My son Charlie has, for most of his life, been a hands-down good eater. As a baby, while he did have more than a few gross motor delays), he had no difficulty learning to nurse. We’re not always or, indeed, often sure about what Charlie might be thinking due to his limited language, but we’ve generally been able to assume that he’s ever ready to eat.

And then, this summer—-amid various other changes—a most curious thing happened. Charlie (who is definitely an adolescent) must be in the throes of a growth spurt. He’s needed new shoes after only a few months and shirts that seemed loose and baggy now are just the right length. He’s gotten decidedly lanky and lean. And he’s been eating less than he usually has, and left fries and burgers uneaten on his plate.

After nine years of being gluten-free, Charlie is no longer on “the special diet.” This past summer, that is, all those “forbidden fruit foods”—Saltine crackers; bread that wasn’t made of rice, tapioca, and corn flour and xantham gum; pizza crust; bagels; brownies——went from the realm of “off limits and don’t even ask” to “ok, but what do you call it, ok, we’ll get it.” Sometimes I suspect one reason we stayed with the special diet for so long was because it restricted the “allowable” foods. We didn’t have any “forbidden fruits” in our kitchen and when Charlie started taking medication—Risperdal—that is known to increase appetite and cause weight gain, it wasn’t as if we had to hide the Ho-Hos and put a lock on the refrigerator.

After so many years on the special diet, I worried that, once Charlie was off it, there’d be no end to what was consumed. But a funny thing happened: Now given carte blanche to eat anything, Charlie’s appetite, while certainly healthy, has lessened. He is content with one brownie; he still loves sushi and Vietnamese spring rolls and rice and other gluten-free casein-free foods. A request for “brown noodles” still means thick white chung fun made of rice, not the fine yellow (wheaten) strands of other dishes. There’ve been no more (yet) attempts to put an entire cake, encased in white icing and food-colored decorations, into the shopping cart, or to sneak in a lick of something and leave a cake wreck in our wake.

Don’t put “good stuff out of reach”; don’t pressure a child to take a bite, the New York Times notes about those 6 food mistakes parents make:

Studies show that children react negatively when parents pressure them to eat foods, even if the pressure offers a reward. In one study at Pennsylvania State University, researchers asked children to eat vegetables and drink milk, offering them stickers and television time if they did. Later in the study, the children expressed dislike for the foods they had been rewarded for eating.

“Parents say things like ‘eat your vegetables and you can watch TV,’ but we know that kind of thing doesn’t work either,” said Leann L. Birch, director of Penn State’s childhood obesity research center and a co-author of the study. “In the short run, you might be able to coerce a child to eat, but in the long run, they will be less likely to eat those foods.”

The better approach is to put the food on the table and encourage a child to try it. But don’t complain if she refuses, and don’t offer praise if she tastes it. Just ask her if she wants some more or take seconds yourself, but try to stay neutral.

It’s even suggested that parents put out a new food 15 time. You keep putting the food on the table that many to see if a child will accept it; you don’t demand, cajole, or bribe to get in that bite of Brussels sprout, just put out the food. (And eating some yourself doesn’t hurt.) (Yes, I like Brussels sprouts.) Charlie does have a fairly varied diet and has been known to have a taste for cauliflower and sautéed green onions (separately); I think he saw me eating these, and also preparing them—cleaning, chopping, stir-frying—-in the kitchen.

Charlie has, in the past, gotten obsessed day in and day out with various things, and often things that were restricted, from brownies to Barney. And having the chance to make a real choice seems to be giving him a sense of control and, even, moderation. Being able to taste once “forbidden fruit” leaves the decision of whether or now he wants to eat something with him, not with us. Sounds obvious—-but so often choices get made or assumed or not at all asked for Charlie. And he does know what he wants and, given the chance, he can tell us himself that he wants cake, and eat it, too, or not.

No, not that kind of shot. I mean “shot” in the sense of taking a photo—a snapshot—of a moment, of something you wanted to remember.

3 autism shots from Tuesday, September 16th, in reverse chronological order.

