Yahoo ran a follow-up article to my NYT oped. The reporter’s focus was on vaccines during pregnancy — are they safe given the evidence suggesting that an inflammatory response may damage the fetus? (Vaccines prompt an inflammatory response.) That was an issue I deliberately avoided in my piece. I wanted to steer very clear of vaccines. Here’s Dr. Patterson’s response, though, from his blog.
In short, there is no evidence that maternal vaccination is a risk factor for autism in the offspring. The CDC strongly advocates for vaccinating during pregnancy in flu season if the woman has not previously been vaccinated during that year. (Because the flu virus changes every year, a new vaccination is required each year) The CDC recommendation is based on the uncontested fact that it is bad to get a serious influenza infection during pregnancy. Moreover, they cite previous studies showing that maternal vaccination is safe for the offspring – although autism (or schizophrenia) was not tested as an outcome measure. However, authors from the Canadian CDC concluded in a review of the literature a couple of years ago that we don’t have enough knowledge to be sure that maternal vaccination is safe or even efficacious, especially if it is done during the first trimester. In our mouse model, we found that activating the mother’s immune system, in the absence of infection or a pathogen, was sufficient to lead to offspring with behaviors and neuropathology consistent with that seen in autism and schizophrenia.
