The Age of Autism: The Amish Elephant

I have no doubt that the Barrett/Quack/Rag-tag Posse of failures like
Probert will attack this respected journalist ...

See them lined up he


http://web.archive.org/web/200406100...e/whoarewe.htm


The Age of Autism: The Amish Elephant
By Dan Olmsted
UPI Senior Editor
Oct. 29, 2005 at 2:34PM

A specter is haunting the medical and journalism establishments of the
United States: Where are the unvaccinated people with autism?
That is just about the only way to explain what now appears to
be a collective resistance to considering that question. And like all
unanswered questions, this raises another one: Why?
What is the problem with quickly and firmly establishing that
the autism rate is about the same everywhere and for everybody in the
United States, vaccinated or unvaccinated? Wouldn't that stop all the
scientifically illiterate chatter by parents who believe vaccinations
made their children autistic? Wouldn't it put to rest concerns that --
despite the removal of a mercury-containing preservative in most U.S.
vaccines -- hundreds of millions of children in the developing world
are possibly at risk if that preservative is in fact linked to autism?
Calling this issue The Amish Elephant reflects reporting earlier
this year in Age of Autism that the largely unvaccinated Amish may
have a relatively low rate of autism. That apparent dissimilarity is,
in effect, a proverbial elephant in the living room -- studiously
ignored by people who don't want to deal with it and don't believe
they will have to.
Here are a few cases in point.
Earlier this month the National Consumers League conference in
Washington held a session on communicating issues around vaccine
safety. I was on the panel and talked about the Amish and autism. In
the Q&A session that followed, the first question was for me.
"Is this a proper role for a journalist, or is this just a straw
dog set up there with a preliminary answer? It not only showed up
where you wrote it. It was all over the place. You did very, very well
for UPI (at which point I said, 'Thank you -- please tell my bosses
that!') but the question is, did you do very, very well for America?
"Is it appropriate for a journalist -- you weren't reporting,
you were investigating. And I just wonder if you think it's an
appropriate role for you to play."
My answer: "There's different roles for the press. That's
certainly a reasonable question. That is investigative reporting. This
idea is something that's already been discarded -- that there's any
reason why you would want to look in an unvaccinated population.
"One of my favorite comments about journalism is that it's the
wild card of American democracy. The First Amendment says we can do
(in the sense of reporting about) whatever we want. So one of our
privileges is to get an idea in our head and go look at it."
My questioner was not finished. "I wasn't questioning whether
you have a First Amendment right to do it. I think this is more of a
question of the ethics, of what value we are bringing to the debate."
My response: "That's probably not a good one for me to answer.
Obviously I thought it was ethical."
At that point a fellow panelist, Dr. Louis Cooper, former
president of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a staunch vaccine
defender, spoke up. "I would jump in and say I thought it was ethical
and I think it was useful," said Cooper, a courtly and unfailingly
courteous Manhattan pediatrician.
"As you've learned, it was annoying to many people. I wasn't
annoyed by it because I thought you kept the process and the debate
and the discussion going forward. And we have to do that for one
another."
That did not end the discussion. A few minutes later a
public-health professor from -- where else? Harvard -- did her own
version of Jeopardy!, offering the correct "answer" in the form of a
question.
"This question is for Dan. Did you mention the outbreak of polio
that happened in the Amish community in the Netherlands that caused
widespread problems there, and also the fact that there'd been some
context with respect to history in our country in trying to reach out
to the Amish to actually encourage them to try to benefit from some of
the vaccine technology to the extent that we could?
"So there's been a long history in this country of the CDC
trying to reach out to them to the extent that they could. Also with
respect to polio, I think what's really amazing is it's such a great
story, this is such an exciting time, in the sense that we are very
close to global eradication. What that means is we've gone from 1988
when we had 350,000 estimated paralytic polio cases in the world every
year to roughly a thousand. It's very exciting that in fact we don't
have the terror or the hysteria and all of the fear that surrounded
disease.
"I just want to remind everyone that one thing that's very
important in the context of reporting these stories is making sure
that people do remember and also realize with infectious disease is
these things can come back, and until they are eradicated they can
come back and devastate us just as much as they did before, except now
there are a lot more people.
"There's some related news that people might find interesting. A
headline in the Washington Post today, 'Polio outbreak occurs among
Amish families.' So I thought people might be interested in that."
At that point the moderator, Dr. Roger Bernier of the Centers
for Disease Control, said time was getting short -- why was I not
