May 17, 2008
Category: Alternative medicine • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Bioethics • Medicine • Quackery • Skepticism/critical thinking
Believe it or not, even I, Orac, sometimes get tired of blogging about antivaccination idiocy. Indeed, this week was just such a time. I hope you can't blame me. After all, the last few months have been so chock-full of some of the most bizarre and annoying antics of antivaccinationists at such a frequent clip that there was just no way I could even keep up with it, and trying was starting to burn me out. (I guess there's only so much that the stupid can burn before even Orac's nearly indestructible clear plastic case can handle before he needs a break.) Truth be told, not wanting Respectful Insolence to become an "all antivaccinationist all the time" blog, I had been planning on taking a break for a bit and keeping my powder dry for when Jenny McCarthy's merry band of antivaccinationists descend on Washington, DC on June 4.
But then yesterday afternoon, my old irritant, J.B. Handley, that bull-in-a-china-shop mercury- and vaccine-obsessed founder of Generation Rescue, showed me some love in an e-mail:
From: "Generation Rescue" <info@generationrescue.org>
To: "'Orac'"
Subject: FW: SICK MONKEYS: RESEARCH LINKS VACCINE LOAD, AUTISM SIGNS
Date: Fri, 16 May 2008 12:33:25 -0700
Orac:
You are a complete jack-ass.
- Generation Rescue
Appended to the message was the text from this link.
Having felt the love, I have to admit that J.B. sure does know how to charm a blogger. When he draws my attention to some abstracts so politely, how can I refuse to return to him manyfold what he obviously craves so badly, a dose of my characteristic and inimitable not-so-Respectful Insolence™, a dose that, given who he is, I am more than happy--nay, eager--to administer to him with loving care, the way a vaccine should be administered. (Too bad there's no vaccine against bull-headedness.) Indeed, when an antivaccinationist asks me so nicely, I cannot refuse, prior vows to chill out for a while notwithstanding. I even view it as my moral duty to give J.B. what he wants, a task facilitated by the fact that my wife was working last night, that I didn't feel like working more on a talk I have to give on Monday (making writing this little screed an excellent excuse for procrastination when it comes to finishing the slides for that talk), and that, other than watching Battlestar Galactica, I didn't have anything better to do. I normally don't do long, substantive, Orac-length posts on the weekend, but for J.B., I'll make an exception. I like him just that much.
No need to thank me, J.B.; writing this was reward enough for me.
Besides, I was curious; after I had asked around about this e-mail, I found that other antivaccinationists had been sending this same link to other bloggers who frequently write about autism and vaccines and who share my conclusion that the science just doesn't support the antivaccinationist myth that vaccines somehow cause autism. Also, the article linked to was written by Dan Olmsted, that credulous reporter who claims that the Amish don't vaccinate and don't get autism when they do both and who conveniently couldn't find the special needs clinic in the heart of Amish country that treats Amish with some forms of autism (not to mention who takes the word of an antivaccination-leaning crunchy physician in Chicago as apparently scientific evidence that the unvaccinated don't get autism), among other developmental conditions. So credulously eager to believe any bit of trash that supports his need to blame vaccines for autism, Olmsted's articles are almost always good for a chuckle, if not an outright belly laugh. Although not quite as amusing as Kent Heckenlively's overblown and ignorant screeds on AoA, they're usually still fairly entertaining in a "gawk at the stupid" sort of way. So onward, we go! Here's Danny-boy:
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 10:02 AM • 11 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
May 16, 2008
Category: Entertainment/culture • History • Politics • Television • World War II
This is too hilarious for words. It's priceless.
