe it's because the vaccines are already safe, the scientists are right -- and Mike Adams has gone even further off the deep end than he was before, however impossible that sounds.

Anti-vaxx backfire

For people with an axe to grind, there's a problem with the scientific method; it can't be swayed by bribes or specious arguments.  Followed correctly, it will give you answers -- even if those answers aren't the ones you'd hoped for.

Now, this doesn't mean that unscrupulous people can't cherry-pick the data afterwards and claim they've been vindicated.  But the method itself doesn't care what your political leanings are, what your biases are, what religion (if any) you belong to...

... or whether you believe in pseudoscience.  Which is a lesson that anti-vaxx organization SafeMinds should have learned before they spent $250,000 only to end up proving that they're wrong.

SafeMinds states their stance clearly, right on their "About Us" page:

The vast majority of new autism cases are due to worrisome changes in our environment – growing chemical exposures, poor nutrition, alterations in our biome, expansion of medical interventions, indoor lifestyles.  These changes are modifiable.  The autism epidemic can be reversed by accelerating environmental research and demanding reform in public health policies.

The problem is, the data doesn't support that conclusion.  The best research recently has shown that there is a strong link between autism and genetics -- including a study showing that the correlation for autism between monozygotic (identical) twins is 76% -- while it is only 34% between same-sex dizygotic (fraternal) twins, and 18% for dizygotic male/female twins.

How do you explain that if autism is caused by environmental factors alone?

But as we've seen, once you've decided you're right about something, even arguments and hard evidence won't change your mind.  In fact, as baffling as this is, it appears that it might make your erroneous convictions stronger.

Which is why SafeMinds pitched in $250,000 to fund a study of the effect of vaccines on the brains of baby macaque monkeys.  Okay, study after study has shown that there is no connection between vaccination and anything except becoming immune to deadly childhood diseases -- but maybe this time they'd have the smoking gun in hand.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Predictably, it didn't quite work out that way.  Science writer David Gorski, over at Science-Based Medicine, describes it this way:

Between 2003 and 2013, SafeMinds provided scientists from the University of Texas Southwestern School of Medicine, the University of Washington, the Johnson Center for Child Health & Development and other research institutions with approximately $250,000 to conduct a long-term investigation evaluating behavioral and brain changes of baby rhesus macaques that were administered a standard course of childhood vaccines.  (The National Autism Association, another organization that has questioned vaccine safety, also provided financial support for this research.)  The latest paper in the multiyear project was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).  In it, the researchers concluded that vaccines did not cause any brain or behavioral changes in the primates.

Oops.  Kind of backfired, wouldn't you say?

The whole thing would make me guffaw except for the fact that millions of dollars have been wasted trying to prove the safety and efficacy of vaccines to people who are bound and determined to ignore every bit of scientific evidence generated -- money that could be better spent trying to find the actual causes of autism, and perhaps a way to treat it more effectively.  At some point, we need to stop treating the anti-vaxxers as if they have any legitimacy.  We don't spend research grant money year after year investigating astrology; why do so for any other pseudoscientific beliefs, regardless of whether the True Believers try to couch their nonsense in scientific terms?

Time to say, "Case closed."  You had your chance to prove your contention.  Turns out you were wrong.  Move on, nothing to see here.

Because that's the beauty of science, isn't it?  It will give you answers -- although they may not be the ones you anticipated.  But as eminent astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."

Giving up on convincing the pigeons

The furor over vaccinations has a long history.

The history, which is intensely frustrating to people like me who think that the anti-vaxxers' rhetoric borders on deliberate endangerment of people's lives, seems always to play out the same way.  In 1998, the now-infamous Dr. Andrew Wakefield published a study in Lancet claiming that there was a connection between the MMR vaccination and autism.  The study turned out to involve only twelve patients, so there was a bias right from the beginning that was so big you could drive a tanker truck through it.  When you add the investigation by Brian Deer that uncovered the fact that Wakefield was being subsidized by a group of lawyers who were conspiring to file lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers, then... well, you get the picture.

The British Medical Journal called Wakefield's study "fraudulent."  Ten of the twelve authors of the Wakefield paper formally withdrew their support in 2004, stating, "We wish to make it clear that in [the 1998] paper no causal link was established between MMR vaccine and autism as the data were insufficient.  However, the possibility of such a link was raised and consequent events have had major implications for public health.  In view of this, we consider now is the appropriate time that we should together formally retract the interpretation placed upon [the] findings in the [1998] paper, according to precedent."