surprised? -- and asked for the next "question."
One thing I've noticed is the more that people want to lecture
instead of learn, the more they speak in breathless run-on sentences
that are hard to stop, slow down or even diagram. They leave one with
the unspoken idea that dialogue -- opening the door to new information
-- is somehow dangerous.
These exchanges reminded me of the response I got from Dr. Julie
Gerberding, the CDC director, when I asked her this summer, verbatim:
"Has the government ever looked at the autism rate in an unvaccinated
U.S. population, and if not, why not?"
Her answer, verbatim:
--
In this country, we have very high levels of vaccination as you
probably know, and I think this year we have record immunization
levels among all of our children, so to (select an unvaccinated group)
that on a population basis would be representative to look at
incidence in that population compared to the other population would be
something that could be done.
But as we're learning, just trying to look at autism in a
community the size of Atlanta, it's very, very difficult to get an
effective numerator and denominator to get a reliable diagnosis.
I think those kind of studies could be done and should be done.
You'd have to adjust for the strong genetic component that also
distinguishes, for example, people in Amish communities who may elect
not to be immunized (and) also have genetic connectivity that would
make them different from populations that are in other sectors of the
United States. So drawing some conclusions from them would be very
difficult.
I think with reference to the timing of all of this, good
science does take time, and it's part of one of the messages I feel
like I've learned from the feedback that we've gotten from parents
groups this summer (in) struggling with developing a more robust and a
faster research agenda, is let's speed this up. Let's look for the
early studies that could give us at least some hypotheses to test and
evaluate and get information flowing through the research pipeline as
quickly as we can.
So we are committed to doing that, and as I mentioned, in terms
of just measuring the frequency of autism in the population some
pretty big steps have been taken. We're careful not to jump ahead of
our data, but we think we will be able to provide more accurate
information in the next year or so than we've been able to do up to
this point. And I know that is our responsibility.
We've also benefited from some increased investments in these
areas that have allowed us to do this, and so we thank Congress and we
thank the administration for supporting those investments, not just at
CDC but also at NIH and FDA.
--
The latest response to my pesky persistence comes not from
academia or government but from my own profession. Last week the
prestigious Columbia Journalism Review published an article whose main
thrust -- with which I concur -- was that a vigorous debate over a
possible link between vaccines and autism was being thwarted by the
self-induced timidity of the press.
Some reporters told the author, Daniel Schulman, that they have
basically given up on the story because the criticism -- some of it
from their own editors -- was so fierce, and the story was so
complicated.
Schulman described Age of Autism's efforts to come at the issue
"sideways," looking for possible clues to the cause of the disorder in
the natural history of autism. And he mentioned our reporting on the
Amish:
"Privately, two reporters told me that, while intriguing,
Olmsted's reporting on the Amish is misguided, since it may simply
reflect genetic differences among an isolated gene pool. ... Both
reporters believed that Olmsted has made up his mind on the question
and is reporting the facts that support his conclusions."
Ouch. Being slammed by one's peers is never enjoyable, although
reporters need to have thick skins and realize they dish this kind of
thing out every day. (And those anonymous sources really are annoying,
especially when I am happy to be quoted by name about everything.)
What's interesting about the reporters' "private" remarks is the
degree of presumed expertise they suggest -- that looking at the Amish
is misguided "since it may simply reflect genetic differences among an
isolated gene pool." Really? Where did these guys get their doctorate
in genetics, Harvard?
This assertion -- that the Amish gene pool could explain
everything, based on no data that I'm aware of -- is the kind of
self-interested speculation masquerading as expertise that has beset
the autism-vaccines discussion for far too long. The term I learned
for it long ago is "convenient reasoning," and it does not always have
to be conscious.
The Amish have all kinds of standard genetic mental and
developmental disorders -- from bipolar to retardation -- and a lot
more genetic issues to boot from this supposedly protective "isolated
gene pool." The doctors who actually know something about the Amish
have never suggested to me that genes have anything to do with a low
rate of autism. They seem perplexed.
In upcoming columns, we'll put that question to the right people
-- geneticists -- and tell you what we find. It's called reporting.
--
This ongoing series on the roots and rise of autism welcomes
reader response. E-mail:

"Ilena Rose" wrote in message
...

What is the problem with quickly and firmly establishing that
the autism rate is about the same everywhere and for everybody in the
United States, vaccinated or unvaccinated?

