The previous 4 parts are located here:

1. Vaccine: From Inoculation to Eradication, Part 1 of 5
2. Vaccination: the Immune System of Phagocytes, Part 2 of 5
3. Vaccination: to Kill that Which Isn't Living, Part 3 of 5
4. Vaccination: A Case Study of Measles to Chickenpox, Part 4 of 5

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Myth 1: Vaccines Cause Autism

The study is here^[1] if you want to read it. I will just like to go through a few basic things first which is that there were only 12 subjects. Of the millions of people that et the MMR vaccine each year, only 12 were use to come to a conclusion. Most studies use as many participants as possible in order to drown out any statistical noise, this can mean in the hundreds to thousands if they can manage it yet this one came off with only 12 patients. Anyways if you want to read some posts that are directly attacking this study then go here^[2] and here^[3] . Warning, I cannot grantee the language in these posts, as they were not written by myself, I am linking them because I am not attacking the study, but the conclusion.

First off, there have been so many studies that actively dispute the claims of vaccines causing autism but first we need to dissociate the 3 main believed causes of this in order to debunk it. The causes were: MMR, Thimerosal, and Too Many Vaccines.

MMR

MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) is a LAV (Live Attenuated Virus) vaccine that was linked to cause autism in a paper published on February 28th, 1998^[4] .

Andrew Wakefield, a British gastroenterologist, and colleagues published a paper in The Lancet that described 8 children whose first symptoms of autism appeared within 1 month after receiving an MMR vaccine. All 8 of these children had gastrointestinal symptoms and signs and lymphoid nodular hyperplasia revealed on endoscopy. From these observations, Wakefield postulated that MMR vaccine caused intestinal inflammation that led to translocation of usually nonpermeable peptides to the bloodstream and, subsequently, to the brain, where they affected development.

From source [4]

Table 1 from Source [4], a list of studies (and where they were done) that were done within the years following the first publication, all of which refuted the conclusion of [1].

Due to the massive amounts of vaccinations happening, with the MMR vaccine, it was easy to have descriptive and observational studies conducted providing massive amounts of statistical data that denied the claims of the study conducted by Wakefield^[1] and to add on to that, studies were not published that could confirm the findings of the original. There was even a study that looked at the number of people with autism before 1988 (when the MMR vaccine was introduced to the UK) and found that there was no change in the trend of people being diagnosed with autism from before the introduction^[5]. There was even a second study that looked at similar data over a longer period of time and found no statistical difference between the rates of autism in those vaccinated against those that are not vaccinated. I could throw study after study onto this one showing there is no link between MMR and autism but in order to save time I will suggest just going to source 4 and reading those, much shorter

Thimerosal

Thimerosal is an organomercury antiseptic compound that was used in certain vaccines and in many tattoo inks^[7]. Thimerosal is not contained in LAV vaccines^[4] (meaning it isn't in the MMR vaccine) and has been phased out of routine childhood vaccines^[8] due to public fears. Claims about the potential danger of thimerosal are unproven but tend to stem from, base on personal observations, the fact that it contains mercury. Now the fact that a compound contains something potentially toxic is a logical fallacy at best. For instance, table salt contains both sodium and chlorine (chlorine is pretty toxic in humans) yet due to how it bonds, it can be safely eaten. The reason for this is that the chemical properties of a substance change depending on the molecule, meaning some compounds containing mercury (including atomic mercury) will be toxic and some will not. Either way, the usage of thimerosal in childhood vaccines has stopped in the past 17 years. But now that we have showcased the logical fallacy of assumption, we can now move onto actually debunking claims of thimerosal being the culprit that causes autism. As many know, mercury poisoning and autism have 2 different sets of symptoms^[4] which can rule out the degrading of the compound being the cause. A study done in 2004 looked at 140,887 children vaccinated with thimerosal containing vaccines and found no correlation between thimerosal and autism^[9]. Another study looked at 2 groups, one with thimerosal vaccines and 1 without, between the years of 1990 and 1996 and determined that there wasn't any data to support a casual relationship between thimerosal and autism^[10]. Again with thimerosal, same as MMR, there are more studies that conclude no link with autism then there are is time in the day to read them all. Research is still being conducted on the toxicity of thimerosal but in the quantities it is in in vaccines, it is unable to pose a threat.

Too Many Vaccines

That old saying, too much of anything is never good is really ambiguous. How do yo define too much? Is one volume of something equivalent to another thing of similar volume when constituting what too much is? The problem with looking at pictures of this and saying that the amount of vaccines given looks scary is honestly because it is misleading. If we were to take the exact volumes of the vaccines given, you wouldn't even have a cup. I think a better reason to debunk this one though is that autism is not an immune-mediated affliction^[4] but I will discuss that more below. The idea of how too many vaccines cases autism is the impression that the number of vaccines used can overwhelm the immune system but with vaccines getting better (from advances in the field) the current recommended vaccines actually require less of an immune response then in 1980^[4] allowing for estimates of us being able to administer upwards of 1000 vaccines without compromising the immune system^[4].

What is Autism?

