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| Jenny McCarthy, Playboy Model and archvillain: I'm a poser, not a doctor. |
Jenny McCarthy's irrational and irresponsible dissent against vaccinations is yielding a measles epidemic. The central vector of it being Disneyland. It's in seven states already, which pretty much means it's out of control and will get much worse before it burns out.
I'm supposing Disney is not happy about this. They're probably thinking of some PSA's and probably having some lawyers look at lawsuits. Probably there will be one attempted sometime against Jenny McCarthy or others leading the anti-vaccine movement. If so, it's probably going to be groundbreaking. It'll be the first suit against someone who provided irresponsibly false information to the public. If the defendants are found liable, that will change public discourse.
Meanwhile, the anti-vaccine people are standing firm, like Gary Monahan quoted in the Los Angeles Times:
"How do I say this without sounding crazy?" he said. "I don't want anyone to get measles … but you have to make it easier for the parents through the health system to do it the right way. Pounding three live viruses into somebody at 1 year old is devastating."Be careful any time you're tempted to begin a statement, "How do I say this without sounding crazy."
The most important issue has been buried in this debate: what's causing the upsurge in autisms? It used to be rarity, just as lung cancer used to be rare disease until cigarette smoking became ubiquitous. Now, almost everybody knows two three parents who have a diagnosed autistic child, or one with Asperger's Syndrome. I know two or three, and I'm practically a shut-in. A look at the growing prevalence is shocking:
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| That's a 45-fold increase in autism diagnoses in 35 years. Similar to lung cancer diagnoses after cigarettes were introduced. |
Yes, some of this might be due to just having the condition better defined, but I think if autism were so common in the 1930s or 1950s, it would have been much better known, and my generation would have grown up with common knowledge about it. We'd have a colloquial name for it, just as the "the mumps" or "the chicken pox," rather then autism. Those are just indications that autism symptoms couldn't have been that common. When I grew up, I didn't know any family that had an autistic child. Children growing up now all either have an autistic sibling or know a family with it.
In the face of this, and without any answers being offered, little apparent concern shown by the government, of course parents are becoming hysterical. Parents as group have hair-triggers when it comes to panic over their children's safety. There's all kinds of hysterias that are proof of that. So, of course they're looking for culprits. This is made worse when it's demonstrated that if one in 110 people were coming down with measles, there would be a lot of public health effort to identifying the source and containing the problem. By comparison, autism is much more devastating and costly, and the government does almost nothing. This is a public health crisis, but there's no public health effort to find the reason and remedy it.
Why isn't the government at any level giving a concerted effort to finding out what is causing this huge upsurge in autism?
This is just my guess: our generation is exposed to more exotic chemicals than any other. It's on food, in our cosmetics, in our beds, in our homes. They range from pesticides to flame-retardants, to food additives. Few of them have been studied or tested. Those that are frequently have neurotoxic or neuroactive effects. Many are known to be hormone disrupters.
It might not be any one chemical, but being exposed to the whole cocktail together must have some effect on us, and effect that's seen in the long-term, such as an upsurge in autism. Class comes into it. The wealthy class does not want to know and doesn't people to find out that products that making them richer could be harmful. This could badly effect their bottom lines, and their goal of getting richer. It's similar to how spreading climate change denial keeps cash flow healthy and prevents a public backlash.
I'm receptive to the idea in that I have a brother who has Angelman Syndrome, a totally tragic, crippling condition caused by a damaged maternal gene. My parents grew up within a few blocks of each other in extremely polluted St Louis City. For example, my father used to play baseball all summer on a cinder lot. This is where people dumped coal ash from their furnaces. So, he played baseball all summer long on a toxic waste dump, stirring up and inhaling ash that was loaded with lead, cadmium and arsenic. They used to chew tar off the streets, chew lead paint chips, oblivious to the fact that they were damaging themselves. I don't know exactly what my mother was exposed to, but I know St. Louis City, like all urban areas in the 1930s-1960s was in a haze of smoke and airborne industrial waste similar to what Chinese cities are experiencing.
Even if I'm wrong on my conjecture, the question remains: why isn't the government having concerted studies into the causes of autism?
