A Facebook survey of Unvaccinated Children and autism rates
Since the people controlling the research money won’t touch the question of comparing autism rates in vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, a non-scientist has picked up the torch. Andreas Bachmair, a natural health practitioner in Germany, asked people to fill out a form if their kids were unvaccinated, providing information about the overall health of their children. He spread the word on Facebook and on his website, German and English versions.
He got responses on 7,851 participants, the majority of whom are under the age of 2. Of course, a scientist would call his results skewed, because the participants’ parents selected themselves. A well-made study involves random selection and a matched control group.
Nevertheless, it’s interesting to look at his results. He compared his unvaccinated group to those in a separate study called KIGGS (http://www.kiggs.de/service/english/index.html) where parents of 17,641 participants, all in Germany, answered very similar questions. Presumably they were all or mostly vaccinated. So there is a control group in a way.
Is autism less prevalent in the unvaccinated? Since autism often doesn’t show up until much later than age 2, his data aren’t helpful with the autism question.
But his data showed levels of allergy, athsma, and ear infections in the unvaccinated that were much lower than the KIGGS group. In the KIGGS group, 4.7% suffer from asthma, 10.7% from hayfever and 13.2% from neurodermatitis.
The prevalence of asthma among unvaccinated children was around 2.5%, hayfever 2.5% and neurodermatitis 7%, Bachmair reported.
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A more scientific way to go about this would be to count ALL autistic children in a given community and see what percentage were vaccinated. Is this too simple? I have never heard of this having been done yet.
@autismreads – I agree. I think the prevalence of recognizing conditions (whether it be learning-based conditions such as ADD or ADHD and/or behavioural issues like on the Autism spectrum) is on the uprise due to increased awareness, knowledge and strategic testing. I think these conditions have always BEEN there, but are now more RECOGNIZED and therefore diagnosed/treated rather than overlooked or hushed up. If that makes sense.
@seasidehearts@xanga – Interesting, since I had my daughter at 21 and my son at 24. Both, I figured, relatively young ages for bearing children.
It’s interesting to me that attention always focuses on the mom. I think eventually scientists will find a cluster effect with genes & triggers. It sure isn’t just the age of the mom, because my oldest boy has autism and my youngest born five years later, does not. My oldest spent his first week in the hospital undergoing stressful testing.
@seasidehearts@xanga – What you just said is basically what I learned about in my biology class from a teacher who did know her stuff so I’m sure there is some basis to this. It looks like they are trying to find a link between autism and later in life pregnancies.
“Since the people controlling the research money won’t touch the question of comparing autism rates in vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, a non-scientist has picked up the torch.”
“Is autism less prevalent in the unvaccinated? Since autism often doesn’t show up until much later than age 2, his data aren’t helpful with the autism question.”
What the flip?
it’s interesting to look at the bible too
here’s an interesting article: http://www.ageofautism.com/2009/02/unvaccinated-children-madness.html
instead of bandying around all this conjecture, what if…we repeated the study scientifically. of course, that would make too much sense.
The correlation between vaccines and autism has been studied extensively over the past decade. The results repeatedly show no correlation. Any implication that not enough is being done to study the association is blatantly false. Autism advocates would benefit far more from research looking into actual possible causes for autism rather than endangering even more people with their support of the anti-vaccination movement.
i think extraneous factors make up the difference most likely here.
-The nonvaccinated portion of people in the study chose themselves, whereas the vaccinated portion did not. They likely had an agenda or something to “prove” which motivated them to participate. I highly doubt that most parents of nonvaccinated children who suffered adverse effects by their negligence would be equally likely to participate, possibly partially out of shame or fear of reprisal.
-I suspect it’s likely that parents of nonvaccinated children are more health-conscious and perhaps more highly educated/informed on average, taking more time to research and concentrate on their children’s health. This likely has contributed to better health quality than the norm.
I can’t remember the man who did a study on this, but i would have to ask my psychology professor
@seasidehearts@xanga – exactly, the man who studied this completely destroyed his credibility when he posted those results. previously, it sent parents into a frenzy and diseases that hadn’t shown up in years had resurfaced. i agree with your post exactly
@seasidehearts@xanga – Based on my own experience, I’d have to agree. I had my first baby when I was 19 and he is neurotypical. My other two were born after age 30 and both autistic, my son high functioning, my daughter lower functioning. It seems to have become more intense with each subsequent birth.