First shot. Pulling out of the parking lot of Target after the purchase of overly mundane items with a Target card from my sister and making our way through more parking lots to the actual exit of a mega-suburban shopping complex, a car putts, pauses, and zooms by us on the right. I see a wall of white stuffed animals in the back window and two autism magnets like this.

Shot the second. Charlie and I go for a walk down the condo-lined boulevard that we live off of. He’s scrunching up his shirt and running ahead and humming; cooler day; we’re happy. I sight a girl around Charlie’s age, beside a red wagon filled with cups and a plastic pitcher and a sign and a box. I had seen her yesterday when the sign (”LEMONADE”) was set up and I’d seen her in the summer at the condo complex’s pool. Then, I met her mother and found out she’s on the spectrum.

She looks right at Charlie as he hurries happily past. She looks at me.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi,” I say.

Final autism shot of Tuesday the 16th of September takes place as my mythology class is ending. We’re talking about myth and science in fifth and fourth century BC Greece, and also superstition, and do we see these all today in ourselves? I mention various myths about AIDS and a students says “and there’s this theory that says that vaccines cause autism and all the science says no……”

No, I did not think my student was going to say that—the student and the whole class looked a little surprised when I said, well, I kind of write about that topic a lot.

Maybe more than kind of.

“Fear of autism is perfectly reasonable.”

Well, I guess it could be construed as such. But not really.

The above sentence is from a September 15th article on Babble—”the magazine and community for a new generation of parents”—by Kate Tuttle, with the title of Compulsory Vaccination. The article presents a capsule history of vaccines and resistance to them since their invention in the late 18th century:

Some of these early objectors believed that vaccination was itself an affront to the God who had sent disease to punish sinners, while others, like today’s anti-vaccination activists, feared that the shots meant to protect the public good would inflict harm on individuals.

The numerous scientific studies refuting a vaccine-autism link are cited, and the role of the Internet and the mass media in furthering the life of rumors about this or that as a “cause” of autism; after this comes the statement about fear of autism being “reasonable”:

Fear of autism is perfectly reasonable. It’s a scary diagnosis, one that’s risen exponentially over the past two decades — though whether through a vast expansion of the diagnosis or an actual increase in numbers is still hotly debated. But it’s natural that a condition with no known cause would inspire concerned parents to go looking for a culprit, particularly one they can protect their children from.

Fear of autism might seem “perfectly reasonable.” But autism is not something you can catch, like measles and there’s a tendency, because of fear and a bit even of panic, for people to shrug away and even belittle arguments that attribute the notable recent rise in the prevalence of autism to better diagnosis. It’s not that there is an epidemic of autism, as that fear of a child “getting” autism from something that a parent could “protect their children from” seems endemic in our culture right now.

The Babble article gets somewhat to the heart of why some continue to believe, and quite fervently, in a vaccine-autism link. The now-discredited study by Dr. Andrew Wakefield claiming a link between the MMR and autism that was published in The Lancet in 1998 (not 1988 as Babble says) is noted:

It doesn’t really matter that there’s no significant scientific debate about the matter (as with evolution and global warming, a vanishingly miniscule number of actual scientists disagree with the majority opinion), many parents still feel that the relationship between autism and vaccines is an open question. And though the number of families opting to exempt themselves from vaccination requirements is overall quite small — less than one percent in most states — it’s a very vocal minority. (A growing movement of parents choose to vaccinate their children, but on a delayed or modified schedule.) Parents who opt out of vaccines tend toward the crunchy; Waldorf Schools are among those with the highest incidence of non-vaccination, and have found themselves the epicenters of childhood disease outbreaks.

Many parents still feel that the relationship between autism and vaccines is an open question. To me this is the crux of the problem, and one of the main reasons why belief in vaccines or something as vaccines as causing autism persists. Science is not enough, and is not going, to change people’s views, but their feelings and emotions—the heart over the head, if you will—-play a huge role in all of this. Parental fear of autism is rather anything but reasonable, it would seem, and stems from a resistance to accepting what the science says.

