RE: Vaccines didn't cause GWS (or autism, or ___, or ...)

Measles incidence was highly variable prior to the introduction of the vaccine. Here’s an article with a graph that goes back to the 1940s. You can still very clearly see the effect that the two vaccine introductions had on the disease.

The reported rates of autism have increased. It’s not at all clear that the actual rates of autism have increased. Here’s a paper I linked elsewhere in this topic. The section called “Descriptive Epidemiology” has this to say (emphasis added):

The epidemiologic data coupled with dramatic increases over the past 15 years in the numbers of individuals receiving services from educational and developmental disabilities service agencies under autism classifications have focused attention on the secular trend in autism prevalence and its underlying causes. Some of the trend in administrative data is undoubtedly artifact. For example, the U.S. special education classification of autism was introduced only in 1994, and some of the rise in reported prevalence is certainly related to expansion of the boundaries set for behaviors consistent with an autism phenotype. Nonetheless, the question of whether this historical increase can be fully accounted for by these and other changes in diagnosis and classification remains open to debate, largely because it is very difficult to develop quantifiable estimates of diagnostic effects and virtually impossible to prove or disprove temporal changes in autism population risk profiles given the condition’s unknown etiology.

The data just doesn’t tell us whether there’s a real rise in autism or not. Pediatricians are much more aware of ASDs today than they were in the past, diagnostic techniques and standards have changed, and even parents are more likely to bring possible cases to the attention of the physicians. Those factors all contribute to a rise in reported incidence without implying a rise in actual incidence.

That first article (the blog entry) offers some morbidity data on measles:

• ear infection (1 in 20)
• pneumonia/bronchitis (1 in 25)
• convulsion (1 in 200)
• diarrhoea (1 in 6)
• hospital admission (1 in 100)
• meningitis/encephalitis (1 in 1,000)
• late onset: SSPE (1 in 8,000 children under 2 years old)
• death (1 in 2,500-5,000)

Ear infections and diarrhea are relatively mild in adults, but measles generally infects children, where they’re much more dangerous. The rest of them are all pretty bad. SSPE is a degenerative condition that can develop years after the actual measles infection (average is about 8 years), and is invariably deadly.

So, yeah, it’s pretty bad.