The US Health Minister Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has promised that the country’s top health authority will precisely determine the cause of autism by September, an announcement that has triggered a wave of the event among medical experts and lawyers who question the feasibility and focus of research.
Kennedy – A long -time vaccine critic who has promoted discredited theory that routine childhood images cause autism, said on Thursday that the efforts will affect hundreds of scientists. He informed the plans with the US President Donald Trump during a television cabinet meeting.
Trump suggested that vaccines could be to blame for autism, although decades of research has come to the conclusion that there is no connection between the two.
“There has to be something artificial that does that,” said Trump to Kennedy and later said: “Maybe it’s a shot. But it causes something.”
There is a scientific consensus that vaccines do not cause autism in childhood. The circularity of this reason increases alarm bells, says Kristyn Roth, spokeswoman for Autism Society of America.
“There is a concern that we go backwards and evaluate unmasked theories,” Roth told the Associated Press and added that leading autism organizations were not consulted with the planned research.
Autism is a state of development that has a variety of symptoms that can include delays in language, learning and differently in social or emotional skills. People with autism can also have a variety of support needs. Around two percent According to the Canadian public health authority, Canadian children and adolescents are autistic.
Decades of research, including studies on twins, have shown that genetics play a major role in autism, but that there is no specific “autism gene”. The US National Institute of Health, which already spend more than 300 million US dollars annually for researching autism annually, also lists some possible risk factors, such as: B. Prenatural exposure to pesticides or air pollution, extreme premature birth or low birth weight, certain health problems or parents that occur at an older age.
It is “an exquisite complex disease”, Dr. Melanie Penner, a senior clinician and development pediatrician at the Holland BloorView Kids Rehabilitation Hospital in Toronto, told CBC News.
“Everything we know about autism indicates that this has a really complex, multifactorial origin that differs from child to child. So we have to invest in science that is able to understand this nuance to understand all of this complexity.”
Kennedy has not given any further details about how his study is carried out or which researchers will be involved.
It seems absurd that a single cause of a disease with such a strong genetic component can be found in a few months, says Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center in the children’s hospital in Philadelphia. The reason why Kennedy could see it as feasible, officially suspect is that Kennedy probably believes that he already knows the matter.
“He believes that vaccines cause autism. And no matter how many studies are carried out to show that he is wrong, he does not believe you,” said Offit, who is also a professor of pediatrics at the Medical School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
Offit believes that Kennedy’s end goal is to make vaccines “less available, less supportable and more frightful”.
“This is what he does and believe that it has not taken care of who he is and what he has done in the past 20 years.”
Before confirming Kennedy as a US health secretary, waves of members of the health professions asked the senators to vote against the appointment – with a letter signed by more than 800 health experts that emphasize that Kennedy’s lack of health competence and “unfounded frayed beliefs could significantly undermine public health practices”.
Increasing diagnostic rate
Trump and Kennedy have said both concerns about the increasing autism diagnoses rate, which Kennedy referred to as “epidemic”.
However, experts say that the diagnoses have increased due to a widening of autism and a widening of the consciousness efforts.
For decades, the diagnosis was only given to children with serious problems with communication or conviviality and was considered very rare. However, the diagnostic criteria were expanded about 30 years ago when scientific understanding developed in order to act as an autism as on a spectrum. Milder autism falls are far more common than severity.
With an improved screening and autism services, the diagnosis is increasingly made in recent years. And more advocacy to combat a long history of recognizing autism in girls and women, gender -specific people and in racist groups “has led to an increase in diagnoses in these groups, said Penner.
Nevertheless, the lawyers against Avaccine, including Kennedy, claim that vaccines are to blame. The theory largely comes from a work in 1998 in the medical journal The Lancet, which was later withdrawn as fraudulent.
Anne Borden King, co -founder of autistic 4 autistic: self -representation in Canada, says that it is extremely stigmatized when discussions about autism focus on a “cause” or “healing”.
“We don’t want to be prevented. We want services that are actually useful for autistic people,” she said.
“My question as a lawyer is how many of these wild geese hunt we have to continue if we could really bring all these scientists to work, and all these research funds for working and research, which are actually improved the quality of life for autistic people who are here and now.”
Kennedy’s project already has a rocky start. The Department of Health and Human Services commissioned David Geier, a man who was once occupied by the state of Maryland because he had practiced medicine against a child without a doctor’s license, and has repeatedly claimed a connection between vaccines and autism in order to lead the federal research efforts.
The department did not immediately respond to a request for comments.