None of that mattered.  The anti-vaccination movement was off and running.  A claim was made that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative in many vaccines, was what was causing the link between vaccines and autism (which was based on a fraudulent claim from the beginning, remember?).  Many governments caved to the hype, removing thimerosal, which had been used safely since the 1930s.  Surprisingly enough, the rates of autism were unaffected.

That apparently didn't matter, either.

[image courtesy of the Center for Disease Control and the Wikimedia Commons]

Then the claim started running about that getting "natural" diseases was better for your immune system than getting "artificial" vaccines.  Apparently the idea was that getting diseases was like lifting weights for the immune system.  In 2002, the American Institute of Medicine sponsored a study to see if this was true.  They found no support for it.

Guess what effect this had on the anti-vaccination movement?

Further studies tried to find a link between vaccination and multiple sclerosis, ALS, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and sudden infant death syndrome.  Yup... no connection.  So the anti-vaxxers decided that some children were more sensitive to vaccines, and the studies hadn't taken that into account.  Other, more extreme spokespeople for the movement started claiming that the researchers, not to mention all the doctors and nurses, were shills for "Big Pharma."  "Big Pharma," they say, wants to keep people sick (or worse, make people sick) in order to keep making profits.  And people like me, who object to policy being driven by folks who evidently have no understanding of how science and peer review are done, are just plain stupid.

But the research continued to pile up, and always in favor of the safety of childhood vaccination.  So the anti-vaxxers shifted the goalposts again.  Now they went after gardasil, the vaccine against HPV, a virus shown to be one of the main triggers for cervical, oropharyngeal, vaginal, and anal cancer.  So that was studied.  Once again: the vaccine is safe and effective.  Any side effects are extremely uncommon, and the risk is far lower than the risk of contracting the virus and eventually developing cancer.  But the claims continued to circulate; I've heard more than one parent say, "I'm not having my kid get the HPV vaccine!  It's too risky!"

So more studies were done.  No connection continued to be found.  And just last week, a study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showing that in a study of 95,000 children, there was no link between vaccinations and autism -- being vaccinated doesn't alter the risk even in children who have a higher risk of autism from other factors.

An article about the study in Vocativ states that "this should end the debate once and for all."  But it won't.  You know why?

This is not a debate.  This is people who understand science trying to argue with alarmists who believe every damn thing a celebrity says, over the advice given by medical researchers.  This is playing chess with a pigeon -- no matter how cleverly you play, the pigeon just shits all over the chessboard and then struts around like it won.

This should have been over, as a discussion, twenty years ago.  Eliminating vaccines is dangerous and irresponsible.  The childhood diseases of the pre-vaccine period are not mild tummy aches; kids died of them.  Lots of kids.  But you know why the anti-vaxxers don't recognize that?  Here's why.

No one in the United States remembers how horrific these diseases are.  Hardly anyone dies of them any more, because nearly everyone has had the fucking vaccine.  Measles is not just "a bunch of spots," it causes sky-high fever that can leave a child deaf or permanently brain damaged.  Mumps can cause sterility, especially in young men.  Diphtheria kills you by slow suffocation.  Typhoid gives children such serious vomiting and diarrhea that they can die of dehydration, not to mention getting lovely symptoms like intestinal hemorrhage.

Vivid enough mental images for you?

Some people do change their views, but it often takes being walloped by a metaphorical two-by-four for it to happen.  Last month there was the highly publicized story of a mom from Ottawa who was an outspoken anti-vaxxer, but changed her tune after all seven of her unvaccinated children simultaneously contracted whooping cough.

Wouldn't it be nice if people could be convinced by evidence and logic, and not by their children being at risk of dying?

So my general opinion is that if the research we already had hasn't convinced people, further research won't, either.  It's time we stop wasting resources on these people.  The evolutionary biologists learned that long ago; you don't see them doing research and publishing papers to demonstrate over and over again that the Earth is not six thousand years old.  We need to treat the anti-vaxxers as what they are -- the young-earth creationists of the medical world.

And mandate that children be vaccinated, nationwide.  No exemptions, sorry.

