Cracking The Autism Riddle: Common Sense About Vaccines And Autism
All sorts of arguments are thrown around to persuade parents that shots threaten their children with autism. I'd like to discuss 4 of the commonly repeated concerns, 3 flawed...and 1 that I think has merit.
1) Too many shots can overwhelm a child and cause autism. No!
Babies get more vaccines today than 30 years ago, but if you think that means more things are injected into their young bodies...you'd be wrong! That's because immunizations today are much more purified than those of the past.
For example, in 1980, the DPT shot (Diphtheria/Pertussis/Tetanus) was made from a soup of blendarized bacteria (over 1000 different illness particles - antigens - all mixed together). And, the polio vaccine had live virus that actually protected children by triggering a minute case of...polio! Today, our modern DPT vaccine is highly purified, containing only 3-5 bacterial antigens and the polio shot has absolutely no live virus.
Actually, the current trend to give kids more shots is a win-win for them. They win because they're protected from many more illnesses and because they have fewer antigens put into their bodies.
But, some still worry, "Can too many shots overwhelm a baby's immature immune system?" That idea is pretty close to a baby urban legend.
The immune system is a superb multitasking, fighting machine. Every day, babies are bombarded by thousands of threats: irritating pollen; colonic microbes; bacterial invaders from the skin, eyes, nose, mouth; viral swarms; offending dietary proteins; damaged cells; even tiny, little cancers. The immune system's magnificent ability to protect against many, mild attacks at one time is exactly why most babies tolerate several shots at once with no reaction whatsoever. (In fact, a new theory suggests that allergies and asthma may be on the rise in part because we have made the world so clean it doesn't exercise a baby's immune system enough!)
2) Shots hurt the brains of extra-sensitive children. No!
Each of us has special sensitivities. Some have peanut allergies...some get lots of strep throat....and a very, very few get serious reactions to vaccines. I wish we had a test to detect which infants are susceptible to severe measles or big vaccine reactions, but no such test exists.
The good news, however, is that shot risks are tiny compared to the risks of full-blown illness. For example, influenza and chicken pox hammer the immune system 100-1000 times harder than the impact of the flu or pox vaccines. While most kids breeze through the chicken pox shot, even a mild case of real pox can weaken a child's immunity for weeks to months and lead to ear infections, pneumonia and, rarely, toxic shock syndrome. (And, it can often land an adult in the hospital!)
There is one special case of possible vaccine susceptibility that made headlines last year and became a major new focus for those who claim vaccines cause autism. A 19-month-old child developed autism after getting 5 shots. But - and this is a huge "but" - unlike most autistic kids, this one child also has a rare medical problem - Mitochondrial Disease (MD).
Recently, vaccine avoiders have floated the theory that perhaps many healthy looking kids have hidden MD. They suggest that it may be the combination of vaccines plus hidden MD that is triggering autism in so many seemingly normal children.
But, the research suggests that this is unlikely to affect more than a handful of kids. Here's why:
MD is rare (1 in 5-10,000 children). A Portuguese study found ~93% of autistic children had no evidence of MD (and even that 7% figure has yet to be confirmed). In a recent study, scientists from Harvard and Johns Hopkins could find only 25 children with both MD and autism. And, these kids had serious problems rarely seen in most cases of autism (like, delayed walking, acid reflux, liver disorder, severe fatigue, etc).
Fourteen of these kids seemed to be developing normally then suddenly deteriorated into autism during toddlerhood. But only 1/14 (7%) got worse right after shots. (Had 2 or 3 or 5 kids gotten worse after the shots, one could make the argument that children with MD are at increased risk for getting autism after vaccinations. However, as I mentioned in part 1 of this blog, 7% is very close to the number of cases one would expect to be diagnosed right after shots...just by chance.)
Another dramatic finding of this study argues against a link between MD and the national rise in autism incidence: classic autism spectrum disorder affects many more boys than girls (3-9 times more boys!)...but children with Mitochondrial Disease + autism are evenly split between the genders.
