Continuing on Autism and Inoculation; Pollution or Hurricanes?

View 784 Tuesday, July 30, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barrack Obama, January 231, 2009

We took Sable for a walk around the block this morning. She was tired and ready to come home, but she was cheerful and happy to be home and I think she feels better for the exercise even though she limps a lot. She was slow this morning, but she managed to run into the breakfast room when she heard the spoon click on the cereal dish – it sounds different when you’re down to the last spoonful and she has decided that she’s entitled to lick the dish when we’re finished. She’s smart, and she’s cute, and she knows how to exploit being cute. But then she always has been.

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/images/photos2002/sable1.html

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/images/photos2002/sable2.html

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/images/photos2002/sable3.html

Those were done when we first got her, and I used thumbnails because I was trying to keep page loading times down. You can doubleclick on the pictures to get the full image.

Continuing the theme on autism and vaccinations.

In the introduction I mused about growing up in a time when there were limited inoculations and vaccinations. There were a few religious objections to vaccination, most of them similar to those raised at the time that it was learned that those exposed to cowpox almost never got smallpox. If God wants us to get smallpox we have no business preventing His Will. That has never been the doctrine of the Catholic Church or its orthodox associates, and is not the doctrine of many evangelical churches, but there have always been a few Puritan derivatives who have held that God’s Will Be Done means that man must not interfere with afflictions. It was argued after Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod, and very much so against Jenner’s vaccinations, but common sense prevailed in most churches as rod-protected churches survived and those with tall unprotected steeples burned, and vaccinated children did not die of the pox.

Cowpox is a fairly mild skin disease; smallpox was often fatal. People were so afraid of smallpox that some, like John and Abigail Adams, resorted to inoculation: they deliberately infected themselves with tissue from pox patients in hopes of achieving a mild case of smallpox – in hopes of avoiding the full pox. Inoculation was practiced in China in the First Millennium AD, and possibly in India two thousand years before that. Because it could result in a full and contagious case of smallpox, inoculation remained controversial, although there were reliable indications that inoculation was fatal less than 5% of the time, while smallpox was 30% fatal and some variants were essentially 100% fatal. When Jenner and other British physicians noticed that vaccination – inoculation with vaccina virus – conferred immunity from smallpox after recovery from a mild form of cowpox, vaccination became popular, and after a few years of controversy became mandatory.

Over time inoculations against tetanus (lockjaw), diphtheria, and pertussis (whooping cough) became popular, and over time it became popular to give DPT shots which inoculated against all three at the same time. While I was growing up The story of Balto and the 1925 race against time to deliver diphtheria inoculation doses to Nome was known to every school child – at least to all I met in Memphis and Capleville – and I didn’t know anyone who was opposed to inoculation.

Then inoculations against measles, mumps, and rubella (German measles) were developed. I’d already had measles and mumps by the time those inoculations became widespread, and I never had them.

Now it’s time to look at the history of autism. When I was in graduate courses in psychology in the 1950’s, autism wasn’t a big subject. Henderson and Gillespie, A Textbook of Psychiatry, 15^th Ed. 1951, has no index item for Asperger or autism. In those days the medicos and the Freudians were the main schools of psychology theory. The medicos were hoping to find medical cures or at least alleviative medicines for psychiatric problem, but they hadn’t really been developed yet. They tended to insulin shock and electric shock, and even psychosurgery which the psychologists denoted as butchery. In one graduate psychology class we were shown that many of the effects of electro convulsive shock were indistinguishable from a blow to the head with a padded club.

The talk therapists on the other hand had their grand theories based on – well, on case histories, supposedly. In particular Sigmund Freud was the giant of the field. There were disciples and heretic prophets, and it was often difficult to determine which was which. There were also a myriad of odd and special theories and schools. Rogerian permissiveness, Freudian paternalism, Karen Horney’s variant on Freud and Jung, and Jung who got off into the realm of science fiction with his collective unconscious – which became one of the founding pillars of the science fiction author Lafayette Ron Hubbard who burst on the scene with Dianetics. Dianetics purported to be the modern science of mental health, and there was no hint of religion about it in the early 1950’s. It incorporated the theories of General Semantics as espoused by Korzybski, Wendell Johnson, and Hayakawa and much of the psychostructure of Jung’s variant of Freud, postulating “minds” and various neural structures for which there was no physiological evidence (just as there had never been any evidence for Freud’s Ego, Id, and Superego). Freud, of course, had medical degrees and put forth his case histories as evidence. Hubbell had no degrees, and put forth his case histories as evidence. It is now known that Freud made up many of his case histories. Given Hubbard’s biographical data, it is very difficult to determine when he compiled his case histories and his early patients have been extraordinarily difficult to find. Pretty well the same could be said for most of the other leaders in psychological theory. Orgone Therapy, Psychodrama, Gestalt theory, Horney’s ‘feminist’ psychology, general semantics and its variants – there was no end to theory but very little evidence, and no science at all.

Of the schools of psychology, the Freudians claimed the greatest respectability, and it could be said that there were Freudians and all the others.

And none of those were much concerned with autism. Moreover, ADHD didn’t exist at all.

I will continue this ramble into autism and vaccination – there is a connection – tomorrow and at some point I’ll pull all these pieces into a single report. Bear with me. Now I have other things I must do today.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323300004578555453881252798.html

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704022804575041212437364420.html

On Unintended Consequences

We are all happy that there is no longer smog in Los Angeles (at least not much; we can see the mountains every day, etc.) and I am sure that is true over on the East Coast.  Of course the cost of reducing pollution may be more hurricanes.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/23/pollution-reduced-frequency-of-north-atlantic-hurricanes-study/

http://www.france24.com/en/20130623-man-made-particles-lowered-hurricane-frequency-study

We can discuss this another time.  None of this is in the current climate models, of course, and in our politicized  science grant environment it’s unlikely to be studied.

I get a lot of mail pointing me to web sites that I might find interesting. I try to look at a lot of them although I can’t get to them all, and if it looks interesting enough that I would probably want to comment and link to it I tend to leave the Tab open in Firefox. Over time those accumulate and I have to do something about them. This last week or so I had less time to follow them up. I kept the ones below, but in going over them I don’t think I’ll be able to comment on them, so I am putting them here. If you find one of these particularly interesting you can remind me to look at it again. And I have closed the tabs.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/22/prescient-fallen-angels-a1991-satire-of-climate-alarmism/#more-88559

http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2013-06-12.html

http://vigilantcitizen.com/latestnews/former-fbi-counterterrorism-agent-all-digital-communications-and-phonecalls-are-recorded/

http://thonyc.wordpress.com/2013/06/08/a-mind-bogglingly-stupid-statement/

http://accordingtohoyt.com/2013/06/12/who-are-you-really-2/

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/07/%E2%80%9Cwhy_did_you_shoot_me_i_was_reading_a_book_the_new_warrior_cop_is_out_of_control/

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/sun-s-bizarre-activity-may-trigger-another-ice-age-1.1460937