“Because of measles’ long incubation period, we know this outbreak will get worse before it gets better,” stated Oxiris Barbot. Recently there have been measles outbreaks in New York and in Washington state. Measle symptoms include a runny nose, red eyes, rash, fever, and an ear infection. New York has been forced to close down schools and placed an emergency mandatory measles vaccination in the city. 359 cases of measles have broken out in just New York alone because parents have decided not to vaccinate their kids. This decision was influenced by a 1997 study by Andrew Wakefield when he released a scientific paper stating vaccines cause autism. Since then this paper has been retracted yet parents still chose to not vaccinate their children in fear of them developing autism. Even though there is a vaccination for measles, mumps, and rubella, we still face outbreaks today because of a quack article. Many scientific studies have proven that vaccinations and autism do not correlate. In the 1920’s Autism was once believed to be caused by the parents of a child. When a parent isolated a child from the world basic social and emotional problems occurred such a repetitive behavior, minimal interest in activities, and mood disorders. The children would act this way because they didn’t want to live in reality. This was believed to be the relationship between the allusive life and real life. Extreme hallucinations, or schizophrenia, was thought to be the most common sign of autism since they were living out their allusive lives. After the 1960’s the definition of autism took a complete turn. Epidemiology proved that autism was the opposite of a fantasy world and didn’t go hand in hand with hallucinations. Since the children acted different compared to other children, people were assuming that hallucinations was causing this behavior. Because the children with these behaviors never reported hallucinations themselves, this theory lacked evidence. Now that hallucinations were out of the picture, researchers were, and are still on, on a mission to figure out why these behavior/emotional symptoms occur. Genes have been shown to have an important role on the development of autism. Some environmental factors such as the presence of metals are a reported risk for developing ASD. In order for Autism to be diagnosed, there’s an array of specialist the child has to see such as a psychiatrist, therapist, psychologist and speech pathologist. Multiple studies have found that there is no association between MMR vaccinations and autism therefore, vaccinate your kids!
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Indy chapter.