Yes, Mark and David Geier, that father-son team of dumpster-diving pseudoscientists and promoters of chelation and chemical castration as treatments for autism dedicated to “proving” that mercury in vaccines causes autism, no matter how much they need to torture the data to do it, are at it again.

This time around, they’ve published an allegedly scientific paper entitled Early Downward Trends in Neurodevelopmental Disorders Following Removal of Thimerosal- Containing Vaccines, published (where else?) in that repository of dubious medical science, The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. This paper purports to show that autism rates have started to dip since early 2003, when the last lots of thimerosal-containing childhood vaccines expired, the point after which, with the exception of some flu vaccines, for all intents and purposes no child in the U.S. has received thimerosal-containing vaccines. If true, such an observation would represent compelling evidence for the thimerosal-autism hypothesis. Not surprisingly, loony sources like WorldNut Daily and Vox Day (to whom I administered a blog slapdown a few months ago when he uncritically parroted Dan Olmsted’s credulous reporting on a poorly documented population that is claimed not to have been vaccinated and to have very low rates of autism) have trumpeted the Geiers’ study as “proof” that mercury in vaccines causes autism).

It’s no such thing.

What it is, in actuality, is yet another example of the Geiers mining the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) database for purposes for which it was never designed and misusing the California Department of Developmental Services (CDDS) database similarly. First, off, as I pointed out extensively before, the VAERS database is designed only as an early warning system for reporting adverse events thought to be due to vaccines. It is not designed to track the incidence or prevalence of vaccine complications. One reason is that anyone can make entries into it, not just medical professionals, and the results are only checked in the most perfunctory way.

The level of testosterone that is “important”, is the level right next to the cell being affected by that testosterone. The levels in blood, in serum, or in amniotic fluid are considerably less than the levels right next to the cells producing the testosterone. Those testosterone levels are different in different tissue compartments because there are many different tissues that make testosterone, that consume testosterone, and that make and consume metabolites upstream and downstream of the rate limiting enzymes in testosterone synthesis.

His theory was that high levels of prenatal testesterone would lead to autism outcomes greater than the prevelance of autism in the general population. None of the the 235 babies at followup (6-8 years later) had ever received an autism diagnosis of any kind, not one. Baron-Cohen must have been extremely disappointed with the results of his study. Baron-Cohen has called for more studies using much higher samples to test his conjecture.

thanks for those links. The one by Promethius is an excellent discussion on how removed from reality the Gier’s “understanding” of teststosterone and autism is.

and the classic:
http://www.neurodiversity.com/weblog/article/109

Have the groups that sponsor the Age of Autism blog ever shunned anyone (well, besides that one ex-rescue angel)?