Sheri, you are probably the best to answer this but does anyone know of any research available that compares health stats between vaccinated and non-vaccinated children.

Thanks in advance for any input,
Joy

No, there are none that I know of.

Trouble is, who would do the research. Certainly not the vaccine producer as the 'gig' would be up (the truth told).

They won't even do a placebo controlled group for their vaccine studies miniscule as they are). They always use another vaccine for the control group. What does that tell you?

And nowadays, with the way things are, people are not very willing to admit publicly that they haven't vaccinated for fear of repercusions (Child Protective Services have taken children - there is a case right now in the UK that that has happened with - mom hasn't vaccinated, homeschools and is vegetarian - also in US this happens a lot). So people keep a low profile.

Its a challenge

Sheri
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Sheri Nakken, R.N., MA, Classical Homeopath

Quote:

Originally Posted by Leilanae Wasn't a study mentioned "somewhere" comparing the non-vaccinated Amish children tovaccinated children? Maybe it was on "nomorefakenews.com"?

Well, the issue is that many Amish DO vaccinate and they also use pesticides etc on their farms. Shannon posted some of the information.

Sheri
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Sheri Nakken, R.N., MA, Classical Homeopath

My post to this list got bounced for being too long--I'll try it again, in two or several parts!

Shannon

Trying again with the "Amish and Vaccination" (and autism and mercury!) articles:

I would think that in many places (US for sure) it would be hard to get a well matched set of kids, eliminating other possible reasons for the differences, because parents who don't vaccinate don't tend to live a "typical lifestyle" in other ways, either. But there must be a cadre of health food freaks who have been sucked into the vaccination thing...

Shannon




The Age of Autism: The Amish anomaly
By Dan Olmsted
Published 4/18/2005 10:52 AM
LANCASTER, Pa., April 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" first described in 1943 by child psychiatrist Leo Kanner at Johns Hopkins University. The full-syndrome disorder is hard to miss, characterized by "markedly abnormal or impaired development in social interaction and communication and a markedly restricted repertoire of activities and interests," according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Why bother looking for them among the Amish? Because they could hold clues to the cause of autism.

The first half-dozen articles in this ongoing series on the roots and rise of autism examined the initial studies and early accounts of the disorder, first identified by Kanner among 11 U.S. children born starting in 1931.

Kanner wrote that his 1938 encounter with a child from Mississippi, identified as Donald T., "made me aware of a behavior pattern not known to me or anyone else theretofore." Kanner literally wrote the book on "Child Psychiatry," published in 1934.

If Kanner was correct -- if autism was new and increasingly prevalent -- something must have happened in the 1930s to trigger those first autistic cases. Genetic disorders do not begin suddenly or increase dramatically in prevalence in a short period of time.

That is why it is worth looking for autistic Amish -- to test reasoning against reality. Largely cut off for hundreds of years from American culture and scientific progress, the Amish might have had less exposure to some new factor triggering autism in the rest of population.

Surprising, but no one seems to have looked.

Of course, the Amish world is insular by nature; finding a small subset of Amish is a challenge by definition. Many Amish, particularly Old Order, ride horse-and-buggies, eschew electricity, do not attend public school, will not pose for pictures and do not chat casually with the "English," as they warily call the non-Amish.

Still, some Amish today interact with the outside world in many ways. Some drive, use phones, see doctors and send out Christmas cards with family photos. They all still refer to themselves as "Plain," but the definition of that word varies quite a bit.

So far, from sources inside and outside the Amish community, 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.

--

The Age of Autism: Julia
DAN OLMSTED

LEOLA, Pa., Part 2 of 2.

Three-year old Julia is napping when I arrive at the spare, neat, cheerful house on Musser School Road near the town of Leola in Lancaster County.

She is the reason I have driven through the budding countryside on this perfect spring day, but I really do not need to meet her.

In the last column, I wrote about trying to find autistic Amish people here in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, and noted there should be dozens of them -- if autism occurs at the same prevalence as the rest of the United States.

So far, there is evidence of only three, all of them children, the oldest age 9 or 10. Julia is one of them. I found out about her through a pediatrician in Richmond, Va., Dr. Mary Megson. I had been asking around for quite some time about autism and the Amish, and she provided the first direct link.

Megson said she would give my name to this child's mother, who could call if she chose. A few days later the phone rang. It was Stacey-jean Inion, an Amish-Mennonite woman. She, her husband Brent and their four children live simply, but they do drive a vehicle and have a telephone. After a few pleasantries, I told her about my trying to find autistic Amish.

