they see their kids working harder than any kids work, and they see that their parents do care when they're, you know, brought into the process. so they come out of it thinking when the kids are met with high expectations, given extra supports, they do well. and they also come out of it realizing that there's no silver bullet in this. meaning -- >> we're going to get to that. >> yeah. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> we're here at cpac with thomas woods talking to him about his latest book. tell us what it's about. >> well, it's about the crisis that, unfortunately, we're about to face. it turns out that the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train because we've got not only a situation where even in the best scenario we're going to start paying a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt by 2020, but also, unfortunately, the entitlement programs are underfunded by, like, $111 trillion, and there's no come -- combination of taxes or

borrowing or printing the money that could possibly solve this, so we have to start acting like adults and fix it now. .. as the mall way but there are some things we could do to ease the burden on the system. u-turn 65 the government says tuned you can get all the benefits you are entitled to under these programs or you foursquare them and the rest of your life you are exempt from income. that would immediately take tremendous pressure off of this. no one would consider this ten years ago but we're staring the

fall in the face and that is the choice of between that and unplugging granny people will consider unconventional alternatives. >> next from the annapolis book festival, seth mnookin and roy richard grinker discuss oxygen, vaccine and chief threat to public health. >> thank you for coming. we are both going to talk about our book "the panic virus" and "unstrange minds". my name is roy richard grinker and i am a professor of anthropology at george washington university. i am going to speak for ten minutes after which seth mnookin will speak for ten minute and then we will have a dialogue with each other before opening it up to the audience. many of you have probably not

heard an apologist speak about autism and that is not surprising since most of the are in the field of counseling, psychology, speech therapy and so on but i have a daughter with autism and she was diagnosed in 1994. at that time there was an emerging feeling there was an epidemic of autism. there was an emerging sense in the united states and other countries that there was a dramatic rise and people said i feel it in my gut that there are more kids with autism now than ever before. one of the strategies anthropologist's often use to look at their own world is to go away. go to other countries and learn about those other countries. not just in and of themselves but to come back and see your own society in a new light and to try to figure out what was happening with my daughter and

what was happening with autism epidemiological. was there an epidemic? i started traveling to different countries and i found some interesting things. one of my first trips was to south africa where a young couple named susanna and bolden to mollah, is zulu families, they have an adorable boy named big boy and around the age of 2 big boy lost the language he had developed. he started to make rapid repetitive stereotyped movements with his fingers and hands, he had only one interest which was drawing circles which parents said where marbles or planets. they looked to be just like circles. they knew something was wrong and they decided to go to a western-style hospital in order to have him evaluated by their parents objected. they said this is not a western illness. this is not a white man's illness.

this is an illness of god or an illness of the ancestors of the spirits. you have to go to the witch doctor. they objected. they are not terribly well educated. neither of them graduated high school but they think of themselves as very modern and very progressive and enlightened people and they said these witch doctors are shysters. they are going to take our money and give us a supernatural explanation. what happened was that the family crisis got so bad that they gave in and they said let's take which boy to the. dr.. they were terrified because they knew what would happen. big boy would be given a medic to fall much of the evil in him and a laxative to expel the evil in his balls and might even be bled to get the evil of his blood. he might see a star ceremony or an animal sacrifice. the parents were terrified and

they had to leave him with the witch doctor for two days during which time they were not allowed to see him. after two days they went to the witch doctor and said what is the verdict? the witch doctors that i know what is wrong with big boy. he has autism. the last thing they expected to hear out of a witch doctor's mouths. where did he hear about it? he heard about it on the internet. how did he hear about it on the internet? someone gave him a computer printout at one of the local meetings where which doctors go to learn about diseases. this and other experiences where we saw this dramatic increase in awareness in autism led me to realize there was a huge wave of awareness throughout the world. it gave me a new insight on the concept of academic.