This discussion is over.

Facts about a non-epidemic

Having participated in raising two boys who presented nothing more than the usual challenges of parenting a couple of rambunctious and strong-willed kids, I cannot begin to imagine the difficulties faced by parents of an autistic child.

Friends of mine who have children with autism spectrum disorder have told me that the experience is not without its rewards, and I am certain that it is true.  But the obstacles that those children themselves face -- not least in the realm of acceptance by the outside world -- must present their parents with a formidable and exhausting task, and one for which I have nothing but the utmost respect.

Such a diagnosis often leaves parents searching for a cause as well as a treatment, and in such periods of emotional strain people will sometimes grasp at straws.  Thus the completely discredited Andrew Wakefield "study" pinning the cause of autism on routine vaccinations.  The truth is that medical researchers still have not identified a single clear cause for autism spectrum disorder; a genetic basis is strongly suspected, with perhaps a variety of epigenetic effects contributing, along with possible environmental triggers as well.

That, of course, is still not enough for some people, and the vaccine myth persists.  It has been debunked roundly by more authoritative individuals than myself, and a quick Google search will provide you with all of the reputable information you need (and scads of specious and fear-laden pseudoscience, as well).  I want to deal with a different facet of the misinformation here -- the idea that autism rates have skyrocketed in the past few decades.

That we are in the midst of an "autism epidemic."

Such claims are rampant, and bolster the (unsupported) conjecture that autism is caused solely by some toxin in our modern lifestyle (once again, the mercury-based preservative thimerosal in vaccines is often named, although its use was discontinued in the USA and EU in 2003).  Take, for example, this article by Dan Olmstead, that not only refers to autism as an "epidemic," but claims that the "medico-industrial complex" is trying to hush the fact up.

The first problem is, Olmstead is trying to support his point using information that simply isn't true.  He claims, for example, that the first children with autism were identified in 1943, even though Houston and Frith's book Autism in History makes an excellent case that one Hugh Blair of Borgue, Scotland exhibited all of the classic symptoms of autism spectrum disorder -- way back in 1747.

But the difficulties run deeper than that.  If Olmstead and (many) others are correct, then there is not only a correlation between vaccination and other environmental toxins in the industrial west, there's also a causative link.

And a study just published in Psychological Medicine demonstrates conclusively that there isn't even a correlation.

This paper does an exhaustive analysis of the data, worldwide, of the incidence of autism in the last twenty years.  And not only does it indicate that the rates of autism haven't changed appreciably in the last twenty years -- pretty curious if it's an "epidemic" -- the incidence of autism in sub-Saharan Africa (30.0 affected children per 100,000), where very few children are vaccinated, is actually higher than that for western Europe (24.8 affected children per 100,000), where almost all children are immunized.

Kind of blows a hole in the idea of a human-induced autism epidemic being suppressed by the evil medico-industrial complex and "Big Pharma."  The authors of the study, of course, put it in more measured terms, stating, "After accounting for methodological variations, there was no clear evidence of a change in prevalence for autistic disorder or other ASDs between 1990 and 2010.  Worldwide, there was little regional variation in the prevalence of ASDs."

And if you add that to a further study that found that in places where rates of autism diagnosis have risen, diagnosis of mental retardation has fallen, the situation becomes even clearer.  Consider this graph, developed by from United States Department of Education data:

[after Shattuck et al.]

It is evident that in times past autistic children were lumped in with those who suffered from other developmental disorders -- those unfortunates who were labeled in the US Census starting in 1850 as "idiots, imbeciles, deaf & dumb, blind, or insane" and who were often institutionalized in conditions so horrible that they defy belief.

In taking issue with the people who are publicizing false information about an "autism epidemic," I am in no way trying to minimize the struggles that autistic children and their parents go through, nor am I unsympathetic with their desire to understand the cause.  But no one -- least of all the children with ASD -- are helped in any way by fear-mongering, alarmism, and conspiracy theories.

As with anything: we are always best off knowing the facts, even if those facts still leave us in a state of ignorance regarding ultimate causes.  Recent advances in identifying the genetic underpinning of autism and related disorders leave me hopeful that we may soon have answers; in the meantime, what we need is compassion and understanding for ASD children and their caregivers, and some caution about promoting spurious and unscientific theories about the disorder's origins.