To think that anti-vaxers may actually being onto something?

[viiz]

I don't have children myself yet but I don't know what I would chose when the time comes. Most of pro vax/anti vax threads turns nasty with people not even willing to try and look at things with others side perspective. Not willing to even consider points of view different than their own and that's a very silly approach. People believed a lot of things that turned out to be false over the years and centuries. Why not to doubt a little?

I was born in early '80s and not in UK. Myself, my siblings and friends were all vaccinated at the time. I don't even remember what I was vaccinated against but had to be pretty basic. Just a few jabs throughout my whole childhood/teen years and nothing 3in1 or 10in1 or whatever they'll bring next.

Now to the point. Reading through hundreds of threads it jumps at me how many children have neurological, behavioural or emotional disorders. No one else sees it really?? I don't know even one person from my childhood including friends, extended family , neighbours etc who would have ADS or ADHD or any other issues like that. I see their children to have it though.

AIBU to consider there could be a link here??

Please be gentle. I hope to have a discussion here. I don't disrespect anyone's views and I only ask to try and ask yourself 'what if'.

With regards to the special needs and disorders link - time was that being labelled with one of these things was extremely problematic. Parents didn't want their child to be set apart, seen as different or marked as potentially 'difficult because there was a much lower tolerance / acceptance in society. Now, with a greater understanding, better and earlier diagnosis and clear support systems in place, it's much better to have that label and access the help on offer. Not to mention that many of the disorders you mention have only recently been recognised. In addition, people are now much more aware of mental health issues and so there is less stigma around saying you have it. I don't necessarily think people are more anxious/ depressed than before, but people are much less ashamed to say they are suffering.

Anyway, to equate vaccines with this seems silly. It's like the thing that circles on social media sometimes - the graph showing that how, as the number of pirates have fallen, global warming has increased; therefore, pirates must prevent global warming. You are noticing two factors in modern life and equating them when there is no link. Instead, maybe look to the decreased infant mortality rate, the eradication of certain diseases and how few children are permanently damaged from childhood illnesses as proof of how well vaccinations work.

I’ve made a similar post to this previously. I have worked for years as a research nurse for the nhs. The things that need to happen before we even start testing trial drugs takes years. Ethic approval, scientific advisory board approval, etc etc. Finally there are such stringent procedures in place as to which patients can and can’t be recruited onto a trial. We have to report every single tiny thing that happens to a patient if they’re on a drug. More cold sores? Reported. Hit by a bus? Reported. If there was even the slightest chance that x drug causes x side effect it is looked into again and again. You’d see it listed on the info sheet that comes with that drug if it ever gets licensed (which also takes years!) the amount of research into vaccines is astounding. There is no conspiracy theory between drug companies and the nhs. They haven’t found the cure to cancer and vaccines don’t cause autism, adhd etc! Why would the nhs hide something that causes them to spend billions of pounds on treatment every year? The nhs wouldn’t vaccinate children then shell out to treat its side effects?!
There are lots of children suffering from disorders yes that’s true, but I personally think there’s more awareness of mental health, less excercise, worse diet, more screen time and pressures at school etc. I want to end my post with vaccinations protect your children from devastating illnesses. To not vaccinate is to fail to protect them from something preventable.

YABVU.
Anti-vaxers are a danger to us all

Adhd and autism are not cause by vaccination
There are few other typos but I can't be arsed to correct 😁

BrieAndOatcakes most children with learning and physical disabilities are now accommodated in mainstream schools. It tends to be children with autism that are managed out of mainstream.

Wow it's a bit insulting to hear parents with autistic children "have a lot to talk about".

What exactly do you mean by that? Your comment is clearly meant to be negative.

Of course we have a lot to talk about. Children do not come with a manual. Add autism into the mix and it's even tougher.
We have to learn everything ourselves as is
often the case you get a diagnosis and are then sent on your merry way.
In the meantime there are real children experiencing this very real condition and as parents we try to do all we can to make life easier so when we meet others in the same boat we tend to talk!

All that said, I wouldn't change a thing. Autism is only a small part of my wonderful son. It doesn't define him by any means but he has struggled with it many times over the last 8 years.
Talking about autism is very important. My dd is only 7 and has been aware of it for as long as I can remember. We spoke about how her brother sees things differently and how it affects him. Awareness is so important.
Her best friend has a little sister with autism
and so they chat to each other about it.
Ds has never kept it a secret and his friends are bloody amazing. I find the attitudes of adults worse than children. Sadly, ignorance is very much alive regarding ASD. Until it happens to someone close to them.