it made me think what looks like an epidemic to us is a recognition and appreciation of certain kinds of differences that we use to turn away from or that we neglected in the past. my own daughter is a case in point. she is now 19 and she spends much of her week working at an animal laboratory where researchers are doing work on a variety of diseases using animal models and when she went for the interview the people who were there looking at her, they knew already what autism was before we got there. so my wife and i went for this orientation. we thought was going to be an orientation where our daughter isabel would be shown where the bathroom is and the cloak room

where she can hang her coat but instead they had arranged this seminar room and all of the vets who work on the animals in laboratories were gathered. i looked at my wife and said what are we thinking? this will intimidate our daughter and make it difficult for her and each of these people went around a room and said do they were. i am a veterinarian and went to college and veterinary school at such and such a place and then it came to isabel. 19-year-old girl with autism and they said tell us about yourself. my wife and i have not prepared her for this. we hadn't prepared her for an oral presentation of herself. we couldn't have prepared her and she might have been capable of doing it. she rose to the challenge. shea somehow got an idea that this arena was an arena in which you were supposed to say something positive about yourself. and she said my name is isabel and i am full of autism.

it was a dramatic moving moment for me because what it said to me, i felt i had succeeded. i felt i had succeeded in raising a child who in a world where people were aware of autism and was aware of her own autism and there was not a hint of stigma in the way that she talked about herself. if she hears the word autism she doesn't think this is a condition defined by impairment and social communication, stereotypes and repetitive behavior. she doesn't think that. she thinks autism is something that makes me a good artist. it makes me funny and interesting. autism is not something she feels stigmatized about or that she stigmatizes for herself. she is someone who is lucky. it is a better time than ever to be autistic. as i started to think about the epidemic issue it dawned on me

and this is what i write about in my book, that more and more cases are being diagnosed because of awareness, because we are able to identify autism better, because we understand it and where are we seeing the growth in cases? in two places primarily. the people who are more impaired, those who are nonverbal who have profound intellectual disabilities, these are people who used to have a diagnosis of mental retardation. they might have had other diagnoses of other conditions like cerebrum palsy or down's syndrome and al a diagnosis of autism with it. the biggest increase is among those who are very capable, people who might in the past not have even had a diagnosis at all. the autism spectrum today includes everyone from the profoundly intellectually

disabled to be socially awkward engineer in silicon valley who might be incredibly socially awkward but amazingly skilled at computers. and so with the growth of this spectrum of diagnosis and the growth of awareness we now have this feeling that there are more cases than there ever have been. as i recounted in this book, i consistently find evidence for reasons why people are being diagnosed more with partisan than ever before but very little evidence that there was somehow a true rise in the incidence of the condition. it is hard to know. we don't know. if there is in fact a true increase in the incidence of autism. there certainly could be but what the evidence points to at the moment is a number of factors are creating this larger

pool of cases. more diagnosis along the spectrum. changes in diagnostic practices. tremendous awareness. that is something we can't quantify. special education programs. the growth in services for children with special education needs that then create a need to have a diagnosis since the diagnosis drives service. diagnosis at younger and younger ages bringing more people into the pool, diagnosiss in later years when people are 14, 15 years old and the diagnosis of autos and helps people make sense of the problems they had and the differences they developed throughout their childhood and education. there is no one factor that can account for changes and problems of autism. they all act in concert together and it makes us feel there must be an epidemic. i feel that. i know so many people with

autism. where were they when i grew up? they were there. they were in other places was different diagnoses. they were hidden away. they were in an institution where i didn't see them. the question of the epidemic is very important. in large part because vaccines which study after study found to be unfounded have been based on a notion of epidemic. if there is no epidemic then i think people would not be as afraid as they are that there was some sort of evil toxin that was somehow affecting our children. and i suppose this is a good segway to introduce seth mnookin who is the author of several fabulous books including this remarkable new book "the panic virus". i applaud his efforts because he

is dealing with this topic of vaccines from different perspectives than i would have and in a way that just packs a punch and is an incredible page turner. having given you my introduction i will now pass it off to seth mnookin and after is done we are going to talk a little bit with each other and ask each other a few questions and have a dialogue about these issues and open it up to the floor for much of the time so you can have any questions or comments you would like to offer. i do want to say if there are questions from the audience please wait until the boom like gets close to you so that the question can be heard by the buick -- viewing audience. >> thank you so much. thank you all for coming on a saturday. it had been a rainy saturday but now looks like an increasingly lovely saturday. and thanks a lot to the book

festival for having us. i am going to talk briefly about how i came to write my book and then a little bit about what it is about. and and when we open it up to you all, we will both discover that what we might have been your questions, almost every appearance i have done what i anticipated the audience to be interested in and what they have been interested in have been different. i began work on "the panic virus" in 2008 and i did not know i had begun work on it at the time. i was newly married and my wife and i were doing things that newly married people do like act like adults and go to dinner parties and have conversations with other married couples and the topic of vaccines and

