Autism

When I was in PA school I did my graduate project on Autism. Russ's nephew has Autism so it was a very interesting topic for me. My main point of interest was vaccines and Autism, may people were worried that there was a risk with getting their children vaccinated especially with the MMR vaccine. The number of children getting their vaccines has significantly dropped over the past 10 years, this is putting children at risk of getting these deadly diseases that we had almost eradicated because of the invention of vaccinations. The whole basis behind the scare was one research article that came out in England in 1998 that only has 12 subjects (those who have done any research will know that this is a very low number and no credible evidence should come from that type of study), either way the study was published and this scare of Autism ran ramped. The most annoying thing to me is a celebrity wrote a book about autism and how she believed her son was a victim of the vaccination causing the autism. (celebrity is Jenny McCarthy) Of course with out any medical training she published this book and it sold like crazy and even hyped up this scare. I am very happy to announce that today the study that started this whole scare was retracted from the Lancet journal stating that it should have never been published in the first place and the Doctor that published the article was paid to give those findings. See the article below... I hope this helps reverse the false knowledge of vaccines and Autism.
This is from ABC news
Lancet climbs down on autism vaccine link
Posted Wed Feb 3, 2010 9:10am AEDT
A British medical journal has retracted a controversial study which suggested a link between autism and the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine known as MMR.
The now-discredited research by Doctor Andrew Wakefield caused vaccination rates to plummet in Britain.
Six years ago The Lancet admitted it was wrong to publish the research, but it has taken the journal 12 years to retract the Wakefield paper.
It emerged that Dr Wakefield failed to disclose that he was being paid to investigate claims that children had been damaged by the MMR vaccine.
It took an in-depth investigation by the General Medical Council to finally convince the journal to formally retract the paper.
The council found Dr Wakefield had been dishonest and irresponsible in his research methods.
-BBC