It's Chris Matthews applying a little history smackdown--I mean lesson--to an ignorant right wing talk radio host named Kevin James, who was overjoyed at President Bush's use of the Neville Chamberlain gambit the other day and wanted to take the opportunity to throw the same gambit around too about the Democrats in general and Barack Obama in particular. Bad idea:
My only complaint is that Matthews didn't deliver what would have been the perfect coup de grâce. That would have been to ask (1) what did Neville Chamberlain do in March 1939 after Hitler invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia in violation of the Munich agreement of 1938 and (2) who was Prime Minister when Hitler invaded Poland and what did he do in response? Answers: (1) Chamberlain, realizing he had been betrayed, put the British military on a war footing, accelerated rearmament, and took a much harder line with Germany thereafter; and (2) Neville Chamberlain (not, as many think, Winston Churchill) was Prime Minister on September 1, 1939. He asked for and got a declaration of war against Germany on September 3 in response, even though some argued that England wasn't absolutely bound to go to war for Poland. I'd also quibble with Matthews' definition of "appeasement" as "giving something away to the enemy." We give stuff away to the enemy all the time; it's called negotiations. The difference between negotiation and appeasement is that we get something substantive in return for what we give away. A better definition of appeasement is giving something away to the enemy and not getting anything near the value of what was given away in the hopes that the enemy will be bought off. Chamberlain basically gave Hitler his assurance that he would accept his annexation of the Sudetenland. All he got in return was Hitler's pledge that that was the end of his territorial ambitions, which was worth no more than the piece of paper it was written on.
If you can't stand watching a historically ignorant idiot twist in the wind while Matthews cranks up a wind machine (and after a while it does become painful to watch), the transcript is here.
(Hat tip to Jason Rosenhouse. I've also written about other fallacious uses of the Neville Chamberlain gambit in other contexts, and Glenn Greenwald has written one of the best deconstructions ever of this particular bit of idiocy. This particular misuse of history is a pet peeve of mine, in case regular readers hadn't noticed...)
Posted by Orac at 5:00 PM • 26 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Category: Alternative medicine • Friday Woo • Medicine • Quackery • Skepticism/critical thinking
This week was difficult.
No, it wasn't difficult because I had hit one of my periodic woo writer's blocks that I whine about, no doubt to the occasional annoyance of my readers, even though I have one of the greatest hobbies in the world. I mean, I get to do something that I love (writing and blogging) and even get paid a nominal sum for doing it. Even better, this whole Respectful Insolence™ thing has grown far beyond my wildest imaginings when more than three years ago, on winter's day in a deep and dark December, I experimented with Blogger on a whim and created the first incarnation of this blog. Now more people than I could ever have imagined actually read my nearly daily (and often more than daily) brain droppings. How great is that?
The difficulty, it turns out, was due to my having identified two equally deliciously woo-ey targets--I mean topics--for this week. As if deciding between two woos, both equally matched in outrageous ridiculousness, wasn't enough, a good friend of my wife's sent me a link yesterday to a bit of woo that is every bit the equal of the two that I was trying to decide between. It was a triumvirate of woo, and I couldn't make up my mind! Sadly, for those of us of a science- and evidence-based mindset in medicine, an embarrassment of riches is a frequent situation when I come to do this weekly exercise in amusement. Fortunately, in fact, I've encountered this problem enough times that I knew exactly what to do.
Have a beer and examine the relative merits of each woo again, of course.
Oh, and listening to an album of World War II-era music, for whatever reason, seemed to aid me in my decision. Truly, I have officially entered the stage of my life that I like to call old fart-dom. In any case, it's amazing what a bit of that golden, fizzy liquid can do for clarity of mind when it comes to woo, particularly when coupled with scratchy recordings of jingoistic big band music from the 1940s. My mind sandwiched between the glory of the two, particularly while listening to Don Cornell with Swing and Sway with Danny Kaye singing I Left My Heart at the Stage Door followed by the Andrew Sisters singing Here Comes The Navy (or even Barry Wood singing Arms for the Love of America), it became clear to me that there was really only one bit of woo that floated my boat in such a way that a German U-boat couldn't sink it.