While it remains to be proven that children with MD are more vulnerable to shots, there is no doubt that they are super-vulnerable to illness. In other words, MD kids who skip shots can get very sick, very fast it they catch a vaccine preventable disease like influenza or pneumonia.
3) Doctors push risky shots on children to make more money. Please!
This accusation is as appalling as it is ridiculous. Pediatricians labor through 23 years of education; wake at all hours to help worried parents; and desert our own families on weekends and holidays to rush to the hospital to care for sick babies.
In fact, a greedy doctor wanting more money would actually discourage parents from giving their children shots...not encourage it! Why? Because doctors make more money caring for sick kids - needing repeat office visits - than caring for the well.
In truth, the only reason doctors cajole, beg and pressure parents to immunize their children is because we want to protect them - and other children - from the pain and suffering of preventable infections.
I agree that there are too many ties between doctors and big pharmaceutical companies. This must be stopped because it creates the appearance of conflict of interest and the real potential of collusion. However, the record of organized medicine is reassuring. Over the past 30 years, doctors have rejected many vaccines when concerns arose that they were not effective enough or caused unacceptable side effects.
4) Shots can be delayed. MAYBE...but only those risking your child's health.
This is one of the most critical issues facing parents: Are shots a personal choice or a civic duty?
As a pediatrician, I recommend all vaccines, but I suggest parents think of shots as falling into 2 different groups: 1) those given primarily to protect your child, 2) those protecting your child and your neighbors' children.
The first group of shots stops infections like, influenza, rotavirus, hepatitis A, chicken pox and hepatitis B. They help your child but don't give great protection to the community. That is either because the illnesses are very common (spread quickly through your neighborhood even if your child gets the shot) or hard to spread (difficult for your child to give it to others). (Note: Older kids, teens and adults are at risk for hepatitis B. It has caused thousands of cases of liver failure and cancer and so all citizens should eventually get this vaccine.)
The second group of shots stops infections that threaten your child and your community (your neighbor's baby, the elderly, chronic disease sufferers, etc.). These shots include, whooping cough, meningitis (Hib), pneumococcus (Prevnar) and measles. They miraculously halt diseases that are so contagious just one cough, one airplane flight or one germy doorknob can spread them like wildfire through your town.
I believe giving the first group of shots is a parent's personal choice because the suffering you risk is mostly limited to your child and family. Skipping the flu shot, for example, may cause your child to be one of the 36,000 Americans who die from influenza this year, but it probably won't stop a flu outbreak (although it may help to reduce it).
However, giving the second group of shots is an important civic responsibility., because delaying them creates a serious public health risk. By immunizing at least 95% of children with these shots we create "herd immunity" that can totally halt the spread of deadly epidemics in our communities. Herd immunity stymies the spread of disease the way that frequent rain keeps lightening strikes from starting raging forest fires.
Some doctors may fairly argue which vaccines should go into which groups, but the important point is that the shot schedule has some flexibility...it is not written in stone. In fact doctors have repeatedly tweaked this schedule to make it safer and more effective (for example, over the past 30 years, the measles vaccine was pushed from 9 months to 12 months...and now is recommended to be given as late as 15 months of age). However, the second group of vaccines is crucial if we are to protect children in our communities who are too young to get their own shots. Parents who skip these shots may not mean to harm others, but their action significantly increases the risk of avoidable suffering and death to innocent children.
For over 10 years, a huge amount of passion and debate about the cause of autism has focused on vaccines. But recently a totally new suspect has surfaced that warrants investigation as a potential autism trigger. In the last installment of this 3-part blog, I'll discuss the worrisome compounds known as...endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs).
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Those of you who think we should abandon vaccines and just "fight off" these infectious diseases should take some time to check out the severe problems these diseases cause:
polio
http://www
http://www
smallpox
http://why
rubella:
http://emb
Pertussis:
http://www
meningitis:
http://www
My son had a severe reaction to the pertusis vaccine. I still remember that his little hands were so hot and it scared me to death. But he is grown now, neurotypical, and a bright university graduate. A vaccine reaction , in his case, did no lasting damage--a case of pertusis might have. BTW, I was much older than average when he was born.
