@enhydra lutris

that post, EL- you saved me a lot of typing. I'm glad that my two-fingers-and-a-thumb typing is so slow...

Indeed, correlation does not imply causation. And at the same time that the childhood vax schedule has been unnecessarily bloated (in many cases, in the service of corporate profits rather than public health), a lot of other environmental things have gotten much, much worse as well.

There is obviously no reason for an infant to have a hepatitis vaccine, so I'm not disagreeing there. But over the same interval, we've seen the list of food additives/preservatives bloat by roughly the same proportion (also primarily in service of corporate profits rather than public health)- and very little testing has been done there, either.

Some of those food-borne environmental toxins are fairly bad juju as well- like the trace glyphosate in grains, for example. We simply don't know what all the contributors are, let alone being able to identify a specific "worst" contributor. And, since a healthy public isn't as profitable as an intractably-sick public, our corporations will never do the work to find out unless they are forced to do so.

Meanwhile, I'll just sit back with a bag of preservative-laden Doritos and a can of additive-laden energy drink, and celebrate my on-the-spectrumness: I got mine long before any of this new stuff became ubiquitous. One thing is certain: they won't figure out the actual primary cause of the current autism issue in my lifetime. Doing so would very likely hurt the bottom line of one or more major corporations, and We Can't Have That...

in the researchers and medical profession, a need to blame mothers because of at least one stone cold link to fathers. I just decided that I don't hav all day to work up a presentation style comment, so I thought I'd just throw out some facts that we all need to consider. First, "autism" is really ASD - autism spectrum disorder.

"Fragile x (chromosome) disorder" if often a factor linked to various types of "autism (spectrum disorder)" and the x chromosome is a very link in any developmental chain.

ASD is diagnosed far more in males than females.

A whole herd of disorders are far more likely when the male parent is less than 25 years old or greater than 35 years old, and especially when he is over 45 years old. There is no similar finding with respect to the age of the mathers.

"Autism" as a diagnosis or thing dates to the 1920s or so. The number of cases has grown ever since. In part because more and more shit is being declared to 1) exist and 2) be part of ASD, for example, ADHD. Also more and more kids are getting tested. We've always had these people, they used to be "slow kids" and before that "damaged" or "defective". How many per 100,000 is a complete unknown because a) there was nothing "official" to diagnose them with and b) there was a relative rarity of diagnoses due to a low frequency of the collision of all of the relevant factors such as somebody to do the diagnosis, a felt need for there to be some sort of medical diagnosis, the presence of alternative support systems where the kids would simply be kept at home and away from society, etc.

Correlation charts showing an increase in the incidence of ASD diagnoses with the incidence of any of a myriad of factors show nothing. Post hoc ego propter hoc fallacy. Correlation is not causation. The incidence of a vast number of things has increased radically and progressively throughout the modern era, vaccinations, flouridated water, commercial toothpaste, aspirin usage, electromagnetic radiation at home and away, noise, sanitation, pesticides, herbicides, hospital births, over-the-counter cold remedies, grain fed beef, hormone treated beef, dairy cows, pigs and poultry, hydrocarbons in the air and water, plastic, halocarbons, researchers, post-doc candidates, shrinks and sociologists, synthetic fibers, pavement, and on and on and on. It is more likely to be a combination of all them than to be any particular one of them.

ASD is a spectrum and is somewhat highly heritable while we are just beginning to realize that epigenics is a reality and something we don't really understand at all.

There is a near universal mental defect related to the conditions and preconditions for our survival back in the way back whereby we look for a single cause for each and every effect. That's why god did it became such a widespread answer for everything for which there was no obvious answer. Before we figured out to do and not do specific things we sacrificed to one or more deities even though they were clearly unreliable. It is not the case that every thing or effect has a specific single cause. Most stuff has, at some point, more than one contributing caqusal factor.

be well and have a good one

@Enchantress
working in the yard, and one thing hit me. There is a lot of concern about the vaccination schedule, and legitimately so, but when I think back, I see something else.

