The US federal government has sent some rather mixed messages on the link between vaccines and autism over the past few weeks.
Last week, the federal “Vaccine Court”, established to address the nearly 5,000 pending claims from parents who believe their children developed autism due to vaccinations, decided to award the family of 9-year-old Hannah Poling more than $1.5 million dollars for the cost of caring for their daughter, lost earnings, and pain and suffering, followed by an annual award of more than $500,000. The vaccine court ruled favorably on the Polings’ claim in 2008, and is the first and only successful claim filed thus far.
The government stopped short of saying that vaccines “caused” Poling’s autism, saying instead that the childhood vaccines aggravated a previously unknown mitochondrial disorder, “resulting” in autism.
Earlier this year, the US Court of Appeals for the federal circuit took a closer look at some cases of parents whose claims were denied by the “vaccine court” in order to examine the robustness of the vaccine origin argument. Thus far, the rulings have all upheld the lower courts’ decisions. In late August, the court reaffirmed the vaccine court’s decision to deny the claim by the family of Michelle Cedillo, saying that there was “no legal error in the standards applied by the special master”. In May, they did the same for a claim brought by the parents of William Hazlehurst.
There’s certainly no lack of scientific studies discrediting the thimerosal-autism relationship, the most popular working theory for linking vaccines to autism. The latest offering, published online today in Pediatrics, was conducted by researchers from the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC). They compared the medical records of 256 autistic children and 752 neurotypical children, all born between 1994 and 1999. Researchers looked for signs that vaccine exposure correlated with a diagnosis of autism whether the exposure occurred at a number of times: prenatal, 0-1 months, 0-7 months, and 0-20 months. No statistically significant relationship between exposure to thimerosal and a later diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder was found.
But fears about vaccine safety persist among the parents of autistic children, many who see a coordinated effort by the entire medical industry&mdash government health agencies, university researchers, and scientific journals&mdash to squash any data that supports the autism-vaccine link. It’s unlikely that another study from the CDC will convince them, and the Poling ruling has provided an encouraging touchstone.
Dan Olmsted, a blogger at Age of Autism, a site for parents with autistic children, wrote in response to the money awarded to Poling’s family: “The medical industry’s wall of doublespeak, delay and denial is crumbling and today, at least, one child got justice”.
Meanwhile, in China, there is widespread negativity in response to a recently announced government vaccine program, though not due to any alleged link to autism. The World Health Organization is attempting to lead what would be the world’s largest-ever vaccination program attempting to reach over 100 million children between the ages of four months and 14 years. In 2009, China recorded 52,000 cases of measles nationwide.
When the program was announced by the Chinese health ministry, citizens across the country responded with alarm, passing along theories that vaccines were tainted. This stemmed from an incident this past March, where news sources reported that a number of vaccines were responsible for the deaths of four children and sickening a number of others.
The health ministry’s internal investigation said that the vaccines were improperly stored, but also denied that the vaccines were the cause of the illnesses. But the word of the health ministry, whose slow response to SARS is blamed for exacerbating that epidemic, may not carry much currency with a lot of Chinese citizens.
Image by Melissa via Flickr Creative Commons