Unfortunately, there are side effects in most medicines, that our FDA deems acceptable since they tend to be infrequent in occurance, and the greater good is in having the medicine or vaccines available. I'm glad your son is okay, and as you said, it would be much worst if he contracted pertusis, or if because of the low chance of such bad reactions, that children don't get the vaccination, and there are many more cases of that disease.
Thanks for your story. Yours is one of the more typical stories of adverse reaction, a case where there was a short term fever.
I am curious. Was this the combined DTP vaccine? if so, are you sure it was the pertussis portion?
Those of you wanting to read to scientific facts on this manufactroversy of vaccines causing autism should read this article:
http://www
i am 51. i am autistic. my autism wasn't caused by shots. the research on the vaccine link was faked. this is a moot point. it has been verified there is no link and there never was.
dear ricmarc, some of these folks dont think autism existed when you developed this. jenny mccarthy is one of these
Jenny McCarthy is a passionate advocate for her ideas, but I prefer my science from real scientists rather than a Playboy Playmate turned upset mother. I feel for her and her situation, but her crusade is based more on opinion and fact mining than on objective science.
ricmarc: thank you for sharing. It is great to see someone who is autistic adding their voice.
The fact that pharma has successfully lobbied Congress ("our" representatives) to provide immunity to pharma from lawsuits for vaccines that harm people, is an obvious admission that the vaccines harm susceptible people (children and others) in our population.
Wow, that's some down-right interesting reasoning there! Funny, it doesn't say anything of the sort on the HRSA site: http://www
So, because they have a program to protect citizens, it MUST be that they are involved in a cover up conspiracy. An obvious admission. Great reasoning!
So, these conspirators (our representatives, doctors, scientists, those working in the healthcare field) since it is obvious that vaccines harm susceptible people....
http://www
Here's a good place to see what vaccine could do to you. They must have either studied these vaccines or tested them on people because they list exactly what can happen in each case.
http://www
here's a few good places to see what NOT vaccinating could do tho you:
polio
http://www
http://www
smallpox
http://why
rubella:
http://emb
Pertussis:
http://www
meningitis:
http://www
"In fact, a new theory suggests that allergies and asthma may be on the rise in part because we have made the world so clean it doesn't exercise a baby's immune system enough!"
Actually, Friedrich Nietzsche stumbled across that idea more than a hundred years ago, saying, "what doesn't kill us makes us stronger." But it's great that doctors have finally caught on!
Not the same thing.
the anti-vax loons would also use the same quote as an advocate for contracting infectious disease.
however, Nietzsche was no biological or scientific expert, and neither are the like of jb handley and co.
"doctors" are not catching on to woo and pseudo science
"made the world so clean it doesn't exercise a baby's immune system enough"
I was reading something the other day about this but now I can't find it. It basically said what your saying. Manmade disease is not the proper road to travel down and we might be setting ourselves up for something big. Makes sense to me.
(here comes the hate mail ! LOL)
George Carlin used to do a bit about swimming in rivers full of sewage as a kid, and said he never washed his hands.
He was very funny. But that seemed like bad advice....
Virginia1932
Way below you asked for links to demonstrate that in the US one can sue vaccine manufacturers.
You can start at the HRSA site. They explain right in their frequently asked questions how anyone can sue.
More to the point, you can read some of the actual cases.
E.g. Maryland posts their decisions: http://mdc
After a 10 day evidentiary hearing all their “expert” witnesses were excluded from even testifying in court—it was all ruled junk science.
Drs Greier, Haley, Mumper, Deth, and Seibert—all their testimony was found to be so unreliable that it could not even be presented in court.
Too bad parents seeking treatment for their kids are told these court cases don’t exist…
Did you read the media reports from Autism One?
