Hmm, I guess I can take that one step further, and say that cancer research being done may help find more ways to induce cancer in the population so as to increase the need for treatment even higher.

How's that for cynical?

I think there are reasons to by somewhat cynical.

Some of this comes directly from a free-market capitalist system where vaccines, cures and preventative measures, get little funding while treatments, particularly ones which require chronic and life-long use, are well financed. The recent revelation that drug companies spent more money for advertising than research and that the vast majority of basic research done for drugs has been taxpayer funded not financed by the drug companies have done nothing to make the industries look any less like the greedy, conniving and manipulative capitalists they are.

Bottom line is that the business of business is making money. Given their druthers the drug companies would gleefully bottle stump water and sell it to you for a kings ransom if they could get away with it. For them having to produce something that at least marginally aids, or at least not directly harm, clients is a onerous task forced on them by regulations and trial lawyers.

On the other hand while the generalized cause of 'beating cancer' sounds good cancer, in all its myriad forms, doesn't generally cooperate with simple one-size-fits-all treatments.

While the general cause of cancer seems to be mostly some sort of transcription error during multiplication the exact timing, sequence and placement of the error makes different types of cancer impossible to treat with one method. Some can be expected to respond to radiation. Other types to surgery. And a third type to respond best to chemotherapy. Often a mix of all three but sometimes using the wrong treatment can cause more harm than good. Both from simple cellular or anatomical reasons but also because of the human life, what is valued by the person being treated and also their life cycle. You don't generally treat non-aggressive prostate cancer in a 90 year-old patient. Odds are he dies f something else before the cancer gets him.

Even the prevalence of cancer is not without assumptions. More people get it but then again two factors play into this. First we are simply living longer. malnutrition and disease tended to kill a good percentage of people who had or where going to get cancer. A lot of people died of 'natural causes'. Second, we are far better at spotting cancers. Back in the 1900s a cancer often had to be clearly visible to be diagnosed. Now we spot cancers of the blood and bone marrow that have no obvious growths.

"... we are simply living longer. malnutrition and disease tended to kill a good percentage of people who had or where going to get cancer. A lot of people died of 'natural causes'."

That is a very common argument, but I have a feeling that it's wrong. For instance, there is a study that should have been put out before now, called “Public Health Implications of Hazardous Substances in the Twenty-Six U.S. Great Lakes Areas of Concern,” developed by the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR). It brings together two sets of data: environmental data on known “areas of concern” — including superfund sites and hazardous waste dumps — and separate health data collected by county or, in some cases, smaller geographical regions. The findings pointed to elevated rates of lung, colon, and breast cancer; low birth weight; and infant mortality in several of the geographical areas of concern. http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/08/6942/

Also, there is a fellow who has been trying to find cases of autism in the Amish of Lancaster Co., PA, and has only found three. One is a girl adopted from China (vaccinated there), one is a girl who was perfectly normal until she was vaccinated locally, and one other. For the population, there should be over a hundred cases. Why aren't there? Could it have anything to do with the fact that the Amish haven't (historically) gotten vaccinations? Or that they don't farm with chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides?
http://www.whale.to/vaccine/olmsted.html

An easy answer like longer lifespans and better diagnosis is easy. Maybe not accurate, but it's easy. Nobody has to take responsibility for anything, and you know how this country is fond of that.

Sue

I saw that Common Dreams article and thought it was interesting. But it has to be noted that the parts of the same area were in some ways more polluted and toxic than what we see now. Difference being that up until the 1950s no one was studying the health effects. Coal tars, benzine, phenols and early disposal of toxic wastes and all sorts of other general offal and crud were freely dumped on the land and in the rivers. The same land the poor and the workers in the factories and processing plants lived and often the same water they drank.

Word was you could tell what each plant was doing by the color of the river beside it and workers were identified by their type of 'industrial cough'.

The difference is that nobody was studying the health effects and they didn't have Super-fund sites or hazardous waste dumps. They had the surrounding land and the river. Nobody considered doing it any other way. If your kid was retarded or got sick and died it was just part of living in an industrialized age. 'Hire people with hooks' and 'company stores with company credit' were standing jokes.

