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This hearing has now been running intermittently for 18 months, has cost the taxpayer millions, has kept good doctors from helping autistic and other children, and incredibly still manages to control mainstream public opinion. Where are the dissenting views? Where is the news about events in this field in the USA? Well it is all on the web, most notably perhaps at Cry Shame (www.cryshame.co.uk), an apt name for the site that spearheads the news on this travesty of justice and its role in controlling us all; read Martin Walker’s fascinating account there of the entire hearing, and read also what is happening with regard to autism in real life. Our position on Andrew Wakefield and his co-defendants is clear and unchanging; ethically they had no choice, back in 1999, but to report on their identification of what may still be an important finding in a minority of children with autism. The Lancet saw this at the time and published without hesitation; the editor, Richard Horton, must have come under severe pressure thereafter which led him to change his tune, and to allege a conflict of interest on the part of Wakefield. Nevertheless, in the GMC hearing (last year) Horton asserted that the science of the paper “still stands”, and that he “wished, wished, wished” that the clock could be turned back and the paper be considered again in the light in which it was first presented. So say we all. A Fashionable DiagnosisI couldn’t quite believe my ears last week when I heard everybody’s favourite ‘scientist’, Ben Goldacre, on Radio 4 suggesting that autism is a fashionable diagnosis. I thought this one had been put to death long ago — if not by Bernard Rimland writing in the Journal of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine in 2000, and elsewhere, then by Gillian Baird’s Lancet paper in 2006. |
In 2000 Rimland said; While there are a few Flat-Earthers who insist that there is no real epidemic of autism, only an increased awareness, it is obvious to everyone else that the number of young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has risen, and continues to rise, dramatically. and went on to substantiate this by reference to a number of studies in several countries. In 2006 Baird et al said; Prevalence of autism and related ASDs is substantially greater than previously recognised. and reported that, of 56,000 children aged 9 or 10 they surveyed in the South Thames area, 1 in 86 had autism or ASD. Since then, further doubt has been left in the air by a report in the Observer in 2007 that the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge had conducted their own studies, and found an incidence of one child in 58. All attempts to get this confirmed or denied have been unsuccessful. So why do we now have a media ‘scientist’ jumping back a decade to imply that there is no epidemic of autism, only fashionably neurotic parents, misled by unscrupulous people (like me, I guess)? He’s entitled to his opinion, of course, so the question is more “Why do we never hear dissenting voices to the chorus of government, industry and academic voices declaring unanimously that vaccines are entirely safe?” Equally, why do we never hear, unless we log on to certain American websites, about the constantly accruing evidence that mercury and other toxins can cause autism? |