peristaltor | Shots V. Worms

I'll first make an up-front declaration of bias: I hate the anti-vaccination crowd.

For those of you unfamiliar with actress, comedianne and centerfold model Jenny McCarthy's hobbies, she has been probably the most visible and outspoken celebrity to endorse the vile lies that childhood vaccines, especially those containing mercury-based preservatives like Thimerisol, cause autism.

I call her positions on vaccine "vile lies" for good reason: At least four peer-reviewed studies have failed to show a connection. That doesn't stop folks -- including celebs like McCarthy and her boyfriend Jim Carrey, Robert Kennedy, Jr., Bill Mahr and a raft of others -- from flogging the Thimerisol horse corpse.

Ms. McCarthy, of course, has reason to be angry at autism; her son suffers from the condition. In this case, though, she has gone completely off the deep end attacking vaccines, even going so far as to suggest that the inevitable preventable deaths that follow people refusing to immunize their own children are a price worth paying to avoid an autism connection that (once again) has been debunked.

Let's really add to evidence of her dissonance. Though she has on more than one occasion likened vaccines to "poison," take a gander at what she had to say about one of the most deadly poisons known to man:

“I love Botox, I absolutely love it. I get it minimally so I can still move my face. But I really do think it’s a savior.”

Anyhoo, I'm not posting this just to rant. I was responding to

alobar the other day. I think the Hygienic Hypothesis might be a more likely culprit, and said so. He asked a good question: Why now? Why are we facing an explosion of autism?

I had to mull that one. I'm not sure anyone has looked into this, but I'm here suggesting it might have something to do with epigenetics, the study of how genetic code is activated and de-activated based upon environmental factors, not heredity. If you want to blow you mind and perhaps invalidate much of the stuff that got stuffed into your head about our DNA, do go immediately and view Nova's "Ghost in Your Genes". You'll see how rats that get cuddled and well-tended as pups respond more resiliently to stress later in life, that the cuddling and early nurture might actually physically activate their "resilience" DNA.

You'll also see that childhood events can have generational effects:

At the far speculative edge of this new science, some are seeing evidence of an astonishing possibility, that genes may not be all that passes from generation to generation.

The evidence comes from this Swedish village huddled on the Arctic Circle. Overkalix stands out for one reason, its archives.

Olov Bygren, a Swedish public health expert, has been studying them from more than 20 years. What makes these records unique is their detail. They track births and deaths over centuries—and harvests. This is significant because, in years past, Overkalix's location left it particularly vulnerable to crop failures and famines. . . .

Bygren was studying the connection between poor nutrition and health when he stumbled on something curious.

It appeared that a famine might affect people almost a century later, even if they had never experienced a famine themselves. . . . (Emphasis mine.)

After crunching the detailed records, Marcus Pembrey, Bygren's research partner, discovered that:

. . . a grandson was four times more likely to die from an illness related to diabetes if his grandfather had plenty of food to eat in late childhood. . . . They discovered that when a famine was able to trigger an effect was different for the grandmother than the grandfather. The grandmother appeared susceptible while she, herself, was still in the womb, while the grandfather was affected in late childhood.

MARCUS PEMBREY: And the timing of these sensitive periods was telling us that it was tied in with the formation of the eggs and the sperm.

"Tied in with the formation of the eggs and the sperm" -- of grandparents. What happened to your grandparents could one day make it more or less likely that you yourself would live or die.

Okay, now let's get back to autism. What if autism is an auto-immune disease like diabetes?

There is some evidence that suggests such a link. For example, symptoms of autism seem to diminish when the children experience high fevers. Perhaps the immune system is too busy during these fevers.

Let's assume this is the case and extrapolate. As I recently noted, RadioLab's latest covered parasites. They there mentioned that outhouses were not common in the rural South of the United States until after 1908. (I'll let you listen to learn the full icky icky story.) This improvement in hygiene took some time to popularize, but once outhouses caught on a host of until then common diseases, including salmonella, typhus and cholera, also declined in frequency and severity. So, let's start the speculative clock after 1908 in the rural South, and a few decades earlier at least in the major cities of the colder North, especially New York (which has an exceptional and unprecedented clean water system; as I mentioned earlier, some auto-immune diseases were first noted there). For the sake of an average, though, let's peg the date at or around 1900.

The average generations separate by 30 years. My own grandparents were born just after the turn of the last century. For the sake of this exercise, lets assume they led relatively infestation-free lives, unlike those of their own predecessors. Had I had children at the average age of 30, they would have been born 15 years ago or so in the early 1990s. With me so far? Okay.

Now check out the chart below (from this site):

Some disclaimers are in order. I am not a medical researcher. While I am suggesting autism may be the direct result of an auto-immune disorder, I have no personal research to back that claim, no body of empirical evidence upon which my case can stand . . . but others do:

Studies using TSO (Trichuris Suis Ova) to treat certain autoimmune disorders have yielded remarkable results with no side effects. I brought these two together and treated my autistic son with TSO with dramatic results. . . .

After 10 weeks he completely lost all symptoms of agitation, aggression, self abusive behavior (including head smashing and hand biting), perseveration(?), behavioral inflexibility, compulsivity, impulsivity, repeated questioning, “stimming” and hypersensitivity to external stimuli. He continues to take TSO every two weeks and the symptoms have been gone now for 15 months. (Emphasis mine.)

And to that, I can only strongly urge everyone to question that assumed trope that vaccines are poison, to kill that vicious rumor and get kids those shots . . . before more children die.

Edit: Link and floppy verbiage corrected October 8, 2009.