Olmsted on Vaccines, Not Autism
December 12, 2006 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
Statistics, data and methodology: Those are the main topics of ‘Problems’ in CDC data, the latest installment in Dan Olmsted’s The Age of Autism series. ‘Problems’ in CDC data reports on certain “’serious problems’” with the approach the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used in its study of its own Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD). The purpose of the study, called the Verstraeten Study for its principal author, Dr. Thomas Verstraeten, was to assure parents that mercury in vaccines does not cause autism. But the CDC’s own database has problems, as Olmsted writes:
But the database has weaknesses — including different ways of diagnosing autism at different HMOs — that make it hard to draw broad conclusions, the experts said.
“The panel identified several serious problems that were judged to reduce the usefulness of an ecologic study design using the VSD to address the potential association between thimerosal and the risk” of autism, according to the report. An ecologic study — analyzing groups rather than individuals — was the approach the CDC used.
The remainder of ‘Problems’ in CDC data includes quotations from Dr. Irva Hertz-Picciotto, J.B. Handley of Generation Rescue and David Kirby, the journalist who wrote Evidence of Harm, regarding the problems in the VSD.
I am curious to find out what criteria were used to identify children as autistic in the Verstaeten Study and, too, what changes regarding the diagnostic criteria for autism, or what other changes might be made. If one reason that autism diagnoses are increasing is a sign of our increased understanding about what autism is (not mercury poisoning, for instance), this difference in understanding—-this epistemological difference—ought also to be be factored into future studies. Parents of young children and the general public too are quite aware of the vaccine-autism connection, less well-informed about what autism is—and, while article likes ‘Problems’ in CDC data and books like Evidence of Harm present plenty of facts, figures, and information about issues of public health in our day and age, they do not really show why this might be the “age of autism.”
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Check out what others are saying about this post...[...] Figaro of Figures of Speech served fresh notes that epitasis “supplements a point with a sentence that adds emphasis rather than meaning.” Indeed, Olmsted’s Age of Autism return again and again to the same topics: He has continually called for investigation into an autism-vaccine link, stated that there is an epidemic of autism, and noted that earlier evidence suggests that autism and a “a rare and mysterious autoimmune disorder,” Still’s disease, may be connected. Epitasis thus serves Olmsted well as, by “stretching out” what one sentence is saying into the next, by adding on phrases of similar meaning but different wording (”…..disorders on the autism “spectrum” now afflict as many as 1 in 166 children. Note: children. Where are the 1 in 166 autistic adults?”), Olmsted is able to continue to make the same points about autism (and, in particular, that autism is an epidemic affecting today’s children that has potentially been caused by vaccines or by mercury or by some environmental agent, and that the truth about all this is not being revealed by some institution or agency). [...]