Autism-Vaccine Doctor Banned From Practicing Medicine
The doctor whose controversial research first tied autism to vaccination has lost his license to practice medicine in the United Kingdom, BBC News reports. In January, Britain's General Medical Council ruled that Andrew Wakefield acted unethically while conducting that research and allegedly paid kids for providing blood samples at a birthday party, among more than 30 other charges. Weeks later, The Lancet retracted the study in which Wakefield suggested that participants developed autism after getting MMR shots. Now, the GMC has decided that Wakefield's actions amounted to "serious professional misconduct" and banned him from the medical profession.
The effect of his research on the health of children has been extraordinary, U.S. News contributor Nancy Shute wrote in February. Vaccination rates for children in the United States and the United Kingdom have been dropping, and the rates of deadly childhood diseases like measles are rising for the first time in decades.
Time and money that could have been marshaled to find the true causes of autism, and then used to develop effective treatments for the nearly 1 in 100 American children diagnosed with autism or a related disorder, have instead been sidetracked to the expensive and exhausting effort of combating the antivaccine movement inspired by Wakefield's flawed report, Shute wrote. [Read more: Vaccine Study Retracted, and Causes of Autism Remain Elusive.]
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Autism Doesn't Doom Parents to Divorce, Researchers Report
Learning that a child has autism can be devastating, especially since moms and dads often hear that parents of children with autism have an 80 percent divorce rate. But that high divorce rate, it turns out, is just an urban legend. Parents of a child with autism are no more likely to divorce than are parents in unaffected families, U.S. News contributor Nancy Shute reports.
"We looked and couldn't find where this statistic came from, so we did our own well-conducted survey," says Brian Freedman, the study's lead author and clinical director of the Center for Autism and Related Disorders at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore. Parents often would tell him how upset they were to be getting a "diagnosis of divorce" at the same time their child was diagnosed.
Freedman's report is based on the 2007 National Survey of Children's Health, which polled families of 77,911 children, ages 3 to 17. In families where a child had autism, 64 percent of the children lived with two parents. In families unaffected by autism, 65 percent had a two-parent household. That's good news, but it's not to say that life is easy for parents of children with an autism spectrum disorder. For most families, managing the child's health and treatment takes huge amounts of time and money. "We do know they face these stressors," Freedman says, "but they're quite resilient." [Read more: Contrary to Myth, Autism Doesn't Doom Parents to Divorce.]
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