http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/Concerns/Autism/Index.html"As the country's leading public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is committed to protecting the health of all Americans–including infants, children, and adolescents. CDC shares with parents and many others great concern about the number of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We are committed to understanding what causes autism, how it can be prevented, and how it can be recognized and treated as early as possible.
Recent estimates from CDC's Autism Developmental Disabilities Monitoring network found that about 1 in 68 children born in 2002 have ASD. This estimate is higher than estimates from the early 1990s. Over the years, some people have had concerns that autism might be linked to the vaccines children receive. One vaccine ingredient that has been studied specifically is thimerosal, previously used as a preservative in many recommended childhood vaccines. However, in 2001 thimerosal was removed or reduced to trace amounts in all childhood vaccines except for one type of influenza vaccine, and thimerosal-free alternatives are available for influenza vaccine. Evidence from several studies examining trends in vaccine use and changes in autism frequency does not support such an association between thimerosal and autism. Furthermore, a scientific reviewExternal Web Site Icon by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) concluded that "the evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship between thimerosal–containing vaccines and autism." CDC supports the IOM conclusion that there is no relationship between vaccines containing thimerosal and autism rates in children."
http://www.immunize.org/catg.d/p4026.pdf"One Thing We Know About Autism: Vaccines Aren't to Blame
Anti-vaccine advocate Jenny McCarthy has a new platform on The View. Experts hope she won't spread more lies."
"published—and later retracted—in the journal Lancet. In 2010, Great Britain stripped Andrew Wakefield, the lead author of the study, of his medical license. An investigation had deemed his research an elaborate fraud.
But in those dozen years, fear of lifesaving immunizations took hold of millions of parents. Jenny McCarthy—former Playmate of the year, model, actress, and soon-to-be cohost of the television show The View—fueled parental fears. She built a movement around the flawed theory. McCarthy, who has an autistic son, wrote Louder Than Words: A Mother's Journey in Healing Autism, correlating the increase in childhood vaccinations with the rise in autism worldwide.
"She is absolutely entitled to her opinion, but to say that it's fact when it's not fact is just wrong," says Glenn Braunstein, vice president of clinical innovation at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. "It's one step down from yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater when there is no fire. It's fear-mongering."
But the movement snowballed. Congress held hearings. More than 5,000 people petitioned a newly formed Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, charging that vaccines injured their children. (Courts eventually found no proven link between vaccines and autism.) Parents began saying no to immunizations, and the percentage of parents who delayed or refused vaccinations rose from 22 percent in 2003 to nearly 40 percent in 2008. For the first time in decades, the U.S. saw outbreaks of diseases like measles, mumps, and whooping cough.
Completely Discredited
The original research began to be discredited as early as 1999, when two studies commissioned by the U.K. Department of Health found no evidence that immunizations were associated with autism. In 2001, a panel of 15 experts from the Institute of Medicine, which advises Congress, found no connection between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. In 2004, a comprehensive review by the Institute of Medicine found no causal relationship between vaccines and autism.
But it would take almost another decade for the furor to even begin to die down. A study this year in The Journal of Pediatrics may at last put the final nail in the coffin of the discredited research. In April, researchers published a study that looked at nearly 1,000 children and concluded that exposure to vaccines during the first two years of life was not associated with an increased risk of developing autism.
Maybe, just maybe, Jenny McCarthy won't even mention autism and vaccines from her new perch on The View. That's the hope of Paul Offit, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "In a more rational world, this discussion would be un-reopenable," Offit says. "The answerable questions have all been answered." It's not the vaccine, or anything in the vaccine. It's not the number or timing of vaccinations. Scientifically, he says, we know that.
So what is causing an increase in autism? We don't know for sure, says Offit, but the best data are genetic, involving several genes required for brain development that may generate abnormalities even in the womb. Some researchers have found a connection between older fathers and an increased risk of autism in their children. Or the increase could be due to more awareness of autism and a broader definition of the disorder.