And autism can seem a “scary” word if your child has just been diagnosed and all you can think is, “what do I do?”. But there is (however much it seems to be so or not) a lot more that can be done to help and teach autistic children today—my son’s prospects, while limited and seemingly ever in flux—are much greater than they would have been in previous generations. There’s still a lot of misunderstanding out there, but also a lot more understanding and knowledge. While some parents will continue feel that a vaccine or something in a vaccine “triggered” autism in their child, I’m not so sure whether most parents actually think so, and will continue to believe so.

It’s not autism that is to be feared but how tenaciously the notion of a vaccine-autism link is being clung to, and will be adherd to, long after study after study refutes a link, and the jury is long gone.

A simile, as my students are quick to tell me, is when you’re comparing something to something else and you use “as” or “like.” It’s a comparison of something by way of mentioning something else, and the “‘as’ or ‘like’” makes it very clear what you’re up to.

“Simile” is the title of one of my favorite poems from Line Dance (Word Press 2008) by Barbara Crooker:

My son showd me his paper from remedial
English; he was supposed to fill in the blanks.
Cool as a __________.
Smooth as a __________. Neat as a _____.

He came up with: angry as a teakettle
and when I asked, “Why?” said,
“Because it was boiling mad.” Of course,
it was marked wrong, one more red mark
in his life’s long test.

When I called from Virginia to ask him
what he did last weekend,
he said, “We bought Italian salad dressing.”

Last fall we went to a Broadway
play; what he liked the most
were traffic lights and Don’t Walk signs.

Of, my little pork chop, my sweet potato,
my tender tot. You have made me pay attention
to the world’s smallest minutia. My pea-shaped
heart, red as a stop sign, fills with
the helium of tenderness, thinks it might burst.

Crooker is the mother of an adult autistic son and a couple of poems (such as “Climbing the Jade Mountain,” quoted at the end of this post) in Line Dance are about him. Crooker being a poet, and  (like me) the mother of an autistic son who struggles especially to use words, I sense in “Simile” a certain feeling of intertwined sadness and tenderness—-linked with “helium” in the poem’s last line, and potentially explosive. Crooker’s fine attentiveness to the power and nuance of words is ever, implicitly, in quiet contrast to her son’s different way of being-in-language, in which one is “angry as a teakettle” because “it was boiling mad,” an answer evoking a certain kind of poetry of its own. An answer that is marked simply wrong, in red.

Language is, you might say, my bread and butter. I teach two languages (”dead” ones, all right, and so perhaps all the more “foreign”). I translate poetry from both (Latin more, and Virgil in particular) and sit across from undergraduates trying to turn vocabulary words and grammar into a coherent sentence. And, like Crooker, my son is autistic and language is not a medium he is readily conversant in, is perhaps not at all comfortable in. My son does speak, mostly in phrases of a few words recalling a telegraph’s message. It’s mostly the names of things—nouns—and their attributes–adjectives—and a few very literal verbs (eat, drink, want) that he says on his own.

Charlie has plenty to communicate, it should be so obvious. I learn what that might be from something very simple: We (Charlie, Jim and I) spend a lot of time together, on many good adventures (to the beach on Sunday) and for many mundane humdrum moments. Trips to Target to buy paper towels and detergent. Walks down the clean-swept, anonymous main street of our condo complex. Waits in waiting rooms where Charlie has grown too old for the toys and I’ve already read all the autism, special need, and special diet books on the shelf.

It’s a lot of dad-mom-Charlie together time. There aren’t soccer teams or JV football practice or swim team tryouts, or general hanging around with friends, or all the other things “typical” kids do. “Not just any babysitter” can watch Charlie, and we’re excessively choosy about who might. People look too long or look deliberately elsewhere on knowing there’s someone so very different in their midst; someone who doesn’t seem so like them.

While it can get wearying to keeping dealing with all that, I’ve also found that I get better at, truly and really, not letting it bother me. One reason is because I’m too busy talking with, relating to Charlie, and what others are thinking is of no consequence. And honestly, I more and more feel at my most relaxed when I’m with Charlie. Life with our boy is not a continuous stream of harried moments of late; it’s rich and busy and we do tend to do the same things over and over, and yet there’s plenty going on, plenty to learn and do.