...because you would need to control for a lot of other factors. For
example... Parents who don't vaccinate their kids might be less likely to
smoke. If parental smoking caused Autism the results would be misleading if
you didn't control for that. The author claims that the Amish have lower
rates of Autism but is that because they are unvaccinated or because they
live in the countryside away from poluted cities? What about mobile phone
masts? If the parents of unvaccinated children choose not to live near
phone masts then how would you seperate out the effect (if any) of the
masts?

This is one of the reasons that the results of previous studies has been
debated so much - it's allways possible to find something that the study
hasn't controlled for.

http://www.immunize.org/catg.d/p2065.htm

"Evidence that autism occurs in utero

Toxic or viral insults in utero as well as certain central nervous system
disorders are associated with an increase in the incidence of autism.

For example, children exposed to thalidomide during the first or early
second trimester were found to have an increased incidence of autism.(16)
However, autism occurred in children with ear, but not arm or leg,
abnormalities. Because arms and legs develop after 24 days gestation, the
risk period for autism following receipt of thalidomide must be before 24
days gestation. In support of this finding, Rodier and colleagues(17) found
evidence for structural brainstem abnormalities in children with autism.
These abnormalities could only have occurred during brainstem development in
utero.

Similarly, children with congenital rubella syndrome are at increased risk
for development of autism.(18-24) Risk is associated with exposure to
rubella prenatally, but not postnatally.

Finally, children with fragile X syndrome or tuberous sclerosis are also at
increased risk of developing autism.

Taken together, these findings indicate that autism is likely due to
abnormalities of the central nervous system that occur in utero"

Ilena Rose wrote:
I have no doubt that the Barrett/Quack/Rag-tag Posse of failures like
Probert will attack this respected journalist ...

No one from the newsgroup has to. It was done here, by a professional
journalist who was commenting on Olmsted's faulty methodology.

http://www.cjr.org/issues/2005/6/schulman.asp:

"Privately, two reporters told me that, while intriguing, Olmsted's
reporting on the Amish is misguided, since it may simply reflect genetic
differences among an isolated gene pool (Hornig, however, said that a
study on the Amish may still be valuable should the prevalence of autism
in that community indeed be low, allowing researchers to study the
genetics of people who are not susceptible to the disorder). Both
reporters believed that Olmsted has made up his mind on the question and
is reporting the facts that support his conclusions."

See them lined up he

http://web.archive.org/web/200406100...e/whoarewe.htm

A fine bunch of criticl thinkers.

The Age of Autism: The Amish Elephant
By Dan Olmsted
UPI Senior Editor
Oct. 29, 2005 at 2:34PM

