It’s the countdown to the end of 2008 and here is some of what was going on at the beginning of the year:
The trial of Dr. Karen McCarron began on January 7th. On January 16th, McCarron was ruled guilty on all counts. On April 1st, she was sentenced to 36 years in prison for the May 13th suffocation of her then 3-year-old daughter, Katherine “Katie” McCarron.
January also saw the publication of further evidence refuting a link between vaccines and autism, with the publication in the Archives of General Psychiatry on the decline in thimerosal exposure and the continue increase …read more

For the past two weeks, one post after another has been about the exclusion of autistic individuals: 13-year-old Adam Race from church—and by a restraining order. 5-year-old Alex Barton from his kindergarten class—and by a “voting out” process that has had more than a few echoes of the “Survivor” reality TV show.
But these cases weren’t the stuff of network drama (like this TV show—remember the “mercuritol”?). They were real things that happened to real autistic people and—based on what’s been said ‘round the web and here on this blog—this kind of exclusion is not at all uncommon. And it’s not …read more

Parents don’t cause autism and neither do vaccines.
Further: More and more evidence is being found that rejects the hypothesis that there is a link between autism and mercury; more and more evidence is also being found that rejects the hypothesis that there is a link between autism and the MMR vaccine.
Nonetheless: Proponents of the hypothesis that a vaccine or something in vaccines (such as mercury in the form of the preservative thimerosal) causes autism remain as vocal as ever about their views, which they make known via full-page ads in national newspapers; celebrities such as Jenny McCarthy; and press releases …read more

Neon-bright marquees and music (from B.B. King’s theater–Buckwheat Zydeco is playing) and tour buses driving up halfway onto 42nd street and Russian Spanish Korean Twi being spoken and the smell of the gyros and steam from the subway grates: That was what Charlie walked through, holding Jim’s arm and grinning, with my parents and me bringing up the rear on Saturday afternoon in New York City. Too much going on, same as the topics for the past two weeks’ posts.

What’s It All About, Eli? (2): Keeping the FaithWhile the court case that the main character of ABC’s legal drama, Eli …read more

It’s the charm that matters most, at least according to New York Magazine in a review of Eli Stone, the new ABC legal drama that got off to a controversial start with its first episode about lawyer Stone winning a $5.2 million verdict for a mother who claimed that her son became autistic due to a mercury-based substance in a flu vaccine. New York Magazine says “tsk tsk” to the New York Times for feeling it “necessary to deplore this plot point in a February 2 editorial about mercury preservatives. (Sloppy science in a TV serial! Imagine that.).” Who …read more

Autism and schizophrenia: This is a topic far beyond what one blog post can even begin to discuss, and this post is simply a note on the topic after reflecting on what Dr. Nancy Minshew said in a February 6th article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and puzzling over the as-usual excessive response by those who believe that a vaccine or mercury or something in a vaccine causes autism. Dr. Minshew, who is the Director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Excellence in Autism Research, was quoted in a January 31st article about the ABC comedic legal drama, Eli Stone, …read more

“…there might be a deeper meaning to the series as a whole. This is something I touched upon on my own post for today (autism and spirituality–maybe they’ll get that angle right).
wrote one commenter after watching ABC’s new legal TV drama, Eli Stone: In reading responses and commentary on the show, I’ve been struck at how often people have talked about faith—a New York Times editorial about the show is entitled Eli Stone’s Overleap of Faith—and stating that they appreciate the show because it brings other topics into the discussion about autism. While the court case that Stone successfully …read more

A certain TV show about a certain lawyer and a certain hypothesis about what causes autism dominated autism discussions this week, for better or for worse—-when I talk about autism, I’m thinking of a very real boy, my son Charlie, and not so much about a fictional TV character. My real boy’s week was more of a struggle than has been usual. And then, this evening as we stood in the checkout line at the grocery store, a teenage clerk in the next aisle said “his tooth’s on the floor!” and sure enough, there was Charlie bending over to pick …read more

Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick, the author of MMR and Autism: What Parents Need to Know, charts the rise and fall of anti-MMR mania in a book review of Health, Risk and News: The MMR Vaccine and the Media by Tammy Boyce, a research fellow in Risk, Science, and Health Communication at Cardiff University.

Dr. Boyce’s book tells the story of media coverage of the scare over the MMR vaccine in Britain after Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the primary author of the first paper suggesting an MMR-autism link (a paper that has since been retracted by journal that published it most of the …read more

There’s a new blog in the blogosphere, Hollywood Spectrum, and its first post offers a summary of the original script of a certain TV show set to air tonight, in which lawyer Eli Stone takes on an insurance company which won’t pay for treatments for “William,” who has autism (and who is played by an autistic child). The treatment in question is not some alterna-biomedical magic supplement, but Risperidone: After a month on this antipsychotic (which has been approved to treat “irritability” in autistic children), William’s mother describes the value of the drug this way: “He actually smiled.”

A child …read more