Vaccination & epidemic

I have to confess that I probably do define those things a bit differently... I stay out of the politics threads for the most part, so in the last three months almost all of the posting activity I've seen has been of the "What I'm eating today" and "word association" variety. Silly games, and blog-type posts. Not very much lively discussion or debate. Maybe it's all in the political threads, but I have little interest in politics.

Here's a sample of the first page of threads with unread posts:


On Tour in the USA
What's mildly irritating you today?
Explosive Diarrhea or Hyperglycemia?
I will be mean to you in this thread
The Last Word
The brain is a vicious little bugger
Vaccination & epidemic
May 22, 2009: K-9 Andy
Betting tips
let me give you a new user title
The 24 hour engorgement
The 24 hour engagement.
How good is your memory?
Ya Stoopit Potato!
May 21, 2009: Solar Stadium
Ginger or Mary Ann?
Word Association, part deux.
Do you have stuff from your childhood?
The WTF NSFW thread
Innie or Outie?
I finally bought my hot dog cart!!!
Be a post whore!
Steele's Speech to the RNC, 19 May
What I Learned Today
I cant believe I just ate.....

[xoxoxoBruce]

Some of those threads may not be about what you think they're about.

Very possible. I try to streamline my forum time by only clicking on threads that have titles suggestive that the content might be interesting to me. I'm online often, but usually only for short periods during the day.

I've looked at most of them, but not all of them.

[Undertoad]

This thread is about Vaccination & epidemic.

[skysidhe]

Having not read pages 11 to 15 thinking I'd find far too many more things to quote about I might have missed some information that makes my posting now inane. well maybe they're inconsequential anyway. I wanted to comment further on the over diagnosis of the 'autism spectrum'

Originally Posted by Flint

I have made joking comments in this thread, but this is not one of them. And this is not a trolling or shit-stirring comment either, but rather a product of my natural curiosity and Devil's Advocacy. The question is: are there actually more cases of Autism, as opposed to more diagnoses of Autism?

I think that many kids are put under that 'autism umbrella' which are the pdd-nos diagnosis. That means kids who with 2 or 3 traits of autism but not any of the other traits are classified as such and put into special programs. It is my belief only that we as people/kids are a multi-special brew of humanity and most kids who fall or deviate from the norm to not benefit from being in a special classification at all.

Originally Posted by Flint

Well, well, well. Your book is kicking my ass. I guess I missed the distinction between Autism "spectrum" and Autism. You know, I've been told I'm Asperger's, but I wouldn't have known that before I knew what that was. What I was thinking was: the day I figured it out, there wasn't "another" case of Asperger's. There was the same amount as before. And I think, actually, Asperger's has become a "popular" diagnosis. That doesn't (necessarily) mean that people have physiologically changed, it could just be that we're applying different or more specific labels.

In my estimation I think you are absolutely correct. Perhaps, just perhaps, I was wondering if some schools if they were smaller and more intimate would be more inclusive of others differences.

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

Did you know, incidentally, that the guy who wrote the book I've linked, the doctor who is successfully treating my son--he used to be an ER surgeon? Then his child was diagnosed with autism, and his wife started researching all this crazy nonsense on the internet. Being a doctor, he set out to disprove her with sound medical science, and ended up finding more information than he was prepared for, and ultimately abandoning his ER career to treat autistic children instead.

What book? It sounds interesting.

[Flint]

@sky: If I am reading you correctly, you are touching upon some of my thoughts, that, wrapped up in this issue is the nature of our fast-paced, cookie-cutter society having become callous and indifferent towards the uniqueness of people. The Onion ran the joke, Ritalin Cures Next Picasso.

[Clodfobble]

ORLY?

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by skysidhe

What book? It sounds interesting.

Post 153. You must have missed it because it was on page 11.

[skysidhe]

Originally Posted by Flint

@sky: If I am reading you correctly, you are touching upon some of my thoughts, that, wrapped up in this issue is the nature of our fast-paced, cookie-cutter society having become callous and indifferent towards the uniqueness of people. The Onion ran the joke, Ritalin Cures Next Picasso.

exactly..I love that sarcasm. To watch tv like all the normal kids what an acievment!



does anything profound come from mediocricy? And frankly I haven't met any special education teachers, except from State schools that actually understood that.

[skysidhe]

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

ORLY?

I was not commenting on the figures. I am not a fact gatherer. I was commenting from the experience of what I see in emotional growth classrooms as a TA. Kids with pdd-nos which falls under the autism spectrum umbrella as far as the educational setting goes. Alludes to the cookie cutter society flint commented about.

