I don’t know how old your child is, but varicella vaccine has been shown to work a little better when given after 15 months of age and also when given seperate from MMR.

“Live” viral vaccines have to be seperated by a month (the reason being that the first vaccination would cause the body to turn on defenses that include cytokines inhibiting viral proliferation, so if the second live viral vaccine is given to early after the first, say, a week later, the second vaccine virus might not proliferate so well and you don’t get decent antibodies).

My own autism spectrum child has multiple obvious problems. Some of them are really odd/unusual. I want to know what caused this odd collection of problems that includes ASD. Because of that I’ve taken this kid to multiple geneticists over the years and as of today I’m waiting for results from a microarray test (that wasn’t available when we went to geneticists in the past – my kid is approaching 30 years old).

I don’t want to know because I need someone to blame. I want to know, #1 because I love genetics and I just want to know, and #2 because sometimes knowing the exact cause of a problem enables one to accurately treat problems.

In my ex-husband’s family there are relatives with seizures, I suspect that their seizures MIGHT be caused by the same gene(s) my kid has that MIGHT have contributed to my kid’s ASD. If that was true, say then we’d be watching more carefully for seizures in my kid… though it doesn’t seem really likely that s/he’d get them at this age it could happen.

If they find something that looks like it might be associated with autism in my kid in this new test, then maybe I could have the same test done and we’d know if my kid got it from me or maybe from my ex-husband.

Facts like that can be shared with relatives who might want to know. That’s not just so they can worry about having autistic kids in the future, but so they’d know the specifics of what kind of ASD their kid has. Once upon a time, no one knew what Fragile X was. Now they know a lot about it and they know that there are specific health problems connected with it.

There is always a “cause” of mental retardation, physical disability and autism. It’s not always knowable what the cause is, at least up until now. To me, it’s natural that people want to know the cause, the problem is that in this litigious culture, some people start thinking about suing someone from the very second any negative thing happens to them. Get a bad perm? Sue the beautician. Got a bad boss? Sue the company.

Of course, suing can be an appropriate recourse, but it’s not always a sensible one and people do sue innocent entities for things that those entities did not cause, and even win in those suits sometimes.

The parents who don’t vaccinate their kids and who have autistic kids are busy raising their families and aren’t concerned about what the mercury parents think. One parent who used to believe that his/her child was made autistic by mercury in vaccines is the blogger called, “Not Mercury.” S/he had a second child that was not vaccinated up to the point when that child was diagnosed as being on the spectrum (at age 2 or 3).

One reason “Not Mercury” remains pseudonymous is fear or being harassed or worse by the mercury malicia. This is likely a reason why other parents don’t come forward. Members of the mercury malicia have been known to make death threats.

Another thing is that there is still a large portion of the populace who thinks the vaccine hypothesis is nonsense. They aren’t wasting time worrying about it.

There was a phone survey funded by one of the mercury parents and it found a large number of people who claimed to have children on the autism spectrum that were unvaccinated. None of the numbers in that survey make sense but the mercury parents hold it up as evidence of something or other and the numbers include a bunch of these unvaccinated autistic kids.

Like I said, they see everything through a “Vaccines are EVIL!” sort of lens so any information that contradicts what they believe is just tossed aside. Like the people who believe that Tide causes autism in my illustration, if you come along and offer another equally silly hypothesis, they ignore it. If you come along with a well grounded hypothesis they ignore it. Only stuff that sounds scary and is about vaccines and mercury gets through.

If you do some reading on social psychology and on more general kinds of psychology like memory, you can see that people are sometimes strongly influenced by what they are told. Before the vaccine hypothesis took off, people had children with regressive autism. It’s been happening probably for hundreds of years at least, Dr. J. Langdon Down (who described Down syndrome) among his patients in London in the 1800’s identified regressive autism.
http://www.wisconsinmedicalsoc.....octor_down

People used to blame other things for their child’s regression. Really, anything that a parent would think would be likely to cause it could be blamed. Humans are weird. Some might have seen it as a curse or a punishment, some might have thought the fairies came and took their real child and put another look alike in it’s place. Not that long ago parents blamed things like the birth of a baby sibling or a bout with the flu or something like that that would have occurred around the same time of the regression.