Those theories require a lot more research. The vaccine theory does not. It was thoroughly investigated, and it doesn't hold up"
Bang, bang!
You just got shot down!
Bang, bang!
That awful sound!
Ban g, ban; the TRUTH just shot you down!
Further, your horseshit is killing children!
http://www.jennymccarthybodycount.com/Anti-Vaccine_Body_Count/Home.htmlStop killing children!
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/whatifstop.htmAnd this!:
"What Would Happen If We Stopped Vaccinations?
Before the middle of the last century, diseases like whooping cough, polio, measles, Haemophilus influenzae, and rubella struck hundreds of thousands of infants, children and adults in the U.S.. Thousands died every year from them. As vaccines were developed and became widely used, rates of these diseases declined until today most of them are nearly gone from our country.
Nearly everyone in the U.S. got measles before there was a vaccine, and hundreds died from it each year. Today, most doctors have never seen a case of measles.
More than 15,000 Americans died from diphtheria in 1921, before there was a vaccine. Only one case of diphtheria has been reported to CDC since 2004.
An epidemic of rubella (German measles) in 1964-65 infected 12½ million Americans, killed 2,000 babies, and caused 11,000 miscarriages. In 2012, 9 cases of rubella were reported to CDC.
Given successes like these, it might seem reasonable to ask, “Why should we keep vaccinating against diseases that we will probably never see?” Here is why:
Vaccines don’t just protect yourself.
Most vaccine-preventable diseases are spread from person to person. If one person in a community gets an infectious disease, he can spread it to others who are not immune. But a person who is immune to a disease because she has been vaccinated can’t get that disease and can’t spread it to others. The more people who are vaccinated, the fewer opportunities a disease has to spread.
illustration: if only some get vaccinated, the virus spreads. if most get vaccinated, spreading is contained.
If one or two cases of disease are introduced into a community where most people are not vaccinated, outbreaks will occur. In 2013, for example, several measles outbreaks occurred around the country, including large outbreaks in New York City and Texas – mainly among groups with low vaccination rates. If vaccination rates dropped to low levels nationally, diseases could become as common as they were before vaccines.
Diseases haven’t disappeared.
The United States has very low rates of vaccine-preventable diseases, but this isn’t true everywhere in the world. Only one disease — smallpox — has been totally erased from the planet. Polio no longer occurs in the U.S., but it is still paralyzing children in several African countries. More than 350,000 cases of measles were reported from around the world in 2011, with outbreaks in the Pacific, Asia, Africa, and Europe. In that same year, 90% of measles cases in the U.S. were associated with cases imported from another country. Only the fact that most Americans are vaccinated against measles prevented these clusters of cases from becoming epidemics.
planeDisease rates are low in the United States today. But if we let ourselves become vulnerable by not vaccinating, a case that could touch off an outbreak of some disease that is currently under control is just a plane ride away.
A final example: what could happen.
We know that a disease that is apparently under control can suddenly return, because we have seen it happen, in countries like Japan, Australia, and Sweden. Here is an example from Japan. In 1974, about 80% of Japanese children were getting pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine. That year there were only 393 cases of whooping cough in the entire country, and not a single pertussis-related death. Then immunization rates began to drop, until only about 10% of children were being vaccinated. In 1979, more than 13,000 people got whooping cough and 41 died. When routine vaccination was resumed, the disease numbers dropped again.
The chances of your child getting a case of measles or chickenpox or whooping cough might be quite low today. But vaccinations are not just for protecting ourselves, and are not just for today. They also protect the people around us (some of whom may be unable to get certain vaccines, or might have failed to respond to a vaccine, or might be susceptible for other reasons). And they also protect our children’s children and their children by keeping diseases that we have almost defeated from making a comeback. What would happen if we stopped vaccinations? We could soon find ourselves battling epidemics of diseases we thought we had conquered decades ago."
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/whatifstop.htmDo your homework and stop being a jackass!
You're just arguing my point, if you'd click the link, you'd see where I stand.
Do YOUR homework and stop being a jackass.