The same clowns were billing $250,000+ for one child, based on tests that don’t work and junk science.
And they wonder why their integrity is being questioned.
White and Nerdy,
Don't you love that video. I'll bet the wife and I have watched it 50 times already. I didn't know some of these things were nerdy ! LOL
We need some nerd immunity around here !
http://www
I must have missed the day when doctors promised the treatments they offered would only do good and have no possible problems. I don't think I did, medicine and the human are very tricky How could anyone believe injecting viruses could not have any harm. I am not saying I believe they cause autism but if they did would you rather have one of the things they might prevent. If someone has a perfect solution for vaccines, cancer drugs, mental health drugs, anti arthritis, heart disease medicines etc. I would love to see them. Until your ready to put forth the effort to make these things happen why is this even up for discussion. My only problem is that modern health care is priced like were at that state of perfection.
doctors are not perfect, they never claim to be and neither does anyone claim any medical treatment to be either. however, we are in much better state thanks to medical advances than we were many years ago. vaccines are the prime example of a great preventative treatment that have same more lives than anything else in medicine.
we dont have a "perfect" answer yet, but that is how science and medicine is. it isnt waving a magic wand.
"I am not saying I believe they cause autism but if they did would you rather have one of the things they might prevent." they dont so the point is mute.
How many Americans die every year from properly prescribed, FDA approved and "independently tested" drug company pharmaceuticals which had studies posted in prestigious peer-reviewed journals? I've read on many occassion that properly prescribed pharmaceuticals are AT LEAST the 3rd or 4th greatest killer in the U.S. These vaccine drugs are manufactured by the same companies and approved and endorsed by the same groups that these potentially deadly drugs are. So don't take it personally when I say your nuts if you trust the vaccine industry or think that they care about you or your kids.
Do you think those evil-do'ers in the 'vaccine industry' immunize their kids? Are they getting some secret special vaccines or placebo to fool everybody else with their evil scheme? I'm sure you have some proof to back up your accusations.
I'm not interested in making any accusations about drug companies, but I know for a fact that polluters breathe the same air we do, and so do their children.
I've always wondered about that.
I guess they're not worried...
The plain fact is that there is wide variation in the population, due to genetics, of the ability to safely metabolize drugs. So it is absurd to deny that FDA-approved drugs/vaccines are harmless.
A recent survey of 2.070 Swiss doctors showed " Nonpediatricians were twice as likely as pediatricians to deviate, for their own child, from the recommended schedule. Pediatricians were more likely to give Hib, measles, mumps, and hepatitis B vaccines to their own children than nonpediatrician parents." Think about this for awhile.
http://www
My wife lost her sense of smell probably due to Zycam. Our doctor presrcibed it to her in 2006/2007.
There were court cases in 2006 related to Zycam. Of course we never knew it but I think our doctor has a rsponsibility to keep up to date and inform their patients of potential side effects.
Should the doctor be responsible for keeping up with drug side effects? I think so.
What doctor would 'prescribe' Zycam, an over the counter 'holistic' medicine that was never evaluated by the FDA? Zycam and other concoctions like it should never be sold the way they are (only because of a loophole from the 1930's it can be) as medicine.
The main reason why the side effects were not known is because there never where any studies on its use.
http://www
UCLA has a good study on this subject:
http://www
UCLA has its share of charlatans and trend-driven "scientist
It seems implausible that effective herd immunity requires the same 95% vaccination rate for every vaccine. Some diseases are transmitted much more readily than others. There is no obvious reason to expect that the efficacy rate is the same for every vaccine.
"There is no obvious reason to expect that the efficacy rate is the same for every vaccine."
I think you make an excellent point that I've never heard before.
Anyone else know some more on this?
The 95% figure is a rule-of-thumb taken specifically from the measles vaccine. Wiki has a great article with herd immunity percentages:
Diptheria - 85%
Measles - 83-94%
Mumps - 75-86%
Polio - 80-86%
and so on.
http://en.