Just like when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's a-MORA:
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 9:00 AM • 26 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
May 15, 2008
Category: Anti-Semitism • History • Politics
Jake and Elwood hated Illinois Nazis. I hate Michigan Nazis. Actually, I hate all Nazis, but I especially detest Nazis from states I've lived in, such as Ohio, New Jersey, and Illinois. But worst of all are Michigan Nazis, because it's my home state, and even worse than that are Detroit Nazis, because that's my home town. I was born there and lived there until I was around 10. I will always have an affinity for the city, no matter how down and out it is.
And there's a Nazi in Detroit now trying to take advantage of the crappy economy to recruit to his hate cause:
On a dead-end street along Detroit's fringe, the leader of America's largest neo-Nazi group is scheming to exploit the region's economic unease.
Jeff Schoep, commander of the National Socialist Movement, said he's undeterred by the area's large African-American and Jewish populations since moving his group to the area in December. In fact, he said, the diversity and distress of metro Detroit makes it ripe for recruitment.
"Detroit's a big city, and the economy is not real good," he said. "Anywhere the economy is bad, people are looking for answers. And I think we provide some."
This is the kind of movement that he leads:
Philosophically, he concedes, "We do like Hitler and the way he ran the government," but it's "a misconception that we are bigoted."
Yeah, right. I wonder if they'd let a black woman or a Jew into their organization. Let's see:
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 4:00 PM • 16 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Category: Cancer • Clinical trials • Medicine • Surgery
Perhaps one of the most common misconceptions held about cancer among lay people is that it is one disease. We often hear non-physicians talk about "curing cancer" as though it were a single disease. Sometimes, we even hear physicians, who should know better, using the same sort of fuzzy thinking and language about "curing cancer" as well. But cancer is not a single disease. Indeed, it's a collection of dozens of different diseases, with different cell types of origin, pathophysiologies, behaviors, and treatments. True, there are a fair number of commonalities between cancers in terms of shared molecular mechanisms of evading the immune system, overcoming the body's natural checks and balances to proliferate in an uncontrolled manner, induce angiogenesis to supply themselves with a blood supply, and metastasizing, but the differences make talk of "curing cancer" to be wishful thinking. Of course, curing individual cancers is entirely possible. Indeed, we already routinely cure Hodgkin's lymphoma, for example, as well as breast cancer, colon cancer, and various leukemias, among others. It's the seductive idea that there is a "magic bullet" or a single treatment that will cure cancer that is the wishful thinking.
Indeed, a recent study out of Norway1 could be taken as evidence that even different cases of the same cancer might reasonably be considered different diseases, so different are their behaviors. This study was recently reported in the media thusly:
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 8:00 AM • 6 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
May 14, 2008
Category: Alternative medicine • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine • Quackery
...because the author of the book that fueled the rise of the mercury militia in 2005, that indefatigable purveyor of bad science, logical fallacies and bizarre speculations, that useful idiot that antivaccinationists all know and love, is coming to the U.K next month.
Yes, I'm talking about David Kirby. Credulous blogger Ginger of Adventures in Autism has informed me that, thanks to "support" from antivaccinationist groups Generation Rescue and the National Autism Association, Autism Research Institute, Coalition for SAFE MINDS, and Talk About Curing Autism, David Kirby will be traveling to the U.K. to give lectures and do book signings from June 4 to 6:
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 4:45 PM • 10 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Category: Alternative medicine • Bioethics • Clinical trials • Medicine • Politics • Quackery
Regular readers here are probably most familiar with the so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" therapy known as chelation therapy in the context of its use, or, more specifically, its misuse in "treating" autistic children, a misuse that has resulted in at least one death, a five-year-old autistic boy named Abubakar Tariq Nadama. However, before the profit potential of chelating nonexistent mercury in autistic children was even a gleam in Dr. Roy Kerry's eye, there was another equally dubious use of chelation therapy: to treat atherosclerotic coronary artery and peripheral vascular disease, a "therapy" that is, alas, still very much alive and well today.
