Reread chapter 6 of Paul Offit’s book. There were three experiments where the rate of autism went up when thimerosal was removed from the vaccines. The question, “If not mercury then what?” came up. It was answered without proof as being because of the diagnostics. It could just as easily been answered as being because the vaccination rate went up during the experiments. That, too, would have been speculation. Both sides have allowed speculation to morph into dogmatic faith. This does the autism community no good.

I see autism as a medical issue. There are a number of medical aspects of autism that will never be explored because they step dangerously close to thimerosal and/or vaccines. These aspects that could be exploited to make the lives of our children better will never be exploited. I find that frustrating.

As I said before, I witnessed the change in autism rate. What I saw was a change. Classical autism went from unknown to expected in the school district. Yes there were odd kids that rightly would be classified as Aspergers, but the classic autistic behavior was unknown.

The idea that there is no epidemic comes from the question of why the rate jumped if it “can’t be vaccines”. “It can’t be vaccines.” is not a reason for no epidemic.

That there are environmental causes for conditions (and there are some possible causes for autism, like congenital Rubella) does not mean that the prevalence of the condition is not stable. Again, mental retardation is a good analogy here.

….apparent clusters of diseases are reported all the time. Most of the time the clusters are not real, meaning they are just statistical flukes. So the first question to answer with any apparent cluster is – does this represent a real epidemiological phenomenon.

from the Neurologica blog.

I realize we’ve discussed this before, but RAJ’s critiques of the autism construct don’t make sense to me.

By his reasoning, mental retardation must be a bogus construct too. It’s not measured biologically, it doesn’t matter what causes it to diagnose it, and the IQ threshold (70) is essentially arbitrary.