vaccine safety came up again and again and it was not something that had been on either of our radar previously. we did have children at the time. i said a couple times i was not a prospect of father but i guess i was a prospect of a father. i wasn't an expectant father at the time. what struck me about these conversations, when i would ask them how they were going about making these decisions about whether or not to fully vaccinate their children according to the recommended vaccine schedule, whether to delay some vaccines or spread the now, the answers i got were often times couched in language of emotion and intuition, children these days are getting too many vaccines too soon.

we did not have a chicken pox vaccine. i had chickenpox and was fine. and immune systems getting too many antibodies. the preservatives that are in vaccines that intuitively makes sense that those are dangerous, at the time i had no sense of whether or not those instincts or intuitions were incorrect. what struck me was that was a way of discussing the issue that these friends of mine were very dismissive of when it was applied to other topics like climate change or evolution versus creationism. if we were in a conversation and someone said last year we had five feet of snow, the doesn't feel to me like there could possibly be global warming, or i look at myself and my family and

it doesn't feel to me like it is possible that we could be descended from apes, the response among this group of peers of mine would be that is ridiculous. how could you not look at the evidence? how could you not look at all of the cumulative data and realize that your personal experience over the last one year or your understanding of your relationship to your ancestors does not from all the research that scientists and doctors have done and that is what got me looking into this. it really was an inquiry into how we as individuals and society decide what counts as truth. whose opinion do we give more weight to? experts or piers? when do we decide we are going to listen to scientists and doctors and when do we decide we will listen to our got? or our neighbors or friends?

when we started this, a sense of how emotionally topic is. anyone involved with autism or autism research, anyone who has a child, anyone involved in public health knows that this is one of the most difficult and personal and emotional discussions that parents have. i would like to think that had i known that at that time, eyes still would have embarked on this project but the reality is this really is so draining to talk about, and you deal with so many people who are in impossible situations that i sometimes wonder if i would not have chosen to write another book that people don't care about in the same way although

at the time it certainly seemed like a lot of people got very e. emotional about whether their team won or lost. red sox fan. it has been a rough couple weeks. i proceeded to spend two years working on this. one of the really lucky accidents for me was because i was coming to it from a sort of neutral position, because i was not the parent of a child who believe vaccine injured because i was not a doctor, don't have relatives that work for a public drug company, i could go about it as a reporter first and meet people on both sides of this debate and legitimately and truthfully say to them i don't know where the evidence lies. i want to talk to you and find out your perspective and where you're coming from and the reason i say that was a lucky

accident was because there is very little discussion in those two camps. one of the things -- one of the dynamics that sets up which is the real tragedy is you have groups of parents, all of whom are really focused on the exact same thing which is protecting their children and doing whatever they can to make the world safer place for them and for their children and instead of being able to work together you have groups of parents who believe their children are vaccine injured and groups of parents who do not believe vaccine's cause autism and incredible ill will and insight -- infighting and one of the results has been that it has been very hard for autism research, getting vaccines off

the ground. anyone involved in a family with autism and autism research knows that it desperately needs funding. social services and support systems, also woefully inadequate. i am sure which could talk about this more. one of the sad stories i heard again and again was families who were moving from state to state because based on what services were available to them. i will talk briefly in the time i have left about my ultimate conclusions and why i think this is so important moving forward and we can open it up. i came to the very strong conclusion that there is no connection between vaccines and

autism. because of the amount of attention it has gone and we know more about whether there's a potential link to autism that we do with almost any other negative consequence, potential negative outcome from vaccination. these are studies that have been duplicated and replicated literally now hundreds of times. the studies that have reported to show connection between vaccines and autism have not been independently verified and in many cases have been retracted. the doctor who is the main progenitor of this theory, andrew wakefield, has lost his medical license, was ruled by the general medical council in the u.k. to have had a callous disregard for the suffering of children, who he put through tests that are unnecessary, the journal that published his paper

refracted and co-authors disavowed it. this is not a topic about which there really should be continued debate and yet there is. the consequences of that, and the consequences of declining vaccination rates in communities around the country are deadly serious. a lot of times when i am talking to public health officials someone will say actually the situation isn't that serious because the vaccine rate in the country as a whole is still 90%. those figures are pretty meaningless if you happen to be living in a community where there is only 60% or 70% vaccine rate. when you talk about whether an infectious disease or virus can spread in a population it doesn't really matter to us if someone in california has measles just as if there's a child in california who has measles it doesn't really matter if the rest of the country has a 90% vaccine rate.

