Liam was born in July of 2009. Erin and I had put so much energy into just
getting through pregnancy and childbirth that we didn't have a clue what to do
the second the delivery was over. I doubt I would have even remembered a car
seat if the hospital hadn't warned me we couldn't leave without one.
Inexplicably, the nurses placed Liam's tiny butt in my inept hands and sent us
on our way despite the obvious peril he'd be facing in our care. I've been in a
mild state of panic ever since.
The learning curve is steep those first couple of weeks. You find yourself
using words like 'colostrum' and 'bilirubin' and forming strong opinions about
things that had never crossed your mind just a month earlier; things like
circumcision, pacifiers, swaddling, and vaccination.
The topic of vaccination was a hot one that summer in 2009. Andrew Wakefield
had published his paper in the Lancet back in 1998 linking autism to the MMR
vaccine, and by 2009 the campaign against vaccination had built up such an
impressive head of steam that there were enough reliable looking articles on
the subject to scare the meconium out of any new parent.
Many parents chose to opt out of the doctor recommended vaccinations for
their children that year. I'm happy to say Erin and I did not. We did, however,
go with the "alternative schedule" that spread the vaccinations over
multiple visits. The anti-vaccine movement was effective enough to give us
doubts, at least for a moment.
By 2010 the Lancet formally retracted Wakefield's paper and we'd read enough
reliable scientific research on the topic to assuage any fears, so when Finn
was born in 2011 he received the regular vaccination schedule.
Now here's the kicker: as of last December
both of my sons have being
diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).
"A-HA!!
See!!!?" screams the collective anti-vax movement.
I'm not going to talk about the ocean of scientific research that proves the
MMR vaccine does
not cause autism. There is enough out there for anyone
with an interest to do their own research. What I do want to talk about is the
one thing that I think is keeping the anti-vaccine movement alive. These
studies that support vaccination tend to leave nothing on the other side of the
equals sign. If vaccines don't cause autism, what does?
The CDC estimates that the current rate of ASD prevalence is about 1 in 68
U.S. children. That's up from 1 in 150 children in 2000. Those numbers are
terrifying. It's natural for any parent to think some unseen force is at work
and to start to look for patterns. If the increase in vaccinations in the past
few decades is paralleling the increase in autism prevalence and the symptoms
of autism show up about the same time children are vaccinated, it's an
understandable conclusion that one might cause the other.
I say this only because the opponents on either side of the debate need to
start listening to one another. I'm definitely pro-vaccine and I don't know
many who aren't. All too often I hear my pro-vaccine friends using slanderous
and hateful language toward anti-vaxxers, and that's not helping anyone. When has
a debate ever been settled by two opposing sides screaming at one another until
they're blue in the face? If you have young children like I do, remember how
scary some of these claims about the MMR vaccine were. That fear created by the
anti-vaccine movement is the real problem.
There's a theory explaining the rise in autism prevalence that calmed my
fears about the MMR vaccine when I first heard it. Now that both of my boys have
been diagnosed with ASD, I'm even
more convinced it explains everything.
The theory is that the apparent rise in autism prevalence is simply due to
better diagnoses and awareness.
Think back to when we were kids. We'd never even heard of autism until the
movie "Rain Man" came out. There was no discussion of it, it wasn't
something teachers were well aware of, and doctors weren't buzzing about it. It
was not a hot topic.
But remember those kids in school? There were those kids described as
late-talkers,
anti-social, or just
weird.
Nothing much was done for those kids back then, but why would there be? They
were odd but they weren't exactly "Rain Man." Those kids don't get
passed over anymore.
My boys were both diagnosed with the broadest form of ASD. It's called
Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS). Surely, if
educators, child-care professionals, and medical professionals had the same
tools back then that they have today, this non-specific diagnosis would have
applied to just as many children as it does today.
The good news is my boys are getting extra help. They're offered special
education and therapies through my healthcare provider that kids didn't get
back in the day. Back then they would have just had to struggle, so this
prevalence of autism diagnoses is not a bad thing.
As of this date there have been 88 cases of measles linked to the outbreak
that started in Disneyland this month. Those little kids whose parents exempted
them from the MMR vaccine are growing up and for the first time they're going
on the all the rides, using the public bathrooms by themselves, wiping they're
runny noses on everything, and never washing their hands. Last year there were
644 cases of measles in the U.S. according to the CDC. That's a number that
hasn't been seen in this country since
before the widespread use of the
MMR vaccine started in the mid to late sixties. This year we're on track to
beat that number.
What needs to be feared isn’t autism. The autism we know today was always
there. What needs to be feared is the consequences of this unresolved
anti-vaccine movement.
