More Grist for Your Mill....

I belong to Daily Challenge, an online exercise group.  Their "Well-Being Wire" often prints items of interest regarding health.  Today they offered this:

Another Major Study Debunks Vaccine-Autism Link

by Bob Curley on April 24, 2015. Filed under: Healthy Behaviors

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, some still believe that vaccines for diseases like measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) increase their children’s risks of developing autism. Yet another study shows that simply isn’t the case, the Guardian reports.

Using data on nearly 100,000 kids, researchers led by Anjali Jain of the health care consulting firm The Lewin Group found that there was no link between MMR vaccines and autism rates.

There is a higher risk of autism among children in families where an older sibling has an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) — 6.9 percent compared to 0.9 percent in non ASD families. But these families are actually less likely to vaccinate their younger children after their older ones received an ASD diagnosis. If there was any link between vaccination and autism, scientists would expect to see the opposite be the case.

This study marks merely the latest of many to discredit supposed links between vaccination rates and autism risk. Most notably, the progenitor of the autism-vaccine link, gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield, not only had his research thrown out but was disbarred from the medical profession.

In other words, don’t let the myths stop you from vaccinating your kids.

The study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

 If you have been following XE Xpress this past week, you'll know faithful reader Stuart Savory
and I have gone back and forth about polio vaccines in the comments, and he claimed at one point to be making a "point for the Anti-Vaxxers you have in the USA."  They're not mine, Stuart.  This is a big country, and there are oddballs aplenty making headlines (they hope).  I assured Stuart that I doubt very much whether any Anti-Vaxxers read XE or its offshoots, especially this one.  I know all three of XPress's readers, and they are impeccable thinkers. (Even you, Stuart.)

So I'm posting this, thanks to Daily Challenge. 

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