jenny mccarthy wants your kid to get measles: autism, vaccines, and stupid idiots

Like, autism risk pretty clearly increases when the parents are older, and I think the number of older parents has also increased significantly, but I don't know if the increase in older parents is enough to account for the increase in autism.

Thats an angle I never pondered. I am guessing studies have been done. When I was kid I'm sure the general consensus was "try not to have your first child after 35 (or whatever later age)", because of all the risks of downs syndrome and similar.

Also, older parents seem to be common among the anti-vaccine demographic, but that's just my totally unscientific observation

xpost There was once a story about disproportionate autism among children of Microsoft employees (or something like that), many of whom might have been somewhere along the spectrum (as such) any way, but many of whom definitely partnered up late.

parents who seek nonmedical exemptions from vaccines are whiter and of higher SES but i don't recall any data that they're older. might be though

used to be caustic abt the gluten-free crowd but now i think there's something genuinely up w the wheat. meanwhile i have crohn's but bread is all i care about in the world :(

xp just checked and yes they're older too

I don't think I have enough knowledge to posit any real theories, just sarcastic posts responding to studies that seem really inconclusive

Regarding Josh's point, though, I think there are a lot of people with cat allergies regardless of age, if my mid-to-late 30s peer group is representative

Yeah animal allergies I'm ok with being a real Thing, Ive seen first hand a person walk into a room my cat was in, and within 10 mins become a snotty, red faced, wheezing, dribbly mess.

my dad is like that and I have a milder form of it

In addition to parents being older, I would also posit that perhaps the increased use of assisted reproductive technologies might have something to do with it.

sunspots

CONTRAILS OMG

Flouride

some ppl really do blame flouride actually :/

all these autistic kids with nice teeth and strong bones

xpost I mean, people with SERIOUS cat allergies, like bad enough to trigger asthma attacks (asthma being another thing that seems more prevalent). But I mostly just threw cat allergies in there. Peanuts, tree nuts, strawberries, mango, passion fruit (!) ... these are all things I'm seeing more often, especially the former. Oh, and Type 1 diabetes, which is a horrible thing that is also mysteriously on the rise, also oddly among certain ethnic/income lines, iirc.

In addition to parents being older, I would also posit that perhaps the increased use of assisted reproductive technologies might have something to do with it.

what's the rate of these ailments in countries/cultures that haven't seen avg age of parents increase or increased use of assisted reproductive technologies? (obv there'd be other variables to account for when comparing)

Asthma's been pretty strongly correlated to interior and exterior environmental pollutants (as are poverty levels), iirc.

asthma and some food allergies are things kids can grow out of, too. I guess 20% of kids with peanut allergies no longer have an allergy as adults?

I seem to remember a lot more kids in elementary school having inhalers than adults having them now.

xpost I seem to recall studies that showed, say, a disproportionate amount of asthma in places like Harlem vs. some super-polluted can't-see-the-sun places, though, so it's not just pollution/poverty but maybe the type?

Some amazing asthma figures here: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs206/en/

The scale of the problem

Between 100 and 150 million people around the globe -- roughly the equivalent of the population of the Russian Federation -- suffer from asthma and this number is rising. World-wide, deaths from this condition have reached over 180,000 annually.

Around 8% of the Swiss population suffers from asthma as against only 2% some 25-30 years ago.
In Germany, there are an estimated 4 million asthmatics.
In Western Europe as a whole, asthma has doubled in ten years, according to the UCB Institute of Allergy in Belgium.
In the United States, the number of asthmatics has leapt by over 60% since the early 1980s and deaths have doubled to 5,000 a year.
There are about 3 million asthmatics in Japan of whom 7% have severe and 30% have moderate asthma.
In Australia, one child in six under the age of 16 is affected.
Asthma is not just a public health problem for developed countries. In developing countries, however, the incidence of the disease varies greatly.

India has an estimated 15-20 million asthmatics.
In the Western Pacific Region of WHO, the incidence varies from over 50% among children in the Caroline Islands to virtually zero in Papua New Guinea.
In Brazil, Costa Rica, Panama, Peru and Uruguay, prevalence of asthma symptoms in children varies from 20% to 30%.
In Kenya, it approaches 20%.
In India, rough estimates indicate a prevalence of between 10% and 15% in 5-11 year old children.