Charlie has had and has a lot of challenges and struggles in the behavior department. Some like to go into more detail about all matters “kaka“—that’s ancient Greek for “bad things”—I can assure that we’ve seen and smelled our share of plenty. Nonetheless never would or have we thought that h would be better to be dead rather to be autistic. This very notion was the subject of a post yesterday on Left Brain/Right Brain and such a statement seems to me, in rather classical terms, a statement of hubris. Hubris describes a kind of over-arching pride and self-confidence, the sort of too-great faith that a human—even a hero, like a king or noble in a Greek tragedy—can have, and this pride can breed a kind of defiance and blind one to the truth and the reality before one’s eyes. (Such pride is the flaw in the character of Oedipus, King of Thebes, in Sophocles Oedipus Rex).

Saying that death is better than autism suggests a one-dimensional understanding of autism and of autistic persons. Jim and I have never been able to consider that vaccines or mercury or any of that had something to do with “making” Charlie autistic: A shot didn’t make Charlie Charlie.

My son has done and does some really tough things. Really tough things. There was a time we feared we would not be able to keep him with us at home, that we could not take care of him anymore, could not help him. I think these sorts of terrible, difficult feelings and thoughts drive some or many or most or maybe all of the 5000 or so petitioners in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, and lead them and a whole cast of others (certainly including some lawyers) to, as Kathleen Seidel on Neurodiversity points out, go to some great, great lengths. I also think the claims of a vaccine-autism link will one day seem like so much history when this hypothesis of autism causation is put to rest, after a protracted existence.

Somedays I’m just grateful that Charlie’s with us, and what’s he not able to do and what he’s able to do is so much (as Jim likes to put it) gravy. Monday night after swimming and shopping and a big dinner, Charlie was sitting on a floppy cushion chair (that happens to be personalized with his name in white stitching). Jim was working late and I was finishing my dinner when Charlie suddenly looked straight at me, and squinted his right eye, and said, “Stop it.” And, “stop it.” And, “stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. STOP IT.” Interspersed with “What’s the matter, Charlie? What’s the matter, Charlie?”

He was clearly agitated, the lines of his face drawn and troubled, and he said those two phrases over and over and over for several minutes. I believe I know where they are from: When Charlie was having immense trouble with head-banging, I’d say (what can you say) “stop it, just stop it.” (He did not.) The “what’s the matter Charlie?” was said to him at the school in the town we used to live in. Charlie was never able to answer with words. Somehow those old memories had gone live in him Monday night.

I sat across from him. I moved beside him and said “yeah.” I got up and sat on an old IKEA footstool. When Charlie paused from talking, I said something about taking deep breaths when you’re nervouse—a technique his teacher has told me they have been teaching him—and Charlie said “breath” and breathed in and sat, quiet.

He was as quickly up and into his room, where he ran furiously back and forth across the floor and then started belly-flopping on his bed. I came in and sat on the floor and Charlie started saying the name of an old teacher (whom he’d had in our old town). I said the name of his current teacher and Charlie repeated her name and sat and buried his face in a fleece blanket. He lay down to go to sleep soon after that and I sat in a chair as we pulled his blankets around him and didn’t say anything in particular.

………..You have made me pay attention
to the world’s smallest minutia

——the sound of a boy peacefully breathing, asleep in his own bed on Superman sheets, safe at home.

No similes or metaphors or fanciful figurative language here—-just the depiction of what is, and it is good.

At the risk of being repetitive: Be sure to get your feedback in to the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC). Send in what you think about comments about autism services by September 19, and also your comments about the draft of the Strategic Plan for ASD Research by September 30.

Also, you can go here to review the NIH’s Autism Spectrum Disorder Research Portfolio. Last year (FY 2007), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) devoted $127 million to research autism spectrum disorders through “grants, contracts, research projects conducted as part of the NIH Intramural Research Program, and other mechanisms of support.” In addition, NIH invested $3.9 million in the development of the National Database for Autism Research (NDAR). In FY 2006, $108 million was devoted to research on ASD’s. Go here to see the NIH Autism Spectrum Disorder Research Portfolio; this is how much was allotted to various areas of research:

Genetics/Genomics received $20,670,059 in funding; many other research areas also received significant funds. Clinical Neuroscience received $22,407,705; Behavioral/Psychosocial research received $10,275,206; Environmental Influences and Gene X Environment Interplay received $6,672,090; Education and Dissemination received $4,149,842.