A specter is haunting the medical and journalism establishments of the
United States: Where are the unvaccinated people with autism?
That is just about the only way to explain what now appears to
be a collective resistance to considering that question. And like all
unanswered questions, this raises another one: Why?
What is the problem with quickly and firmly establishing that
the autism rate is about the same everywhere and for everybody in the
United States, vaccinated or unvaccinated? Wouldn't that stop all the
scientifically illiterate chatter by parents who believe vaccinations
made their children autistic? Wouldn't it put to rest concerns that --
despite the removal of a mercury-containing preservative in most U.S.
vaccines -- hundreds of millions of children in the developing world
are possibly at risk if that preservative is in fact linked to autism?
Calling this issue The Amish Elephant reflects reporting earlier
this year in Age of Autism that the largely unvaccinated Amish may
have a relatively low rate of autism. That apparent dissimilarity is,
in effect, a proverbial elephant in the living room -- studiously
ignored by people who don't want to deal with it and don't believe
they will have to.
Here are a few cases in point.
Earlier this month the National Consumers League conference in
Washington held a session on communicating issues around vaccine
safety. I was on the panel and talked about the Amish and autism. In
the Q&A session that followed, the first question was for me.
"Is this a proper role for a journalist, or is this just a straw
dog set up there with a preliminary answer? It not only showed up
where you wrote it. It was all over the place. You did very, very well
for UPI (at which point I said, 'Thank you -- please tell my bosses
that!') but the question is, did you do very, very well for America?
"Is it appropriate for a journalist -- you weren't reporting,
you were investigating. And I just wonder if you think it's an
appropriate role for you to play."
My answer: "There's different roles for the press. That's
certainly a reasonable question. That is investigative reporting. This
idea is something that's already been discarded -- that there's any
reason why you would want to look in an unvaccinated population.
"One of my favorite comments about journalism is that it's the
wild card of American democracy. The First Amendment says we can do
(in the sense of reporting about) whatever we want. So one of our
privileges is to get an idea in our head and go look at it."
My questioner was not finished. "I wasn't questioning whether
you have a First Amendment right to do it. I think this is more of a
question of the ethics, of what value we are bringing to the debate."
My response: "That's probably not a good one for me to answer.
Obviously I thought it was ethical."
At that point a fellow panelist, Dr. Louis Cooper, former
president of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a staunch vaccine
defender, spoke up. "I would jump in and say I thought it was ethical
and I think it was useful," said Cooper, a courtly and unfailingly
courteous Manhattan pediatrician.
"As you've learned, it was annoying to many people. I wasn't
annoyed by it because I thought you kept the process and the debate
and the discussion going forward. And we have to do that for one
another."
That did not end the discussion. A few minutes later a
public-health professor from -- where else? Harvard -- did her own
version of Jeopardy!, offering the correct "answer" in the form of a
question.
"This question is for Dan. Did you mention the outbreak of polio
that happened in the Amish community in the Netherlands that caused
widespread problems there, and also the fact that there'd been some
context with respect to history in our country in trying to reach out
to the Amish to actually encourage them to try to benefit from some of
the vaccine technology to the extent that we could?
"So there's been a long history in this country of the CDC
trying to reach out to them to the extent that they could. Also with
respect to polio, I think what's really amazing is it's such a great
story, this is such an exciting time, in the sense that we are very
close to global eradication. What that means is we've gone from 1988
when we had 350,000 estimated paralytic polio cases in the world every
year to roughly a thousand. It's very exciting that in fact we don't
have the terror or the hysteria and all of the fear that surrounded
disease.
"I just want to remind everyone that one thing that's very
important in the context of reporting these stories is making sure
that people do remember and also realize with infectious disease is
these things can come back, and until they are eradicated they can
come back and devastate us just as much as they did before, except now
there are a lot more people.
"There's some related news that people might find interesting. A
headline in the Washington Post today, 'Polio outbreak occurs among
Amish families.' So I thought people might be interested in that."
At that point the moderator, Dr. Roger Bernier of the Centers
for Disease Control, said time was getting short -- why was I not
surprised? -- and asked for the next "question."
One thing I've noticed is the more that people want to lecture
instead of learn, the more they speak in breathless run-on sentences
that are hard to stop, slow down or even diagram. They leave one with
the unspoken idea that dialogue -- opening the door to new information
-- is somehow dangerous.
These exchanges reminded me of the response I got from Dr. Julie
Gerberding, the CDC director, when I asked her this summer, verbatim:
"Has the government ever looked at the autism rate in an unvaccinated
U.S. population, and if not, why not?"
Her answer, verbatim:
--
In this country, we have very high levels of vaccination as you
probably know, and I think this year we have record immunization
levels among all of our children, so to (select an unvaccinated group)
that on a population basis would be representative to look at
incidence in that population compared to the other population would be
something that could be done.
But as we're learning, just trying to look at autism in a
community the size of Atlanta, it's very, very difficult to get an
effective numerator and denominator to get a reliable diagnosis.
I think those kind of studies could be done and should be done.
You'd have to adjust for the strong genetic component that also
distinguishes, for example, people in Amish communities who may elect
not to be immunized (and) also have genetic connectivity that would
make them different from populations that are in other sectors of the
United States. So drawing some conclusions from them would be very
difficult.
I think with reference to the timing of all of this, good
science does take time, and it's part of one of the messages I feel
like I've learned from the feedback that we've gotten from parents
groups this summer (in) struggling with developing a more robust and a
faster research agenda, is let's speed this up. Let's look for the
early studies that could give us at least some hypotheses to test and
evaluate and get information flowing through the research pipeline as
quickly as we can.
So we are committed to doing that, and as I mentioned, in terms
of just measuring the frequency of autism in the population some
pretty big steps have been taken. We're careful not to jump ahead of
our data, but we think we will be able to provide more accurate
information in the next year or so than we've been able to do up to
this point. And I know that is our responsibility.
We've also benefited from some increased investments in these
areas that have allowed us to do this, and so we thank Congress and we
thank the administration for supporting those investments, not just at
CDC but also at NIH and FDA.
--
The latest response to my pesky persistence comes not from
academia or government but from my own profession. Last week the
prestigious Columbia Journalism Review published an article whose main
thrust -- with which I concur -- was that a vigorous debate over a
possible link between vaccines and autism was being thwarted by the
self-induced timidity of the press.
Some reporters told the author, Daniel Schulman, that they have
basically given up on the story because the criticism -- some of it
from their own editors -- was so fierce, and the story was so
complicated.
Schulman described Age of Autism's efforts to come at the issue
"sideways," looking for possible clues to the cause of the disorder in
the natural history of autism. And he mentioned our reporting on the
Amish:
"Privately, two reporters told me that, while intriguing,
Olmsted's reporting on the Amish is misguided, since it may simply
reflect genetic differences among an isolated gene pool. ... Both
reporters believed that Olmsted has made up his mind on the question
and is reporting the facts that support his conclusions."
Ouch. Being slammed by one's peers is never enjoyable, although
reporters need to have thick skins and realize they dish this kind of
thing out every day. (And those anonymous sources really are annoying,
especially when I am happy to be quoted by name about everything.)
What's interesting about the reporters' "private" remarks is the
degree of presumed expertise they suggest -- that looking at the Amish
is misguided "since it may simply reflect genetic differences among an
isolated gene pool." Really? Where did these guys get their doctorate
in genetics, Harvard?
This assertion -- that the Amish gene pool could explain
everything, based on no data that I'm aware of -- is the kind of
self-interested speculation masquerading as expertise that has beset
the autism-vaccines discussion for far too long. The term I learned
for it long ago is "convenient reasoning," and it does not always have
to be conscious.
The Amish have all kinds of standard genetic mental and
developmental disorders -- from bipolar to retardation -- and a lot
more genetic issues to boot from this supposedly protective "isolated
gene pool." The doctors who actually know something about the Amish
have never suggested to me that genes have anything to do with a low
rate of autism. They seem perplexed.
In upcoming columns, we'll put that question to the right people
-- geneticists -- and tell you what we find. It's called reporting.
--
This ongoing series on the roots and rise of autism welcomes
reader response. E-mail:

