Category: autism

Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced vaccine critic who claimed to link vaccines to autism and helped create a worldwide anti-vaccine movement, was featured prominently on the front page of a British newspaper over the weekend.

Wakefield's paper claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism was later retracted. An investigation has accused him of fraud. And numerous studies have failed to find any evidence that vaccines cause autism. Yet a press release that he issued was reprinted by Britain's The Independent as if it were an Op-Ed comment.

In the press release, Wakefield, who may have done more than any other individual to discourage parents from vaccinating their children, blamed the government for a measles outbreak in the UK that has afflicted nearly...

In the aftermath of the horrific Newtown shooting, media reports began to circulate that the shooter, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, had been diagnosed with Asperger's syndome. Although neither the family nor health care professionals involved in treatment have officially confirmed this, an unfortunate number of news media outlets leapt on this as a possible explanation for the murderous outcome.

But the actual information was so sketchy that we ended up with stories that read occasionally sketchy as well, like this section from a David Halbfinger piece in The New York Times, in which former Lanza classmates were cited as follows: "Several said in separate interviews that it was their understanding that he had a developmental disorder. They said they had been told that the disorder was Asperger’s syndrome, which is...

Faulty and irresponsible reporting on a study finding an association between air pollution and autism has drawn the ire of the scientist and science blogger Emily Willingham--and deservedly so.

In a post at Forbes, Willingham examines coverage of a study in the Archives of General Psychiatry that found that "exposure to traffic-related air pollution, nitrogen dioxide, PM2.5, and PM10 during pregnancy and during the first year of life was associated with autism." (PM2.5 and PM10 refer to particles less than 2.5 and 10 microns in diameter.)

The researchers go on to say that further study is needed to determine whether this exposure causes autism.

Willingham didn't have to burrow deeply into the science or the coverage of...

Memoir is a tricky business, and writers who have not written much about themselves can have a hard time grappling with it. How much should a writer tell? What should be kept private? How should a writer portray his or her own foibles, mistakes, and triumphs on the page, without sounding weepy, stiff and artificial, or far too self-involved?

This problem arises when writers experience something personally that they feel compelled to write about, even if they haven't written much about themselves before. I don't know a lot about the work of the science writer Eugenie Samuel Reich, but a quick scan of her work online suggests she is a journalist, not a memoirist. Yet she has taken on a difficult and personal subject in a recent article on Slate entitled "When is it...

Jenny McCarthy--yes, that Jenny McCarthy, Playboy playmate, actress, model, ex-girlfriend of Jim Carrey, and notorious proponent of a vaccine-autism link--has been hired by the Chicago Sun-Times to write a daily blog on parenting, dating, and "family issues," the paper reports.

McCarthy's blog will run Monday through Friday. In addition, she "will debut a cheeky weekly advice column called 'Ask Jenny' inside the Splash print edition," the Sun-Times says. "Splash" is the paper's Lifestyles section, which runs daily online and is where McCarthy's blog posts will appear. (I'll have more to say about Splash in a moment; it has serious problems of its own.)

Knowing nothing about McCarthy's personal life, I'll grant that she is a mother who cares about her child; I don't have any reason to...

I posted earlier on the late-August study adding new evidence to the link between older fathers and autism and other ailments, and Deborah Blum posted on a story looking at the implications for the human gene pool. But there is, I think, one more thing to say about the coverage.

The study received wide attention, even though this link has been clear for years. Most of the coverage missed what was new about this study, which did indeed add significant evidence to what had already been known. But something very important was largely missed. And I count that as a general failure of the press.

Much of the coverage was simply silly, amounting to this: OK, men, now you have to worry about your biological clocks, too! ...

Last week, the journal Nature published a paper titled "Risk of de novo mutations and the importance of the father's age to disease risk." As Paul Raeburn noted here at the Tracker, the resulting coverage focused almost entirely on whether aging fathers could be suddenly seen as a significant contribution to autism cases.

Perhaps that emphasis isn't surprising given the fact that autism is a high-profile condition and given that earlier stories had put more emphasis on the age of the mother.  But, as science writer Seth Mnookin points out in a Monday post at New Yorker.com, the...