Am finishing off my own statement before sending it off to the IACC.

It’s possible (possible) that Sarah Palin was a bigger topic around here than the usual suspects (vaccines……). The Nation and Foreign Policy have listed some questions for her: What’s yours?

Questions about disability policy and legislation for supports, services, and research preferred.

• About the Two Babies in the Palin Family
  As the mother of a special needs son, it’s not what choices about vaccines that Sarah Palin and her husband make that is my main concern, but how to make sure that Trig gets the right, and the very best, therapies and services for his medical and educational needs.
• (Special Needs) Mommy Wars
  Update on the Mommy Wars: Special Campaign Edition.
• Something(s) To Comment About
  I respond to a commenter’s thought experiment about prenatal genetic testing.
• MMR Vaccine Does Not Cause Autism (not that you didn’t know that already)
  new study in PLoS One by scientists at Columbia University and from the CDC has found no link between the measles vaccine and autism.
• Disabled Woman Dies at Camp After Given Wrong Medication
  Peggy Hjelseth, the camp founder’s daughter, gave 49-year-old Shirley Meade the wrong medication.
• “I get a lot of hate mail”: Autism’s False Prophets by Paul Offit
  Dr. Paul Offit writes the history of the alleged MMR-autism link in Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure.
• More about Gov.Palin on Disabilities
  What Gov. Palin has done done and not done for disabled children in Alaska.
• Autistic Man Loses His Job Over YouTube Videos
  An autistic man, Karl Tilcock, who also has two autistic children, lost his job at Foster’s brewer in Queensland (Australia) over YouTube videos made under the name AustDingo that offended his employer.
• Sarah Palin and her baby Trig
  Without Trig, Governor Sarah Palin’s infant son who has Down Syndrome, what might discussions about her being Senator John McCain’s running mate be like?
• Coming Your Way: Too Good by Jenny
  A whole new line of non-toxic products and gluten-free food from Jenny McCarthy.
• Hope Can Be Expensive
  Does any “result” justify handing over the dollars?
• Chocolate for Autism
  I guess this could be a candidate for the above-mentioned “Too Good” product line.
• Saying No to Timeout Rooms
  Two families are suing the Waukee (Iowa) school district for the way that timeout rooms were used to “discipline” their children.
• Suspended; Need Suggestions and Support
  A mother comments about her 5-year-old autistic son getting suspended from school for the day: Readers have lots to say.

Seems a band called Elbow has won the Nationwide Mercury Prize—-a “staple of UK music accolade-giving since 1992“—-for its album The Seldom Seen Kid. Considering the attention devoted by some “autism activists” (Safe Minds etc.) to the belief that vaccines or something in vaccines, like the mercury-based preservative thimerosal, can be linked to autism, there would indeed be some competition for, I don’t know, “most mad about mercury” and “best talking about detoxing autism.” Jenny McCarthy—now starting up a lifestyle line of non-toxic products—would be a fair contender, as would Evidence of Harm author David Kirby who has again and again “rebranded autism”—-renaming it vaccine-transmitted mercury poisoning or “Environmentally-acquired Neuroimmune Disorder,” to name but two examples—-all while stating that it’s something in the environment behind the epidemic rise in cases of autism, be it vaccines, dental amalgams, or a “Shanghai Plume” of mercury from coal plants built in China that’s wafting across the Pacific Ocean.

Dr. Paul Offit’s recently published book, Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure charts the rise and fall of the vaccine/something in vaccine causes autism hypothesis. A growing body of scientific research refutes such a hypothesis, but not before it has stoked so many parental fears that vaccination rates for the MMR have decreased in the UK and that the US has had its largest outbreak of measles. Just last week, a new study disputed a link between the MMR and autism; as more such studies have been published, anti-vaccine/pro-vaccine safety advocates have cried foul and claimed that scientists have “deep ties to Big Pharma”: Rather than weighing the scientific evidence, there’s a tendency among such advocates to cry out “conspiracy!” and talk around what the evidence says.

