My Gates Foundation Post on Autism & Vaccine Misinformation

I have a guest post on the Gates Foundation site: After the Debunking: Autism Parents Have Their Say, about how, as a post-autism-diagnosis parent in crisis, I fell for anti-vaccine misinformation despite having lived in West Africa and being familiar with vaccine-preventable disease; how rigorous autism-vaccine link debunking helped me resume vaccinating my kids; and what we can do to protect the health of all of our kids (the following is an excerpt from the original post):

• Read up on vaccine information:
  • Vaccines and Your Child, by Dr. Paul Offit and Charlotte Moser
  • The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear, by Seth Mnookin
  • Shot of Prevention
  • Parents of Kids With Infections Diseases
• Practice positive vaccination role modeling.
• Be visible not judgmental.
• Talk about your own vaccination decisions.
• Encourage parents of children with autism to compare their kids’ home videos*, pictures, and medical records to their immunization records. The autism symptoms may have been there all along.

It was an honor to write for the Gates Foundation, and I hope my story reaches the right eyes and ears.

Some of my Ghanaian best friends: Mrs. T., Sylvia T., and Joyce T., who was my University of Ghana roommate and who spoke at my and Seymour's wedding.

*The link is my TPGA report from the IMFAR (International Meeting for Autism Research) session  Onset Patterns in Autism: Correspondence Between Home Video and Parent Report. Visit the Thinking Person's Guide to Autism for past and upcoming write ups of the IMFAR  sessions I attended.