@ZombieMom_Speaks@xanga – I’m not a medical student or anything but my mom used to work at a OB/GYN clinic/ is a medical assistant. The age generally where the risk shoots up to a high percentage is 35. But I think we’re seeing it occur more often since it used to be common in the past for girls to get married & start a family, etc. in their early 20s, while now most of us are in college at that age. While the risk may not be *as* high in your early 30s, I still think the percentages go up the more and more you get closer to menopause so the lowest possible chance is probably from ages 18 (or younger, but no one really wants to have babies that early in this day & age)-25.
Like I said, I don’t have sources or anything to back this up but I’m just making a hypothesis from what I’ve observed/heard about.
@seasidehearts@xanga – How old? I was married twice and had my two youngest (both autistic), when I was age 31 and 32.
That wasn’t meant to be facetious, btw. I really want to know. How old is too old?
The methodology of this “study” renders it statistically irrelevant. It establishes nothing whatsoever.
The link between autism and vaccines has already been studied by LEGIT scientists… There was a correlation BUT correlation does not equal causation. This is my 2nd year in college and I’ve heard this hundreds of times from my professors already. There could be another factor that all kids that are vaccinated all have that isn’t being included in the study.
If you want my honest opinion I think kids are being born with autism because mothers are giving birth at much older ages due to wanting to be satisfied with their jobs first before starting a family.
The only word to describe this study is “irrelevant,” I would maybe even go with 2 words, and choose “statistically insignificant.” You know what else the vaccinated children had higher rates of? Not contracting polio, measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, typhoid, and tetanus, and not aiding in the spread of disease. Wouldn’t it be fun if we hadn’t eradicated smallpox?
I didn’t want this to come out as insensitively as it did, but seriously folks. There are a BILLION other things “on the rise” that correlate with autism’s climbing numbers. Just because one researcher fraudulently decided that this was the field on which he was going to focus doesn’t mean we should prolong the madness he began.
The things minimized in your post are extremely important, scientifically speaking. Things like self-selected polling instead of random selection and a control; assuming that the KIGGS group were “presumably mostly vaccinated,” and comparing kids under 2 to kids 0-17. Yikes. So many other things impact allergies/asthma/ear infections. Group childcare or home childcare? Poor air quality or excellent air quality? Genetic history of allergy/asthma, or no family history? Yikes, again. I think the dogs have already been barking up the vaccine tree for some years with no good results. My personal opinion is we should focus on a different tree.
I wonder what his purpose was in conducting this research?
It is simply not true that researchers “won’t touch the question of comparing autism rates in vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.”
There have been numerous studies on the topic, including one only a few years ago (it was in the paper and we talked about in my child development class)
At the end of the day, allergies/asthma/hayfever > having a childhood illness that might have killed me. I don’t have autism so I can’t say which is preferable, but I’m just going to guess autism > death. Juuust saying.
@Ikwa@xanga – That’s a good point too: Things that weren’t red flags for me at the TIME, I can look back and think “Hmm… now that I know more, those things were odd.” But I had no reason to look for them then. I also agree that a study to figure out the boys vs. girls issue would be interesting, since my eldest is a girl and is unaffected, and my second is a boy and is affected.
My sister-in-law is convinced her son did not show any signs of Autism until he was vaccinated. Where my sister saw it before when her baby boy was an infant now that she recalls. such info has to be hard to prove because at a very young age of infancy it has to be hard to rule out other factors. My reasoning is why is Autism more prevaliant in boys vs girls? That should be studied.
Most things that you chose to articulate as ‘shown’ in this study aren’t diagnosed younger than age two. This is not a very helpful study, in my opinion, and a poor comparison to the KIGGS study which covers children from aged 0-17 years of age.
My son wasn’t diagnosed with allergies until he was over 3 years of age, and he has to undergo another skin-prick test when he’s ten as it will be more accurate since he’ll be older. We are still working on getting a firm developmental diagnosis for him and he’s 9 years old. So if you had asked me if my fully vaccinated son had Autism or Allergies when he was 2 years old, I would have said no.
Very Interesting! Thank you!