Yeah that seemed to be what the police were claiming but I don't really get it. They were seeking an alternate, valid, and known treatment in another jurisdiction. As I said I'm not 100% up on the case and there may well be a ton of things going on that we don't know but so far it looks pretty bad to me.

I'm pretty sure the parents are out if their minds with grief and worry, perhaps not making the most logical plans regarding house sales. But still, I wouldn't leave the country if my child was dying in hospital. I'm not saying I'd smuggle him out Spain, I just wouldn't leave him for anything.

From what I've read so far this is a massive cock up and a wholly inappropriate use of the law. There might be more going on than we know but this is a free country with two health care systems (public and private) and we have freedom of movement. If I want to take my kid elsewhere fir medical treatment I have that…

This is an excellent point to bring up. Thank you.

they were attempting to take him to a proton therapy centre in the Czech Republic.

Another aspect of it that I thought was incredibly distasteful, was how the media kept going on and on about the family being Jehova's witnesses. While they oppose blood transfusions for religious reasons they do not object to cancer treatments in any shape or form and it should never have been made into the big issue…

I want to bracket for a moment the parents' decisions (because of the religious angle) and ask how many kids in England /UK went missing last week? Was this kind police and media effort put into tracking them down?

I don't get it... Why arrest the parents of the child when they take him out of the hospital? How does that even work?

From the Guardian coverage, they were going, not just to sell the property, but to take the kid someplace where he could have the procedure.

Yes, and I think most people realize that Autism in it's most severe forms can consume the lives of entire families. But even so, as you mentioned, most people would rather have their child alive and living with Autism, than dead from a totally preventable disease.

Of course you're freaked out. It's hard. One thing that it might help for you to know is that the people assessing your child will do their best to make it stress free for him and for you. A lot of the assessments seem like games. After the testing there will be a meeting where the test results will be explained in…

thank goodness it is now being diagnosed in girls. I was born in 75' with high functioning autism and by third grade they were like "what's wrong with her?" I was given IQ tests as well as other tests by a psychologist and I tested very well so they all shrugged their shoulders and said "bright and quirky, I guess".…

No! Complicated natural systems are scary! It must be evil Big Pharma trying to kill us all.

Because that research paper is a travesty of bad statistics, with data heavily cherrypicked by Wakefield et al. And the paper has since bee retracted.

Or something in their immediate environment—a common food, chemicals used to clean the schools they go to—the vaccine may not be all they have in common, or maybe the vaccine+certain environmental factor+genetic similarity=bad reaction? It's really complicated.

I've seen that floating around, but no real news organization has TOUCHED it yet, and it's been a few weeks. I think you need to ask yourself, why? This would be almost Woodward/Bernstein level shit for a journalist.

Well no, not really. Since I and my peer group all had it, and if the side effects were anything like what happened to those girls, it would have affected at least some of us. Since I'm a former clinic volunteer, I know that the women I worked with are highly ethical and if they had concerns or saw a pattern of side…

Or it's something completely unrelated because humans are terrible at correlations = causation.

Another reason so many girls may be experiencing the same side effects is that smaller isolated towns often lack genetic diversity. Diversity in genetics and subsequent diversity in metabolic pathways is why one person may be affected vs another having no side effects when it comes to all medication, not just…