From xkcd.com comes this slightly off color take on the swine flu with an autism twist.

If autistic-rights advocates win their court battles, many treatment programs could stop receiving government money. In 2004, for instance, autistic-rights crusader Michelle Dawson convinced the Canadian Supreme Court to overturn an appeal that would have provided state funding for ABA therapy.There is approximately one line in there that references her directly - a little over 20 words.
The standards currently applied to autistics are such that you are free to misrepresent me, and major legal decisions and issues, and so on, all you want. There's nothing I can do except put accurate information on the record, again, even though it has been here all along, for anyone who takes autism seriously.I am not sure what autism has to do with the feeling that a journalist has misrepresented you - I thought that could pretty much happen to everyone. I am also not sure why she felt the need to write a lengthy letter over one sentence.
Something of an imbalance? Especially in light of the reality that (like all of us......) individuals on the autism spectrum are going to be adults for far longer than they are children.
Has parents' fear of their children growing up and becoming adults with autism focused attention too much on doing "everything one can" to "remediate" autism in a child, rather than on thinking about the life-long needs of a child?
I'm not critiquing "early intervention"; certainly my own son benefited hugely from the teaching and care he received from the time he was 2 years old. But I hope we can find ways to think of autism as not simply, not only an "issue of children's health" but as why we need to allocate resources for individuals of autism of all ages, all through their lives.
I think this is a safe enough statement
So autism is a genetic disposition that has some sort of "trigger" that causes it to occur. So far so good, nothing out of the ordinary.
This is an interesting phrasing. You have a condition that has triggers that you are attempting to identify - if you succeed in identifying the triggers then why focus on treatments that "enhance the quality of life", why not focus on preventing the condition from being triggered in the first place?The use of the words "safe" and "effective" is also an interesting choice. It almost sounds like they are describing a drug based treatments ... oh uh.
This goal starts off well enough. Early intervention is thought to be key to helping people with autism overcome their disability.
As my parents were always fond of pointing out when you use the word "but" you are essentially negating what came before. So early intervention would be key except but...
Ah, early intervention is important but services must be there for the entire life. Or in other words, we are going to focus on treatments for adults on the spectrum. Sounds like a good idea, there are going to be a huge number of adults on the spectrum in the coming decades and there need to be services to help them since it is likely that the majority will not be able to live independently.
I have never heard of scientific, evidence-based educational, vocational, or support services. Do you think they are going to conduct studies to "prove" which vocational trades are most suited for people with autism? Or do you think they are talking about developing drugs again? I'm thinking drugs.
Yikes - a "science" foundation making a unequivocal statement of fact. They are in essence saying that all possible avenues of thought have been explored and Science has decreed that there is no possible relationship and that vaccines cannot, under any circumstances cause autism. I have to wonder how they know this.
Now I feel much better. They have numerous studies that failed to show a link. And, as everyone who has taken the basic science knows, having "numerous failures" to show a link clearly means that the link isn't there. It couldn't be possible that it was just the wrong question being asked.
So vaccine safety research should continue to be left up to the companies that are developing the vaccines and marketing them in a liability free market place. No possibility of problems there.
I also have to wonder at including maintaining confidence as a goal of safety research. I would think that the goal of safety research is to make sure that they are safe not to make people feel better about them
There is that word again.
Safety research is important but we won't be doing it - which does make a certain amount of sense since they have already decreed that there is no possibility of any sort of relationship.
CDC scientists and press representatives did not respond to requests for an explanation about why the results were not widely publicized. George Hawkins, director of the District Department of the Environment, in Washington, says he became aware of the 2007 study only on April 2 this year, when Salon showed him an abstract of the study. Scientists from other agencies, including EPA and HUD, also say they were never told about the results. "CDC never told us," says an EPA scientist, "and they never asked our help or any other water expert's help when they did their studies..."This is the same government agency that plays a leading role in the the autism world. I can only hope that they do a better job in that field.
For the vast majority of CAM therapies for ASD, there is little or no evidence to document efficacy. However, the lack of evidence should not be equated with a conclusion that a therapy is ineffective. In the absence of scientific evidence, there is an equal chance that any therapy will be beneficial or harmful.I couldn't have said it better.
