Autism Week: Vaccines

To shoot or not to shoot, that is the question. Whether tis better to vaccinate your child against the panoply of diseases we can now prevent them from getting, or to avoid the needle for fear of autism or other ills?

If you look at the number of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders, there is a huge jump starting with kids about my 17 year old son's age.  My son's age cohort was one of the first to get the HepB vaccine and  the HIB had only been out a couple years when he was born.  Prior to that, the "baby shots" had been the same for a generation.  It is no wonder that parents started to question whether all these new shots were having an effect on their children.  First, there were those who said that they symptoms of autism were similar to those of mercury poisoning, and that many of the shots contained thimerisol, a preservative made with mercury.  Though never a an accepted standard care, some doctors used chelation treatments on autistic children, and many parents felt they got good results.  Due to public outcry (and probably the threat of litigation) thimerisol was removed from most vaccines, yet the autism rate did not decrease.

Several years ago a study was published in a prestigious medical journal linking autism and the MMR shot.  Though the study was discredited rather quickly, and finally, this year, withdrawn, it has had the effect of markedly decreasing the number of children who receive the MMR vaccine.

The number of vaccines continues to climb, as does parental concern about injecting all that stuff into such a small baby.  Maybe, some have postulated, there is nothing wrong with the (fill in the blank) vaccine; the problem is giving them all at once overloads the immune system and causes autism, or auto-immune disease or....

My youngest is twelve years younger than my oldest.  With my two big kids, I showed up at the doctor as scheduled, signed the shot papers after a quick glance (it wasn't like I really had a choice about shots, was it?) and got them what they were supposed to have more or less when they were supposed to get it.  By the time my youngest showed up, my son had already been diagnosed and I had already spent lots of hours researching autism, including reading about the shots.  Needless to say, I wasn't near as enthusiastic about vaccines as I had been years before.  I refused to sign for the HepB (or was it C) in the hospital.  I checked all the shot papers for mention of thimerisol, always wrote "NO THIMERISOL" on them before signing.  I delayed shots, but given the lack of evidence in the mainstream press for vaccines causing autism, I didn't refuse them completely.  We'll never know if my attitude toward shots was a factor in my baby not being autistic, but the fact of the matter is, she's not, and that's a good thing.

So, my question for you today is whether the stories relating autism and vaccines have had any effect on the medical choices you make for your children.  Why or why not?

Autism Week: Diagnosis

Once upon a time, I left the hospital with a normal, healthy baby boy, or so I thought.  He was a fussy, clingy baby who loved routine.  He cried when the vacuum cleaner ran, or if the door was open when the grass was being cut.  He met his physical milestones, but not the verbal ones.  Maybe if he hadn't been our first, we would have realized it sooner, but there was definitely something wrong, language wise.  Yet, there were also lots of signs of definite intelligence.  He started receiving speech therapy at 2 1/2 and a special ed preschool teacher came to his daycare a couple of days a week to work with him when he was three and four.  After a rough start, he thrived in an inclusion kindergarten class in a wonderful public school, and his teacher told me he was the best reader she'd seen in the ten years she'd taught kindergarten.  He was diagnosed with ADHD and continued to receive some special ed services in first and second grade, but he also made the honor roll.  Then came third grade, changing classes and more structured work--and behavior problems.  I took him to another pediatrician for advice/consultation and after speaking to my son for a few minutes, told me he had Asperger's syndrome, that it was the diagnosis of the week, and that all they could do was treat the symptoms.  I went home, looked it up and saw the A word, Autism.  I knew autistic kids, he was in school with them and played with them, and I had to admit, had some things in common with them--but those kids couldn't do what he could, those kids had been diagnosed years before, and my son hadn't.  Was the pediatrician right?

After a full work-up by a center known for treating autistic kids, it was determined that his proper diagnosis was PDD-NOS, since he had language issues as well as social ones.  However, one thing the pediatrician said proved to be true--we've treated the symptoms to the best of our ability, but there is no miracle medication or therapy that makes it go away.

Do you have an autistic child?  Tell us about your diagnosis experience.  Either do it in a comment here, or by a post on your blog.  Link your post (even if it is an old one, already written) to Mr. Linky below.  Do you know an autistic child, or the parents of an autistic child?  What did you think when you heard about the child's diagnosis?  How did the parents react?

Welcome to Autism Week

I hope you enjoyed my review of  Cowboy & Wills: A Love Story as much as I enjoyed reading the book.  Of course, I'm a little biased, you see, I too have a son whose disability is classified as "high-functioning" autism.  Autism is getting a lot of press these days.  I have a Google Alert set for "Autism".  When I first set it years ago, I used to get an email once or twice a week, with one article link.  Now, I'm emailed daily, and each email gives me links to several stories--stories that range from the latest attempts to get health insurance to cover ABA, to a community's autism walk to treatments that someone thinks may be "the" answer.  It is said that as many as 1% of children today will be diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder.  These kids are everywhere, in our churches, in our classrooms, in our families.  This week we are going to talk about them, and I invite you to join the discussion.