While the rationale for chelation therapy for autism was based on the highly dubious belief that it would eliminate mercury from vaccines that supposedly caused autism, the rationale for chelation therapy for vascular disease was based on a contention that on first glance seems not nearly as ridiculous. There is a proper use for chelation therapy, and that is to eliminate heavy metals in the case of acute, documented heavy metal toxicity. However, this is not what we're talking about. However, the original rationale of chelationists did sort of make sense superficially. Basically, because there is often calcium in advanced atherosclerotic plaques, it was speculated, perhaps using chelation therapy to "pull out" the extra calcium would allow soften the "hardening" of the arteries associated with those calcium deposits and decrease the blockage. For a number of reasons that I've explained before, this simplistic view just doesn't hold up to science. For one thing, most atherosclerotic plaques don't contain calcium. That's a very late development in a mature plaque that's been there for a while. It's quite possible to die from an acute blockage of an artery causing a heart attack or a stroke without a bit of detectable calcium being there. Of course, like all "alternative" therapies, as soon as one rationale is pounded down by science, advocates pop up with another one, like an altie version of Whac-A-Mole. For chelation therapy, these rationales, tortured as they may be, included increased parathyroid hormone secretion, decreased free radicals, or, believe it or not, increased production of NO. (Given the affinity one of the regular commenters has for this molecule, I almost shudder to mention this last speculation.)
The story of chelation therapy followed a frequent script in that some case series from four or five decades ago studying it looked promising, but more recent randomized clinical trials in the 1990s showed it to be no more effective than a placebo in the relief of symptoms of angina or claudication. Furthermore, no study has ever shown objective evidence that chelation therapy decreases the volume of obstructing atherosclerotic plaques, an important functional correlate to test its claim that it improves blood flow. Of course, in this parallel universe of altieland, where scientific evidence and well-designed clinical trials showing no efficacy better than a placebo mean nothing compared to testimonials can't stop chelation therapy from rising again and again to feast on the dollars of the credulous. Such a situation can, of course, lead to only one thing. That's right, a multimillion dollar "clinical trial" sponsored by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM).
Subscribers to Medscape can now read a detailed history of how this boondoggle came to be written by Kimball C. Atwood IV, MD; Elizabeth Woeckner, AB, MA; Robert S. Baratz, MD, DDS, PhD; and Wallace I. Sampson, MD, entitled Why the NIH Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT) Should Be Abandoned. Those who have a subscription to Medscape should read the entire nine-page article (and, of course, also read this for my peerless prose and scintillating commentary). Those who do not can register for free to have access to the article, and I encourage you to do so. For those who do not wish to register with Medscape, I will try to summarize, along with judicious excerpts, the reasons why this $30 million dollar clinical trial is almost certainly an utter waste of taxpayer money that will resolve nothing in terms of demonstrating or disproving any efficacy from chelation therapy.
The article is truly disturbing.
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 9:00 AM • 13 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
May 13, 2008
Category: Entertainment/culture • Humor • Science fiction/fantasy • Television
...which Presidential candidate would make the best companion for which Doctor.
I have to agree with Phil, though, in that McCain is probably too old. In the show, the Doctor's companions are nearly always younger-appearing than the Doctor. McCain looks way older than the Doctor--and I'm talking about the Doctor's real age.
Posted by Orac at 6:01 PM • 9 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Category: Cancer • Clinical trials • Medicine • Surgery
Last week, I wrote about factors that lead to the premature adoption of surgical technologies and procedures, the "bandwagon" or "fad" effect among surgeons, if you will. By "premature," I am referring to widespread adoption "in the trenches," so to speak, of a procedure before good quality evidence from science and clinical trials show it to be superior in some way to previously used procedures, either in terms of efficacy, cost, time to recover, or other measurable parameters. As I pointed out before, laparoscopic cholecystectomy definitely fell into that category. The popularity of the procedure spread like wildfire in the early 1990s before there was good quality data supporting its superiority to the "old-fashioned" gold standard procedure of open cholecystectomy. Another example, although not nearly as dramatic because the number of patients for whom the procedure would be appropriate is much smaller, is transanal endoscopic microsurgery. However, the difficulties in practicing science- and evidence-based medicine don't just include fads and bandwagon effects. The example of laparoscopic cholecystectomy notwithstanding (which was largely driven by marketing and patient demand), surgical culture tends to be deeply conservative in that surgeons can be very reluctant to change practice even there is very strong evidence from clinical trials saying that they should.