"CWatters" wrote in message
...

"Ilena Rose" wrote in message
...

What is the problem with quickly and firmly establishing that
the autism rate is about the same everywhere and for everybody in the
United States, vaccinated or unvaccinated?

..because you would need to control for a lot of other factors. For
example... Parents who don't vaccinate their kids might be less likely to
smoke. If parental smoking caused Autism the results would be misleading
if
you didn't control for that. The author claims that the Amish have lower
rates of Autism but is that because they are unvaccinated or because they
live in the countryside away from poluted cities? What about mobile phone
masts? If the parents of unvaccinated children choose not to live near
phone masts then how would you seperate out the effect (if any) of the
masts?

This is one of the reasons that the results of previous studies has been
debated so much - it's allways possible to find something that the study
hasn't controlled for.
===========================

Pin pointing the causes 100%, is difficult at best.
As you indicated, there could be other factors which come into play which
are not being considered. Having grown up in the age when vaccinations for
all children were desirable to prevent damaging diseases, I don't recall
observing an abundance of Autism in kids. It wasn't until recent years that
the theory came about associating it with vaccinations.

Personally, I think Autism is more of a random family gene that pops
up......or perhaps with many more years of intense study it may be found
(surprise!) that all mothers of Autistic kids had a similar experience of
viewing a bad TV commercial of a balding car salesmen in a mismatched plaid
suit hawking old junkers with his pet skunk.

The jury is still out on nailing the exact 'cause'.

"Mark Probert" wrote in message
...
Ilena Rose wrote:
I have no doubt that the Barrett/Quack/Rag-tag Posse of failures like
Probert will attack this respected journalist ...

No one from the newsgroup has to. It was done here, by a professional
journalist who was commenting on Olmsted's faulty methodology.

I'm glad you respect him.

He believes is GASP

Alternative medicine!

http://www.acupuncturepei.com/daniel-schulman.html

Publications on Acupuncture, Oriental Medicine and Alternative Medicine

Schulman D. Case Study Report: Migraines Following a Hysterectomy. North
American Journal of Oriental Medicine. March, 2001: Volume 8 (21); Pages
18-19.

Schulman D. The Best of All Worlds. Towards an Integrated Health Care System
Model. Submission to Commission on Future of Health Care in Canada. Prince
Edward Island Association for Integrative Medicine. 2002.

Schulman D. A Framework for Classifying Unpleasant Responses to Acupuncture.
The Journal of Chinese Medicine. June, 2004: Volume 75; Pages 10-16.