We are more aware of the damage and potential for biological damage because we have the tools and have taken the time.

As for the Amish.
"Could it have anything to do with the fact that the Amish haven't (historically) gotten vaccinations? Or that they don't farm with chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides?"

Nobody knows for sure. The studies are incomplete. I think several recent studies have pretty much delinked autism from vaccines and mercury within vaccines. Generally not being vaccinated or vaccinated with a vaccine that doesn't contain mercury doesn't seem to change the prevalence.

Also the rates of autism don't seem to be in any obvious way linked to pesticide or herbicide exposure. But, as far as I know, there haven't been any large studies designed to show any connection or non-connection. The anecdotal evidence doesn't show high rates of autism in people with these chemicals in their bodies. There are a whole lot of other really bad effects, including liver damage and birth defects, but autism isn't near the top of any list I remember.

IMO the best bet is that the Amish may have a genetic factor that protects them. This makes some sense because the Amish are fairly tightly intermarried. With a limited number of families and the vast majority of children being a product by crosses within this narrow community. This near inbreeding would be constantly making genotypical, hidden potential genetic tendencies, into phenotypical, clearly physically apparent, manifestations.

It also makes sense that autistic children would be kept by the tight sexual mores from reproducing. Their genetic line, and its tendency to be susceptible to autism, would die out as they naturally age and in time the population would become entirely free of the genetic tendency to succumb to autism.

This is the classic methods farmers have used to clear the susceptibility to any disease from a flock. Recessive genes lurk within the genetic code. Cross breeding to closely related animals allows the recessive genes to manifest themselves and become clearly visible. This allows the farmer to keep the lines prone to the disease from reproducing and to select the less disease prone stock and breed them instead.

The Amish are farmers and well aware of how to breed healthy stock. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a selective breeding program, and it doesn't even resemble eugenics, but it makes sense that the surrounding Amish society to want the good-looking healthy guy to get together with the good looking healthy girl. And to encourage them to have a large flock of children.

Any children with autism that might show up would be loved and cared for but they would also be encouraged to stay celibate and to avoid having children. Using this alone it wouldn't take many generations of these social pressures to eliminate the tendency to develop autism.

If true, and just because it makes some sense to me doesn't make it true, the Amish having few autistic children could be a result and benefit of having a closed and relatively inbred society. I suspect that soon enough, in a few years, some scientist will present the world with a study supporting this argument, or not.

Interesting thought. . . by successfully treating autism so that the children can function, they continue to spread the "autism gene"? Is there an autism gene?

It seems to me that over time we've simply traded off one set of carcinogens for others. Wood smoke has at least 11 known carcinogens, and not that far back everyone used fire to heat and cook with almost constantly. Sunscreen wasn't commonly available that long ago either, and heavy metals were in common use for everything from jewelry, ceramics, eating utensils and water supply systems. We do have a lot of new synthetic carcinogens in the system now, so the threat persists, but I don't think it is any greater per capita than it has always been. What has improved greatly is our ability to diagnose the disease and raise the awareness of the risk. That in itself most likely contributes to the greater number of reported and confirmed cases than what was being done even a hundred years ago.

Genetic disposition towards certain conditions is a known property of our existence. Just as with certain genetic traits making some individuals more susceptible to cancer, heart disease, or alzheimers, so to it is most likely with autism.

We also have very adaptable immune systems which when not compromised are very effective at protecting the organism. However, it's been shown that quite a few things in our everyday existence can compromise that immune system -- white processed sugar for instance. Then there are the alternatives of Aspartame and Saccharin which are unnatural to say the least. How are these chemicals processed in the human body? They mimic sugar in some respects but they don't burn like sugar. So when these chemicals start roaming around, what do our bodies do with them? I use natural unprocessed cane sugar (dark brown with the molasses still resident) or honey.

