Vaccinations and Autism

Hello Dr. Palmer!  I am currently taking Phar 4200W: Drugs and the U.S. Healthcare System, and we are also talking about some hot topics in that class as well. One of the topics that we are currently talking about is parents refusing vaccinations for their children. Should parents have the right to refuse the vaccinations? What about vaccinations that are for highly contagious diseases, should these be mandated before a child can go to school? What about the risk to other children? Although it's not something we talk about in Biol 1010, I thought it was a really interesting topic! This article is from the Washington Post and talks about how the number of parents who are refusing vaccines has gone up in the past couple of years. One of the main reasons for the spike is that a lot of parents fear that vaccinations cause Autism and other cognitive disorders, which there is no scientific evidence for. I suppose that whole argument ties into the "scientific evidence vs. anecdotal thinking" concept we discussed at the beginning of the semester. Those individuals who believe vaccinations cause cognitive disorders are only looking at the small number of cases where Autism was diagnosed roughly around the same time the child received the vaccination and not at the much higher number of children who were just fine. What they don't realize is that typically the first time Autism can be diagnosed is around 2 years old, the same age a number of vaccinations are administered. So correlation does not necessarily mean causation. The article then talks about how some of these parents have documentation of evidence that they are basing their beliefs on, but when examined are completely false and just based on a whim. It's just a really interesting read and I think something people aren't aware of how big an issue it's becoming.

  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/04/AR2...   Thanks Dr. Palmer!