Here is what she said, verbatim:

"Unfortunately our autistic daughter -- who's doing very well, she's been diagnosed with very, very severe autism -- is adopted from China, and so she would have had all her vaccines in China before we got her, and then she had most of her vaccines given to her in the United States before we got her.

"So we're probably not the pure case you're looking for."

Maybe not, but it was stunning that Julia Inion, the first autistic Amish person I could find, turned out to be adopted -- from another country, no less. It also was surprising that Stacey-jean launched unbidden into vaccines, because the Amish have a religious exemption from vaccination and presumably would not have given it much thought.

She said a minority of Amish families do, in fact, vaccinate their children these days, partly at the urging of public health officials.

"Almost every Amish family I know has had somebody from the health department knock on our door and try to convince us to get vaccines for our children," she said. "The younger Amish more and more are getting vaccines. It's a minority of children who vaccinate, but that is changing now."

Did she know of any other autistic Amish? Two more children, she said.

"One of them, we're very certain it was a vaccine reaction, even though the government would not agree with that."

Federal health officials have said there is no association between vaccinations and autism or learning disabilities.

"The other one I'm not sure if this child was vaccinated or not," she added.

During my visit to their home, I asked Stacey-jean to explain why she attributed the first case to vaccines.

"There's one family that we know, their daughter had a vaccine reaction and is now autistic. She was walking and functioning and a happy bright child, and 24 hours after she had her vaccine, her legs went limp and she had a typical high-pitched scream. They called the doctor and the doctor said it was fine -- a lot of high-pitched screaming goes along with it.

"She completely quit speaking," Stacey-jean said. "She completely quit making eye contact with people. She went in her own world."

This happened, Stacey-jean said, at "something like 15 months." The child is now about 8.

For similar reasons, Julia Inion's Chinese background is intriguing. China, India and Indonesia are among countries moving quickly to mass-vaccination programs. In some vaccines, they use a mercury-based preservative called thimerosal that keeps multiple-dose vials from becoming contaminated by repeated needle sticks.

Thimerosal was phased out of U.S. vaccines starting in 1999, after health officials became concerned about the amount of mercury infants and children were receiving. The officials said they simply were erring on the side of caution, and that all evidence favors rejection of any link between Autism Spectrum Disorders and thimerosal, or vaccines themselves.

Julia's vaccinations in China -- all given in one day at about age 15 months -- may well have contained thimerosal; the United States had stopped using it by the time she was born, but other countries with millions to vaccinate had not.

Stacey-jean said photographs of Julia taken in China before she was vaccinated showed a smiling alert child looking squarely at the camera. Her original adoptive family in the United States, overwhelmed trying to cope with an autistic child, gave Julia up for re-adoption. The Inions took her in knowing her diagnosis of severe autism.

I tried hard -- and am still trying -- to find people who know about other autistic Amish. Of the local health and social service agency personnel in Lancaster, some said they dealt with Amish people with disabilities, such as mental retardation, but none recalled seeing an autistic Amish.

Still, I could be trapped in a feedback loop: The Amish I am likeliest to know about -- because they have the most contact with the outside world -- also are likeliest to adopt a special-needs child such as Julia from outside the community, and likeliest to have their children vaccinated.

Another qualifier: The Inions are converts to the Amish-Mennonite religion (Brent is an Asian-American). They simply might not know about any number of autistic Amish sheltered quietly with their families for decades.

It also is possible the isolated Amish gene pool might confer some kind of immunity to autism -- which might be a useful topic for research.

Whatever the case, Stacey-jean thinks the autistic Amish are nowhere to be found.

"It is so much more rare among our people," she said. "My husband just said last week that so far we've never met a family that lives a healthy lifestyle and does not vaccinate their children that has an autistic child. We haven't come across one yet."

"Everywhere I go (outside the Amish community) I find children who are autistic, just because I have an autistic daughter -- in the grocery store, in the park, wherever I go. In the Amish community, I simply don't find that."

UPI researcher Kyle Pearson contributed to this article.

*The Age of Autism: Absence of evidence -*Latest in a series of articles on Autism
By Dan Olmsted for UPI.

UPI - After several weeks of looking, the prevalence of autism among the central Pennsylvania Amish still appears remarkably low, and the few cases I have found suggest an ominous pattern.

In two columns last month I asked, "Where are the autistic Amish?"

