I saw something very intersting yesterday on Nova about
epigenetics. From what I understand, you can have certain times in life during which a gene is working over time, so to speak, and becomes susceptible to markers being turned on or off that may persist at least two generations down the line. One of the examples use in the program was autism expressed in only 1 of 2 identical twins.
My view of most "empirics" is that there is usually some truth behind observations made in the front line once you peel away the biases and unique perspectives. Ignoring all the God mumbo jumbo, which is just frankly a cop out for "we thing somethings wrong, we don't understand it, and so we're going to hide behind and un-impeachable source, but still does not mean the position is not valid, the main issue is whether or not childhood vaccinations can give rise to autism.
It seems perfectly possible that a vaccine could affect the gene expression in a way that would give rise to autism or other behavioral disorders. So if I though there was a chance that the gene existed in my family, I would be inclined to attempt to get out of vaccinating my children (even if it meant crying God about it). Once you know that the gene is in the soup, it makes the classic "public health" argument that the probability of a complication x the population size << the magnitude of the public health benefit completely goes away and you have an obligation, I think, to your children, to assess whether they individually should be vaccinated.
I suspect in the long run all of this is going to head away from the traditional understanding of alergic reaction, as it manifests itself in as an acute immune system response to a harmless antigen and the macro-biological level, and instead we are going to be looking and alergic reaction as a complex set of macro-biological instincts that can be carried from generation to generation. One puzzling question today is why there is such a higher instance of food allergies among children today, at least in the US. While there are a few plausible theories out there, many are proposing that there is an acquired environmental element to developing allergies. I recall my old grandmother telling me as a child not to smell the dandelions because so-and-so cousin did that all the time, and she has hay fever. I laughed at her, but in the end she may turn out to have been correct.
I actually have an classic alergy to a specific form of tree pollen. And I can tell you exactly when the allergy was acquired. It was when I was about 8 and had a very bad cold... and it just happened to coincide with the time of year when a local tree was at the peak of pollen count. Every year after that infection, when the pollen count went up, the immune response followed.
Even though the actual white blood cells from the first infection were long gone, at an epigenetic level, the genes has "memorized" an antigen that it associated with my earlier infection. And, accordingly, whenever the antigen was present, the immune system responded as though the infection was again present, even though it wasn't.
It has also been postulated that mercury in ones fillings is associated with allergies. More bizarre than my example, it seems that the presence of the mercury can cause a shifting auto-immune response. That is to say, a person with mercury fillings might develop an allergy to Maple pollen. Years later, they move to a location with Dogwood pollen, and they develop an alergy to the dogwood pollen, or to a food.
This suggests that the mercury, a known toxin, may be substituting for the infection in my example, and the allergic trigger is analogous to the tree pollen. Because the mercury is continuously present, but released into the body in bursts throughout the breakdown of the filling, it is possible for the toxin to trigger memorization of multiple allergic antigens. So, for example, if the immune program reads like this: toxin looks like that glob with some mercury receptor cites and maple pollen receptor cites (even though the mercury and the maple pollen are separate molecules floating around in your system), it produced the immune response that is associated with that antigen. If the immune program found mercury and no maple, it thought there was something new attacking you, and tried to glob onto a more complex shape, and eventually built in a "recognition" capability keyed on another innocuous stand in for the mercury - i.e., dogwood pollen.
If you a pragmatic vaccine designer, you might deliberately exploit this characteristic of mercury by including it in your vaccine. The quantity and toxicity of the mercury itself is not what will harm you, but a failure of perception by the immune systems chemistry may create harmful epigenetic markers. The question then becomes, if those epigenetic markers don't end up pointing at the virus cells that are included in the vaccine, what will they point to?
But suppose you are dealing with a baby with the very early stages of immuno-memory (precisely when immunization is given). It is also likely that the child is not being actually exposed to lots of germs. Maybe you are just being introduced to a new food. Possible result = food allergy. What if you are just being introduced to a new chemical used in brain development, and the chemical hasn't had a chance to be cataloged by the imuno memory as something that belongs in the body? That chemical might look to the immuno memory just the same way a piece of maple pollen might look, or a virus receptor cite might look. And the result would be an auto-immune disease that might not kill you, but merely deprive you of certain hormones that are released during different periods of cellular development. And that sounds like something that could very well lead to autism.
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