Laurie Garrett On Trump, RFK Jr. And Who Dies When Antivax Nutbags Are Believed
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So let’s get a few things straight, Mr. Trump. Yes, there has been an increase in autism diagnoses in parts of Europe, the United States, and Canada — but this is largely because psychiatric associations have widened the definition of the disorder, now describing autism as a spectrum that ranges from the extreme of complete nonfunctionality all the way to socially challenged genius, or Asperger’s syndrome. Some additional rise in rates may not be fully explained by the expanded diagnostic definition: It is likely that parent and physician awareness, coupled with lowered stigma, has brought more cases to light. Boys are at least five times more likely to be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder than girls, yet the genders are equally likely to be vaccinated.
No, I do not think Trump’s primary motivation for raising autism concerns is his son Barron. There has been considerable controversy regarding 10-year-old Barron’s public behavior and allegations that he is autistic: Such discourse has no place in public health. It is stigmatizing, both by pointing a finger at a child and by de facto insinuating that people who are on the autism spectrum deserve to be singled out.
And, yes, Mr. Trump, back in the day when you and I were children and were vaccinated — thankfully — to prevent us from getting measles, rubella, polio, diphtheria, tetanus, and other awful diseases, a mercury-based preservative was used to keep vaccines from going bad on doctors’ shelves. Kennedy claims the mercury is still used as a preservative and causes brain damage. But the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Food and Drug Administration removed Thimerosal, the preservative in question, from vaccines and it has not been used in MMR since 1999. The terrific science writer Seth Mnookin documented all of this in his book The Panic Virus.
Given Trump’s interest in Russia, he might be interested to know that the first claims of an association among vaccines, mercury, and child neurological health problems were raised in the early 1980s by Soviet virologist Galena Petrovna Chervonskaya and trumpeted in the Communist Party’s Komsomolskaya Pravda. Vaccination rates fell so low following the report that Soviet soldiers returning from war in Afghanistan, where diphtheria was still common, unwittingly spawned an epidemic that swept the Soviet Union, causing the worst outbreak since World War II. Some 200,000 unvaccinated children contracted diphtheria, which killed roughly 2 to 3 percent of those infected, varying by region.
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http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/01/11/donald-trump-and-the-anti-vaxxer-conspiracy-theorists/?utm_content=bufferec8ac&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
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