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Autism In Amish Children – 1 in 10,000

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After learning that “Autism Rates Rocket – 1 in 38 British Boys – Cambridge Study”

we now find Dr. Max Wiznitzer, a key vaccine proponent admitted on Friday night’s US TV programme Larry King Live that the rate of autism in northeastern Ohio, the largest Amish community in the USA with low rates of vaccination, was 1 in 10,000. He should know, he said: “I’m their neurologist.” [See: Larry King Live – Breakthrough Coverage & More]

Dr. Max Wiznitzer of University Hospitals in Cleveland is an expert witness for the government against the families who file in the US National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. In the US Federal Court case of Ben Zeller of proven developmental delay caused by vaccines the Court commented on Dr Wiznitzer’s expert testimony defending the vaccines on behalf of the defendant US Department of Health and Human Services that Wiznitzer had no alternative explanation for Ben Zeller’s injuries beyond:-

Unconfirmed speculation by a few treating doctors, as with Dr. Wiznitzer’s hypothesization” http://www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/ABELL.ZELLER073008.pdf

Wiznitzer admits to Amish vaccination rates being around 50% but others have reported very much lower rates.

Dr Wiznitzer’s comment is recorded in this extract of CNN’s transcript of the programme [emphasis added]:-

KARTZINEL: I think they made some very good points, especially about doing studies with children who haven’t been vaccinated. When you look at smoking, for example, when you look at smokers and the rates of lung cancer, it didn’t become apparent until they compared that to non-smokers. Then the lung cancer rates were high.

We need to look at these diseases, whether it be childhood asthma or attention deficit order or autism, and look at them among those who were vaccinated and compare them to those who weren’t.

KING: Are you saying it will show that vaccinations played a part?

KARTZINEL: Absolutely.

KING: How will you respond to that, Dr. Wiznitzer?

WIZNITZER: Years ago, I thought about this idea among the Amish population here in northeast Ohio, to whom I am actually the neurologist. And I went to the public health nurses and said, tell me about their vaccination rates. And I was told that there is a very high rate of vaccination amongst the Amish population. Out of ten thousand of individuals in our population, we have one child with autism. I see all these children.

The fact is, we can’t basically use the argument. It’s much more complex than just vaccinated versus unvaccinated.

But the following extract by journalist and former senior UPI Editor Dan Olmsted disagrees:-

“Wang is the medical director, and a physician and researcher, at the DDC Clinic for Special Needs Children, created three years ago to treat the Amish in northeastern Ohio.

“I take care of all the children with special needs,” he said, putting him in a unique position to observe autism. “The one case Wang has identified is a 12-year-old boy.”

He said half the children in the area were vaccinated, half weren’t. That child, he said, was vaccinated, but let’s not split hairs here. Either vaccinated or unvaccinated, that’s a low rate — 1 in 5000. The question I didn’t think to ask at the time but will soon, is, exactly how were those half vaccinated? Flu shots for pregnant moms? Hep B at birth? Chickenpox and MMR on the same day at one year? Rotavirus, Hep B, Hep A, and on and on? Or did it look more like the less intense, less front-loaded schedule in place in the rest of the country back before the autism epidemic began? The kind Jenny and Jim and J.B. and Jerry (hey, the four J’s!) keep harking back to when the autism rate was, like, 1 in 10,000 and we still managed to stave off wholesale plagues.

Let’s even stipulate that the vaccine schedule for every single Amish child is now fully loaded and follows the CDC to a T. What is Wiznitzer’s point? That the Amish genes protect them? Well, good for them, then, let’s find out why. Or, that some kind of other environmental risk is absent? In that case, autism is a genetic vulnerability with an environmental trigger, and something about the Amish world is not triggering it, which puts us back about where I started four years ago. There would have been plenty of time to have the answer right now if Julie Gerberding weren’t still filibustering the question by talking about numerators, denominators and getting more research into the pipeline as fast as bureaucratically possible (meaning never, never, never).

Critics of the Amish Anomaly — like critics of the idea that vaccines might be implicated in autism — want to have it every which way.

For a closely related stories see:

Autism Not Genetic – Says Expert Professor Simon Baron Cohen

Autism Increase Environmental Not Genetic – Says New Director of USA’s $30.5 Billion Health Research Budget

For more read:

Olmsted on Autism: 1 in 10,000 Amish – April 04, 2009.

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