Interesting article from www.autism.about.com: Inherent to public health is politics. And the political reality of the autism epidemic is that the watchdogs, and the vaccine pharmaceutical companies and their agent researchers have too many conflicts of interests for the issue to be settled by epidemiologic research alone. This research only looks at the results of pathology upon a population, and does not easily prove or disprove cause. This allows too much wiggle room for self-serving spin (and counter-spin). A growing number of citizen public health advocates find vaccines to be poorly tested, and sometimes dirty with toxins like mercury. Vaccine-strain measles virus is showing up in the cerebral spinal fluid of autistic children and nobody can tell us how it got there, if not via the MMR vaccine.
Genetic research and epidemiological research are not the primary tools for finding the cause of autism. The final answers will come from biomedical and clinical research. Someone better start examining these kids and soon. Until we start seeing efforts and money spent to pay for the clinics to do this research (and also, along the way, to treat our children), all other research serves as little more than alibi research.
The murky vaccine - autism connection has been effective leverage by some autism research advocates for getting the public health watchdogs and the media to sit up and pay attention to autism. Soon this leveraging won't be necessary as the prevalence rates will reveal more and more autism victimized sons and daughters, and grandsons and granddaughters of congress people, movie and sports celebrities, investors in pharmaceuticals, jurists and jurors, etc. . .people not so readily dismissed as anecdotal hysterics - and who in ever growing numbers will demand answers, not alibis. Not everyone is equally willing to let vaccines off the hook just yet as are some autism research fundraisers.
~ Lenny Schafer