Those Vaccines

My son Charlie’s lead ABA therapist has years of experience teaching autistic students (including adolescents) in an autism school; we were more than fortunate when she started to work with Charlie in 1:1 sessions in our house one and a half years ago. Charlie is tall for his age and, thanks to lots of bike-riding and swimming, muscled and strong. When we first met our therapist, Charlie did many of the kind of behaviors that make people speak of autism as “devastating” and “severely affected.” Thanks to the combination of finding the right school placement and a home ABA program—to the good teaching from this therapist and others—the behaviors have dwindled and Charlie is learning not only to control them, but to learn other ways to express his needs and frustrations.

So when our therapist had to stop working for us, we more than missed her. She was in her third trimester and was not so quick on her feet. We were overjoyed when she came back to work with Charlie. Unfortunately, she often had to cancel a session or cut one short, to pick up her baby, who was frequently sick. As she was hurrying out after the daycare had yet again called that she had to pick up her child, she mentioned in passing that her pediatrician had not been happy that she was not getting him a flu shot.

“Those vaccines……” Her voice trailed off.”The things you hear”

“Yes, those vaccines……..” I said.

This elliptical interchange between two mothers would not have, I think, occurred at any time other than our own. A review of journalist Arthur Allen’s book Vaccines: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver in the February 1st Wall Street Journal suggests why. The reviewer, Henry Miller, a physician and the author (with Gregory Conko) of The Frankenfood Myth: How Protest and Politics Threaten the Biotech Revolution,highlights Allen’s account of not only the discovery and development of vaccines, but also of their “changing social status.”

If you (like myself; like our ABA therapist) have had anything to do with autism in the previous decade, you cannot but help at least being familiar with the theories linking vaccines (specifically the MMR) and the mercury-based preservative thimerasol to autism and, specifically, as agents causing autism. As Miller points out, controversy surrounding vaccines did not start with autism, but even “their early trials and their sometimes (undeservedly) wobbly reputation in recent years.” It was the success of vaccines in keeping soldiers in the field in the first half of the twentieth century that “promoted public trust.” Paradoxically, while vaccines (writes Miller) are “more safe, effective and innovative” than ever before thanks to developments in “modern laboratory techniques,” vaccines have fallen under suspicion. To more than a few parents of autistic children, vaccines have indeed become the culprit for the “loss” of a child to the nightmares of autism.

Recent writing by parents of autistic children (one example) and by those promoting an environmental agent as causing autism (one example), has emphasized the physical symptoms and indeed the physical distress of their children; use of biomedical treatments that address these physical symptoms has become not uncommon. “Something is medically wrong with many, many autistic children,” wrote journalist Dan Olmsted in The Age of Autism: A whole-body illness (October 4, 2005); medical problems referred to in letters sent to Olmsted (and quoted from in his article) include “allergies,” “chronic diarrhea,” “gut parasites, ulcer bacteria,” and the like.

I note this tendency to feature these medical issues in writing about autism (and in particular in writing about autism only available on the Internet) in light of an observation that Miller makes in his review of Allen’s Vaccines: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver, namely that the vast majority of American children “no longer come down with the infectious diseases ‘that shots protect against.’” Instead, Miller notes in reference to Allen, other childhood diseases—you know which ones—have come to the forefront:

With the near disappearance of virulent infectious disease, Mr. Allen writes, “other diseases of childhood — autism, juvenile diabetes, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, asthma — have become more visible.” Vaccines have even been blamed for them. Notably, the mercury-containing vaccine preservative thimerosal has been blamed for autism. But as Mr. Allen observes, there is no persuasive evidence for this claim. He comments wryly that even after thimerosal “was long gone from vaccines, people kept discovering that their children were being made autistic by it.” Little wonder that vaccination rates have dwindled — and deadly outbreaks of measles, mumps and whooping cough are more common.

I have yet to read Allen’s book and so prefer not to say too much regarding it. Having read a great deal of writing about autism of late that refers to the aforementioned medical symptoms and physical distress, and having known more than a few parents who fall under the category of those who have discovered “that their children were being made autistic” by a substance that was not even in the vaccines those very children received, I can say that those who believe in a connection between vaccines/mercury and autism have certainly gotten their message out to the public. I am not sure what would be going through my mind were I expecting a child now (as our ABA therapist was a year ago) regarding the foods I eat, the fillings in my teeth, or the air that I breathe. “No one wants a sick baby,” was a line in some book or magazine about babies and parenting I remember reading some ten years ago; what mother—what new parents—would not do everything they could to make sure their child is healthy and (as the phrase goes) happy?

Writing about autistic children that constantly emphasizes the medical aspects and physical symptoms often downplays, if it at all mentions, how much can be done not in regard to biomedical treatment, but through education. Through teaching a child, and not only academic subjects, but also skills that autistic children struggle so much with, from communicating appropriately and managing their anxiety to just sitting in their seat at circle time. The beauty of education is that a child learns to do things on his or her own to help him or herself speak his or her own mind, not yell in class, and sit in that chair. Education does not cure a child of a disease but there is one thing that it has been, time and again, shown to cure:

Ignorance.

Whether about autism, what life with autism is “really” like, or vaccines; or about what really causes autism.