it matters if the rest of the children in his or her class do. in the past week we have had a number of examples of that being true. in virginia last week, a school closed for the week because half of its students work infected with whooping cough. half of its students. all of them were deliberately not vaccinated. protest this is not a minor disease. ten infants died last year. nine of them were under 6 months old which means there too young to have been fully vaccinated. so regardless of what their parents did or did not do they would not have had full immunity anyway. i spoke with parents, many parents whose children died of vaccine preventable diseases and that is not a conversation that anyone wants to or should have. right now in minnesota there is a measles outbreak that was

started when a deliberately not vaccinated child was infected while out of the country. that has now spread to six of his deliberately non vaccinated peers as well as five children. measles killed more children than any other disease in history. this is very serious. in utah there are 2 dozen high school students who are quarantined from school for the next two weeks because they are deliberately non vaccinated. i hope everyone turned off your soul phones. they are all deliberately non vaccinated and they came in contact with someone with a measles infection. there are two pregnant teachers at that school who also can't be in the area not because they are non vaccinated but because there's always the chance that a

vaccine won't work. i will close with one brief story that hopefully will drive that home. in 2008 there was a young girl in minnesota named julia who was a year-and-a-half old who got very sick and her mom thought she had the flu. she took her to the hospital and they did a series of tests and it was only after some time that the doctor -- the doctors discovered that she had an immune deficiency which meant the vaccine that she received hadn't been effective. so she was fully vaccinated. non of the vaccines caused any harm. but it was not 100% effective. she was placed in a medically induced coma, lost her motor skills including the ability to swallow. and may never get all of those

skills back and will need immune globulin injections for the rest of her life. this is not a child who was deliberately non vaccinated or even a child who was too young to have been vaccinated. this is just one of the realities of the world. nothing is 100% effective. it is why when we talk about vaccines and vaccine exemptions it is really crucial important on a moral and ethical level that we acknowledge that this is not purely a personal choice. there is an aspect of personal choice obviously, but when we choose not to vaccinate we are not only putting our own children at risk but the people around us. the people around us who are too young to the vaccinated, pregnant women and the elderly at risk. aho that this discussion can start to shift toward some of those issues without there being

more stories like those of the family who lost their children to measles and children being hospitalized and dying. we will talk for ten minutes or so and open it up. and thank you for coming out. [applause] >> question for you. which is why want -- this opposition to vaccines has had so much traction. are there many reasons? can you reduce it to one or two? i know the concern among the somalis community in minneapolis had to do with this fear of an epidemic because there were more

somalis sets in special education programs in minnesota between the ages of 3 and 5 than non some ofes so there was this rush to judgment that these cases constituted some kind of -- aside from the fear of epidemic of autism are there other reasons the anti vaccine movement if you want to call it that has so much traction? >> yes. i think there are a couple of reasons. one is vaccines are somewhat unique in that they are prophylactic public health measure. you are not treating something. you are trying to protect against something. the only real analogue is fluoride, both because it is

prophylactic and also because it occurs on a population wide level and not an individual level. you can fluoridate some people's water and not the whole community. vaccines are somewhat different but because of the issue of immunity it is important for a whole community to be vaccinated. one of the other reasons is you have seen this historically, whenever vaccines are effective at combating diseases that they are for, then fears about that vaccine rise because incidentss of the disease fall and so the risks of not vaccinating feel very emotional. for my generation i think i don't know people who were in iron lungs because of polio. before i started this book i didn't know children who had died of whipping cough.

my experience with chickenpox and measles was that it was something that was not fun but not potentially life-threatening. as fears of those became more notional concerns about vaccines rise and the last thing i think is the medical community and the public health community have done a very poor job at communicating what vaccines do, hardware work, communicating risk. there is a risk of negative reactions with vaccines. parents are smart enough to know there's a risk with anything. when they are told this is effective, don't worry about it, people's warning flags go off. the fact that there's not a risk for autism doesn't mean your child won't have a high fever. there are number of reasons.