My search encompassed Lancaster County, heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, and I obtained a tentative answer. After inquiring widely, these three cases emerged: --a girl, age 3, adopted from China by an Amish-Mennonite family (a very small percentage of Amish do vaccinate their children); --a girl of about 8, described by the mother of the first child as a clear vaccine reaction at 15 months, and --a boy of about 10.

Since then, I have become aware of possibly one more case in Lancaster County and a total of five more nationwide -- which will be the subject of a future column.

Meanwhile, there is the question of prevalence. There is no reason to be particularly interested in autism among the Amish -- unless it occurs much less frequently than normal. If it did, it would suggest either genetic immunity -- which is unlikely, because at least a handful of Amish are in fact autistic -- or lower exposure to something that, combined with genetic susceptibility, triggers autism.

In my view, the latter is more likely.

About 22,000 Amish live in Lancaster County, where they first put down roots almost 300 years ago after fleeing religious persecution in Germany. At the current rate of autism among the "English," as they call the rest of us, several dozen of them should be identifiably autistic.

My first Lancaster contacts basically fell into the "absence of evidence" category, which is intriguing, but establishes nothing. The well-known scientific axiom is, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

In the absence-of-evidence category: --"I've been an advocate for the past five years in Lancaster and I have yet to come across a case where an Amish family is struggling for services," said Jim Bouder of the Lancaster County Autism Support Group. "I haven't seen any."

--"There are a lot of other kids who have autism, but we haven't seen that in the Amish because they're not referring them," said Stu Symons, director of mental retardation and early intervention services for Lancaster County Mental Health/Mental Retardation, a public agency. "There's a lot of birth defects and other disabilities (among the Amish), but we haven't seen, necessarily, autism."

--"That's one of our head-scratchers," said another local person who works with autistic children.

The Amish-Mennonite mother with whom I spoke, Stacey-jean Inion of Leola, said the view from inside looking out is no different.

"Everywhere I go (outside the Amish community) I find children who are autistic, just because I have an autistic daughter -- in the grocery store, in the park, wherever I go," Inion said. "In the Amish community, I simply don't find that."

Though all this seemed intriguing, it did not constitute proof of anything. Because of the insular and unusual nature of the Amish community, everyone outside might just be missing the necessary evidence.

Among the dozens of e-mail messages I read after publishing the previous articles, several made exactly that point.

"I do not know of any Amish or Mennonite children with autism," said one doctor in a neighboring county, "but it would be difficult to assess this because these families rarely come to medical care for that type of problem, nor do they use Early Intervention or IU (Intermediate Unit) services. Thus, the incidence of autism in that population is unknown."

One message board posting even suggested because there apparently have been no studies of Amish people with autism, they must be there.

"Proof? Evidence? Where is it written other than a newspaper article or forum message? A search for 'amish autism' on ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD=search&DB=pubmed only comes up with a 'No items found' message. You would think that anything that significant would actually be published."

You would think.

This past weekend, I traveled back to Pennsylvania and met with a person who gave me the best insights yet into autism in the Amish community here. What he had to say was the tipping point between absence-of-evidence and evidence-of-absence.

That will be the focus of the next column.

-- This ongoing series on the roots and rise of autism aims to be interactive with readers and welcomes comment, criticism and suggestions.

The Age of Autism: Witness
By Dan Olmsted for UPI. Another in a series by UPI on autism.

Frank Noonan is a family doctor in Lancaster County. When I met him for lunch last Saturday, he was still in golfing togs from his weekly game -- "Saturdays are my 'I can breathe' day," he says. Even so, he stayed after our meal to meet a cancer patient who phoned him at the restaurant.

He's energetic, friendly, straightforward -- the kind of doctor people want.

People such as the Amish. As a family practitioner, Noonan sees patients of all ages. He combines traditional and alternative medicine in an "integrative" blend to suit the individual. The Amish like that approach -- they prefer to see just one doctor for all their care, and their first resort is herbs and supplements, not prescriptions and pills. For one thing, most don't have insurance.

Based on movies like "Witness" and the image of the Amish in horse-and-buggies, many people -- myself included -- assume they have virtually no contact with such outside influences as modern medicine.

Not so.

Noonan has been a doctor in Lancaster County nearly 25 years and about a third of his patients are Amish, making his Amish practice one of the area's largest. He has seen "thousands and thousands" of the county's 22,000 Amish residents and others who live nearby.

I found him through an Amish-Mennonite mother of an autistic child adopted from China. She told me she has seen almost no autism among the Amish, but that I should talk to Noonan because he has treated so many Amish for so long.

