Autism Street

This week, I invited blogger Not Mercury to collaborate on an article that might illustrate how skeptical review of information in the media can lead to conclusions different than the media itself appears to represent. Yesterday, a news item caught our attention. In a co-written article, we’ll examine claims about a hypothetical ”link” between mercury in vaccines, and autism.

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- By Not Mercury and Do’C

An opinion piece about the hypothesized, but never proven, link between mercury in vaccines and autism was published online in yesterday’s Capital Times from Madison, Wisconsin.  Written by someone with a presumed scientific background, it’s a little surprising to see that the piece begins with bold assertion that such a “link” is or may have ever been established.

“It was reported repeatedly in 2006 that the link between mercury-containing vaccines and autism has been disproven.”

Michael Wagnitz (the author) is described at the end of the piece as a chemist. In a strict scientific sense, claims worded like the one above are possibly an unfortunate side effect of getting one’s scientific information from, or writing for, the news media. The media seems adept at communicating major misunderstanding of how science works in the first place, and all too often completely ignores that science is more about a way of looking at things than it is about a collection of information to be reported in the news. When that concept is understood, it becomes clear that science is not asking for ‘disproof’ of a link between mercury-containing vaccines and autism. Science looks for proof (or the failure to find such proof - see falsified and null hypothesis), not ‘disproof’. Although this very basic concept of burden of proof that is “built-in” to science is often overlooked, it should seem surprising that a chemist would ignore this rudimentary aspect of science itself. What the research that has looked for a “link” between mercury-containing vaccines and autism reveals, is that nothing really seems to have been found that establishes such a link.

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Sunday is one of the few days of the week I have little extra time to catch up some reading. I peruse several blogs (usually from links to the right), catch up on e-mail, and often just print a couple of articles for nighttime reading during the week ahead. Today is no exception, and here’s just some of what I found that was ”well worth reading” in my opinion.

As a parent, I like to read what some of the pediatrician bloggers are writing. Two of my favorites are Clark Bartram (Untelligent Design) and Dr. Flea. Dr. Flea has written about autism quite a bit recently, so if you haven’t in a while, I highly recommend a visit to his blog. There’s also some excellent reading available at today’s Pediatric Grand Rounds over at Allergy and Asthma Source (by Dr. Lourdes de Asis).

Out of the realm of pediatrics, and specific to autism:

Dr. Morton Ann Gernsbacher has written a most thoughtful column for the March edition of the Association for Psychological Science’s Observer. The article,

Neural Diversity 

is primarily written in layman’s language and replete with everyday examples - I’d venture to guess that most readers will recognize at least two of the three examples of common behavioral diversity. Although the science behind discussion of the cited neural imaging studies is certainly more complex, the take home messages from Gernsbacher about the subsequent interpretations are not.

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Kim Stagliano has written another brilliant autism piece over at the Huffington Post blog. Although she’ll venture into discussion of “cause” (ooh, so brave), let’s first look at the ‘autism epidemiology’ presented in her article.

The media is jumping all over itself to scream about the new CDC autism numbers. 1 in 150! All of which is due to better diagnosis according to most reliable reporting sources. OK - I agree. (Shocked?) There is much better awareness of autism and docs are more willing to use the term AUTISM with parents than in the past.

All of which is due to better diagnosis? She agrees with Mr. “it’s all just better diagnosis” straw man? I’m not shocked in the least. Let’s she what she’ll attempt to knock down Mr. “better diagnosis” straw man with:

But can better diagnosis really account for a change from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 150 in 20 or 30 years?

1 in 10,000? to 1 in 150 in 20 or 30 years?

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Remember the Aesop fable of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”?

Here’s part of what’s in Wikipedia about the fable:

The Boy Who Cried Wolf, also known as The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf, is a fable by Aesop. The protagonist of the fable is a bored shepherd boy who entertained himself by calling out “wolf”. Nearby villagers who came to his rescue found that the alarms were false and that they’d wasted their time. When the boy was actually confronted by a wolf, the villagers did not believe his cries for help and his flock perished (in some versions when the villagers ignore him the wolf kills him). The moral is stated at the end of the fable as:

Even when liars tell the truth, they are never believed.

And this:

The English idiom “to cry wolf”, derived from the fable, refers to the act of persistently raising the alarm about a non-existent threat, with the implication that the person who cried wolf would not be taken seriously should a real emergency take place.

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