Some parts of the British media are finally responding to growing evidence of vaccination caused autism; but why do so few British reporters appear to be in the know, has the profession reached an all time low?
Autism, now believed to afflict more than 1 in 100 UK children, ought to be story of the day when breaking news occurs; a nation’s children at risk, not least a nation’s future. So where are all the journalists?
Are Doherty, Jardine, Beck and Phillips the only British journalists and are their publications the only ones who recognise the implications of these recent developments?
MMR The Debate That Won’t Go Away – Cassandra Jardine & Sally Beck – The Daily Telegraph – 26 May 2008
Autism-link writer in talk to MPs – May 25 2008 by Phil Doherty, Sunday Sun
Jury still out on MMR jab – Sunday Sun May 25 2008 Sunday Sun
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Filed under: ADHD, Aspergers, autism, Child Health Safety, MMR, vaccination, Vaccine Damage, Vaccines | Tagged: ADHD, Andrew Wakefield, Aspergers, autism, Barak Obama, Baron Cohen, CDC, David Kirby, fraud, genetic, genetics, Hannah Poling, immunisation, Jon Poling, Julie Gerberding, MMR, Obama, Professor Baron Cohen, Professor Simon Baron Cohen, research, research fraud, Simon Baron Cohen, vaccination, vaccine, vaccine adverse reaction, Vaccine Damage, vaccine risks, Vaccines, Wakefield |
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Older paternal age is another cause of non-familial autism. http://autism-prevention.blogspot.com/2008/06/autism-speaks-rakes-in-money-but-never.html
Advancing paternal age is not the cause of the massive increase in autism.
If we restrict ourselves to what is called variously “typical” or “childhood” or “kanner” autism, there is no doubt from Richenberg’s 2006 paper there is a real rise in numbers.
The study was out of date before it was written and has little no relevance to the substantial increase in autism since the mid 1980s. It is based on data from Israeli military draft board records of 17 year old conscripts born in a six year period commencing no later than 1982. The failure to mention the distinction between early onset and late onset autism is also highly significant.
The study also documents a 1200% rise since the 1980s. On present UK trends if we pretend older fathers are responsible for the rise, using the model of this study it would take 100 years to affect a 100% rise.
The new problem since the mid-1980s is late onset autism where the children develop normally and then start regressing around 18 months and older:-
– late onset is at least 5 times more common than early onset autism.
– autism is 4 times more common in boys than girls.
In contrast, the subjects of the study must predominantly be early onset autism cases as they were all born in the early 1980s (and are now at least between 18 to 25 years of age). As this paper is published in 2006, they can have been born no later than 1988.
It seems the subjects may have been born earlier than 1982 but the authors have oddly failed to state which consecutive six years in 1980 were the birth years of the subjects. That is critical information because the large increase in “late onset” autism started in the mid-1980’s and at that time had not reached the levels we are now seeing.
The study is also based on low accuracy data and the authors state so in their paper.
The uncertainty over accuracy is called the “confidence interval”. The range of values given in a confidence interval are values which could all be valid. The problem is that the data is so inaccurate no one can tell for sure which is the right figure – hence the “confidence interval”.
What this means is that the risk for fathers 40 and over could be exactly the same as that for those 39 and under. The lowest risk figure of 2.65 times for fathers 40 and over fathering an autistic child is exactly the same as the highest risk figure for fathers between 30 and 39.
The data is so inaccurate the authors give it a wide confidence interval of as low as 2.65 times the risk or as high as 12.46 times the risk for fathers aged 15-29. This is a very large confidence interval – or really it is a “lack of confidence interval” – and this also does not take account of any errors or biases by the researchers which they have missed themselves.
The reason for the inaccuracy is that the number of children and fathers is very small:-
– there were only 13 autistic children born to fathers 40 and over considered in the study
– there were 128,000 children with fathers under 40 but only 4000 with fathers over 40
Despite the low confidence level in the data, for sensationalism the story issued to the press cited the highest risk figure. That is scaremongering. It claimed fathers over 40 are six times as likely to have an autistic child than fathers aged 15 to 29.
It is not scientific to suggest the conclusions of the paper as reported in the press are valid for the entire world when based on such a small sample – especially one genetically biased to jewish israeli fathers and which has not been subject yet to critical scrutiny by the scientific world post publication.
It is also interesting that the researchers could have chosen data subjects from Israeli draft board records earlier than 1980 but they did not. The reason for that could well be that there are very few autistics over 25 years old and that is part of the evidence for this new problem since the mid 1980s.
We are told there is no point studying why autism is almost unknown in the Amish, because it is alleged the Amish might be genetically different. However, we are now told a study genetically limited to jewish people born in Israel in the early 1980s is relevant. See this extract from the study abstract:-
“Participants We conducted a study of Jewish persons born in Israel during 6 consecutive years. Virtually all men and about three quarters of women in this cohort underwent draft board assessment at age 17 years. Paternal age at birth was obtained for most of the cohort; maternal age was obtained for a smaller subset. We used the smaller subset (n = 132 271) with data on both paternal and maternal age for the primary analysis and the larger subset (n = 318 506) with data on paternal but not maternal age for sensitivity analyses.
Main Outcome Measures Information on persons coded as having International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision ASD was obtained from the registry. The registry identified 110 cases of ASD (incidence, 8.3 cases per 10 000 persons), mainly autism, in the smaller subset with complete parental age data.”