Schulman D. Is 'Energy Medicine' A Good Label for Acupuncture? Guest
Editorial. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. June, 2004:
Volume 10 (3); Pages 7-10.

Schulman D. The Unexpected Outcomes of Acupuncture. Case Reports in Support
of Refocused Research Designs. Journal of Alternative and Complementary
Medicine; October, 2004: Volume 10 (5) In Press.

Schulman D. Gold Standard or Fool's Gold. Staking Our Own Claim on the
Evidence-Based Medicine Map. North American Journal of Oriental Medicine.
November, 2004: Volume 11(32) In Press.

Schulman D. Is An Acupuncture Meridian a Real Thing? Complementary Therapies
in Medicine. 2004. Submitted.

Schulman D. Towards an Acupuncture-Friendly Research Design. Plausibility,
Efficacy and Safety Reframed. 2005. In Preparation.



http://www.cjr.org/issues/2005/6/schulman.asp:

"Privately, two reporters told me that, while intriguing, Olmsted's
reporting on the Amish is misguided, since it may simply reflect genetic
differences among an isolated gene pool (Hornig, however, said that a
study on the Amish may still be valuable should the prevalence of autism
in that community indeed be low, allowing researchers to study the
genetics of people who are not susceptible to the disorder). Both
reporters believed that Olmsted has made up his mind on the question and
is reporting the facts that support his conclusions."

See them lined up he

http://web.archive.org/web/200406100...e/whoarewe.htm

A fine bunch of criticl thinkers.

