The Huffington Post: Featuring bad science, facile reasoning since 2005

December 14th, 2010 → 12:19 pm @

On Saturday, The Huffington Post published a story titled Autism Research: Breakthrough Discovery on the Causes of Autism. The piece was about a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association titled “Mitochondrial Dysfunction in Autism,” which, according to the HuffPo‘s Mark Hyman, “discovered a profound and serious biological underpinning of autism.”

This is a big deal because if scientists can identify a biological mechanism that causes autism, they’re that much closer to determining a cure. (Indeed, the study received plenty of attention from all sorts of blogs.) It’s also notable because the vaccines-cause-autism crowd has as of late claimed that vaccines damage mitochondria–and therefore cause autism. But Hyman’s claim is not supported by the actual data presented in the paper he wrote about. (more…)

Post Categories: alternative medicine & Andrew Wakefield & Huffington Post & JAMA & mitochondrial autism & vaccines