Posted on 12/08/2005 6:15:13 PM PST by agsloss
It's a far piece from the horse-and-buggies of Lancaster County, Pa., to the cars and freeways of Cook County, Ill. But thousands of children cared for by Homefirst Health Services in metropolitan Chicago have at least two things in common with thousands of Amish children in rural Lancaster: They have never been vaccinated. And they don't have autism. "We have a fairly large practice. We have about 30,000 or 35,000 children that we've taken care of over the years, and I don't think we have a single case of autism in children delivered by us who never received vaccines," said Dr. Mayer Eisenstein, Homefirst's medical director who founded the practice in 1973. Homefirst doctors have delivered more than 15,000 babies at home, and thousands of them have never been vaccinated....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Many Amish are relocating here from Ohio, which will be good for the gene pool in Lancaster.
There actually WAS an interesting study of aborigines and vaccines. Their infant mortality rate increased to nearly 50% following the inception of a government vaccination program. Massive doses of vitamin C reversed the trend. (It will take me a couple of days to find the cite if you're interested).
None of those Amish had polio. The vaccine-strain of the live polio virus was found in their feces. This is why our country discontinued use of that vaccine, since there was the possibility of transmission from those recently vaccinated.
Interesting comment. Reminds me of my Soviet expatriate colleague (no defender of communism, believe me) who nonetheless said the old Soviet Union didn't have cases of mental illness, and attributed it to there being less stress in society.
Upon further discussion, however, I concluded that the communist system just covered up such instances of mental illness very effectively. That is, you wouldn't get fired even if you did a lousy job at work (or even failed to show up), and so the mental cases just continued to draw checks, failed to perform, but were pushed along by the system.
I don't know what to make of the autism/vaccination connection, but I agree with several posters that correlation is not the same as causality.
They've kind moved around her in Indiana too. Most are Mennonite now, but a new community of Amish sprung up 50 miles north of here where I used to live, but I believe they came from the East. Don't remember where.
I agree. It's not a scientific study. It's not double blind. It's not peer reviewed. The doctor correctly refuses to say that it's scientifically proven, because he'd get blasted if he did. The writer is properly cautious as well.
Nevertheless, those are very large numbers. If it was zero out of a hundred, I could believe it was a statistical fluke. But zero out of 30,000 is pretty incredible. I think this is enough initial evidence to call for a more rigorous follow-up investigation.
That's a good point because at one point heavy metals were widely used with no precautions. The "Mad Hatter" for example. If you do a google search, you'll get links and most of them describe symptoms and conditions caused by mercury poisoning and none of it fits with autism. If mercury were the cause, I would think that there would have been a tremendous amount of autism noticed then.
My oldest son began to show autistic symptoms at the age of ten days - before he was vaccinated, but while I was on intravenous antibiotics and rehydration - and breastfeeding.
I wonder if the antibiotics or saline solution could have been preserved with thimerosol - or if the antibiotics themselves were the cause - or if that had nothing to do with it.
When he was first born he was very serene and distant and stern - like a warrior monk - unusual but not anything obviously wrong, as it was two weeks later.
Mrs VS
Amish are actually an off shoot of the Old Order Mennonites. They belong to the same council of churches.
I know of a girl who was diagnosed as autistic and even her parents disagreed with the diagnosis. Her social skills weren't the greatest but it seemed to be just a matter of maturity than anything. I would never have guessed that this girl would be diagnosed as autistic.
I almost think that zero out of 30,000 is unbelievable. Something just doesn't sit right with me with those numbers. You'd think that statistically speaking, there would be SOME number of cases of autism but NONE? That doesn't sound right.
Since Amish are so isolated, how would one of them come in contact with Polio? Just seems like it would be harder to get since they basically stay in the same place and don't fly all over the world.
Exactly.
I found this correlation equally interesting.
They do go to schools with others and accompany their parents to stores...at Hershey Park several years ago I noted many Amish families. You only need be exposed once to the right person at the right time.
I agree. The doctor's got to be exaggerating though. Is he really saying that none of the 30K children ever had any vaccines? Aren't vaccines federally required for admission into schools unless they get a religious exemption? (It doesn't sound that the people get religious exemption in that article)
Please do. I'm quite interested.
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