You do sort of get to the fundamental problem of autism not being an actual disease, just a group of symptoms. The mitochondrial enzyme deficiencies suffered by

You do sort of get to the fundamental problem of autism not being an actual disease, just a group of symptoms. The mitochondrial enzyme deficiencies suffered by Poling have a distinct, but overlapping set of symptoms. So, the reason I mentioned classical autism is that the symptoms of mitochondrial encephalopathy[1] go well beyond those, never mind the milder symptoms of ASD. Apparently, the court's justification for giving the award is that the fever from the vaccine might have been one of the many fevers she suffered that led to the particular expression of this condition. Sadly, her parents had already given her the "autism" label, which only confuses the issue. Here's the other side of the story: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0802904 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0802904 [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MELAS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MELAS