And, too, they keep digging for connections and links and bits of data that would suggest that, for instance, some of the autistic children described in Leo Kanner’s 1943 article on infantile autism had been exposed to something suspicious, and even toxic, in the environment; a number of articles by journalist Dan Olmsted have claimed such coincidences. The latest such coincidence was described in a September th  of Autism post, in which Olmsted hypothesized that Neurodiversity blogger Kathleen Seidel is literally “toxic,” due to an alleged brush with ethylmercury—an “occupational exposure to chemicals”—that, who knows, “triggered autism” in her……….

This is Dan Olmsted’s hypothesis, though one can’t but help noting that the post’s title, “Is Kathleen Seidel Toxic?”, has at least two meanings. The first meaning is that noted above—-that Seidel is “toxic” (like autistic children who “become” autistic due to mercury poisoning or some such)—-and the second is that she’s “toxic” in a more metaphorical sense, insofar as her extremely-well-researched and thought-out posts on Neurodiversity have exposed the anti-vaccine/pro-vaccine-safety advocates to some trenchant scrutiny. Seidel is also featured in Dr. Offit’s new book, and was featured as well in a New York magazine article on neurodiversity. She’s indeed been rather “toxic” (in a figurative sense) to the vaccine-autism hypothesis, and to the purveyors of a number of biomedcal and alternative, and often experimental, treatments for autism; Seidel has strongly objected to the detrimental effects of calling autistic persons “trainwrecks” or “poisoned” or “tragedies.” (And here’s more about toxicity.)

Seidel’s scrutiny of vaccine litigation and alternative treatments for autism is much-needed. Of course, families will choose the treatments that they discern are best for their child, but it’s not so easy to evaluate claims of what works and what does not, and when a quack is quacking. Take something as apparently innocuous as organic food: Talk About Curing Autism (TACA) indeed suggests that “considering and going organic is another important step in this process for better eating, health, and digestion.” Then one reads history professor James E. McWilliams in the September 8th Slate about how organic agriculture might be polluting food with heavy metals:

Scientists have known since the 1920s that organic fertilizers used by farmers to supplement conventional systems—composted animal manure, rock phosphates, fish emulsions, guano, wood ashes, etc.—further contaminate topsoil with varying concentrations of heavy metals. Organic advocates, who rely exclusively on these fertilizers, remain well aware of the problem today, although they rarely publicize the point.

No one is saying that organic soil has higher heavy-metal counts than conventional soil as a rule—scientists have not conducted enough research to make such a determination. Still, some evidence indicates that organic soil can, in some cases, be more contaminated. George Kuepper, an agriculture specialist with the National Center for Appropriate Technology, observed in a 2003 report that composting manure actually concentrates the fertilizer’s metal content, which could lead to greater levels of the contaminants in organic soil.

So even while, as TACA says, “these [organic] foods do not contain nasty chemicals added during the growing process,” something—even “heavy metals” of the type some talk about “detoxifying” a child of—may still be present in organic food (which maybe is not exactly “better” for us). There’s more than meets the eye, and the label.

When the talk is about autism, there’s been enough time devoted to arguing for and refuting hypotheses of vaccines as linked to autism. Dr. Offit’s Autism’s False Prophets traces the history of this hypothesis, now in decline. What is not, of course, in decline is the number of children and adults diagnosed with autism. Understanding and awareness of autism—what it is, how to teach autistic persons—have also been growing in the past decade. These are growth trends that are not about to stop, and we need to keep calling for more and better educational supports and services, for schools and schools programs, for job-training, actual jobs, actual housing, and many other services and suports for autistic person, throughout their lifespan.

You’ve got a chance to say what you think about autism services to the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC): Send in comments about autism services by September 19, and send in comments about the draft of the Strategic Plan for ASD Research by September 30. Sullivan on Left Brain/Right Brain has also taken a closer look at the Strategic Plan (which you can see here).