For eons our bodies evolved without processed sugar of any type. If we wanted sweet we added fruit and berries to whatever we were eating or just ate them raw. Our diet was much simpler. Simple diets still work, but the typical American diet is one of processed food. I was reading an article about MRE pocket rations and found a link on how they are processed to be stable for such a long time. Interesting read, but is it really nutrition?

Yep, I think the point is we are as much a product of our environment as our past. Some call that evolution???

Nobody is quite sure where heredity fits into autism. There seems to be some genetic component because it looks to be running in families.

There may be more than one gene involved and they may interlock. Also it may be a situation where genetic vulnerability may have to align with some external factor for full blown autism to be seen. There may also be another set of genes which may provide a protective effect. These may be separate controller genes that switch on or off the susceptibility genes or they may independently control the formation of the neurological structures and biochemical functions in a way that disallows autism.

A lot more research and experimentation needs to be done on autism. I think medical science is just now coming to grips with this disease. It has only been recently that the medical community has started to define what autism is. Without being able to clearly define what is, and what is not autism, and to start to categorize various different forms it is pretty hard to do much research. Autism may be a complex of separate but interactive issues.

The possibility of spreading diseases by allowing functionality is, has been, a big issue. Some of it comes down to what we define as a disease. White skin is clearly an adaptation to allow people to live in climates where they don't get much sunlight. Ironically while all humanity clearly had dark skin at some earlier time some claim that dark skin is the 'mark of Cain' and an affliction. It isn't clear how the starting point of all humanity can be seen as a genetic liability, possibly a disease, but it goes to show how life spits out random mutations independent of design or purpose and it is society that defines what is and what is not a disease.

I was watching TV and a piece said that all the people with blue eyes can track their heredity back to one person that had a mutation that cause blue eyes. Are blue eyes a disease? Depends. If your the first person with blue eyes and they think your possessed by a demon and stone you to death I would say it is a disease. On the other hand if everyone in your tribe thinks your special and makes you king based on your blue eyes I would say it is useful and advantageous variation.

You can see this with malaria and sickle-cell trait. If malaria is wiping out wide swaths of the population having the recessive form of sickle-cell gene, which makes you much less likely to die of malaria, is a very good thing. The sickle-cell trait is a blessing. The down side is that if you cross two people with the recessive gene a quarter of their kids will have full blown sickle-cell anemia, a debilitating disease.

Diabetes is suspected to have started as a adaptation allowing people to function longer on less food. In lean times the genes are a blessing. But the same people put into an environment where food, particularly starchy and fatty foods, are in hyper-abundance those same genes are a curse.

This is the problem with the harder forms of genetic controls, particularly eugenics. Someone comes along and in the moment decides they know what is the best form. But they largely, if not completely, ignore their own biases and the simple fact that they are stuck in the here and now and completely unaware of what is coming.

Every aspect of the human body and its variations is a potential adaptation to a past, present or a future situation. I don't want to go to far, to the point where we all stand under a rainbow with joined hands and sing Kumbiah, but variation and mutation is natures way of making sure someone survives. It pays to have many different tools in your genetic toolbox.

To some extent accommodating what might be seen as defects allows those defects to survive and flourish. We could test everyone each year and anyone who doesn't have at least 20/20 vision we shoot. In a few generations everyone has good eyesight. But at what cost? Where does it start and stop. Exactly what constitutes being sufficiently defective to not be worthy of reproduction? And how far are you willing to push it.

I suggested that within the close-knit and tightly controlled society of the Amish there are a lot of societal controls on reproduction. I'm not sure how far they would go to keep a profoundly autistic child from reproducing. I suspect they would reject the use of force but even if they don't go that far social controls are pretty strong.

I suspect that with so many other complicated issues there will always be a large grey area and a lot of what constitutes best practice will depend on the individual cases. I see little advantage to promoting the reproduction of persons with profoundly debilitating genetic defects. But defects are often social labels assigned by people in a particular time and place so I also loath the idea that society could step in and both arbitrarily and violently declare someone unworthy of reproduction.

In it's own faltering and error prone way society will have to work this out.