Here we go again.

You may have noticed that I've been laying off that repository of quackery, autism pseudoscience, and anti-vaccine nonsense, The Huffington Post. I assure you, it's not because things have gotten much better there. Oh, sure, occasionally someone will try to post something resembling science and rationality, but it's impossible for so few to overcome so much history and so much woo. Indeed, even when someone tries, he can't help but be sucked into the morass of pseudoscience that is HuffPo. For example, Dr. Harvey Karp (the same guy who went toe-to-toe with Dr. Jay Gordon--more on him later--on The Doctors and humiliated him) recently wrote what was for the most part a decent post taking on the myth that vaccines cause autism. Unfortunately, he couldn't resist prefacing his post with this:

If a foreign government were suspected of doing something that caused brain problems to 1/166 American children our nation would immediately and vigorously respond...and even go to war! Well, our children are under a mysterious assault that is causing 1/166 to develop autism. And, we must band together and immediately and vigorously make the correction of this problem a true national priority.

This is the sort of risibly hyperbolic warlike rhetoric that would not be out of place on the happy home for autism quackery, Age of Autism or even on the home page of Generation Rescue. The reason is that such rhetoric clearly implies that Dr. Karp accepts the "autism epidemic" fear mongering at face value. Think about it: What could be this "mysterious assault" that's supposedly making so many of our children autistic? It couldn't possibly be, as, for the most part, what the scientific consensus currently believes it is, could it? It couldn't possibly be a combination of increased awareness and diagnostic substitution, which is what most of the evidence thus far supports as the cause for the huge increase in incidence of autism over the last 20 years or so. Indeed, prominent autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen put it very well in an e-mail to Age of Autism (although I have no idea why he is bothering to try to set the cranks there straight):

I think many children in the old days were overlooked and that we are getting much closer to the true rate in the population these days. In that sense, the fact that more cases are being diagnosed could be seen as an achievement, that we are getting much better at identifying such children. If some note of alarm was needed, perhaps it should be over all those individuals who were missed in the old days, and who are now being better recognized.

Which leads Dr. Karp to opine:

In this 3-part blog, I'd like to discuss in detail the reasons why shots are very safe - and super important - and to present some fresh ideas about a more likely cause of autism: an invisible soup of toxins we're exposed to every day...endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs).

Gee, I wonder if that's what Mark and David Geier were thinking when they came up with their Lupron protocol. Or maybe he's making wild extrapolations from Dr. Baron-Cohen's "extra male" hypothesis regarding the pathogenesis of autism. Either way, combine the apocalyptic rhetoric about an autism epidemic with this bit about "endocrine disrupters," and it sounds like the whole "oh, no it's the toxins!!!" gambit, only without the "toxins" coming from vaccines. I really hope that Dr. Karp has some decent evidence to support his "endocrine disrupting chemicals" idea for autism pathogenesis, because I'm not aware of any. Maybe he can educate me, but his rhetoric leaves me worried that, after a good start defending vaccines against the sort of anti-vaccine nonsense that HuffPo is reviled for, he may descend into a different kind of pseudoscience. We'll see.

Which brings me to an old friend of the blog, Dr. Jay Gordon, and his latest foray into anti-vaccine propaganda is also on--where else?--The Huffington Post. The reason is that Dr. Gordon uses Dr. Karp's post as a jumping-off point for a post of his very own entitled, appropriately enough, Autism and Toxins. Suffice it to say, it lives down to what we've come to expect from Dr. Jay over the last four years.

Read the original blog entry...