I was early boomer, June '46, barely made the cutoff. I went to school with kids who had contracted and survived polio. I met or knew people who had had scarlet fever and smallpox. Damn near everybody I knew at one time or another caught mumps, measles, German measles (Rubella), and chicken pox, plus assorted influenzas and colds.

So, today, kids are given an MMR vaccine to deal with mumps, measles and rubella. This is concerning because they are exposed to all 3 things at the same time, but these are attenuated, dead or otherwise inactive versions. I was, no doubt, frequently exposed to all three in the form of contagious live viruses at the same time from kindergarden onwards and very probably earlier, and, at least once, each of them got me. In retrospect, what is the difference here, other than I had to deal with the actual live disease?

be well and have a good one

Autism is a subject I know a little about. It’s no longer just the non-verbal children flapping their hands. Instead, it is now considered a spectrum or a scale. Your child could fall anywhere on it. Both my children in their 40’s have been diagnosed with different forms of Autism. In fact, one was only diagnosed last year. One has ADHD-Au while the other has what used to be called Asperger’s Syndrome.

Both did extremely well in grade school. But middle School and High School was awful. I think that it was too much of a free for all for them to learn. They both like strict routines.

Being of the Baby Boomer generation, there was none of this knowledge while my children were in school. They both hold jobs and can function adequately most of the time.

And I never took Tylenol or drank during either pregnancy. I did take Prenatal Vitamins with Folic Acid, which has been standard for years, although I believe they might have increased the amount of Folic Acid needed during pregnancy.

That vaccine schedule is insane. My children were born in 81 and 82 and I know that they didn’t get more than 10 or 12 vaccines when they were young.

@Snode

I grew up in the middle of a cancer cluster: ~15% of my high school classmates did not survive to see their 30th birthday. Nobody has paid much attention to it in the literature, but I know that as downwinders, we experienced heavy fallout and snowout events after several specific aboveground test shots at the Nevada Test Site in the 50s and up until the '63 ban. Most of those classmates who passed prematurely did so from leukemias, but a good fraction experienced bone cancers and/or stomach cancers.

When I had that stomach tumor a few years ago, I thought that this had finally caught up with me as well. But mine wasn't malignant, and I got to keep most all of my stomach when they fixed it. So I count myself as one among the more fortunate...

My wife, from New England, grew up in the middle of the BASF superfund site in Lowell, MA. Their water supply was and is contaminated with hexavalent chromium, trichlorethylene, methyl-ethyl ketone, and a bunch of other yummy industrial solvents and byproducts. The tumors experienced by she and her classmates primarily involve the pineal and pituitary glands. The list of insults goes on and on, everywhere you look.

Downwinders certainly got the short straw, but only one of many: we aren't alone in having been involuntarily experimented upon in this great open Petri dish we call America. Realistically, everyone is a downwinder, in one way or another.

that even before the industrial revolution we have been conducting one big science experiment on ourselves, through industrial production and the ensuing waste. We bury or dump it and then drink it, and eat it through our crops. Genetics loads the gun, environment pulls the trigger. Who knows what we've done to ourselves.

@usefewersyllables
.
in the foot
then tell me how it feels

BWANGO

https://archive.ph/6CLec

There's intense, ongoing rampant speculation in the aftermath of breaking news reports saying Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has called top US military leaders from across the globe to gather at a meeting next week at Marine Corps base Quantico - which lies some 30 minutes south of Washington D.C.

Washington Post cited over a dozen people familiar with the matter who described all senior officers with the rank of brigadier general or above have been summoned, including all Navy admirals, which will amount to some 800 top commanders being gathered. No explanation has been given by the Pentagon chief.

Despite President Trump this week having boasted that his administration has solved "seven conflicts" - it remains that the globe's biggest wars are still raging: Ukraine and Gaza. At the moment, European officials have been warning Russia that NATO is ready and willing to shootdown its warplanes if they breach NATO airspace.

What a great idea: put all of the military officers at or even near flag rank from all branches in one place all at the same time, and tell the world about it, just as we are standing on the brink of WWIII. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Tuesday, Sept. 30th, could be a very fraught day. This is a good case of a meeting that should have been an email. No smiley.