"3 Reasons Aerial Pesticides Are Not Causing Autism," By Hank Campbell. Steven Hicks, M.D. PhD, pediatrician at Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, looked at autism rates in a swampy region of New York and saw higher developmental delay and autism diagnoses in some areas where and thinks he knows why; pyrethroid pesticides being sprayed by airplanes to kill mosquitoes. Scientists, toxicologists, and public health officials certainly appreciate some attention … [Read more...]
Trump Wrong about Vaccines and Autism
September 17, 2015
"Dear Donald Trump: Vaccines Don’t Cause Autism," by Center for Accountability in Science. Donald Trump has soared to the top of polls for the Republican nomination for president, and many have said it was because he makes bold statements and “speaks truth” to voters. But during last night’s presidential debate, Trump used his high-profile position to repeat one of the most dangerous health myths floating around the internet: that vaccines cause autism. The study behind this myth has been … [Read more...]
Dismiss Junk Science on Autism Causes
June 1, 2015
"Discard the Junk Science on Autism," By Dr. Joseph Perrone. What do Sean Penn and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. have in common? They’re both wealthy celebrities pushing new documentaries that make dangerous, unproven claims about the causes of autism. The rate of autism diagnoses has indeed skyrocketed in the past 20 years from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 68. However, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) points out, a large (though not the only) factor in that dramatic jump is increased … [Read more...]
Pesticides and Autism Link?
June 23, 2014
"UC-Davis Group Links Pesticides to Autism — Without Measuring Pesticides. What?," by American Council on Science and Health. There they go again: a group of “academics” long-devoted to finding pesticide toxicity by any means necessary has accomplished their goal! What goal, you ask? They have attained a vast amount of media attention (sure, mostly in the “enviro-blogosphere,” but many mainstream folks have swallowed this whole as well, thanks to the PR folks at UC-Davis and that font of … [Read more...]
Questionable Claims About Pesticides and Health
March 19, 2014
"No, Pesticides Did Not Give Your Child A Tiny Penis - Or Autism," By Hank Campbell. In mainstream media, everywhere from Fox News to Time (and here on Science 2.0, though with a little more skepticism) a bizarre study is all the rage - pesticides and other environmental toxins will give your kid a malformed penis and cause autism. And state regulations...prevent it. This overturns all of epidemiology, right? Now something has to be done. Autism causes might be okay to debate in a reasoned … [Read more...]
Autism and Environmental Toxins
March 17, 2014
"Just When You Think Science Can’t Get Any Junkier, This Comes Along," by American Council on Science and Health. We at ACSH are sure that you have heard us comment repeatedly that nothing surprises us anymore, because we’ve already heard it all. Yet, we must once again eat crow, because we STILL can’t get this right. Just when we think (or are maybe even sure) we’ve seen it all, it turns out we haven’t. Not even close this time. Today’s “How in god’s name can you publish this and keep a … [Read more...]
Autism and Toxic Exposures
February 20, 2014
"On Autism, Environmental Toxicants, And Bias," by Emily Willingham. Two clinicians who “utilize detoxification methods in their clinical practices” together with a third author have published an epic review in Translational Psychiatry claiming to evaluate the evidence for the involvement of environmental contaminants in autism. While we obviously want to limit contaminant exposure, autism doesn’t emerge here as the reason for doing so. Something that does emerge, however, looks a lot like … [Read more...]
Court Ruling on Autism and Vaccines Not About Science
August 15, 2013
"Court Rulings Don't Confirm Autism-Vaccine Link," by Emily Willingham. There’s a post making the rounds courtesy of something called “Whiteout Press” with the headline “Courts confirm vaccines cause autism.” It’s spreading across sites, through chains of elementary school parent communities, and onto radars of other communities that overlap. In other words, it’s viral. If only there were a vaccine for it. Read the full article on Forbes.com. … [Read more...]
Dangerous Results from Alarmism Regarding Vacines
July 29, 2013
"The Autism-Measles Panic, 15 Years Later," Emily Willingham. Several news outlets today are reviewing the measles outbreak in Wales, citing public health experts who lay the blame for the burst in cases squarely at the feet of Andrew Wakefield’s bogus MMR vaccine scare in 1998 and the subsequent media coverage. The Wall Street Journal has a particularly in-depth story [hits paywall if you click the link here, but clicking from Google News seems to give full access], “Fifteen Years After Autism … [Read more...]
No Link between Autism and Mercury in Seafood
July 25, 2013
"Mercury And Autism Not Linked, Again," by Emily Willingham. A “sentinel” population in the vastness of the Indian Ocean has long attracted scientific interest because of how much dietary methylmercury its members consume. The thing is, though, that as much as scientists have looked, they have yet to find any problems related to this intake. In the latest study with this ‘sentinel population’, researchers again have found no link, this time between autistic behaviors and maternal mercury … [Read more...]
Autism and Air Pollution Connected?
July 2, 2013
"Autism And Air Pollution Caveats, Again," by Emily Willingham. We’ve been here before, coupling autism and air pollution. Now, there’s a new study out, making the same claims of correlation between air pollution exposure during pregnancy and the risk of having a child with autism. When the previous studies appeared a mere few months ago, I wrote about five caveats that should give pause to taking the findings too seriously. These five things were ... Read the full article at Forbes.com. … [Read more...]
More Perspective on Autism Junk Science
November 27, 2012
"Autism and Junk Science," by American Council on Science and Health. As many as one in 88 children — and one in 54 boys — have a form of autism, according to the Centers for Disease Control. A new study attempts to pin the rise in autism to exposure to air pollution during pregnancy — but it’s a statistically invalid junk study, ACSH experts say. The researchers, led by Dr. Heather Volk of the University of Southern California, looked at the records of 279 children with autism and 245 … [Read more...]
Pesticides and Autism
October 23, 2012
"Are Pesticides A Key Driver Of The Autism Increase?" by Emily Willingham. An anti-pesticide manifesto from the Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA) has recently made a few headlines in big papers and nabbed a feature on an NPR member station with claims that “children today are sicker than they were a generation ago” and that pesticides are a “key driver” of the increase in childhood disorders such as “childhood cancers … autism, birth defects, and asthma.” The news reports almost … [Read more...]
