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 …read more

A new study in PLoS One by scientists at Columbia University and from the CDC has found no link between the measles vaccine and autism. Researchers replicated the 1998 Lancet study by Dr. Andrew Wakefield; this study claimed that there was such a link and led to widespread fear that the vaccine could cause autism and, too, parents choosing not to vaccinate their children.
The researchers looked for evidence of genetic material from the measles virus in intestinal tissue samples taken from 25 autistic children who also had gastrointestinal problems; these results were compared to samples from 13 children …read more