The Relationship between Vaccination & Autism
Today, the rise of cases of autism among children pose a serious problem and urges researchers and the public to look for the reason why the amount of children with autism grows. There are multiple factors that may lead to the rise of cases of autism among children, including the enhancement of registration of cases of autism, better information processing concerning statistics of cases of autism, and other factors. However, there is also a belief that vaccination is a risk factor that may trigger the development of autism in children.The Relationship between Vaccination & Autism
Research question:
Therefore, the research question is: What, if any, is the correlation between vaccination and autism and can vaccination trigger the development of autism in children?
Thesis statement: I will argue that vaccination is safe and cannot cause autism in children because there is no factual evidence of such interdependence between vaccination and autism as well as there are no specific mechanism of the impact of vaccination on children that could have triggered the development of autism.
Literature Review:
The development of the contemporary medicine and science brought considerable advancement in the technology and treatment of various diseases. However, some issues have aggravated, including the problem of autism. The rise of the frequency of autism in children has drawn the public attention to the problem and raised the main question concerning the cause of such a substantial rise of cases of autism among children. Among the variety of risk factors, vaccines became one of the primary concerns of people as well as some experts. Some experts believed that vaccines could trigger the development of autism to the extent that autism was viewed as a sort of side-effect of vaccination. Such a view on vaccination discouraged many parents from vaccinating their children. Nevertheless, such assumptions turned out to be erroneous and no factual evidence was found to prove any correlation between vaccination and autism. However, there were theories that suggested that vaccination increased the risk of autism or could trigger the disorder in children.
Three theories were developed with regard to the possible correlation between vaccination and autism. The first theory was grounded on the idea of the negative impact of measles-mumps-rubella vaccine as the risk factor that could have triggered the development of autism in children. Proponents of this theory (Plotkin, Gerber, & Offit 460) argued that the combination measles-mumps-rubella vaccine caused autism by damaging the intestinal lining, which allows the entrance of encephalopathic proteins. However, the detailed study of the possible correlation between the MMR vaccine and autism has revealed the fact that there was no close interaction between the disorder and the vaccine. Moreover, ultimately the MMR disappeared and was replaced by new vaccines, while the problem of autism persisted and even aggravated in a way.The Relationship between Vaccination & Autism