So I should have probably put this first but I didn't because otherwise it would make it super obvious why vaccines are extremely unlikely to cause autism. Autism is an affliction caused by any group of multiple genetic mutations (hence autism spectral disorder) and depending on the mutation will actually change how to affects the person, so not all people with autism are more susceptible to emotions, stop spreading the lie. In our current model the mutations that cause something in the autistic spectrum do so by affecting development during the prenatal stages (before birth) meaning that doing something to them after they are born won't cause autism. The confusion comes because autism is usually determine between 18 and 36 months of age, before that it is way to difficult to tell^[11]. Now what is interesting is that the rates of autism have been rising in the past 30 years but it is indeterminable on whether the rates are rising due to environmental conditions or because of newer techniques being used to diagnose the disorder^[4][12][13]. What is apparent is that there is no determinable study that has been able to link autism with vaccines. Now on a side note, sing a logical fallacy here, what would you prefer to have a child with, autism or polio?

References for Myth 1

[1] www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673697110960
[2] steemit.com/steemstem/@alexs1320/vaccine-and-autism-the-original-scientific-paper-let-s-read-it-together-and-see-why-it-s-a-bat-shit
[3] steemit.com/mathematics/@alexs1320/recognize-bad-math-learn-binomial-distribution-in-10-minutes
[4] academic.oup.com/cid/article/48/4/456/284219
[5] www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673699012398
[6] ww.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X01000974
[7[ www.hindawi.com/journals/jt/2012/373678/
[8] link.springer.com/article/10.2165%2F00002018-200528020-00001
[9] pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/112/5/1039
[10] jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/197365
[11] www.autismspeaks.org/what-autism
[12] www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-real-reasons-autism-rates-are-up-in-the-u-s/
[13] www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html

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Myth 2: Vaccines are Harmless

This myth is in reference to some peoples arguments that vaccines are purely safe. Now, in most cases, the problems that arise from vaccines are cause by factors not controlled for such as a previously compromised immune system or an allergy. Now why I bring this up is that some people will make arguments stating that there is no way that a vaccine can cause a problem. The people that make this argument tend to be in support of science and vaccines but have little background in the subject matter in which this is a time to learn. Vaccines do have the potential to cause adverse effects, the rate of these effects is dependent on the vaccine itself as each vaccine has different rates. In the case of an adverse event we have implemented a system for reporting these effects so that the data can be analyzed and the vaccines studied further to make them safer but no vaccine will be 100% safe^[1]. If you are allergic to something in the vaccine or have a compromised immune system, or a plethora of other conditions (doctors or pharmacists will ask) then you should not get a vaccine and in most cases will not. If you are unsure on whether you have an allergy, get an allergy test before the vaccine to determine.

Sources: Myth 2

[1] vaers.hhs.gov

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Myth 3: Infant Mortality Rates

So this myth is quite interesting due to the fact there are actual scientific studies that have found a correlation here but the problem is how the study was done. First they took a list of all the countries based upon infant mortality rate (IMR), that had a lower and they graphed it when compared to number of vaccines given to infants and did a linear regression to prove correlation. This was similar to how I did the findings to determine correlation between gun laws and gun mortality rate^[2] (by no means a good way to do things) but the difference was that I used ~100% of the data given in the scope, they used 33 data points of potentially 195. Now I could talk about my gun law correlation^[2] post about how bad it was to do things that way and how I could do it better via larger population of data and to use random sampling but at least I didn't intentionally ignore data points that argued my point. Anyways the study/paper was done by Neil Z Miller and Gary S Goldman^[1]. So the reason why this is considered a myth is due to faulty study and the fact that if you are getting published in a journal, you should be under a lot more scrutiny than someone blogging on steemit (no offense bloggers) but I guess I cannot completely ignore this... There is a potential that I am holding a bias here so I will instead discuss why a correlation between these doesn't necessarily mean anything. First of all, most of us have heard the phrase "Correlation does not imply causation" which means that just because 2 things are correlate, does not mean one of those things caused the other. Like for instance, if hours of TV watched correlated to amount of chips eaten, you wouldn't say eating chips made yo watch TV or that watching TV made you eat chips. This paper does nothing more than points out a correlation, without looking at any external factors or controlling for them, and states the following:

These findings demonstrate a counter-intuitive relationship: nations that require more vaccine doses tend to have higher infant mortality rates.

Which has been interpreted as a causality by many. There are other problems with this paper that it doesn't address that I won't get into here. There are better formulate arguments in a post by David Gorski^[3]

References Myth 3

[1] www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3170075/

[2]steemit.com/statistics/@kryzsec/analysis-for-correlation-between-the-number-of-gun-laws-by-state-and-gun-related-mortality-rate

[3] sciencebasedmedicine.org/vaccine-schedules-and-infant-mortality-a-false-relationship-promoted-by-the-anti-vaccine-movement/

Gorski Bio: sciencebasedmedicine.org/editorial-staff/david-h-gorski-md-phd-managing-editor/

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The post is getting a little bit long and due to the stress on my schedule caused by exams I have been taking a break from looking at this. I will make a second part covering a few more of these myths (hopefully in better context) once this finishes. In the mean time I have planned a post about batteries that I have been working on but mostly I am working on the @steemstem-bot. Just to clarify something said, when I say I would hand over the bot after 13 weeks, that is just to power down anything that I put into the bot. So if it had gathered 300-400 SP from rewards (curation, author) then that would stay in it.

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Fun Fact!

Peanuts may have "nut" in their name but they are actually legumes. Peanuts grow underound where as nuts (e.g. walnuts) grow on trees.
Source

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Image Source from @nitesh9
Do you enjoy reading or writing topics related to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) then I would suggest checking out @steemstem! They do wonderful work curating the best STEM related posts on Steemit. For more information check out the SteemStem chat room on steemit.chat or check out their Guidlines and start writing.