Posted on 04/20/2005 8:26:42 AM PDT by agsloss
Lancaster, PA, Apr. 18 (UPI) -- Part 1 of 2. Where are the autistic Amish? Here in Lancaster County, heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, there should be well over 100 with some form of the disorder. I have come here to find them, but so far my mission has failed, and the very few I have identified raise some very interesting questions about some widely held views on autism. The mainstream scientific consensus says autism is a complex genetic disorder, one that has been around for millennia at roughly the same prevalence. That prevalence is now considered to be 1 in every 166 children born in the United States. Applying that model to Lancaster County, there ought to be 130 Amish men, women and children here with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Well over 100, in rough terms. Typically, half would harbor milder variants such as Asperger's Disorder or the catch-all Pervasive Development Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified -- PDD-NOS for short. So let's drop those from our calculation, even though "mild" is a relative term when it comes to autism. That means upwards of 50 Amish people of all ages should be living in Lancaster County with full-syndrome autism, the "classic autism"...
-snip-
I have identified three Amish residents of Lancaster County who apparently have full-syndrome autism, all of them children. A local woman told me there is one classroom with about 30 "special-needs" Amish children. In that classroom, there is one autistic Amish child. Another autistic Amish child does not go to school. The third is that woman's pre-school-age daughter. If there were more, she said, she would know it. What I learned about those children is the subject of the next column.
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
Maybe not. Maybe that accounts for the low rate of autism even though they glut up the doctors' offices occasionally (per another poster).
You are correct in that their exposure to disease is reduced. However, most childhood disease is relatively minor and only severely impacts those who have weakened immune systems to begin with.
I contracted most of those illnesses we now regularly innoculate against. I have to tell you, they were nothing but annoyances that never even resulted in the administration of antibiotics to "cure".
I was regulary innoculated for Typhoid and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. These are diseases that don't even cause a blip on the childhood disease radar screens of our present time.
This supposition is inaccurate. Most vaccinations are not permanent.
Instead of simply repeating the party line, try doing some research and come to your own conclusions.
Most people who question the safety of vaccinating are not trying to get rid of the practice altogether, they simply want the medical community to look into making the process safer. If there was absolute safety in vaccinations, why have they recently removed mercury-based components from them?
Right now the medical community has many more reasons to NOT want to investigate this, than they have to actually look into it. Follow the money.
Why is this such a problem for some of you guys to understand? After all, we're not discussing this on DU, where the majority of the blind sheeple hang out.
The one scientific maxim that lazy scientific researchers, psuedo-scientists, crackpots and conspiracy buffs fail to remember is that correlation is not causation. Simply connecting people and events together with a condition does not provide evidence that the events are related to the cause of the condition.
For instance, a noted researcher once claimed that caucasion people had a genetic predisposition to cocaine. Her evidence? Cocaine addicts were more frequently found to be caucasion while crack addicts were more frequently found to be African-American. Of course, her simplistic analysis ignored the economics of both cocaine and crack as well as cultural and social distinctions that affect those economics. Her thesis failed because - correlation is not causation.
Anyone can put a bunch of facts on a board and draw lines connecting the facts. It is not science, but supposition, until hard science determines if any of those lines exist anywhere besides someone's imagination.
I am not trying to debunk the concept that childhood vaccinations now, or ever, play(ed) a role in people developing autism. It's just that, at this point, it is a concept trying to correlate the two but it has not proven or found a causitive factor that actually links them.
So, people should avoid making declaritive statements about that unproven link; at least for now.
All empirical studies start out based on anecdotal evidence. That's what theories are based on, then you work them out empirically.
incompetent freaks who fall for this bunk...
Those would be all the family members who believe, based on their own personal observation, that a vaccination preceded their personal fight with the autistic pandemic.
From that site:
thimerosal contains 49.6 percent mercury as a preservative, which is one of the most dangerous toxins known to scientists.
mercury is known to cause neurotoxicity and brain damage that mirrors the symptoms of autism.
My wife and I remained Mennonite until we grew up and became Christians.
Nice. Lucky you.
On the other hand, if 100% of immunized people developed autism, we wouldn't be having this stupid discussion, would we?
Someone might have <GASP> worked on a solution!
After admitting "Of course, the Amish world is insular by nature" this "journalistic investigator" tosses this aside by saying "... some Amish today interact with the outside world ...". He then proceeds to advance his lack of finding autistic children as a case of lack of autistic children. NOWHERE DOES HE SAY HOW HE OVERCAME "THEIR INSULAR NATURE".
Can you just see the Amish opening up and spilling all their family secrets to this blue-state pencil-pushing MSM metro-sexual. HOW CAN THOSE SO CLUELESS TAKE THEMSELvES SO SERIOUSLY? (Since he calls this an "ongoing series" let's see if he digs himself out.)
Not to argue, but people do take their children in for well-baby visits and don't necessarily inoculate when that happens, or they may insist on non-mercury vaccines.
But they haven't.
Read later.
Here we go again!
Untrue. There are lists of vaccines that CURRENTLY do and do not contain Thimerosol.
Our local flu vaccine, for instance, DOES contain it-- and is being recommended for ALL ages.
Your facts are incorrect.
I think perhaps he repeats everything on TV because he's echolalic, a common speech phenomenon among autistics. He may outgrow a lot of that. Our son has, by and large. A good speech therapist is worth their weight in gold, but they need to be gentle and acquainted with the issues in autism so they don't do more harm than good.
Correlation is indeed not causation, but it IS a scientific observable. As long as it is not abused correlation is a vital datum. For instance: Jenner's observation of correlation between employment and immunity to smallpox (being a dairymaid = immunity) eventually led to the destruction of smallpox.
It is my belief that one component in the rise of autism is the relative decrease in the exposure of most parents/older siblings to their preschoolers. Rush them to the babysitter (where the babysitter is likely to turn on Barney or Sesame Street), transfer them to the "early learning center" where they learn how to handle keyboards rather than share toys, have both parents and the older siblings (if any) be in the commute or at work or school/afterschool over 10 hours a day... This may impair abilities of those preschoolers to work with others. I would think some of those who have trouble figuring out hon their own how to do that wind up with autism diagnoses.
Compare this to the old order Amish, where there is no electronic entertainment, no getting away from the family and all the siblings (unless one is alone in a field or walking down a road), etc.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.