AIBU to think non vaccination is child abuse

[alittlevoice]

There was this discussion in another thread and i thought i would make a new thread so it doesn't over taken someone elses

To me not vaccinating your child is akin to child abuse because you are putting them at undue risk of disease which is preventable due to scare mongering or from quack doctors that have long been struck off the medical register and shunned from the medical community

I hate the assumption that because there has been no reported cases it means you shouldn't vaccinate your children it's because children have been vaccinated regularly that there has not been a epidemic

leading doctors (not the quacks) have been worried for some time about the rise of mumps because of the scare mongering and children not getting vaccinated and get seriously Ill and have to be saved by modern medicine (which quack parents are always keen to take up on with there anti vaccination stance)

rubella has a incubation period as many other diseases so if your child has it and you dont know and child is near a pregnant woman and she loses her child due to non immunisation I don't understand how as a parent you'd do that to another person

So the long and short of it is why are some parents touched in the head and think they have the right for there child to possibly kill unborn children and infect younger babies too young to have the choice (and for those saying this is far fetched its as plausible of something going wrong from immunisations)

Cat - autism isn't one thing. It has multiple etiologies that is not remotely controversial yet seems to be forgotten in any vaccination/autism thread, and papers. Unfortunately as it really is basic stuff.

Silver - must talk to you about that one day. They ate still querying mt disorder for ds1.

would be good to chat, jj.

I need ot get dd1 investigated, really.

but we are in a good place with ehr currently. and her bowel issues seem to have turned a corner recently too - we are talking about challenging her with casein (the lesser of the 2 evils for her!) to see where that goes - unthinkable a couple of years ago. and she didn't react as badly as she should ahve when she sneaked a couple fo choc brownies, so a gluten challenge may not be that far off either

and so, generally, we are in a place of calm, contented looking about and taking in the world, just like any other family.

Stata you will not find a link between autism abd vaccination because autism is not one thing: repeats thousand times.

Some with autism esp those who are higher functioning are born with it, other start developing on a typical pathway then because of a combination of genetics plus environment become autistic. The immune system appears to be a big factor for sine in developing autism andgor those environmental factors which affect the immune system can trigger autism. These environmental factors are believed to vary which is why it is so hardto unpick. The time of exposure also appears to have sn affect. None of this is remotely controversial amongst those studying autism btw.

In the case of mitochondrial cytopathies (very good review in this months molecular psychiatry btw) many of those working in the field believe that agents such as viruses or more rarely 'vaccinations' can act as the trigger. You won't find that published but people will happily present that at conferences.

starlight, too true, my son was not identified as being at risk. It appears he was though. It is a dangerous thing for children to undergo, there will be many many children who are at risk and not in an obvious way. What a lottery.
Dammed if you don't and then like me you do and get a changed child in return.

Ds1's bowel issues got better eventually - I suspect his issues weredue to overuse of antibiotics and so they were easier to heal than some.

Oh it's hard - I would recommend the autism biomed Europe yahoo group if you're not already on it.

well how funny article published tomorrow no less about the immune system and autism

Unfortunately you will see that the current state of research tends to raise more questions than it answers (the 2 x paeds, the neurologist and the geneticist we have seen in the last year have all agreed on that point).

I think most people would agree that in some subgroups (because as I have already said autism is not one thing) the immune system appears to be involved in some way although it's not clear how and also that whatever the mechanism is it is complicated.

this is a bit old now (2006) but a fairly nice review of autism and immune dysfunction.

I went to a very interesting talk at an autism conference a few years ago. Their model was that the mother had an infection during early pregnancy - this could be very mild, but that triggered a response in the developing foetus which meant it was then had a susceptible immune system (I can't remember the details, could look them up but was to do with cytokine ratios). If the baby then postnatally met another trigger, then autism could result.

I was surprised actually at that conference because the potential role of vaccinations was openly discussed in several talks that I went to. It was a very mainstream autism conference and it surprised me. I thought it would be off limits. In general it seemed that most people seemed to see vaccinations as one of several potential triggers- with other triggers being perhaps more common, but vaccinations doing their bit occasionally.

oh look this is interesting I am not very up to speed in this area, I was a few years ago but I haven't kept up with it.

I do think most of this work is at the stage of raising more questions than answers though. Unfortunately.

blimey this is bam bam bam on the publications

Bit out of date though.

A new study by researchers at the University of California, Davis, MIND Institute and the NIEHS Center for Children?s Environmental Health demonstrate that children with autism have different immune system responses than children who do not have the disorder. From 2005 so again not exactly bang up to date.

hello jimjams! So glad you've turned up - was referencing you earlier (but not by name in a vague attempt to be discreet). Only I'd forgotten all the details. How's things?

I quote from one of the papers you linked to (Ashwood et al.)
" However, the overwhelming majority of epidemiological population studies indicates there is no established correlation between vaccinations and autism."

From waht I can see from the links is that there may be a link with the immune system. How do you know that being exposed to the measles virus rather than the vaccine is a trigger? None of the papers implicated vaccines. BUt I do agree, more research is needed and my be the evidence will change.

I keep returning to this as well because it intrigues me

LEonie. You don't know if you did the right thing. It could very well be that exposing your children to the full blown disease rather than vaccine could lead to a helluva lot of problems - the literature isn't clear on that point. You have no evidence that vaccines would have caused any problems to your children any more than exposing them to the full blown dz (in addition to all the other complications).

good edam. Ds1 is much calmer than he was. :)

Stata- I find it interesting because the papers never mention vaccinations except to say that there is no proof. Sometimes they list potential triggers with vaccinations an apparent obvious omission.

Yes the same scientists will happily discuss their potential role at conferences, and face to face. I find it fascinating. I almost fell off my chair on numerous occasions when I attended IMFAR because I was stunned to hear somewhere so mainstream discussing the role so openly.

Interesting- and says quite a lot about the system of publication in this country - it really is very difficult to get anything published that challenges certain topics. But you will know that I'm sure.

Starlight.

I'll try a different analogy. Most women can give birth naturally. Some women can't and need a c-section. Many of the women who need a c-section can be identified before delivery. We know that they are at higher risk of complications and the risk of the c-section outweighs the risk of vaginal delivery. However, there are some women who don't have any of the identified risk factors but will have complications that could have been avoided by c-section. Does this mean all women should have a c-section? No, of course not. Exactly the same with vax. If you don't belong to one of the already identified groups, then you can only assume that your risk is the same as the whole population. Yes, populations are heterogeneous but there are also many unobserved factors as well. So if a woman who had a vaginal birth because she was 'low risk' was unlucky and had complications, you can't then say that the risk was 100% because that wasn't the a priori risk. Do you get what I'm saying?

"How do you know that being exposed to the measles virus rather than the vaccine is a trigger? "

As I said above it appears from the conference talks that many see both natural viruses and vaccinations as having the potential to play a role - in some cases - in other cases of course they will not have any sort of role. Most seemed to sat they felt natural viruses were more commonly a problem than vaccinations, this would appear sensible to me. These aren't particularly viruses that you would vaccinate against though. And timing of exposure seemed to play a another role.

But to be honest I suspect they are going to eventually untangle multiple routes to autism.

saintly

there's no reason for anyone to think that vaccines are some kind of holy cow. They're not. The first rotavirus vaccine was pulled because of side effects. It happens. I accept that more work could be done to look at autism triggers - there is much that we don't know. But as it stands at the moment, study after study show no relationship between autism and vaccines. It could change but that's how it stands right now.

Haven't caught up with the thread yet but thank you for answering my question r.e vaccinations and safeguarding altinkum