The Age of Autism: The Amish Elephant
By Dan Olmsted
UPI Senior Editor
Oct. 29, 2005 at 2:34PM A specter is haunting the medical and journalism
establishments of the
United States: Where are the unvaccinated people with autism? That is
just about the only way to explain what now appears to
be a collective resistance to considering that question. And like all
unanswered questions, this raises another one: Why? What is the problem
with quickly and firmly establishing that
the autism rate is about the same everywhere and for everybody in the
United States, vaccinated or unvaccinated? Wouldn't that stop all the
scientifically illiterate chatter by parents who believe vaccinations
made their children autistic? Wouldn't it put to rest concerns that --
despite the removal of a mercury-containing preservative in most U.S.
vaccines -- hundreds of millions of children in the developing world
are possibly at risk if that preservative is in fact linked to autism?
Calling this issue The Amish Elephant reflects reporting earlier
this year in Age of Autism that the largely unvaccinated Amish may
have a relatively low rate of autism. That apparent dissimilarity is,
in effect, a proverbial elephant in the living room -- studiously
ignored by people who don't want to deal with it and don't believe
they will have to. Here are a few cases in point. Earlier this month the
National Consumers League conference in
Washington held a session on communicating issues around vaccine
safety. I was on the panel and talked about the Amish and autism. In
the Q&A session that followed, the first question was for me. "Is this a
proper role for a journalist, or is this just a straw
dog set up there with a preliminary answer? It not only showed up
where you wrote it. It was all over the place. You did very, very well
for UPI (at which point I said, 'Thank you -- please tell my bosses
that!') but the question is, did you do very, very well for America? "Is
it appropriate for a journalist -- you weren't reporting,
you were investigating. And I just wonder if you think it's an
appropriate role for you to play." My answer: "There's different roles
for the press. That's
certainly a reasonable question. That is investigative reporting. This
idea is something that's already been discarded -- that there's any
reason why you would want to look in an unvaccinated population. "One of
my favorite comments about journalism is that it's the
wild card of American democracy. The First Amendment says we can do
(in the sense of reporting about) whatever we want. So one of our
privileges is to get an idea in our head and go look at it." My
questioner was not finished. "I wasn't questioning whether
you have a First Amendment right to do it. I think this is more of a
question of the ethics, of what value we are bringing to the debate." My
response: "That's probably not a good one for me to answer.
Obviously I thought it was ethical." At that point a fellow panelist, Dr.
Louis Cooper, former
president of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a staunch vaccine
defender, spoke up. "I would jump in and say I thought it was ethical
and I think it was useful," said Cooper, a courtly and unfailingly
courteous Manhattan pediatrician. "As you've learned, it was annoying to
many people. I wasn't
annoyed by it because I thought you kept the process and the debate
and the discussion going forward. And we have to do that for one
another." That did not end the discussion. A few minutes later a
public-health professor from -- where else? Harvard -- did her own
version of Jeopardy!, offering the correct "answer" in the form of a
question. "This question is for Dan. Did you mention the outbreak of
polio
that happened in the Amish community in the Netherlands that caused
widespread problems there, and also the fact that there'd been some
context with respect to history in our country in trying to reach out
to the Amish to actually encourage them to try to benefit from some of
the vaccine technology to the extent that we could? "So there's been a
long history in this country of the CDC
trying to reach out to them to the extent that they could. Also with
respect to polio, I think what's really amazing is it's such a great
story, this is such an exciting time, in the sense that we are very
close to global eradication. What that means is we've gone from 1988
when we had 350,000 estimated paralytic polio cases in the world every
year to roughly a thousand. It's very exciting that in fact we don't
have the terror or the hysteria and all of the fear that surrounded
disease. "I just want to remind everyone that one thing that's very
important in the context of reporting these stories is making sure
that people do remember and also realize with infectious disease is
these things can come back, and until they are eradicated they can
come back and devastate us just as much as they did before, except now
there are a lot more people. "There's some related news that people might
find interesting. A
headline in the Washington Post today, 'Polio outbreak occurs among
Amish families.' So I thought people might be interested in that." At
that point the moderator, Dr. Roger Bernier of the Centers
for Disease Control, said time was getting short -- why was I not
surprised? -- and asked for the next "question." One thing I've noticed
is the more that people want to lecture
instead of learn, the more they speak in breathless run-on sentences
that are hard to stop, slow down or even diagram. They leave one with
the unspoken idea that dialogue -- opening the door to new information
-- is somehow dangerous. These exchanges reminded me of the response I
got from Dr. Julie
Gerberding, the CDC director, when I asked her this summer, verbatim:
"Has the government ever looked at the autism rate in an unvaccinated
U.S. population, and if not, why not?" Her answer, verbatim: --
In this country, we have very high levels of vaccination as you
probably know, and I think this year we have record immunization
levels among all of our children, so to (select an unvaccinated group)
that on a population basis would be representative to look at
incidence in that population compared to the other population would be
something that could be done. But as we're learning, just trying to look
at autism in a
community the size of Atlanta, it's very, very difficult to get an
effective numerator and denominator to get a reliable diagnosis. I think
those kind of studies could be done and should be done.
You'd have to adjust for the strong genetic component that also
distinguishes, for example, people in Amish communities who may elect
not to be immunized (and) also have genetic connectivity that would
make them different from populations that are in other sectors of the
United States. So drawing some conclusions from them would be very
difficult. I think with reference to the timing of all of this, good
science does take time, and it's part of one of the messages I feel
like I've learned from the feedback that we've gotten from parents
groups this summer (in) struggling with developing a more robust and a
faster research agenda, is let's speed this up. Let's look for the
early studies that could give us at least some hypotheses to test and
evaluate and get information flowing through the research pipeline as
quickly as we can. So we are committed to doing that, and as I mentioned,
in terms
of just measuring the frequency of autism in the population some
pretty big steps have been taken. We're careful not to jump ahead of
our data, but we think we will be able to provide more accurate
information in the next year or so than we've been able to do up to
this point. And I know that is our responsibility. We've also benefited
from some increased investments in these
areas that have allowed us to do this, and so we thank Congress and we
thank the administration for supporting those investments, not just at
CDC but also at NIH and FDA. --
The latest response to my pesky persistence comes not from
academia or government but from my own profession. Last week the
prestigious Columbia Journalism Review published an article whose main
thrust -- with which I concur -- was that a vigorous debate over a
possible link between vaccines and autism was being thwarted by the
self-induced timidity of the press. Some reporters told the author,
Daniel Schulman, that they have
basically given up on the story because the criticism -- some of it
from their own editors -- was so fierce, and the story was so
complicated. Schulman described Age of Autism's efforts to come at the
issue
"sideways," looking for possible clues to the cause of the disorder in
the natural history of autism. And he mentioned our reporting on the
Amish: "Privately, two reporters told me that, while intriguing,
Olmsted's reporting on the Amish is misguided, since it may simply
reflect genetic differences among an isolated gene pool. ... Both
reporters believed that Olmsted has made up his mind on the question
and is reporting the facts that support his conclusions." Ouch. Being
slammed by one's peers is never enjoyable, although
reporters need to have thick skins and realize they dish this kind of
thing out every day. (And those anonymous sources really are annoying,
especially when I am happy to be quoted by name about everything.) What's
interesting about the reporters' "private" remarks is the
degree of presumed expertise they suggest -- that looking at the Amish
is misguided "since it may simply reflect genetic differences among an
isolated gene pool." Really? Where did these guys get their doctorate
in genetics, Harvard? This assertion -- that the Amish gene pool could
explain
everything, based on no data that I'm aware of -- is the kind of
self-interested speculation masquerading as expertise that has beset
the autism-vaccines discussion for far too long. The term I learned
for it long ago is "convenient reasoning," and it does not always have
to be conscious. The Amish have all kinds of standard genetic mental and
developmental disorders -- from bipolar to retardation -- and a lot
more genetic issues to boot from this supposedly protective "isolated
gene pool." The doctors who actually know something about the Amish
have never suggested to me that genes have anything to do with a low
rate of autism. They seem perplexed. In upcoming columns, we'll put that
question to the right people
-- geneticists -- and tell you what we find. It's called reporting. --
This ongoing series on the roots and rise of autism welcomes
reader response. E-mail:

