Reading the Research about Autism -- Carefully

As the About Guide to Autism, I've signed up for the Google news alerts about autism. I'm on various autism listserves. And I'm on the mailing list for a raft of autism-related foundations. As a result, my mailbox fills up fast with links to headlines like this one: "Another Study Raises Questions Over MMR!"

Seeing that headline in the British Daily Mail, a reader would assume that some clear link had finally been made to link the MMR to autism. But dig a little deeper into the article, and you find that -- no, what was found was a confirmation that a group of children with autism were found to have measles virus in their gut. This was exactly what Dr. Wakefield found back in 1998 -- nothing new, and nothing definitive. In fact, the article cites one of the researchers, Dr. Stephen Walker, as saying the following:

'We haven't done anything to demonstrate that the measles virus is causing autism or even causing bowel disease. 'Even if we showed association between measles virus and bowel disease and we published in a peer-reviewed journal, the conclusion will be simply that there is measles virus in the gut of a large number of children who have regressive autism and bowel disease. End of story.'

Autism is a hot topic right now, and there's a great desire within the media to hype every headline. It's so hard not to respond to headlines and TV one-liners -- but as this article shows, the headline and the story are not necessarily the same thing!