Basically the factors in herd immunity are: how effective is the vaccine in making a person immune, how likely is a sick person to spread the disease to others, and how likely are those others to be hard (immunized) or soft (susceptible) targets.
Rough example: 1 sick person exposes 20 others. 18 are immunized (vaccine or had the disease before) and are 95% immune: one of the 18 gets sick. 2 are susceptible and have a 95% chance of contracting the disease: 2 of the 2 get sick. Each of the 3 new cases can now expose 20 more people, producing on average 9 more cases, then 27, and so on in a chain reaction.
Change the numbers just slightly: say instead of 18, 19 people are immunized. Say the effectiveness of immunity is 99% instead of 95%. Now, 1 sick person exposes 20 others, and only one person contracts the disease. The chain reaction now goes 1 - 1 - 1 - 1... instead of 1 - 3 - 9 - 27...
Also, if the one susceptible person happens to (5% chance) NOT contract the disease, the chain ends right there. That's how small a difference can contribute to the start - or end - of an epidemic.
Doctor, your rational and detailed response will go to inform rational people a little more; but will it work even a bit to turn this irrational, luddite anti-vaccine tide?
Physicians like yourself are on the front-line, seeing the results of therapies of all sorts, weighing the risks, etc. But what you're combating in the case of the anti-vaccine movement is a lay movement judging the facts from a distance, and only selectively and wrongly looking at the clinical data. As with the lay anti-evolu
The most frightening thing is that the public health implications of masses of parents forgoing vaccination for their kids are lost on those same parents, for their susceptibility to lay propaganda, and their inability to see the clinical and epidemiological evidence first-hand.
What?! You mean just because they are parents, they are not experts in medicine by default? Wow, what a controversial concept.
Parents have the right to choose not to subject their children to risk. It is consummate
arrogance to state otherwise. Until the truth is very clear (and there are liars all around),
then parents should not subject their children to any but the most critical of vaccines, and make sure the vaccine vial is for a single dose, so as not to contain preservatives that are potentially harmful.
Not only do parents have the right to choose not to subject their children to risk, they
have the moral obligation to do so.
We've heard about all the arrogance on this subject as any rational human being can stand.
I still say we should look at the adjuvants in vaccines. Vaccines aren't just antigen and preservative: if you just get exposed to an antigen while healthy, your immune system will learn that the antigen is harmless, and the response will be tolerance. We don't want that with vaccines, so there are drugs in them to make the immune system respond. If each vaccine has adjuvants capable of eliciting the formation of memory lymphocytes, and you give eight vaccines at once, it seems likely that the effect will be different than if you gave them one at a time, and that for some people it could contribute to autoimmune disease.
I also think we should look at the possibility that autism is caused by epigenetics, rather than by environment or by genetics proper.
You can vaccinate all day long with placebo/vehicle solutions with adjuvants in them. It is done on a regular basis during development using animal models (this includes a number of drugs under investigation, not just vaccines) and human clinical trials. No one has ever reported anything along the lines of your hypothetical issue. Radio-labeled Al26 used to make the aluminum salts in some vaccines (the adjuvant) show rapid dispersal and excretion (within 24 hours). There is simply not enough of the salts or enough time of exposure to be of concern.
Aluminum is the only one I hear mentioned, but the word is always used in the plural, suggesting that there are others. Maybe there aren't any others in current use. Even so, if a dose of aluminum is enough to make cells gather in the spleen and secrete interleukins and whatever else it takes to make the difference between immunization and non-immunization with the same antigen, then it's prima-facie plausible that an eight-fold larger dose could have an adverse effect in some people.
In general, any time something is touted as a powerful drug (but not called a drug) that can have a wonderful effect, and simultaneously as an insignificant ubiquitous innocuous substance that can't possibly have any harmful effect, I don't believe it. Normally that's vitamin mega-doses and herbal supplements, but the principle can apply just as well to vaccine ingredients.
