McCarron, a former pathologist, testified she felt responsible for Katie’s autism because she allowed the child to get vaccinated.

is one that I found in a January 12 Associated Press story on this website

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gzi4G83F97PxaZn6ctuLeZ9l5tkwD8U453JG0

The AP story also talks of a videotaped confession that was made of McCarron sitting next to her husband in the hospital after a suicide attempt. It is during that confession that her words about vaccines were allegedly spoken.

Good luck trying to find any mention of the word ‘vaccine’ on google, today, though, if you do either a web or a news search on the words ‘karen+mccarron’. I don’t know, maybe there’s something wrong with my browser.

http://www.wideopenwest.com/~r_nemeth/clinic_timeline.htm

CNN claims to have obtained an answer to this question

http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/10/31/flu.hm.flu.shot/index.html

and they say that only six percent of individual doses of flu shots for this season are ‘mercury free’. If one is to presume that the rest have levels of thimerosal that could be of concern, then, eight long years after the Department of Health and Human Services said that thimerosal should and would be removed from vaccines, the vast majority of flu vaccines in the US still contain the mercury preservative.

Most of the articles I read have a great deal to say about the influence of genes on the development of autism. I am not surprised that genes would affect the development of this devastating condition–they have some affect on how each and every one of us reacts to each and every thing we are exposed to in our environment.

I believe that the incidence of autism in all of it’s forms has skyrocketed in recent decades—I’m pretty sure even the CDC no longer denies this. What the article fails to address is that it is impossible to explain such a ballooning in incidence simply by looking at genetic factors, and not environmental ones as well. (If the environment seems to be affecting genes, journalists these days seem to me to be loath to write the word ‘environment’, but will merely refer to a genetic cause.) If I remember my high school biology correctly, genes are combined, male and female, and passed on from one generation to the next, which means that the process of change in populations is a slow one that can occur only with the passage of many generations. This spike in autism that has parents so concerned right now, however, has occurred in the space of a decade and a half. Such swift change is not possible only via the natural recombination of genes that occurs when two parents have sex. It seems to me that some kind of damage is being done to the genetic makeup, or simply damage to the organism.

JS O’Brien posted here, about an experience he had with a newspaper journalist, ‘Since the paper was reporting accurately that someone else said it, they had no ethical responsibility to probe further.’

Here’s some reporting on the Karen McCarron story, by the Associated Press, that I find particularly interesting (http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gzi4G83F97PxaZn6ctuLeZ9l5tkwD8U63A0O1):

‘McCarron said she ignored God’s warnings by listening to doctors and having Katie vaccinated, then believed the vaccinations caused the autism, said Glenmullen, who works at Harvard University and came to her conclusion by reading another psychiatrist’s interviews, reviewing medical records and hearing other testimony.’

Does Karen McCarron actually believe that God warned her to kill her child? I don’t know, I can’t tell from this story, but I’m willing to bet that a lot of people will jump to that conclusion. I would love to be a fly on the wall in that courtroom, though.

In the words of the infamous F Lee Bailey, “Let’s not cloud this issue with the facts”.

Personally, I’d like nothing better than for someone to come along and either completely debunk the Thimerosal/Mercury/Autism link or prove it beyond a doubt. But until then I hope the information is disseminated professionally and responsibly.

While they might try to say “Thimerosal” isn’t doing it, to help boost the sales of drugs by Big Pharma, that doesn’t mean there’s no mercury link (some are suggesting it’s purely genetic). By pretending that a specific derivative “might not” have anything to do with a specific condition only serves to benefit those looking to push a specific vector… That doesn’t help society at large.

I’ve also not read the study or the methods taken, but I wonder if the “Thimerosal free” vaccines used were actually -tested- for the presence of the vector or if it was taken at the “word” of the companies providing the chemicals. Testing for variables is something -much- different than letting the fox tell you he’s not really eating a chicken.

Also, and this has not been mentioned in anything I have seen: Does the removal of Thimerosal help to isolate the real source, which is the vaccine itself. In particular, the MMR combined “cocktail” of vaccines that is being pushed as the most economical way to get children vaccinated has also been identified as a possible source. There are other factors as well that may be at play, such as the fact that the whole series of shots required or recommended for babies, infants and toddlers (close to 40 by age 5?) may be pushing those small bodies past a threshold that triggers autism. To immediately fall back on”genetic” sources as so many of the reports did seems an almost knee-jerk response to exonerating the pharmaceutical industry for their production and marketing practices.

Incidentally, the MMR vaccine can be administered in three separate shots, requiring three office visits and a lot of hassle to get the doctor to order them and then not being reimbursed by insurance because it is not covered that way in most cases.

It’s bad enough having to fight my own ethical battles, but the state of journalism these days means I sometimes have to find ways of spotting the reporter a few points just to make it semi-fair.

I don’t know about you, but I started to wonder what was wrong with me that I wasn’t getting invited.

All it takes to get a paper to print ridiculously awful “research” is a press release. You send it, they print it. PR firms everywhere know this.

I wonder how much of that is related to a public that doesn’t want to read, that wants everything right-now-if-not-a-minute-ago, and wants to be pandered to. Science reporting doesn’t lend itself to pandering – it takes time and energy to understand what you’re reading. Sometimes you have to go out and do some research before you understand everything the reporter’s telling you (although the best writing gives you everything you need to understand it at at least a basic level), and it takes time and energy to write it up effectively.

In our current culture, time is money and research is money and the reporters’ tools are money, and we’ve got to keep those profit margins above 25%. That leaves us with people like me and innumerable other bloggers who do this stuff for free out of love or obsession and the rare newspaper that can afford to have science reporters on staff (like Andrew Revkin at the NYTimes).

Congratulations. You win the award for understatement of the week.

“We sometimes overstate and oversimplify.”
“We work fast, sometimes too fast, with severe limits on the space or airtime we may fill.”
“We too often omit essential perspective, context, or background.”
“We are influenced by intense competition and other pressures to tell the story first and tell it most dramatically.”

That was written nearly 20 years ago. None of those factors has improved.

Cope and Cohn’s book addresses provides precisely the kind of knowledge and analytical skills needed to allow a good reporter to tell a story housed in science. Newspaper editors can buy it at Amazon for $35.99 a pop. They could pay for their reporters’ memberships in the Society for Environmental Journalism ($45), the National Association of Science Writers ($75) and Investigative Reporters & Editors ($60). They could send their reporters to workshops and conventions.

It’s not that expensive to provide good reporters with the kind of tools Sam is arguing for. But good science writing is not prized by editors of American newspapers any more, because it fails to draw sufficient advertising support.

There was a time when more than 100 newspapers published weekly full-page science sections.

Where are they now? If the newspaper business wants to defend itself against charges it has dumbed down discourse, it should not trot out its performance in science writing.

After all, it hasn’t even addressed the four problems with which Cope and Cohn opened their book.

The new California report on thimerosal and autism contains important data, but some news outlets are mischaracterizing the results because they don’t understand how to report on science and stats. This piece notes who’s getting it right, who’s gett…

Newspapers may be an exception.

Sorry Denny.