Sorry Fido, No Bath For You
Bathe your pet in flea shampoo while you’re pregnant and you are twice as likely to have an autistic child, according to new research to be presented today at the International Meeting For Autism Research in London (scroll down on this link, past the report on how baby bottle chemicals can sentence a child to a life of obesity).
No pets in our house (Charlie is much more easy-going around dogs these days, but still wary). But what about the therapy dogs?
Tags: asd, asperger, autism, autism blog, bottles, disabilities blog, dogs, Family, family blog, fleas, obesity, Parenting, pdd-nos, shampoo
2 opinions for Sorry Fido, No Bath For You
Regan
May 16, 2008 at 9:27 pm
Actually, I think what can be said with the most certainty is,
“The study, at the University of California Davis Centre for Children’s Environmental Health, found that mothers of the children with autism spectrum disorders, which include Asperger’s syndrome, were twice as likely to REPORT using pet shampoos for fleas or ticks than mothers of normally developing children.”
Twice as likely to report is maybe a semantic difference from twice as likely to have, but I think it could be meaningful in this case.
Just as sidebar, I have been gardening long enough to remember when pyrethins were being touted as the green alternative to malathion, diazanon and chlordane, so they are in a lot more products, but I am guessing that the shampoos were either statistically significant in the analysis or the other things were not recalled or surveyed.
Just kind of an “OT” comment.
These are talks and posters at a conference, and unless is a report on previously published or in press work, is interesting but not necessarily yet representative of a future peer reviewed paper.
Kristina Chew, PhD
May 16, 2008 at 10:59 pm
Not OT at all but an example of something especially important to me, close reading—-as in the difference you note between “twice as likely to report” and “twice as likely to have.”
I am teaching a research methods seminar next spring to college students preparing to do research on their own and autism seems to be a subject full of examples of what is and what is not published, peer-reviewed research (as in, not poster presentations).
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