prisoner of the flesh's dilemma

[vito_excalibur]

So jedusor posted about vaccinations and I was thinking about them.

Okay, let's take a look at just one set. Let's look at the MMR vaccine. That's measles, mumps, and rubella.

If you give your kid the MMR vaccine, they have less than a one in a million chance of getting seriously ill or dying (encephalitis). Call it one in a million.

If your kid gets

Comments

[angelbob]

Mostly you're right, but I'll bring this up anyway.

Autism is diagnosed symptomatically. We don't know the mechanism, so we don't diagnose by the mechanism. This means that, like schizophrenia, it's almost certainly a "grab-bag disease." That is, there are almost certainly a number of different underlying conditions, all of which we currently call autism, and some of which are going to be separated out into different sub-conditions as we figure out what the hell causes them. This is how depression, manic-depression, mania, bipolar and several other diseases were separated from dementia praecox, leaving schizophrenia, which could be considered to be "all the conditions we would once have called dementia praecox for which we still have no real understanding of the underlying mechanism."

Bear with me a moment, I *do* have a point.

Some kinds of autism you are *not* born with. For instance, there's a fungus that can grow in your digestive tract and cause you to metabolize both gluten and casein (milk protein) into opioids. This causes a condition which looks a bit like long-term opium addiction, and causes autistic symptoms. Not "autism-like", because autism is diagnosed symptomatically -- if it causes symptoms we can't distinguish from autism, then it *is* autism, because symptoms are our only method of diagnosing autism. In that specific case (people with that fungus), there's both a blood test for metabolic by-products of the fungus and some ways to treat it, mostly dietarily. However, this is *very* rare, even among cases of autism. It exists, it does happen, but if somebody is autistic then chances are good that treating this condition won't help them.

That's a good example of autism that you're approximately born with -- I'm not sure how the fungus spreads, or *if* it spreads, and I don't think anybody else is either. However, by changing diet you can "cause" autism because without a fair bit of gluten and casein in the diet, there's no autistic symptoms, and thus no autism. That's how we define autism.

It would be deeply unfair of me to take the above information and summarize it as "pizza causes autism!". And yet, for a very small and specific chunk of the population, that is literally true.

People who are still yammering on about the vaccine/autism link (I'm not one), when they're not basically crazy, are attempting to show roughly this connection, not with all cases of autism, but with a few specific ones.

And there *do* seem to be some cases of autism with environmental triggers. Not all or most cases of autism -- again, it seems to be a grab-bag disease with a significant variety of underlying mechanisms.

I'm not saying "vaccines cause autism", even in the very limited "pizza causes autism" case above. I'm saying that they're not crazy to look for environmental triggers simply because "autism is something you're born with."

[shoutingboy]

This 'minds me of an argument I waded into once upon a time. A fellow who was, I think, on the side of the angels, was ranting about the anti-vax people. But the argument he made, over and over, was "there's no mechanism by which mercury/thimerosol could cause autism".

Now, if he'd said "there's absolutely no evidence that it causes autism", and tossed in "and we have no other reason to think it could do that, because we don't know of any mechanisms by which it would cause autism"--I'd have had no quarrel. But his argument really was "there's no mechanism, therefore it can't happen." And this struck me as crankery marshalled against crankery. Because "there's no mechanism" only means "we're not aware of a mechanism", and there's a lot we're not aware of.

It reminded me of an article I read about an HIV-doesn't-cause-AIDS crank, who was actually a tenured biochemist (if memory serves). His argument was also, in large part, "we don't know the mechanism by which it would cause those effects"--and he took that to mean "therefore it ain't doing that, and AZT (or possibly MSG, or just maybe ZOG) is causing the disease".

[kcatalyst]

I hate it when crankery is deployed against crankery! Perhaps even more than the original crankery. And there's a lot of it in vaccine discussions. I've started summarizing such arguments as "I'm using science, because I'm arguing for vaccines, and vaccines are MADE of science! Therefore I'm logical and you're a crank!"

[vito_excalibur]

"Apparently you don't understand science!"

[kcatalyst]

*laugh* Exactly!

[shoutingboy]

It is a glorious day... FOR SCIENCE!

[angelbob]

Yeah, that's wrong just on the face of it.

Mercury poisoning can and does cause autism-like symptoms (and thus, by our definition, autism) in large amounts. What he means is that there's a mechanism in general, but thimerosal in vaccines just isn't enough mercury (and the wrong kind of mercury? I forget) to cause that by itself.

A lot of these arguments are hard for exactly that reason -- "I can't imagine a reason that would happen" is different from "that doesn't happen." Or my favorite way of phrasing it, "truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense."

[vito_excalibur]

Yep. There basically isn't thimerosal anymore in vaccines for kids under six, and it's ethylmercury, not the really poisonous variation which is methylmercury.

[rebbyribs]

It reminded me of an article I read about an HIV-doesn't-cause-AIDS crank, who was actually a tenured biochemist (if memory serves).

That would be Peter Duesberg.

[shoutingboy]

Yup, that was the gentleman in question!

[irontongue]

Peter Duesberg did a lot of important work on retroviruses before going off the deep end into HIV denialism and bizarre homophobic accusations about drug use being the cause of AIDS, etc. His arguments centered around legitimate questions about why for so many there was a long, long time period between infection and symptoms. He read this to mean it couldn't possibly be HIV. But at some point in the 90s, the science around HIV had advanced to the point that just what the virus was doing between infection and symptoms became known.

[denelian]

o.O

thank you - i did not know that [i should have known that]
i just get very, very frustrated. because my niece, she got mumps from a playmate. she got mumps 3 weeks before she was supposed to get the vaccination.

i phrased what i said above very badly; i was not trying to say "there are never for enviromental factors" - if nothing else, DDT has shown that enviromental factors can affect a fetus.

but *REALLY* - thank you. i would like to read more about it - do you know of any articles off hand? [i am going google; i am mostly asking for recommendations]

[fanw]

The other trouble with autism diagnosis is that, since it is behavioral, you can't actually diagnose it until the child is developmentally old enough to display the symptoms, typically at about 12-24 months. This is right during or after the vast number of vaccines kids get nowadays (which by the way is more than twice the number we got as kids. No wonder parents are surprised!) You can't diagnose dysfunction in social/emotional response in a newborn who can't even distinguish self from other.

(Sorry Vito! I just had to multi-comment on this one!)

[vito_excalibur]

Are you kidding? I assumed no one was commenting because they were all busily checking my math. :)