| Your argument that "vaccines cause autism" has huge problems, not the least of which are thimerosal-free vaccines over the last decade. In addition, the authors of the first study you cited appear to be involved in vaccine litigation and in a business that purports to treat autism by "chelation therapy" and would thus seem to have a vested interest in research findings that show heavy metals cause pathology. Your second link doesn't go to a paper - you linked to some anti-vaccine website which itself doesn't link to a paper. There actually is a paper in JANE here: http://www.ane.pl/pdf/7020.pdf You can read the paper for yourself - but I am personally not at all impressed by an N=16, with N=3 in the control group. Complete MRI data in this study were obtained on N=9 in the treatment group, and only N=2 in the control group. Another discussion of the posters that preceded this second paper's publication can be found at: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=100
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=1989 and the second paper itself at: http://www.opposingviews.com/i/new-paper-vaccines-cause-auti... You rather carefully chose to note that neither paper was "written" by Wakefield. However, the authors of the second paper noted that Wakefield reviewed their paper and actually helped design their study: "We thank Drs. Saverio Capuano and Mario Rodriguez
for veterinary assistance; and Dr. David Atwood, Carrie
Redinger, Dave McFarland, Amanda Dettmer, Steven
Kendro, Nicole DeBlasio, Melanie O’Malley and Megan
Rufle for technical support. Special thanks to Dr. Andrew
Wakefield for assistance with study design and for critical
review of this manuscript; and to Troy and Charlie Ball
and Robert Sawyer. This work was supported by the
Johnson Family, SafeMinds, The Ted Lindsay Foundation,
the Autism Research Institute, the Greater Milwaukee
Foundation, the late Liz Birt, David and Cindy Emminger,
Sandy McInnis, and Elyse Roberts. Prior to 2005, Carol
Stott was involved in vaccine litigation." Papers aside, some anti-vaccine folk seem to have a great deal of emotion invested in the issue: http://briandeer.com/mmr/carol-stott.htm |