The thing is, say the current belief system is that it’s exposure to too much orange juice or let’s say it’s a certain laundry detergent, then that is what the majority of the population believes is the cause.

If you don’t have a child that regresses, it might not make much difference to you, but you might fear having “Tide” detergent in the house, just in case your friend brings a baby over and it gets exposed to Tide. And if you have a baby that regresses and you happened to have used Tide (because you didn’t think it was a big deal) then of course you will feel bad that you bought the Tide detergent and caused your baby to regress.

Even if you didn’t have Tide in your house, you might start thinking, .... “Well… I bet it was that time we were in the laundromat and there were people there who were using Tide…” or you might think, “maybe I did use Tide that one time when the baby was 5 weeks old…”

Your memory will start to create the reality that your baby was exposed to Tide even if it wasn’t. And if you are skeptical that Tide causes autistic regression, then it won’t matter to you if you used Tide or not, you won’t be trying to sue Proctor and Gamble or Lever Bros, or whoever it is…

If you are inclined to want to sue people or inclined to look at big corporations with a lot of suspicious you might go on an all out anti-Tide campaign and try to make your friends stop buying Tide by scaring them and saying, “You’re baby is NEXT!”

If you think Tide causes autism, then if someone says, “it’s the vaccines” then you’ll think they are ill-informed or crazy and ignore them because you already have it figured out that it’s the Tide.

If you get enough people like this together they start a whole subculture of Tide haters. People will start to out-do each other with tales about how they never had Tide their house at all, but one day when mom and toddler were walking down the detergent isle in the grocery store, they got next to the Tide boxes and suddenly the child had a seizure and fell on the floor and was diagnosed with autism the next day.

Then another mom says, “My child has never even seen a box of Tide, but one day my mother in law came over with a purse that had the same colors on it as a box of Tide and after seen that my child was never the same!”

In the case of vaccine reactions, it is possible that the child got sick after a vaccine, but it’s very likely that the horrific tales of never-ending diarrhea that was never there before the vaccine and stared within minutes of the vaccine and went on for years until they met a DAN! doctor… are embellished. Some people are lying, and some people are just playing, ‘yeah, well can you top this?’ Some are building up cases because they intend to sue and need a good story. Some are just wrong. They’ve heard the same thing over and over again and they just come to believe that everything bad happened to their child right after a vaccine. And even if they say that it was 3 months later, they still blame the vaccine because everything evil in the world in now distilled into vaccines.

There is a real thing called mass hysteria where people get other people all upset over things and people believe things that are not true. In the cases that have come before the vaccine court what you can see is that the documentation does not uphold the parent’s view of horrific changes that happened only following the vaccine.

Some parents are lying about what happened to their child, some have just come to filter everything through this vaccine-blaming lens and they can’t see, for instance, that their child was also exposed to …. Tide… and they can not believe that a regression could just happen. But regressions do just happen. They don’t need a external “trigger” they can be preprogrammed. The evidence is that they are preprogrammed, like adolescence is preprogrammed into a baby’s brain, when the time comes the brain starts putting out hormones and the child because an adolescent.

Remember there are parents whose kids are vaccinated, and that regressed, who don’t blame vaccines. You just don’t hear from them because they aren’t having hysterics and screaming about how someone poisoned their baby.

There are also unvaccinated kids that have regressed, you don’t hear so much about them, either.

there is no benefit to the child by getting the M, M and R a month apart each. It only benefits the doctor (financially), while your child has to be pocked 3 times instead of one and you have to pay up. Biologically, that makes absolutely no sense.

I would recommend you go for the MMR (combined) – the MMR is one of the best studied vaccines and has very few side effects (under 10% of vaccinated children get a fever 7 to 9 days after the vaccination, about the same number get a rash). Get the varicella on a seperate visit at least a month later.