I find it hard to believe that anyone doesn't know a child in real life with ASD. There are several in my dd's class and I have friends with children with ASD ( all have been diagnosed so not me assuming ) and several celebrities have been very vocal about raising awareness due to having children with ASD. It doesn't affect just the unknowns. Attitudes like this make me despair :(

I was having a chat with a support worker for children with adhd etc recently and I asked her about the rise in diagnoses and her thoughts were if you go to any mental health type facility/prison that the majority of the people in them who have been there a long time will actually have some form of autism which back then was not diagnosed as such so there hasn't been as such a rise in cases just a rise in diagnosis of these conditions. I understand where your linkage might come from but I have 2 family members with highly compromised immune systems so for me it's really vaccinate all the way and I say that also as an 80s child who remembers getting a lot of vaccinations over the years.

Andrew Wakefield is a lying toerag. He failed to meet scientific and ethical standards in his infamous 'research' paper which appeared to be designed to provide marketing material for medication he was planning to sell. In this case it was 'little pharma' which was selling you down the river.

He is responsible for many many deaths from measles. He's the problem not MMR.

I will just say this. When I was growing up, certain behaviours were ignored, phased out, punished, extinguished, hidden. They were still there.
My sister would go onto override and stay like a statue for a good five minutes, like in Trance.
My brother couldn't stand touching with cold hands, numbers that were even, plate number that didn't add up to an even number, he would constantly add them up as he saw them.
I could not eat in 1s, everything had to be in 2s, I could not stand on red, if I hit my right leg I would hAve to hit my left with the same intensity and force.
Then came the ticks, the anxieties...
I am convinced all these would not be classes as normal behaviours these days.
Autism in females was under diagnosed for decades.

What drives me mad about anti vax arguments is the lack of scientific data and the selfishness of the western culture

OP: the reason none of your friends, neighbours etc had ASD or ADHD growing up was becasue it was barely known about and only diagnosed in the most extreme cases.

My husband has ADHD. It was diagnosed at age 46 because it wasn't picked up when he was a child. Becasue nobody noticed that sort of thing in the 70s/80s. My daughter has ADHD, diagnosed at age 9, becasue these days it's well known and picked up on in early childhood.

I would be failing my children if I didn't protect them from preventable diseases becasue I had my knickers in a twist about some completely non-existant link between vaccines and autism.

My ADHD child is brilliant, by the way. Her energy and enthusiasm for everything is incredible. She's ridiculously clever, sporty and altogether fabulous. I really hate the idea that ADHD and autism are somehown so dreadful that it's worth risking death for.

Ah yes, your feelings qualify as scientific research. Where as the failure by science to prove a link is worthless.
Bullshit, op. And you know it.

My DM didn't get me vaccinated for whooping cough (at a time when scare mongering was happening around that vaccine) and guess what I got it. I asked her years later and she said she was scared by the stories and thought she was doing the right thing but obvious she now realised she hadn't. That's the problem isn't it lots of this stuff is driven by fear and I think the people doing the driving behind it like to feel 'powerful' over the 'big companies'.

DD has Aspergers. After diagnosis the clinical psychologist mentioned the words “highly heritable” and DH immediately thought of his paternal grandma, whose extraordinarily quirky way of relating to people I’d put down to senile dementia but no - apparently she’d been like that all her life. People were not diagnosed. Even in the 80s when I was at school I often think of a boy in our class (who was eventually excluded) called Bradley who had glaring ADHD and possibly Tourette’s but was just seen as “naughty”

First off correlation does NOT equal causation!!!

Secondly even 40 years ago children who had ASD, ADHD, Dyslexia ect were either put into institutions often only visited by family once a month or less, if children weren’t affected bad enough to be institutionalised they were put into special schools or simply excluded completely and did not receive an education.

If by some small chance they were able to assimilate enough to be in school then they were often called dumb and stuck into special needs classes rarely seen/heard by other children!

So all this ‘I never seen anyone with ASD/ADHD growing up’ business is a load of crap! You never saw them because 90% chance you weren’t allowed to!!! Your memory is selective, everyone’s is. We can’t possibly remember everyone/everything we’d literally go insane! So just because YOU don’t remember something doesn’t mean that something didn’t happen/exist.

You also clearly don’t understand how our immune system works...children don’t have weaker immune systems they actually have much stronger ones then adults!! Children have billions of antibodies of all types as we age we actually have less and less antibodies, our immune systems then only produce antibodies for bacterium and viruses they have encountered.

Ever stopped and wondered why Chicken Pox is in general easier for children to get and SOOO horrible for adults?

Have a watch it’s extremely interesting!

