This is one of my go to blogs. Principally concerned with "woo" or false science.
I think this is the first time they have covered autism. It's a long article but worth it. It also touches on some things like trends in diagnosis which I posted about earlier. Also how misleading statistics can be.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/au...-to-1-in-59-and-antivaxers-lose-it-yet-again/
This is just a brief snippet :
One of the central narratives of the antivaccine movement is that we are in the midst of an “autism epidemic,” which I’ve sometimes heard called an “autism tsunami.” This narrative is essential to the idea that vaccines cause autism because of the expansion of the vaccine schedule in the 1990s that antivaxers blame for the “epidemic” that’s occurred over the last 25 years. Basically, no autism epidemic, no vaccine causation. Antivaxers know this. Unfortunately, what they either don’t know or refuse to acknowledge is that an increase in diagnoses of a condition is not necessarily the same thing as a true increase in prevalence. An increase in diagnoses without a true increase in prevalence (on a biological basis) can occur through, for example, changing of the diagnostic criteria over time or increased screening. My favorite example of the latter is, of course, DCIS, but there are others. For example, increased screening with ultrasound has led to a massive increase in the number of diagnoses of thyroid cancer, the vast majority of which are almost certainly overdiagnosis. Actually, there are issues with changing criteria for the diagnosis of thyroid cancer too. Indeed, diseases for which the prevalence is increasing often involve both increased screening and changes in the diagnostic criteria.
I think this is the first time they have covered autism. It's a long article but worth it. It also touches on some things like trends in diagnosis which I posted about earlier. Also how misleading statistics can be.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/au...-to-1-in-59-and-antivaxers-lose-it-yet-again/
This is just a brief snippet :
One of the central narratives of the antivaccine movement is that we are in the midst of an “autism epidemic,” which I’ve sometimes heard called an “autism tsunami.” This narrative is essential to the idea that vaccines cause autism because of the expansion of the vaccine schedule in the 1990s that antivaxers blame for the “epidemic” that’s occurred over the last 25 years. Basically, no autism epidemic, no vaccine causation. Antivaxers know this. Unfortunately, what they either don’t know or refuse to acknowledge is that an increase in diagnoses of a condition is not necessarily the same thing as a true increase in prevalence. An increase in diagnoses without a true increase in prevalence (on a biological basis) can occur through, for example, changing of the diagnostic criteria over time or increased screening. My favorite example of the latter is, of course, DCIS, but there are others. For example, increased screening with ultrasound has led to a massive increase in the number of diagnoses of thyroid cancer, the vast majority of which are almost certainly overdiagnosis. Actually, there are issues with changing criteria for the diagnosis of thyroid cancer too. Indeed, diseases for which the prevalence is increasing often involve both increased screening and changes in the diagnostic criteria.