Recently, a rather revealing study was published in Cancer1 about just such an example in urology, specifically in the treatment of kidney cancer. Before I get to the study, a little background is first required. The previous gold standard treatment for renal cell carcinoma confined to the kidney was open radical nephrectomy. By "open" I mean no laparoscopy and a surgical approach that uses traditional large incisions. "Radical" nephrectomy is different from a "simple" nephrectomy in that more than just the kidney is removed; the ipsilateral adrenal gland is also removed, and a complete regional lymph node dissection is performed as well. Over the last decade or two, newer procedures have shown their efficacy. Radical nephrectomies can be performed using the laparoscope with both equivalent oncologic outcomes in terms of recurrence, disease-free survival, and overall survival, with attendant advantages of laparoscopy, such as less pain, faster return of bowel function, and fewer days in the hospital. Another example is nephron-sparing nephrectomy for smaller tumors. All "nephron-sparing" means is that a total nephrectomy is not carried out. Rather, only the part of the kidney with the tumor is removed, leaving the rest of the kidney. The advantages include better preservation of long term renal function and reducing overtreatment of patients with indolent tumors, and a number of studies have also demonstrated oncologic outcomes equivalent to those due to radical nephrectomy.
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 9:30 AM • 4 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
May 12, 2008
Category: Alternative medicine • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine • Politics
And I thought, whatever his other faults and whatever my disagreements with his politics,, that Bill Clinton was incredibly smart. Apparently I was wrong:
"You do not want to bring your children into the world where we go on with the number of children who are born with autism tripling every 20 years, and nobody knows why," he said.
Even if the true prevalence of autism is increasing (which is highly debatable), it is not tripling every 20 years--nowhere near it. Again, the apparent increase in prevalence observed over the last two decades can be explained largely by increased awareness and diagnostic substitution. There is no autism epidemic.
The stupid, it burns.
Posted by Orac at 10:31 PM • 36 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Category: Alternative medicine • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine
Oh, no! Phil Plait did a great post on why vaccines do not cause autism. What's his reward?
To be invaded by antivaccinationists!
I think you all know what to do. Please, go lend Phil some tactical air support, and I'll be grateful.
Posted by Orac at 3:00 PM • 24 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Category: Alternative medicine • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine • Quackery
Wow.
I just saw something that utterly stunned me over at that house organ of the mercury militia and antivaccinationists everywhere Age of Autism. It's an example of hypocrisy so blatant that it stuns even me, someone who's been following the whole pseudoscientific "vaccines cause autism" movement for over three years now. It started with this headline:
DR. OFFIT'S CONFLICT OF INTEREST SHOULD DISALLOW HIM FROM COMMENTING
Then, when The Probe quite reasonably points out in the comments:
Kim, since you are so concerned about conflicts of interest that you are willing to deny Dr. Offitt his right of free speech and press, I assume that you support the idea that any parent who is a claimant in the Omnibus Class Action should hold their comments, as they, too, have a conflict of interest.
Kim replies:
The reporter should at least mention Dr. Offit's financial interest in vaccines along with his title at CHOP. If a parent involved in a legal case chooses to discuss it in a forum like this that's their right too.
Dr. Offit is certainly allowed to have freedom of speech. He can write books, articles, get his quotes plastered in every paper in America. We plan to add the information that tends to be missing, however.