There is no evidence that vaccinations cause autism or any such problems, and this has been thoroughly tested. E.g. in Japan, they stopped the MMR for several years and then re-introduced it, and it made no difference to autism rates. There is also little evidence that autism rates have increased. Diagnosis has increased, but that may be a function both of greater awareness and changes in diagnostic criteria. Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues did a study a few years ago, where they assessed thousands of British people on current criteria for diagnosing autistic spectrum disorder. About 1 per cent met the criteria and it was the same percentage at all ages: older adults were just as likely to meet criteria as younger adults or children, though probably less likely to already have a diagnosis. There has not, I think, been a similar study of ADHD, but there are fairly obvious reasons why there would be increased diagnosis nowadays: in the past, the school leaving age was lower, and there was less pressure for all children to get through particular tests and exams. In the past, it was assumed that many pupils were 'not academic' and would leave school as early as possible; nowadays, parents and teachers are more likely to seek explanations for poor performance. And there were plenty of children with neurological disorders in the past, but those with mild problems tended to be regarded simply as 'naughty', 'lazy' or 'odd', while those with more severe problems were hidden away in special schools and institutions.

There isn't a way of innoculating against stupid, sadly.
I am immunocompromised. The whole anti- vacc thing isn't a "different point of view " , it's potentially life threatening.

So the MMR was introduced in the 1980s.

No. No authoritative research has been published to back up claims that it may be linked to autism and bowel disease.
The Wakefield claims have been tested in over a dozen statistical studies carried out across large populations in different countries, and none found any evidence at all to suggest there was any link between the MMR jab and autism.
These studies included a 2004 investigation by a team from the UK Medical Research Council which compared the vaccination records of 1,294 children diagnosed with autism or related conditions with those of 4,469 children who had no such diagnosis.
Overall, 78% of the children with autism had received MMR. But 82% of the other children had also been given MMR.
A 2005 paper looked at autism rates among 31,426 children born in Japan. It found the incidence of autism actually increased after the MMR jab was withdrawn in the country in 1993.
One of the biggest studies of all - a 2002 paper examining the records of 537,303 children born in Denmark - also showed no link between MMR and autism.

I don't know ehere you were born, but I was also born outside of UK, late 80's, and ADHD and ADD very much existed. But it wasn't called that. It had different namesand kids were not given any soecial treatment. Surely you had that 1 child in class who was being disruptive, teachers were trying to seat them away from other kids etc.
Autism also existed. But in country where I was born, people with disabilities ended up hidden. Luckily that all changed now.

It's not vaccines. However, I do agree that there are so many cases it makes onewonderwhat the cause is. So many pps have really interesting points about lifestyle, diet etc. All that surely has an effect.

Not willing to even consider points of view different than their own and that's a very silly approach

You're giving it a false equivalence. If someone starts a thread about the moon being made of cheese am I being silly if I don't spend time considering it?

It's silly to give beliefs consideration without there being a good cause, that being evidence.

All you have to do is look at the parents or wider family and you will see that the diagnosed child has a possibly undiagnosed relative with the same thing. Also the nature of SEN has changed because of vaccinations preventing disabilities caused by illnesses.
Plus scanning in pregnancy which means many syndromes or disorders can be picked up before birth and the pregnancy be terminated.
Allergies though definitely rising but nothing to do with vaccines.

Thanks NellyandKelly
No reply from the OP to my point obviously!

All I will say is that my children are vaccinated but i do think it is worth talking about , that when i had my first child, 10 years ago, the vaccine was a '3 in 1' now it is a '6 in 1'.

No way do we the effects of that in 20 or 30 years time, i think vaccines are good but are changing yearly
they are moving too fast and overloading babies (babies in Ireland get 16 different vaccinations in the first year).
Again, i am all for vaccinations, but I would like to be able to air my concerns about this without being called names.

So thank you for this thread, it is lovely to be able to talk about this.

Also it doesn’t surprise me that children not vaccinated are diagnosed more that vaccinated children. It makes me think of the parental anxiety that led to that decision...

There are a lot more children (and adults) being diagnosed with a variety of disorders. I do not believe vaccinations cause them.

Diagnosis of conditions has improved across the board, brain scanning techniques have improved, genetic medicine has exploded leading to thousands of people being diagnosed with syndromes that previously had no name. Our awareness of mental health issues and neurological conditions has increased.

My ds(8) who has had complex needs since birth but only had a diagnosis last year of a genetic condition, which was only discovered through a national genome study. As genetic medicine improves I think we will find more and more conditions are genetic in nature. Many conditions (including ds's) have co-morbidity or features of autism and ADHD, also anxiety and OCD tendencies. I think that not too far back children with some of these conditions (including ds) wouldn't have made it through their difficult births, or early days in NICU.

I was at school with kids who today would be diagnosed with ADHD and autism. But back in the day they were ‘naughty’ or had learning difficulties or put on the lower table. This was before the triple vaccine etc.