the somali case is interesting in that the measles outbreak in minnesota is in the somali community. in your work did you look at other communities? other cultures within the united states that were analogous to what is going on there and the really concentrated fears? >> it seems to be based on -- most of my work is international but the work i did in the united states really did show a kind of concentration of fear about vaccines in white middle-class communities who tend to drive priuses and go to wholefoods. if you want to talk to parents who are afraid of the vaccines -- i go to all food for the

food. [talking over each other] one of the central culprits is really a kind of engagement with the internet. i think the people who are really developing some of these fears about inoculation, about immunization are people who are very engaged with a particular group of blogs or talk with their neighbors a lot. the information they are getting isn't necessarily information that they would get from their doctor. i know this personally that people will tell me all sorts of health-related recommendations. you should do this or that and it flies in the face of anything

i know about science. it is a double-edged sword. there's this incredible accessibility and availability of information. we can get scientific articles that only doctors use to get. we can get them now and pediatricians tell me that parents are coming in to the office and saying i know you don't know about this but it was in the bulgarian journal hygiene and here is. the other side of that democratization of knowledge and science is that there can then become a kind of pitched battle this win citizens and scientists. the truth value of what their neighbors says is equivalent or at least can compete with the

truth value of what they're hearing from the scientific community, i look at this in terms of what people tell me in interviews and this battle between the public and scientists from the perspective of what people say on the internet, you are very a tuned to the media. you're very critical of how the media have created that kind of equivalence too. >> yes. i think, meaning my professional peers have done a horrible job on this story and do a horrible job covering science and medicine generally. it is something i talk about in the book. i am not entirely sure i understand why, but i think science and medicine are treated somewhat uniquely along with

politics. for some reason journalists feel comfortable presenting issues as on the one hand. the lawn the other hand fan or debate, when there aren't too -- two hands. in politics. personally parallel i draw is the bursar movement. president obama saying i was born in the united states, someone else saying i don't believe he was born in the united states. that is not a debate. that is an absolutely preposterous ridiculous story. if i said you are not sitting here on stage at you say yes i am, that would not be a legitimate issue for us to discuss. you get a similar thing when it comes to science and medicine. if you have someone saying something that is controversial,

oftentimes it doesn't matter whether the accumulated evidence on one side or the other, it is presented as this person says versus this person says. so you don't have that with some issues like the flat earth society or tv reports about the flat earth society or all of these other scientists say the earth is round but you do oftentimes get that when it comes to medicine. one of the reasons is because medicine is something that is very personally affecting, if it bleeds it leads. when you have moving stories about someone's personal experiences that is going to drive readers and viewers. i also think the level of

scientific literacy among journalists is not as high as it could or should be. i don't think that is very hard to achieve. i just think there's not a lot of emphasis. >> one more thing to follow-up on that. when you are talking about journalists not perhaps knowing as much about science as they should begrudge think there is a difficulty with in my profession within the academic profession or the ivory tower, where we are not trained to communicate with the general public. >> or the media. >> we are not trained to speak about research and ideas in a way that is accessible to a wide range of listeners and readers. we are discouraged from it in the early parts of our careers as not contributing to the development of our scholarship and we do it at our own peril. we are discouraged from publishing books with non university presses and yet when we do publish with university

presses the possibility of a wide readership is significantly diminished. >> that is optimistic. >> so the point is you have two sides. you have the media side and the academic side. i think one thing that needs to happen in the academy is scientists need to figure out how to communicate better. why don't we open it up and we will see if the journalists and scientists can communicate better with you? please wait until the microphone has approached you so that we can hear it. >> thank you. i have a question, now that dr. wakefield has been debunked and a little bit about this sort of self perpetuating and try vaccine movement. they didn't get it with artisan

and mercury or whatever and now they decided aluminum is the problem or something else is problem. at this point with the non communication with the scientific community it seems they want to be against vaccines because they have already put so much effort into it and they will find anything like where is the bottom of what they're going to decide, how do you argue against that? i read your book when i was pregnant and was able to communicate with people in my community who are the prius driving whole food shopping -- my daughter too young for vaccinations because of fears that they would be the next measles outbreak or anything. where is next? if you say they have proven it doesn't, the autism but the aluminum or whatever. >> that is the great question.