LadyLollipop wrote:
"Mark Probert" wrote in message
...

Ilena Rose wrote:

I have no doubt that the Barrett/Quack/Rag-tag Posse of failures like
Probert will attack this respected journalist ...

No one from the newsgroup has to. It was done here, by a professional
journalist who was commenting on Olmsted's faulty methodology.


I'm glad you respect him.

He believes is GASP

Alternative medicine!

So? However, I do not accept everything anyone says, even if I highly
respect them.

Now, back to his critquie of Olmsted....obviously Shulman has standards,
and Olmsted was just too much of a sloppy "researcher" for him.

"Mark Probert" wrote in message
...
LadyLollipop wrote:
"Mark Probert" wrote in message
...

Ilena Rose wrote:

I have no doubt that the Barrett/Quack/Rag-tag Posse of failures like
Probert will attack this respected journalist ...

No one from the newsgroup has to. It was done here, by a professional
journalist who was commenting on Olmsted's faulty methodology.


I'm glad you respect him.

He believes is GASP

Alternative medicine!

So?

So, you can't take a compliment?

However, I do not accept everything anyone says, even if I highly
respect them.

Now, back to his critquie of Olmsted....obviously Shulman has standards,
and Olmsted was just too much of a sloppy "researcher" for him.

LadyLollipop wrote:
"Mark Probert" wrote in message
...

LadyLollipop wrote:

"Mark Probert" wrote in message
...


Ilena Rose wrote:


I have no doubt that the Barrett/Quack/Rag-tag Posse of failures like
Probert will attack this respected journalist ...

No one from the newsgroup has to. It was done here, by a professional
journalist who was commenting on Olmsted's faulty methodology.


I'm glad you respect him.

He believes is GASP

Alternative medicine!

So?


So, you can't take a compliment?

From you?

Please keep your compliments to yourself. I prefer your being your usual
rotten and nasty self.


However, I do not accept everything anyone says, even if I highly
respect them.

Now, back to his critquie of Olmsted....obviously Shulman has standards,
and Olmsted was just too much of a sloppy "researcher" for him.

Mark Probert wrote:
Ilena Rose wrote:
I have no doubt that the Barrett/Quack/Rag-tag Posse of failures like
Probert will attack this respected journalist ...

No one from the newsgroup has to. It was done here, by a professional
journalist who was commenting on Olmsted's faulty methodology.

http://www.cjr.org/issues/2005/6/schulman.asp:

"Privately, two reporters told me that, while intriguing, Olmsted's
reporting on the Amish is misguided, since it may simply reflect genetic
differences among an isolated gene pool (Hornig, however, said that a

The "two reporters" probably realized that they were not very
good in the thinking-straight department, perhaps no
better than "Schulman", hence the "privately."

They say it "may" reflect genetic differences. But we are not
talking of a steady-state situation here. We are talking about
something that developed suddenly in the late 80's and 90's.

Supposing the cause is "increased" detection, then clearly there
is material for further investigation he did the Amish
physicians miss out on the circular for increased detection?
Was there a problem with the postal system in Amish areas
at that time?

Why would all the non-Amish genes certainly start to
express themselves differently? And at the same time?
Was this some kind of mass-conspiracy among the non-Amish
genes?

The Amish study clearly provides additional data, that can
obviously be helpful in verifying/falsifying various
hypothesese wrt Autism. (Unless, of course, one is
biased and/or extremely gullible or has an agenda.)