Also, say you decide to go first with mumps, then a few weeks later the measles, then the rubella, or whatever scenario you choose, whichever vaccine you delay leaves then the child more open to that disease for that length of time. You might think that there isn’t a big deal difference between getting a child vaccinated for measles in June vs. August, but it could be enough to put your child in extra harms way and for no reason.

There is absolutely no scientific reason, or even regular old common-sense reason, to think that the MMR or any other vaccine ever could cause autism.

The reality of autism, regressive or not, is that it probably starts in the first weeks of pregnancy. Just because there is a regression, it doesn’t mean that something that happened right before the regression caused it.

The way brain development works is that as new abilities “come on line” new functions within the brain “come on line”. You can’t necessarily predict beforehand what will happen when the time comes for that ability to come on line. Just as when you look at a toddler you don’t know how he or she will look when hormones kick in adolescence.

Will Johnny have a deep voice and a thick beard at age 16? Will he have really broad shoulders and a big biceps? Testosterone drives quite a bit of that. You could guess what he will look like then but you don’t know when he’s 2 years old. You don’t know if a girl will become very emotional and cry alot when she’s 14 or not.

Autism is not the same as adolescence, but in the same way, you can’t predict which babies will regress. And if you look at the fact that almost all babies are vaccinated, then there must be some that will truly regress within a some time after a vaccine.

The other thing is that babies do not ever just “fall into the abyss of autism” over a period of hours or days. Even in boys being discussed in this case who really do seem to have regressed, their parents point to a period of months over which they noticed a change.

So parents who want to blame vaccines have this huge window during which to claim that their kid regressed following a vaccine.

I mean, Johnny starts to really flap and stare at fans at age 12 months, slowly at first and then more and more, and he gets an MMR vaccine at 13 or 14 months and arount then the flapping becomes more noticeable, possibly because something changed, like they have a typical kid come over for a visit at age 14 months and notice that that child isn’t flapping…

And a month later he totally stops talking and he gets an autism diagnosis.

So was it the vaccine? Why? The kid was flapping before the vaccine, but the parents don’t remember that, either they deliberately minimize it because that information contradicts their newfound belief, or they just forget, since it started out more easily ignorable.

I know for myself that my memories about what my kids did is not perfect and sometimes photographs or documents I come across can contradict what my memory had told me was so.

I was manic about keeping developmental history for my kids I still have these charts from their doctor that show when it’s normal for a child to stack two blocks, use a pincer grasp, use 3 words, etc. So some of that for me is documented, and I have their vaccine schedules, but somethings like when they first started to eat ice cream or when they decided they had a favorite flavor, I have no idea.

Not all parents keep records on development like I did. My ASD kid also had a lot of medical problems so there are mountains of doctors reports (some of which I have copies of). I don’t have that for my typical kid who hardly ever went to the doctor because that kid was stunningly healthy.

So parents who say that their baby descended into autism immediately following a vaccine (or within days) are saying something that is illogical, with the exception of people whose children really do develop an encephalopathy following a vaccine reaction (which would be an obvious disease). But worrying about that is foolish since the baby would likely develop that same encephalopathy if they ran into the same germ in the wild type which is necessarily a more virulent form of the virus or bacteria.

You could fear that your baby would develop an encephalopathy following a vaccine and leave him open to encephalopathy, and maybe death from the wild type germ.

And whether or not encephalopathy really causes autism (as opposed to a generic brain damage that causes mental retardation with autistic traits) is debatable. It depends on your definition of autism.

Most autism is NOT caused by encephalopathy.

I hope all that helps and isn’t too much information.

Seriously, though, you need to trust your doctor. There could be reasons for not vaccinating your baby. I can’t see those from here and I’m not a doctor. It’s just that the reasons for not vaccinating are rare (egg allergy, for instance). Fear of autism is not a good reason to avoid or delay vaccines.

For a fact, besides all that, autistic children are just as darling and precious as typical children and autism doesn’t represent absolute doom. There are good things about having an autistic kid. I’m thrilled that I have one. I’m also thrilled that I have a typical kid. There’s no reason to fear having an autistic child. They are wonderful people.