I have found that since pdd-nos is so differential some teachers will grasp onto any text book definition they can find so they can approach these kids in a way they understand without really understanding the true nature of the kid.

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

Post 153. You must have missed it because it was on page 11.

Originally Posted by skysidhe

Having not read pages 11 to 15 thinking I'd find far too many more things to quote about I might have missed some information that makes my posting now inane.

Originally Posted by Undertoad

This thread is about Vaccination & epidemic.

[skysidhe]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

But overall it seems like societal hygiene is an excellent preventative for many diseases, so WASH YOUR GODDAMN HANDS, YOU DIRTY HIPPIES. That goes for you white trash barefoot uneducated crackers as well. And double for you Euro punters, because we all know you filthy buggars'll pee right in the middle of the street and not change out your underwear for a week.

much more interesting than the puplic service announcement was

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

It's a question of overall prevalence. No doubt some people with autism have escaped diagnosis in the past, just as some do today, and I acknowledged that earlier. But it is impossible that all of the people currently diagnosed today would have escaped diagnosis in the past, because there are just too many of them. Far, far too many of them. I have posted my reading on the subject repeatedly--which Undertoad has also agreed to read, as an objective non-parent, and let us know what he thinks--as well as my own personal experience: as I said, I have personally sat in a room full of local autistic children who are not at a functioning level. They are not the handful of hyper-intelligent ones who manage to get by in school for a few years, they are the non-communicative, self-injurious, classically autistic ones, all diagnosed before the age of three, and they all live within my school district. This number of them simply could not have abounded in the past like they do now. These children would have been diagnosed. There are more cases today than there were in the past, and what's more, the rate appears to be accelerating.

But it is indisputable that all of them evaded diagnosis in the past, or were misdiagnosed, because the diagnosis itself didn't exist until the 1940's and was not really in clinical use until the 1960's. It's come a long way in just the last twenty years, for that matter... my friend M is a social worker who specializes in working with severely autistic people, and in the past 20 years he's seen the diagnostic criteria, and treatment, change a lot... for the better, in his opinion. The definition of autism has been revised significantly, meaning far more people are now diagnosed with it.

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/330/7483/112-d

A lot of disorders, such as ADHD, OCD, and depression, are sharply on the rise, and it's possible (perhaps even likely) that there are environmental factors, but I also suspect that diagnostic tools are simply getting a lot more refined and more people who would formerly not have been diagnosed at all, now are.

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by Tiki

the diagnosis itself didn't exist until the 1940's

The diagnosis didn't exist--or the disease itself basically didn't exist? When did widespread vaccination use begin, again? Oh yes, the 1940s.

Originally Posted by Tiki

A lot of disorders, such as ADHD, OCD, and depression, are sharply on the rise, and it's possible (perhaps even likely) that there are environmental factors, but I also suspect that diagnostic tools are simply getting a lot more refined and more people who would formerly not have been diagnosed at all, now are.

Many people suspect that. It's called the "Hidden Horde" theory. Because what is undeniable is the vast majority of these autistic individuals are not capable of caring for themselves into adulthood (please recall again that in this case I am talking about diagnoses of pure autism--not PDD, not Asperger's, not ADHD. All of those are rising too, as you say, but those individuals are often capable of caring for themselves and confound the data, so we look at the data without them to get a clearer picture.) So if these people were formerly not diagnosed at all, there must be hundreds of thousands of adults, aged anywhere from 30 to 70, either in institutions with a different diagnosis, homeless on the streets, or being cared for by relatives completely removed from the social services system.

Burd et. al. did a prevalence study of all autistic children born in North Dakota between the years 1967 and 1983 and found a rate of 3.4 per 10,000. A follow up study on the same cohort done twelve years later showed that the original study detected 98% of the cases of autism (they missed only one individual.)

Nylander and Gillberg screened adults at outpatient psychiatric faclities in Sweden, looking for undiagnosed cases of autism. They presumed they'd find people who had never been evaluated for autism in the past, at least using modern criteria. They did find nineteen people who met autism criteria who'd previously been undiagnosed as such, but that brought their prevalence rate to only 2.7 per ten thousand, similar to the other population rates quoted before 1980.

I can type out the footnote references to the actual studies if you really need me to, but there are dozens of them.

ETA: Just to make sure the reference is all in one post: the current prevalence rate as of 2009 is 67 per 10,000.

[Flint]

I love how if just one person is sufficiently obsessed with learning about something,
the internet lets us all know as much about that thing as that person has time to type.