Falsified Data
I belong to a LJ community called Natural Family. Sometimes I really enjoy the posts I read there. Things like how to clean your home without the use of chemicals, what to do about breastfeeding difficulties, sleeping issues, etc. Mostly I lurk, sometimes I comment. I think I may have posted something there only once.
What I don’t like about this community is the number of people who are electing not to vaccinate their children for fear of vaccine injury, autism, or because it’s not "natural." I have spent brief periods of time wrestling with my feelings about vaccination, especially when it was looking like there might be a tie between certain vaccines, thimerosol (a mercurial antiseptic preservative in vaccines), and incidence of autism. But always Ian and I have decided in FAVOR of prevention via vaccines. Our son goes to a school in which not all children are vaccinated, so we feel strongly that Lucas and Asher should have the immunity. It’s a great gift of science that we can go through life fairly confident that our little darlings won’t die of childhood diseases like measles or diphtheria.
So, Ian, thank you for all your reassuring studies and data that you presented me to refute the one 1998 study claiming that autism came on within days of children receiving the MMR vaccine. Seems the scientist who made that claim has some explaining to do.
February 10, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Boom! Didn’t I tell you?
February 10, 2009 at 11:32 pm
Thanks for posting. The hysteria about the nonexistent autism-MMR link drives me a bit batty. I first heard about this when Amelia was only a few weeks old. So I researched it. By going and reading the actual studies. And in many many studies with thousands of children, no link whatsoever was found.
I am in favor of many vaccines. Not all. But many. But that may be because I have seen the results of some of these diseases. I’ve treated polio survivors with post-polio syndrome. I’ve worked with people who are deaf due to measles. It’s easy to forget the awful impact of the diseases when we have largely grown up without them.
But those are my personal opinions and I know that all parents need to make their own decisions about their children. I just wish they would make the decisions based on facts, not rumor.
February 11, 2009 at 10:47 am
The nice clean water that comes out of our taps isn’t natural either, but I don’t hear anyone complaining about that. Oh wait…