Also xpost, some people do grow out of allergies, but I believe the only way to tell is ... to expose people to serious allergens every few years. Our friends who have a son with severe peanut allergies, I think every couple of years they go to the doctor, and the doctor basically exposes them to peanuts with an epi-pen at the ready.

damn that is a lot of asthma sufferers

In the Western Pacific Region of WHO, the incidence varies from over 50% among children in the Caroline Islands to virtually zero in Papua New Guinea.

Do Caroline Islands have more air pollution then PNG? If percentage of asthmatics is rising across the globe, that would point to global air pollution, no?

(obv there could be other causes)

I dunno, how bad can the air quality be in Switzerland?

well there's pollution in the Grand Canyon due to Los Angeles, so there's not many places that are free from it even if they are free of polluters in the immediate area

But Los Angeles pollution is much lighter than it was 30 and more years ago. Are there LA basin figures for asthma rates?

pollution is lighter but iirc dust-based air pollution is on the rise due to drained water basins inland

Does that affect the LA basin or the Eastern Cal (and points further East) areas? I didn't think that the Owens Valley problems affected us.

just using LA->Grand Canyon as example that air pollution doesn't respect metropolis boundaries

I was just wondering if the world's overall air quality is worse than it was many years ago, because cars everywhere are getting cleaner. I have heard the usual horror stories about Chinese air pollution, and I'd guess that any country desparate to increase its industrialization may have worse air than it used to, but do these effects contribute to the increases in asthma in the US and Western Europe? Or is it some other factor?

pure speculation, but couldn't air pollutants from 30 odd years ago make their way into soils/water/animals and thus still be causing/contributing to things?

i suspect pollutants to tend stick around. plus more huge industrial cities are around because there are more people. Somewhat related: I was reading a UN chart on population growth and their high end estimate for the year 2300 is iirc 36 billion people. The low end is 2 billion.

36? I always figured we'd approach some asymptotic limit long before that

That recent article on the hypothesis that levels of lead pollution might explain violent crime seems vaguely relevant here? partly because its very neat 23-year delay seems to suggest that this particular pollutant doesn't stick around.

high end estimate for the year 2300 is iirc 36 billion people. The low end is 2 billion.

What's scary is that while the first number seems utterly ridiculous, the second number seems totally, scarily plausible.

x-post to Granny.
I assume asthma is caused by airborne stuff rather than food, but I'm no doctor.

There was talk here a few months ago about a UN study that predicted 9.6 billion by 2050, but I thought there was some prediction of a gradual leveling off afterwards. I do think at some point well before 2300 the population will decline, related to water scarcity.

people will eventually get depressed and just stop doin' it

I assume so too but you never know (chronic inflammation in any area of the body can have many causes, rather than just those you'd think would affect the organ/system in question), and sorry I kinda switched there from talking about asthma cause(s) specifically to wondering if "hooray there's less pollution today!" overlooks possible lasting effects from air pollution of yesteryear.

xp

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jan/30/peanut-allergy-study-hopes-cure-children

was expecting that to mention theory of hypersanitization being a cause of uptick

http://www.thv11.com/news/article/298974/2/Mysterious-polio-like-illness-affects-kids-in-California

what is this??

Jesus Chrisy how terrifying

That's pretty frightening. If it's been going on since 2012, why has the story not gotten more traction?

They're describing acute flaccid paralysis, which can be due to a poliomyelitis caused by non-polio enteroviruses like Coxsackie (they mentioned hand-foot-mouth disease). The article doesn't say but I'm sure they've excluded Lyme and West Nile Virus (neither of which are common in CA IIRC).

AFP is rare but not unheard of. In theory, an epidemic could develop if a particular strain of non-polio enterovirus is going around. Children are susceptible to this kind of thing with enteroviruses, most adults would just have a flu-like illness without neurological involvement.

Here's a couple of medical articles reviewing viral causes of AFP...
...in Hong Kong (247 cases in 15 years): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24528511
...in India (2186 cases in 2 years): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23630606

This isn't really on-topic for this thread as there'd be no way of vaccinating for (or refusing vaccination for) the causative enterovirus yet.

thank you!

but, just to clarify, there is a virus named after Coxsackie NY?

History

The coxsackieviruses were discovered in 1948–49 by Dr. Gilbert Dalldorf, a scientist working at the New York State Department of Health in Albany, New York.

...

The virus family he discovered was eventually given the name Coxsackie, from Coxsackie, New York, a small town on the Hudson River where Dalldorf had obtained the first fecal specimens.