How Medical Conclusions Are Made

Autism ruling fails to convince many vaccine-link believers.

According to a CNN report, "special court", composed of "special masters", decided that there is no link between autism and infant vaccines that contain "thimerosal", a mercury-based preservative.

I was a bit disturbed by this article, for the following reasons:

1. I would like to know who these "special masters" are who made this determination. The federal government's US Department of Health and Human Services appeared all too ready to accept this determination, based on "three or four" studies.

2. No information is given about studies conducted to determine whether or not a correlation between autism and thimerosal exists. How do we know that the results of those studies are even sound, or that the research samples were large enough to make a determination?

3. The studies to determine a correlation between thimerasol and autism were only conducted when parents of affected children sued the US Department of Health and Human Services. According to the article, the parents were unable to sue to the manufacturers of these vaccines directly. Regardless of this, is it not the responsibility of the manufacturers and the federal government to test all substances that enter the human body prior to putting them out on the market as safe, trusted, FDA approved substances?

4. The last part of the article:

This week's ruling brought a different outcome from the Hannah Poling case. In November 2007, the Division of Vaccine Injury Compensation concluded that the Georgia girl's illness that had predisposed her to symptoms of autism was "significantly aggravated" by the vaccinations she received as a toddler and that her family should therefore be compensated.

But Thursday, Special Master George L. Hastings Jr. wrote in his ruling in the Cedillos case, "The evidence advanced by the petitioners has fallen far short of demonstrating such a link" between autism and vaccinations.

What was the difference between the Poling case and the Cedillos case? Nothing in the article revealed any difference in the information provided. Why, then, did those decisions contradict each other?

To begin with, autism is such a complex disorder that medical professionals cannot even decide on a definition for the disorder or its symptoms, as they fall into a wide spectrum of variation. Second, no one knows for sure what exactly causes autism. Third, because not all autistic children display all of the the same symptoms of autism with the same level of severity, nor do those symptoms appear within the same age range for each child, the number of official diagnoses vary from year to year. Some children are only diagnosed with autism when they are already in primary school, while others are diagnosed as early as six months old.

So before any more guidelines to critical thinking are violated in the study of autism, here are my humble suggestions:

1. Scientists, psychologists, and pediatricians must go back to the drawing board. First, they must ask more questions about autism in order to determine what autism actually is. It may not be one disorder, but a group of related spectrum disorders, such as Asperger's Syndrome (which has already been isolated as distinct from autism, although it has many similarities to autism). Second, they have to do more studies on what could cause autism so that future parents could receive this education, even if they do not have a history of autism within their families.

2. Pharmaceutical companies must take all human factors into account when creating vaccines and medications, and they should review the history of medicine! Since the nineteenth century, it has been well-documented that the ingestion of mercury has caused various types of damage to the human nervous system (hence the expression "mad as a Hatter", as people who worked in hat factories had used mercury to treat the fabrics to make the hats, and they had been permanently brain damaged from overexposure to mercury). Old fashioned thermometers used to contain mercury to measure temperature, but no longer do because a person could get brain damage or even die from the amount of mercury in a thermometer should it crack in their mouths. Thermometers used to measure internal temperatures of foods also do not include mercury for this reason. Why oh why, then, did a pharmaceutical company decide to use a mercury based preservative in a vaccine for infants and toddlers, whose nervous systems are still developing and often at risk for damage from high fevers or other phemonena? The federal government has told people what type of fish they can and cannot eat, and in what amounts, based on the amount of mercury found in recent catches of those fish. Why oh why, then, is the federal government saying that it is still OK to produce a vaccine for infants and children that contains a mercury based preservative?