Aluminum is indeed ubiquitous in feldspars and clays, and hence in soil and dust that we continually inhale and ingest small amounts of. Aluminum per se can't be particularly dangerous. But by the same token, aluminum per se also can't be particularly efficacious at changing tolerogenic antigen exposure into immunogenic antigen exposure. Whether it's the presence in the blood or the particular compounds, it obviously has an effect that differs dramatically from the background exposure.
You need to publish your observations on how the immune system works because real immunologists have been laboring under the delusion that when exposed to an antigen, the immune system develops an immune reaction (B-cells, activated T-cells, the works). Immunologists are totally unaware that exposure to antigens causes tolerance.
(For those who want to quibble about allergy shots, what you are stimulating there are "blocking" antibodies. And it takes an incredible number of shots to even get a measurable "tolerance
For those who are interested, an adjuvant serves to augment the immune reaction to the presence of an antigen by a number of means. Most of these are by attracting cells that are responsible for developing an immune response. Others are by allowing the antigen to remain in a depot for a longer period of time rather than be rapidly eliminated by nonspecific physiologic mechanisms. For this reason attenuated vaccines lack adjuvants because the body reacts similarly to the real infection.
There's a whole chapter on tolerance in the immunology book I have. Here are a couple quotes: "Tolerance is immunologically specific and results from the recognition of antigens by specific lymphocyte
You'd better write to Harvard and tell them to quit employing Dr. Lichtman, since you're so sure he's a fake immunologist.
Personally I am up in the air about vaccinations and Autism. My daughter has Autism. She did receive all of her vaccines. I personally think autism is genetic, but how it is triggered is still not answered. I have heard and read many articles from mothers that think that vaccinations have "triggered" autism in their child. That could be part of it and the other part could be environment. In my case when I was pregnant with my daughter I was 18 and still in high school. I didn't know I was pregnant until I was around 4 months. During those months I received vaccinations for Hep B and others by my school nurse. When my daughter was born they gave her vaccinations and a couple of days later she got a high fever and for some reason couldn't hear out of her left ear. It went away a couple of months later. I was young and knew nothing about Autism. Knowing what I know now, I think if a parent wants to wait or not get their child vaccinated it is their own choice and their child. Yes people are going to give them a lot of crap, but until you know what it is like to have a child with autism, they have no room to talk. Until there is an answer for the whole "what causes autism" debate, I say if they don't want to vaccinate then don't.
You could make up almost any other cause and it would have as much clinical significance as the link between autism and vaccination. Trips to the zoo, hours in front of the TV, amount of ice cream consumed by the age of 6 - all are at least as valid as the vaccination link (and the possibility of TV as a cause is probably even stronger).
I do not think that the government should force anything upon anyone, but I do think that adults who choose not to vaccinate their children should lose access to government services like welfare, and children who are not vaccinated should not be allowed to use the public school system and be ineligible for federal college loans.
There will never be a certain answer to the "what causes autism debate", because science isn't about certainty. There will always be doubts about everything (even gravity and E = mc^2). As far as scientific proof goes for something of clinical significance, vaccines have already been absolved many times over from any link with autism.
I have more respect for people who deny evolution than those who believe in dangerous anti-vaccination philosophies. At least the creationists aren't increasing the chances of me or my family getting sick, just wasting a bit of time in schools.
well put. i'd further suggest you read this article that explains how the vaccine / autism link was manufactured:
http://www
whilst the scientific opinion as to the environment / genetic basis of autism continues, it would seem that vaccines are not part of the equation
Yes--- and whose life is turned upside-down, and enormous personal cost, but the parents' and the child's--- all of these other "pundits" and "experts" just jabber on and on, feeling no obligation to
take precautions on others' behalf.... because they don't have to pick up the pieces of the lives of others who have unjustifiably given respectful attention to the self-interested, unscientific and frequently deceitful blatherings.