andrew wakefield is the person who rode the initial paper in 1998 connecting a link between measles and autism. it gets to the reason i call in my book "the panic virus". once a fear is present in a community it is impossible to and scare people. i would never let my son eat an apple he got on halloween. the myth that there is someone sticking razor blades in fruit trying to kill children is an enduring one that has wiped out any hope of children not getting candy on halloween. even with all of the evidence i don't think we are nearing the point where all of a sudden these concerns about vaccines

are going to disappear. parents like yourself and like me, one thing that we can do is really push our peers to be honest with themselves and to accept more responsibility for their actions. i no longer allow friends to an end conversation with i feel this is right for me. and in fact when i know that there are people who are not vaccinating their children, my wife and i have a discussion about whether we want to be around them. not to punish them but just because we are not sure we want to put our children at risk. we also have made decisions about a pediatrician based on whether they allow patients who don't vaccinated enter their practices. not out of a moral judgment but

because i want my son to be in a practice where i know that the other children there are not at risk for coming home from switzerland with a case of the measles has happened in san diego or a couple years ago and caused an outbreak there. one last point i would make -- >> walking around with i have been vaccinated sticker. >> obviously true. is your child is full vaccinated the risk is relatively small. it is more of an issue -- >> uncompromised. a child with leukemia might not find a preschool to go to because there is somebody who is not vaccinated and schools keep the records and they know who

has been vaccinated. >> i think that parents can start to ask for more accountability both from their peers and from their doctors and their schools. and if you are going to decide on preschool or day care that is the question you can have. the last thing i was going to say is the strongest anti vaccine sentiment comes from parents who believe their children have been vaccine injured and it is really crucial that we acknowledge that and and acknowledge their pain and acknowledge what they have gone through. personally i think the anti vaccine movement is very damaging but i also can't say what my reaction to the medical community would be if i felt like my child had been perfect, this happened and his or her

life changed. everyone would only benefit by being as respectful and compassionate about everyone in this and having spent a lot of time with parents who believe their children were vaccine injured and a lot of parents who don't like me now and i heard from a lot of them in very strong language, i am fully confident say all of them are coming from a pure and genuine place. i think the consequences are really unfortunate but the conversations might shift, conversations with your peers who don't have those personal beliefs. >> what do you bossi in the immediate or near future for autistic children when they

reach the age of 21? >> that is a very good question. a fear i and a lot of my parents have when a child with partisan turns 21 it is almost like they are off the radar screen because they're not in school anymore. they have to leave high school and it is really answer. there's a belief i don't hold to that there are certainly more autistic children today than there were ten or 20 years ago. we can look at autistic adults today. there are autistic adults who are 80 years old do day and we can look at people who are older for a model of what things were like without services. what things were like in a society that didn't know as much about him. so i am very optimistic that we

are in a better place now. i don't think that we should assume that there's some kind of huge wave of children with autism and special needs that are coming into adulthood that we have never been able to deal with before and never had to confront. there are people who are adults now that we had to take care of and had to help and support. the major question is how will we support those kids in a better way than we supported those who came before them? please wait until the microphone gets there, thank you. >> when and how did autism get recognized as a specific entity? >> i will try to answer the question briefly about where the concept came from. the word autism is spread

throughout psychological and psychiatric literature in the nineteenth century. it was a term that really referred to somebody being withdrawn and kind of unable to be highly social and it was thought to be a symptom of schizophrenia. throughout the 20th century into the 1950s and 60s autism was for all intents and purposes and subtly officially in terms of the terms of the american psychiatric association a symptom of schizophrenia. it wasn't a disorder in its own right. it was thought that children who had autism, what we today would call autism had the early manifestation of what would be schizophrenia. so they were called people with childhood schizophrenia or schizophrenia childhood tight. there is a lot of debate today

whether childhood schizophrenia even exist. and we know it is extremely rare. if you find say 2,000 cases at bellevue hospital in 1950, and 1960 with childhood schizophrenia, pretty good indication those kids were actually autism. the term gets defined as a distinct syndrome in and of itself by leo conner in 1943 which some people than might falsely believe is the onset of the disease, that we didn't have autism before 1943. in fact that is just when the condition is described as a syndrome. in medical history you can find many things of this sort. just one example and we will move onto another question is fetal alcohol syndrome. people didn't think alcohol