We don’t want our kids to be the losers in the vaccine-autism debate, but they and we can lose out on a lot if so much attention remains fixated on this one hypothetical cause of autism. I could care less about taking home any awards, but I’m not interested in my son being a loser when so much is at stake—-and yes, I’ll keep on talking.

The September 9th New York Times has an editorial on the new study refuting an MMR-autism link:

The new study adds weight to a growing body of epidemiological studies and reviews that have debunked the notion that childhood vaccines cause autism. The Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the C.D.C. and the World Health Organization have found no evidence of a causal link between vaccines and autism.

Meanwhile, the original paper’s publisher — The Lancet — complained in 2004 that the lead author had concealed a conflict of interest. Ten of his co-authors retracted the paper’s implication that the vaccine might be linked to autism. Three of the authors are now defending themselves before a fitness-to-practice panel in London on charges related to their autism research.

Sadly, even after all of this, many parents of autistic children still blame the vaccine. The big losers in this debate are the children who are not being vaccinated because of parental fears and are at risk of contracting serious — sometimes fatal — diseases.

As in, measles.

But not autism.

Laughter is the best and possibly the oldest medicine, as recently noted on BrainBlogger:

Laughter is a naturally occurring response to humorous stimuli and is a rather easily implemented and cost-effective clinical tool. Some lay publications even report that laughter is equivalent to aerobic exercise. It is true that laughter can increase blood flow, stimulate circulation, contract muscle groups, and improve respiratory function. But, these effects are short-lived and laughter is followed by a period of muscle relaxation, decreased heart rate, slowed respiration, and decreased blood pressure. This period may last as long as 45 minutes. Some research has shown laughter causes a decrease in the levels of the stress hormones epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol. This may explain the relationship between laughter and increased immune function, which leads to overall health benefits. Scientific data supporting the extent and actual benefit of laughter is lacking, however, and some studies have yielded conflicting results.

Impasse at an IEP meeting—-an elaborate mess of all messes across the kitchen floor, the hall carpet, and nearing the bathroom—-crazy moment in line at the grocery store: Laughter soothes, and salves. (And for a laugh, go to BrainBlogger for two the world’s oldest jokes.)

Lots of media coverage on the newly published study disputing an autism-MMR link. A September 3rd ABC News article opens with the story of Arthur Anderson, who’s now nine years old. He was five when he started to show “signs of autism” after receiving the MMR vaccine; he also had “chronic stomach problems” a couple of weeks earlier. “‘By 7,’” as his mother Sorsha Anderson says, “‘he was a completely different child. He could not make eye contact at all’”; he also “‘began losing language… and then he was diagnosed with autism.’”

While I’ve certainly come across numerous parental accounts of a child losing skills and “developing” autism after receiving a vaccine, the age of Arthur Anderson at the time of diagnosis stands out. 18 months is when children typically receive their first MMR; 18 months is also when children start to present with signs of autism, due to delays in communication, social skills, and play skills becoming more apparent. Much has been made of the temporal proximity within which these two events occur, as evidence for a vaccine-autism link. More would need to be known about Arthur Anderson; are there other cases of children five years and older seeming to develop signs of autism after receiving a vaccine?

A second point about the ABC News study. Laura Bono, a co-founder, board member and Research Committee co-chair of the causes of autism. Dr. Mady Hornig—one of the authors of the new study disputing an MMR-autism link—was also the author of a 2004 study on Neurotoxic effects of postnatal thimerosal are mouse strain dependent . This study is posted as a PDF file via the NAA’s library webapge; the 2004 Hornig study is also posted as a PDF file on the website of Safe Minds.

The NAA states in a press release that the new study by Hornig et al. is “‘flawed’” and that it “‘fell far short of what the public needs to prove safety of the MMR vaccine.’” The NAA also needs, perhaps, to note that its use of Hornig’s 2004 study as providing a sort of “sweeping conclusion” for an MMR-vaccine link also falls “far short.” (The relevance of research on mice who have “signs of autism” is difficult to assess; what such “symptoms” are in mice and how they are arise, is different from what occurs in humans.) The press release does not mention Dr Hornig as one of the authors of the new study.

Here’s Action for Autism and Left Brain/Right Brain.