"self-interested, unscientific and frequently deceitful blathering
yes, thats whats going on at sites like whale.to and gen rescue. the science is in on vaccines. they dont cause autism. lets move on and find out what does. thats how science works.
It may be good to lessen the vaccination debate and look at meth making as an environmental trigger for autism causation.
Mercuric Chloride is often used in meth making. That puts more mercury into the environment than vaccines will put into children..
the rise in autism rates directly coincides with the rise in the average age of the mother at the time of birth. if you don't want an autistic child then get pregnant when you are young and your eggs are not exposed to as many environmental and other negative factors. http://www
women in the past did not appreciate the problems of postponing pregnancy. now, however, women should know better yet many women worry more about getting promoted to junior assistant account rep for suck america dry corp rather than making healthy family planning decisions. still working on that work/lifestyle balance are you ladies? either have a child while you are young and healthy, hire an egg donor or adopt. otherwise, just admit you are selfish and thoughtless and don't appreciate the consequences in getting pregnant over the age of 35.
The rise in autism rates also corresponds with the rise in meth making rates...
Mercuric chloride is often used in meth making and contaminates alot of homes and public accomodations.
sorry I was 18 when I got pregnant and 19 when my daughter was born. She has Autism. Age has nothing to do with it.
Its not a perfect correlation, one outlier does not throw the theory off.
That means that age is not the whole story. It doesn't mean that age has nothing to do with it.
Have you collected statistics on a randomized sample of other mothers in the United States to back up your claim? No? Then please leave your anecdotal evidence to yourself, it adds about as much evidence to the debate as me mooning my computer.
There are 19 year olds who have Downs Syndrome children. The tendency for parents to have children later in life correlates with the possibility. The same goes for autism. Perhaps a statistics refresher will do you good. Just because you site an example (yours) does not discredit the probability.
Unfortunately, age does have something to do with it. In fact, it's the **only** real predictor we have for calculating the risk of Autism. In your case, your risk was low, but there was (is always) risk.
What a hateful and ignorant post. Don't like women who didn't have kids when they were young, do you? Let's see you've accused them of caring more about "sucking corporate america (sic) dry" than making "healthy family planning decisions", and being selfish and thoughtless. Interesting, because that doesn't even remotely describe the women I know who have had children in their late 30s and 40s. And, yes, that does include myself. In my 40s, I have been MUCH more interested in making healthy decisions for my family than many of my younger friends. There may be a SLIGHT correlation with age of a woman's eggs, but it by no means accounts for the rise in autism rates. It also does not explain the prevalence of autism in the children of young women. Get a life.
no, not hateful, i can assure you that. family planning has been altered due to societal changes. the results have produced a tragic situation for many families. i used blunt, plain language because the stakes in this case are high. you would also do well to read the post more carefully. until recently women did not understand the consequences of postponing child birth. a generation of women and their children have paid a dear price so that women could stand their ground in the corporate world. i very much believe that we owe those women and their children a debt of gratitude. thankfully, today's 30 year old woman does not have the same pressure points for remaining in the corp. work force as opposed to taking a maternity leave that in the past would end a woman's career. my blunt words are for those women out there who should now know better. i am questioning women who are delaying pregnancy in order to buy more consumer goods paid for by pointless jobs as Junior Account Reps for the Suck America Dry Corp. Is that clearer? women should absolutely become first time mothers over the age of 35, but should in most cases avoid fertilizing their own eggs after 35+. i'm sure science will soon figure out a way to determine the health of older egs, but no such test currently exist. the risks are too high and the reasons for delayed pregnancy are too thin.
Even though I think there is merit to the concept of women's (and men's) bodies soaking up toxins as they age I do not appreciate you attitude towards women and their family planning decisions. The way you express your judgement makes it easier to discount what you say. And I know plenty of women who had children in their early 20's who have children on the autism spectrum.
Maybe some of you should read before you use your opinions as 'evidence' to a counter-claim. The statistical correlation is well established.
http://www
http://cme
http://www
http://hea
http://www
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