Tuesday, 06 December 2011
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The Amish Don’t Get Autism, and They Aren’t Vaccinated
Bloggers are talking about the autism-vaccine link these days, and some of them have brought up a little investigation done in 2005 by United Press International reporter Dan Olmsted. Olmsted wanted to know whether the Amish, who largely don’t vaccinate their children, suffer autism at the same rates as everybody else.
Olmstead took a trip to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and embarked on looking for people with autism. If the prevailing theory that autism is genetic was correct, there should have been 1 in 166 people in that population with autism, he figured. (One in 166 was the accepted figure at the time. Now it’s more like 1 in 100.)
He figured there would be about 130 people in the Amish community there with autism, based on 1 in 166. About half of those would have easily identifiable classic autism, he said. So, upwards of 50 with classic autism. And he started asking around to find them.
He found only three.
Coincidentally or not, at least two of the three had been vaccinated. One had been adopted from China and had received all her vaccinations on the same day.
Now, there are other variables too. Amish eat a far-different diet from most Americans. They’re mostly from the same gene pool. And so on. So this isn’t conclusive evidence. What’s needed is a study matching vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals and comparing autism rates. No one with any money is willing to do this, at least so far. Since it would settle the question, I do wonder why not.
And what about the headlines a while back about a polio outbreak in an Amish community? According to the HealthWyze blog, it turns out that was a strain of polio that came from a five-year-old vaccine. It didn’t sicken the children, but was found in their stools only. Odd that this made headlines, isn’t it?
UPI report: http://www.putchildrenfirst.org/media/e.4.pdf
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- About Me: I am Phyllis Wheeler, mother of two kids with Asperger's: "Mike" and "Shannon."
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Comments (59)
@seasidehearts@xanga - exactly/+1/whatever it is that indicates violent agreement.
When your kid gets polio you'll know for sure what vaccines don't cause. That guy who led the research was a fraud. I think he's been either charged or arrested.
You might as well say, "The Amish have fewer deaths related to plane crashes and they aren't vaccinated. Therefore, vaccination reduces your chances of surviving a plane crash." Seriously?
@QuantumStorm@xanga - ...and the harmful positivism of sociology is once again exposed for confusing causation with correlation...
@Stacey@xanga - <= What she said.
The study was done in 2005. We're now on the brink of 2012. It is curious that the entry ignored the body of responses and subsequent rebuttal to reporter Olsted's informal survey.
Bullshit.
articulate_silence@xanga exactly. if anything, it's more likely to be caused by one of the thousands of preservatives in all the crap that we eat
I've scanned the comments and I'm a little disappointed that only one person pointed out someone went to the
Amishto study a genetic link found in the general population. That's like going to a china shop to find plastic ware. It's not going to happen. And the
bestway to study the connection between genetics, vaccines and autism would be to use the
bestmethod we have for studying genetics: twins.
You would have to get multiple groups of twins, withhold possibly life-saving vaccines from one and then hope, in 2-3 years, that one of them starts to show signs of autism. You can't go to a segregated population to study genetic traits from the general population. That's just ridiculous.
" If the prevailing theory that autism is genetic was correct, there
should have been 1 in 166 people in that population with autism, he
figured. (One in 166 was the accepted figure at the time. Now it’s more
like 1 in 100.)"
No, if it's genetic then in such an isolated genetic population we would either see lots of autism or very little, depending on if the founders of the community contained the genetic risk factors or not. The 1 in 166 figure is from a randomly selected group, and who is and isn't Amish is clearly not random.
That the Amish do not have the same rates of autism as a random sample from the U.S. only proves that somehow the Amish are a separate population, which we probably could have guessed. Like I said, could just be the founders of their population didn't have the risk factors, and like you said they have different diets, different exercise habits, different jobs, different everything.
The Amish also die of obesity far less often so do vaccines cause obesity? Of course not, correlation =/= causation
Additionally, this guy was not a psychologist, he was a reporter. How do we know he got an accurate headcount? He may very well have missed members of the community exhibiting more subtle symptoms of the disease.
So basically:
1. It's a correlation, nothing more
2. There are a million other factors in the Amish that could also be correlated with it, like not wearing buttons
3. It's based on the false assumption that if the disease is genetic it will occur at the same rate in all populations, which is the exact opposite of how genetics work
4. It was not a scientific study and no statistics on how significant the findings were were calculated
5. It was conducted by a reporter, not a trained psychologist
Therefore, this "study" tells us jack shit about autism
@Somuchtimesolittletodo@xanga - autism rates are still going up (though in my opinion that's because of heightened awareness and better diagnosis) and vaccination rates are going down.
Interestin.
