Yes, noted the link to Rashid Buttar—here is Orac with some thoughts on Dr. Rashid Buttarand the failure of state medical boards.

Cliff

Cliff

Kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.

The reason why they’re fragmented is because, when you are looking for substance that causes certain behavioral trends, you have to consistently control for every possible substance in an inductive trial as it stands. And when you’re dealing with something as nebulous as “adversely affects”, it becomes far less clear. How can you tell when something is “adversely affected”? The type of behavior examined on that end is thrown out the window, and you have an uncontrolled variable lurking in your study. Putting autism back in helps as that’s a defined category in its place. “Cause” is a far more better term than “adversely affect”, because a. with “adversely affect”, you can argue it compounded an unknown variable that hasn’t been determined yet which would, in fact be the cause, and that’s tricky to prove and b. casual conditions are essentially what’s being looked for in practical terms of purpose, taking the assumptions of these studies. Then you’re just knocking out all of the potential substance variables, and I guess vaccines a place to start, if anywhere.

In other words, in “vaccines cause autism”, we actually have means for an inductive trial. In “Do vaccines affect adversely to children who are born immunologically, gastrointestinally, biochemically, metabolically immature-(probably genetically linked through SNPs or other ) or with off the average kidney/liver and xenobiotics management function?”, you’ve got an insane number of conditionals and no means to conduct an inductive test.

Cliff

The understanding of vaccine-induced immune responses in adults and infants is limited. Current vaccination schedules for infants are frequently debated. Especially, the relationship among the timing, the frequency of the dosing, and the generation of an immunological memory are debated. Vaccine antigen-induced cytokine responses to vaccinations given in infancy are of particular interest because little is known about cellular responses in this age, and the information available is based on antibody responses. Pharmacogenomics is ideally suited to study cellular responses related to immune response; in addition, toxicity, inflammation, apoptosis, stress, and oncogenesis can be monitored, since the expression of thousands of genes can be measured in a single experiment.

Much more useful than “vaccines cause autism”? kind of questions may be done with increasing knowledge, especially in combination with clinical studies. There are a lot of questions that may be done about adverse effects and biochemistry and metabolism- and others- and not only from vaccines- considering ASD. Even more, there are a lot of published studies related to these topics in ASD, but fragmented and not in the context of a systemic consideration .