"Private Practice" - the "Grey's Anatomy" spinoff starring Kate Walsh - may be one of the most poorly written, bad excuse for soft porn shows on TV. But big props to the show for last night's episode/public service announcement, which has already ignited a firestorm on the autism blogs.

The episode featured a mother with three sons, and the oldest was autistic. Blaming the MMR vaccine for her child's autism, she chose not to vaccinate her two other sons. An unvaccinated son picks up measles while the family is in Switzerland seeking autism treatment, exposes the entire practice when he comes in, and dies at the end of the episode.

Think this is implausible? Check out this graph of the growth of measles cases in the UK over the last 12 years, courtesy of the BBC:

And it's not just the UK. During the first seven months of 2008, 131 measles cases were reported to CDC, compared with an average of 63 cases per year during 2000--2007. (On a more local level, in the first four months of 2008, there were 22 measles cases in NYC.)

Parents have the right to make choices for their children, but they don't have an inalienable right to expose other people's children to deadly diseases. And if it takes a bunch of hot faux doctors to get that message out, so be it.

Posted by eduwonkette at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (18) | TrackBacks (0)

An event so rare that it deserves its own blog post: Charlie points to a Washington Post article on NCLB and students with disabilities. The article argues that NCLB has forced schools to focus on disabled students because their scores are separately disaggregated and only a small fraction of students can be exempted. Before NCLB, too many state accountability systems had gaping loopholes that allowed these students to be ignored (for more, see here).

Of course, this brings us back to the NCLB incentives debate. If we credit the structure of the law when students with disabilities receive more attention, shouldn't we look at the structure of the law when schools emphasize tested subjects? These are questions better answered by someone with a completed AERA paper...

Posted by eduwonkette at 1:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

John McCain hopped into the autism/thimerosal debate last week when he related, “It’s indisputable that autism is on the rise among children….and there’s strong evidence that indicates that it’s got to do with a preservative in vaccines.” (Hat tip: Campaign K-12; also see On Special Education’s take on McCain's argument.)

The trouble is that no decent study has ever established a link between autism and thimerosal. For example, consider this article published in JAMA, which compared kids exposed to vaccines with and without thimerosal and concluded, “The risk of autism and other autistic-spectrum disorders did not differ significantly between children vaccinated with thimerosal-containing vaccine and children vaccinated with thimerosal-free vaccine.” Or check out this literature review, published in Pediatrics, which also came to the same conclusion. What’s more, autism rates have continued to increase even after thimerosal was removed from kids’ vaccines.

Despite this body of evidence, advocacy groups like the National Autism Association continue to argue otherwise. They're using a recent ruling in favor of an autistic child's vaccination case to further trumpet this claim; check out their press release entitled, “Government Concludes Vaccines Caused Autism.”

The “autism epidemic” has received enormous press attention, but many reporters have neglected the diagnostic process. Is it possible that children who are now labeled autistic would have been classified as mentally retarded or learning disabled a few decades ago? According to a study published in Pediatrics by the University of Wisconsin’s Paul Shattuck, diagnostic substitution may account for a non-trivial proportion of increasing autism prevalence rates. Another article, published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, concluded that diagnostic substitution may account for a third of the increase in autism cases. Shattuck nicely summarized this problem in his op-ed in the New York Times last year:

Most of the more mildly affected children who are considered to be on the spectrum today would never have qualified for an autism diagnosis using older criteria. This expansion of criteria makes it impossible to compare apples to apples when looking at data on long-term trends, because what counts as “autism” is simply quite different today.

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