Fascinating information. I have wondered about this, and it certainly points to the Amish doing something right that we aren't doing. Truth is, they are probably doing a lot of things right that we aren't doing. We expose ourselves to so much toxicity and radiation in our lives that we are definitely doing ourselves harm. It's not to say they couldn't learn a few things from us, but we can certainly learn from eachother. It's dissapointing to read so many commenters with such a pre-judgemental and closed view on the subject, to the point that it doesn't seem many of them even read the articles. It's a shame as much as anything due to the point it makes about polio. I'm not going to say the articles ends in the most professional manner, but there is considerable information there for people to really weigh what it all means, and try to think about what changes they need to make in their lives to improve in such areas as autism. It seems that instantly shutting minds to this is a neat way to avoid facing challenging questions as to what exactly are we bringing into our lives, while demonizing an easy victim in a group of people that lives differently then us. For a community so interested in autism, that doesn't sound like a smart approach. I'm not going to say that this study proves that vaccines are exclusively the reason for far lesser autism rates in the Amish, but it certainly suggests that we need to look deeper at what we can learn from the way they live that can help us improve the way we live, including health.
The Amish don't use zippers, and they don't have autism. Clearly, zippers cause autism.
I'll grant that the concept may seem appealing. But the reality is, the Amish community
is so different from mainstream America, that it is impossible to
account for all the variables. There's just no way to create a stable
control group -- at least, not ethically. As a result, this just can't rise above anecdotal "evidence."
Fact: The disease vaccines protect against kill more children than autism does. Sure, we need to break up these shots different so as not to load a bunch on a child all at once, but still we need vaccines. I'd rather my child (and I have 3) have autism than be dead.
In Loving Lamposts, a movie on Netflix, they state that they mentioned a study as well with vaccinations done by the United States and found that vaccinations do not correlate to Autism. The movie is really interesting.
Its not even true.
Firstly, the Amish do have autism, and has one poster says, she herself has Asperger's and comes from and Amish background. Secondly Americans diagnose all sorts of diseases at much greater rates than other places in the world where there is nationalised medicine. Medicine in the US is a business, and a business must grow, as must the therapy and drug businesses and so they diagnose at greater rates than Canada or the UK. The Amish do not visit doctors very often.
I had a child who went to an American school, Out of the 17 children in his class 6 were on Ritalin. When he later went to a local school there was only one child out of the whole school on Ritalin and he definitely had problems of a nature different from the other kids who seemed to be just rather wild little boys (who all grew out of it). I believe this is the same for the low diagnosis of autism in the Amish. They don't run to the doctor for every little thing and the doctors and therapists can't make the kind of money out of them they can from the general US population.
This is about the REAL state of autism (and vaccination) among the Amish. http://www.opposingviews.com/i/myth-amish-don-t-have-autism
I think that this blogger has a big thing about vaccination and autism. I do believe that this blogger suffers from cognitive dissonance. Despite all evidence they MUST believe that vaccination causes autism to they cling on to any old straw around.
UGH... If vaccinations cause autism then why is being autistic not the norm? And I'm sure there's some autistic person somewhere that wasn't vaccinated. Nobody knows what causes it, just like nobody knows what causes some people to get various forms of cancer over other people. Life's a bitch. Sure more research is needed, but its impossible to find the truth when everybody is wearing vaccination blinders.
It scares me to read blogs like this.
I am surprised that two of the previous commentators had "will not accept recommendation" pop up, when I tried to recommend.
I think that two points should be further studied. First, the Amish community does its best to keep to its own, as far as marriage. Therefore the gene pool is not thrown wide open. This might avoid the genetic tie from affecting the occurrence of autism. Second, yes, they, like some other religious communities (we have one up here) deny that their kids have any problems. I think that the occurrence of autism would be less noticed among the Amish, because all of them act a little more like autistic people than does the modern convenience enjoying public.
They get six fingered dwarfism from all of the genetic inbreeding. That might sound a little unbelievable, but you can google it or learn it in a genetics class.
i was going to say the gene pool thing. thank you for not taking a correlation as proof.
I agree with the reader who said this is "idiotic." Not only are the amish in their only little enclosed gene pool, they live largely separate from mainstream society, so their kids have a far lower risk of being exposed to mumps, measles, rubella & polio.
Not vaccinating your children on the basis of bad "science" puts our whole population at risk of contracting diseases that were once considered "history" in the United States.
The Amish also do not have nearly as many electronic devices cluttering up their homes... I am waiting anxiously for a study to show just how much interference all of this has on developing humans. Electromagnetic interference has to play some part in it, all things considered. Though, my guess would be that it is a combination of factors that ultimately work together to produce the rise in autism. Genetic predisposition, electromagnetic interference, diet, vaccine sensitivities, etc...
Correlation is not causation. There are a thousand other variables.
I think a stronger connection would be: the amish don't use technology, so their children grow up socializing with other humans, rather than getting their socialization from a television, computer, telephone, etc. For a social disorder, I think this is a far more likely cause than something so loosely connected as vaccination or even diet.
@keystspf@xanga - I don't think it's that complex, but you're on a better track. Rather than electronic waves, I think it literally comes from the way we socialize from birth on. With less social substitutions, such as television and the internet, people are more likely to socialize with one another face to face and I think this is necessary in keeping people off of the autism spectrum.