harmed the fetus during pregnancy, there was no fear about there being any kind of alcohol related syndrome in children. it doesn't even exist technically as a condition as a disease until the mid to late 1970s but nobody would ever say there were not women who drank in pregnancy before the 1970s. new disorders come in to play and become new concepts not because they didn't exist before but because of the way scientists start to think of them and describe them. >> that is such a good point and it gets to a big issue in the vaccine debate which is correlation and causation. there are plenty of writers who have said because autism was the term used in the 40s and that

was around the time vaccines were coming into widespread use, therefore there is a connection which in the book i compare to schizophrenia coming -- that term being used in the nineteenth century at the same time the light bulb was going into effect. and the assumption that one cause the other but what happens a lot of times with parents is because development diagnoses including autism are oftentimes diagnosed, in those first couple years of life which is the exact time when children are getting vaccinated, it is understandable that parents draw these connections and why they draw them even when they are not borne out. >> is the vaccine fear movement

primarily an american phenomenon or in western civilizations that have internet is it as high and if there is a difference can you comment on why you think it might be? >> a great question. i don't know if people in the back of here. the question is whether the anti vaccine movement or vaccine skepticism is also common in other countries besides the united states and is there a difference between western and non-western or non industrialized? third world and second world countries. between other western countries and the u.s.. yes. the answer is there is definitely similar anti vaccine movements throughout western europe and australia and in fact the effects in some of those places have been greater because

of school age vaccine laws which are in place in the united states and not necessarily in the other countries. in most non-western countries when you see vaccine for years they are more focused on issues of colonialism or what is going on in nigeria right now. that is a brief answer. i am getting lots of signals that we need to end. so we will both be next door somewhere signing books and also if people have further questions that didn't get to be answered by all means come up and ask us. you can e-mail me. it is easy to find me on my website which is "the panic virus".com or seth mnookin.com. i think i bought all of them. i appreciate you coming out and thank you to the book festival. thank you very much.

[applause] [inaudible conversations] >> that was roy richard grinker, author of "unstrange minds" and seth mnookin, author of "the panic virus". we will be back shortly with more from the key school in annapolis, maryland. >> after 27 years of operation the well-known washington d.c. independent bookstore politics and prose has been sold and we are taking this opportunity on booktv to talk with the new co owner, bradley graham formerly of the washington post. congratulations to you.

what made you by an independent bookstore in 2011? >> guest: thanks very much. we are very excited about taking over at politics and prose. and journalists and authors, a former senior government staff member, we have been very involved in contributing in various ways to the washington community and we see this move to politics and prose as part of the same sort of thing. it is another way to continue to contribute to the community. beyond that we really believe in what the mission has been. it is more than a bookstore. it is a community institution. it is a forum for debate and discussion. i believe in the need for such

forums. >> mr. graham was referring to his wife who also is the new co owner of politics and prose. what changes do you think bnp needs to make in order to stay competitive? >> guest: there's a lot about politics and prose that is very strong. sales are very strong. a very loyal customer base. at a time when the industry has been facing threats from the books and declining readership, the sales have continued to rise. first and foremost, i want to preserve everything that has made politics and prose a success. that said, in order for the store to remain relevant and influential and technologically up-to-date, there are going to

have to be some changes. carla and barbara have recognized that over the years. the store has evolve under their leadership. just what additional directions we hope to move the story and, we are still formulating. we are only now beginning to formulate talking to the staff and getting their ideas. we want to survey opinion among politics and prose customers so this will be an evolving process for us in terms of deciding what new direction and initiatives to undertake. >> host: when you were researching whether or not to purchase of this or i read that you visited a lot of independent bookstores around the country. did you find any similarities among those independent bookstores? >> guest: i did. for all the disappearance of a

number of stores in the industry in recent years what is impressive about the business is a number of bookstores survive and remain strong. i was interested in seeing why that is so i visited a number around the country and i found some common threads. i found those that are continuing to succeed have very strong community roots. they have a very dedicated owner, operators who have been trying number of different initiatives. i did not find that anybody anywhere has hit on a home run solution to keeping their store successful. it is more a matter to borrow