If you are someone hoping for a cure, you should also realize that the people in EOHarm and AoA do more than anyone else to discourage promising causation research, in favor of research aimed to prove their latest money-making fantasy. You won’t stop them with “let’s all just get along.”

Yeah, you’re right, Vaccination is a real waste here. Let’s just let 9000 random children be given a death sentence each year.

According to your values, one half of the children who got Hep B got it from their mothers; these children, all 9000 of them, are great, great candidates for getting the Hep B vaccine on the day they are born. No probalos.

You can honestly think of no way we could possibly optimize this?

What about asking mothers, have you ever engaged in risky behaviors? What about testing mothers for presence of the virus? I believe such a test is run if you give blood; considering how much it costs to have a baby these days, I’m having a difficult time believing the cost would be an issue.

At the very least, we could delay vaccination for children whose mothers test negative for infection; the vast, vast majority of children (say ~3,990,0000).

Hope you trust all those day care workers, teachers and classmates in your child’s class aren’t infected. I sure wouldn’t.

Well, for one thing, vaccinating your child before going to daycare would be an option; not too many people are putting their child in daycare the second day they are out of the womb.

According to the website you pulled information from, these day care workers, teachers and classmates would have to be exchanging blood, or possibly, toothbruses to initiate an exchange of the virus.

Kids are messy, sure, but lets also keep in mind the numbers we are talking about; there are 40,000,000 children ten and under in the US; each year 9,000 of them were getting Hep B from mechanism other than maternal exposure.

And yet, the only way we can think of to address this situation is to vaccinate every child, on the day they are born. Incredible.

– pD

Here’s the intelligence:

“Before the hepatitis B virus vaccine, every year in the United States about 18,000 children were infected with hepatitis B virus by the time they were 10 years old. This statistic is especially important because people are much more likely to develop liver cancer or cirrhosis if they are infected early in life, rather than later in life (most people are infected with hepatitis B virus when they are adolescents and young adults).

About 9,000 of the 18,000 children infected in the first 10 years of life caught the virus from their mother during birth. However, many young children didn’t catch the disease from their mother. They caught it from either another family member or someone else who comes in contact with the child. Because the disease can be transmitted by casual contact, and because many people who are infected with hepatitis B virus don’t know that they have it, it is virtually impossible to be “careful enough” to avoid this infection.

For these reasons, all young children are recommended to receive the hepatitis B vaccine. The best time to receive the first dose is right after birth. This will ensure that the child will be protected as early as possible from catching the disease from someone that doesn’t know that they are infected with the virus.”

Hope you trust all those day care workers, teachers and classmates in your child’s class aren’t infected. I sure wouldn’t.

Well, from my reading of the autism literature, it’s clear that autism researchers, in general, tend to either think that or haven’t made up their mind about it. Experienced researchers such as Lorna Wing clearly think that.

But I’m impressed by your conviction, Keith. It must mean you have clear-cut indisputable evidence of a real increase. What does it consist of? Let’s see it.

Of course, anyone as informed as you think you are would already know this.

As such, some of us have met people who have not recieved thier autism diagnosis until well into older adulthood – some times not until they were turfed out of institutions during healhcare reforms or not until after thier parents/carers died.

To try to tell us that the diagnosis of autism has not changed in the past ( and therefore the rate of diagnosis has not changed) is stupid. There is no way you could be as informed as you claim to be and yet not realise that a broadening in criteria will automatically result in more diagnosis.

The only conclusion, therefore, is that you’re not as well informed as you think you are.

PS, please improve your conditional knowledge. A great many people on the spectrum are not as you describe. Your invalid extrapolation from a single case study is classically aspergers in it’s ‘my experience, therefore yours’ style of thinking.

PPS, no offence intended to anyone with aspergers (which includes myself and several of my social group) by comparing them to people like keith, but we must be aware that ‘We’ have our share of ignorami too.

In fact Keith, that’s pretty much what the peer reviewed science shows. For a good non-technical overview you might try reading Unstrange Minds by Professor Roy Richard Grinker.

“I get it. I’ve met in the middle, and just asked for you all to do the same and all you people do is deny, deny deny deny. You wholly believe the “evidence” and “science” that supports your argument, and discount the equal science and evidence that suggests that all may not be as it seems.”

As far as I’ve seen you’ve not presented any science.