In the treatment group, two children dropped out of the study prior to beginning any treatments due to an illness (one with otitis media, the other with bronchitis). Another child dropped out before finishing one full treatment due to anxiety in both the child and the parent.So in the treatment group the three that dropped out did not complete any treatments.
In the control group, two children dropped out of the study prior to beginning any treatments (one because of a death in the family, the other because of the time commitment). One child dropped out prior to finishing one full treatment due to parental claustrophobia.So in the control group three of the four that dropped out did not complete any treatments. This is the same criteria as to why children were excluded from the treatment group.
this child's scores performed at time of drop-out showed mild improvements in behavior (as separately ranked by both the physician and the parents) and these scores were included in the intention-to-treat analysis. The inclusion or exclusion of this child's scores had no significant effect on the statistical analysis.Or in other words it didn't change the outcome one way or the other.
This may seem like nit-picking, but it is a serious concern. Imagine, if you will, that the numbers were replaced by colors. Is the difference between green and orange twice the difference between orange and red? If half of a population of birds are blue and the other half are yellow, is the “average” bird green? The simple fact is that it is not appropriate to treat these “scores” as though they were real numbers, to be added, subtracted and averaged.This may seem like nit-picking but the analogy comparing these scores to colors is completely wrong. There is an implicit ranking in these scores that is not present in colors. For example, a rating of 1 (very much improved) is "better" than a rating of 2 (much improved). There is no corresponding concept in colors - green is not "better" than red.
Investigators at Burnham Institute for Medical Research (Burnham) have demonstrated that attacks on the mitochondrial protein Drp1 by the free radical nitric oxide—which causes a chemical reaction called S-nitrosylation—mediates neurodegeneration associated with Alzheimer's disease. Prior to this study, the mechanism by which beta-amyloid protein caused synaptic damage to neurons in Alzheimer's disease was unknown.Alzheimer's is a truly terrible disease and it is a good thing that research is being done to determine the causes and what can be done to correct or prevent it.
In the first study of its kind researchers will use video clips of spontaneously produced facial expressions in a real life social context to explore emotion recognition in autism.
This research, carried out at The University of Nottingham, will go beyond the more artificial emotion recognition tasks that have previously been used.
During the first 42 months of life ASD children had a stool pattern that was very similar to other children, apart from a slight increase in stool frequency at 30 and 42 months. There were no symptoms to support the hypothesis that ASD children had an enterocolitis.So this data is meant to contradict reports of GI issues being common in children with autism. Indeed if you read the introduction of the paper it appears the purpose of the paper is to rebut other studies done that show a relation.
NOAA scientists, in a first-of-its-kind report issued today, state that Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers (PBDEs), chemicals commonly used in commercial goods as flame retardants since the 1970s, are found in all United States coastal waters and the Great Lakes, with elevated levels near urban and industrial centers.The original report is available on this page. I have not yet read the entire report but there are some facts that have jumped out at me from the parts that I have read.
The new findings are in contrast to analysis of samples as far back as 1996 that identified PBDEs in only a limited number of sites around the nation.
In recent years, PBDEs have generated international concern due to their global distribution and associated adverse environmental and human health effects. Laboratory studies indicate that PBDEs may impair liver, thyroid, and neurobehavioral development, and the most sensitive populations are likely to be pregnant women, developing fetuses, and infants.
PBDE production has been banned throughout Europe and Asia, and production of some PBDE mixtures has been voluntarily discontinued by U.S. industry, although one form of PBDE is still produced. While production of PBDE flame retardants began in the 1970s and peaked in 1999 they are still found in many consumer products including many household items. Because the application of PBDEs has been so widespread – including many consumer plastics, textiles, electronics, and furniture – scientists speculate that they may present an ongoing and growing problem in coastal environmentsWhich is indeed what this most recent report has found - that the concentration of PBDEs in coastal waters are growing.
5 Hyperbarics and HypothesesUhm, that would be something that he wrote on his blog. Lets look at that page on his site, are there any references over there? Nope. So it is true because he says it is true.
http://www.autismstreet.org/weblog/?p=60