Based on my reporting so far, there is evidence of only three or possibly four Amish with autism in Lancaster County, where there should be dozens at the 1-in-166 prevalence in society at large. One of them is the adopted Chinese child. Another was described as having "a clear vaccine reaction" at 15 months, after which she became autistic. I have not met that child and can't vouch for that description.

When I called Noonan three weeks ago, he seemed surprised by my question about Amish autism but agreed to think about it, check around and tell me what he found. At lunch, Noonan said he hesitated to offer an opinion when I first called because it had never occurred to him.

But now, he said, he realized something.

"I have not seen autism with the Amish," Noonan told me. "And I say that having seen a ton of Amish patients. I may be able to think in all those years of maybe one case of (Amish) autism I've had."

"I've checked with some of my colleagues," he added, "and they all tell me it's very, very sporadic that we'll see a case of autism among the Amish."

From 2000 to 2003, Noonan also saw patients at the Wellness Center, which is operated by the Amish and Mennonites. About 90 percent of those patients are Amish, Noonan said, and he saw thousands of them. But still he saw no autism.

"Absolutely none, in the almost three years I was there. We would have seen it. It's not something they would hide. They're not like that."

Noonan said he sees "a fair amount of mental retardation among the Amish." A significant percentage of people with autism have mental retardation as well as severe speech and hearing problems. Wouldn't they show up on the radar of those who track and treat such issues? And wouldn't autistic Amish see Noonan for the same inevitable illnesses and injuries that bring the rest of their family to him? I tried various ways to find gaps in Noonan's account. Perhaps autistic Amish children were seeing pediatricians or specialists as opposed to family doctors ..

"The Amish don't go to specialists like we do," he responded. "The Amish go to family docs for all their pediatric care. So at least in Lancaster County, where I practice, almost all pediatrics among the Amish is done by family docs."

"You'll find all the other stuff, but we don't find the autism," Noonan said. "We're right in the heart of Amish country and seeing none. And that's just the way it is."

In my last column, I said this interview was a tipping point between absence-of-evidence (not finding many autistic Amish) and evidence-of-absence (finding there might not be many).

The case is still open, but does anyone disagree that Dr. Noonan makes a compelling witness? -- (Researcher Kyle Pearson contributed to this story.) -- This series on the roots and rise of autism aims to be interactive with readers and will take note of comments, criticism and suggestions.

I have followed information on the risks of vaccination for years. As a one month old infant I had a severe hypotonic reaction (went limp) to the DPT vaccine. I first went limp in the arm that the injection was given and it spread through out my whole body (according to my mother) and lasted for 5 days before muscle tone returned.

Needless to say there was no question in my mind about whether or not to vaccinate my children. I have three children ranging in age from 16 - 21 and none of them have been vaccinated for anything ever. They are certainly the healthiest people I know. It is not that they don't catch the odd cold etc but they are usually sick for a few hours and then it is gone. There immune systems react so fast. The oldest daughter seems much less healthy since she started smoking :( but still she is basically very healthy in comparison to most people her age.

After telling a few people that I did not vaccinate my children some how I became the person that everyone who was considering their options about vaccination called. We live in Canada and there is no mandate to vaccinate here although most people are not really aware of that, they think we are like the US. I decided with so many people calling to ask questions i needed to bring myself up to date on the issue and became involved in an organization called Vaccination Risk Awareness Network. They have a great website with loads of information and links to other sites www.vran.org If there is research you will find it there.

One bit of statistics that I remember reading but do not know where - probably others on the list have seen this before. in Japan(I believe) they made the decision to stop vaccinating their infants and delay it till the age of 2. They did that for about 2 years until apparently they were being pressured to conform and started vaccinating their infants again. During that time though the SIDS rate dropped significantly, I don't remember the exact % it dropped by but I believe it was somewhere around 98%. I just remember it was very close to 100%. And ironically we are still looking for a cure for SIDS and telling new moms not to let their baby's sleep on their stomach or sides. I don't know if this is the kind of research you are looking for but this speaks volumes to the health of vaccinated infants compared to unvaccinated ones.

Perhaps you all already know about the work of Dr.Viera Scheibner a Principal Research Scientist and the author of the books Vaccination and Behavioural Problems in Childhood. If anyone has done research or knows of reseach that has been done with respect to vaccination and the potential damage that it may cause she is the person. She and her husband have conducted some their own studies and in her books she quotes much research that is available in Medical Journals around the world but is kept hush hush


Hope you find this useful
Carol