But wait a minute. What was the title of Kim's post again? Oh, yeah, it was this:
DR. OFFIT'S CONFLICT OF INTEREST SHOULD DISALLOW HIM FROM COMMENTING
Nice to catch Kim lying so blatantly about what she clearly meant from the title.
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 2:31 PM • 34 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Category: Alternative medicine • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Clinical trials • Medicine • Quackery
"Detoxification."
Whenever I hear that term, I'm at least 90% certain that I'm dealing with seriously unscientific woo. The reason should be obvious to longtime readers of this blog or to anyone who has followed "alternative medicine" for a while, because "detoxification" is a mainstay of "alternative" treatments and quackery for such a wide variety of diseases and conditions. Of course, toxins are indeed a bad thing, and we close-minded reductionist "allopathic" physicians do indeed use detoxification when appropriate. What differentiates us from "alternative" medicine practitioners is that we have this extremely annoying tendency (annoying to alties, that is) to want to know exactly what toxins we are dealing with, to verify that they are present in concentrations that can cause problems or damage before instituting any sort of treatment for them, and then to tailor our therapies to remove the specific toxins causing symptoms and to verify that we are successful. Not so for the "detoxification" as practiced by so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) practitioners. CAM "detoxification" most often does not specify which "toxins" are being "detoxified," or when it does it is intentionally vague about them. Occasionally, they will get specific (mercury as a cause for autism), but the problem with specifying a "toxin" as a cause for a disease is that doing so allows for falsification; it also allows scientists who know something about the disease to assess the specific toxin as a cause for a disease for biological plausibility. Not surprisingly, rarely is the mechanism biologically plausible.
The concept of "detoxification" in alternative medicine also leads to a number of bizarre and sometimes dangerous treatments. For example, there is chelation therapy for all manner of conditions, such as atherosclerotic coronary artery disease and autism; there have been deaths, even the death of a child, from this nonsense. Then there is all manner of "detoxification" for cancer patients, which can include coffee enemas, combinations of enemas and various juices, or all manner of combinations of fasts and purges. Perhaps the ultimate "detoxification" regimen is the Gonzalez regimen for pancreatic cancer, which involves taking over 100 supplements and multiple enemas a day. Truly, "detoxification," at least as practices in alt-med circles, is far more of a religious concept akin to self-purification of unspecified evils than anything else.
No doubt the person who has thought up what I'm about to write about would, were he to see this post, think that my introduction is horribly unfair, but I don't think so. As you will see, the only difference between this form of "detoxification" and traditional alt-med forms of detoxification is high tech. The rationales are in essence the same. What am I talking about? A pediatrician in Pittsburgh named Dr. Scott Faber is planning on treating autism by placing children in an "Environmental Pediatric Room," which is in reality planned to be a clean room, at a cost of $500,000 to construct and $1,000,000 a year in operating costs:
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 9:00 AM • 13 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
May 11, 2008
Category: Computers
A while back I complained about an installation misadventure I had when I got Comcast service hooked up to my new abode. Since the misadventure was corrected, things have been generally OK, except that for a while Comcast's digital voice phone service produced an annoying buzz for a couple of weeks that made it almost unusable and that no amount of rebooting the modem would fix. Just as I was about to call customer service, the buzz spontaneously disappeared, and since then things have been more or less acceptable. In my area, at least, as far as I can tell BitTorrent traffic hasn't been affected. I still get my fix of British TV shows, and download speed appears just as good as they were with my old cable company.
Thus it was with interest that I read this:
Comcast is evaluating a capping system that it hopes will pay for the cost of very heavy users without affecting most reasonable use, according to a tip sent to BBR. In the proposed plan, the provider would implement a clear 250GB monthly data transfer cap and charge users $15 extra per month for every 10GB increment past the limit. The effort would target the top 0.1 percent of users, or about 14,000 subscribers, who download well in excess of others but would still provide enough bandwidth for frequent use, such as video downloads.
It's about time.
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 12:29 PM • 39 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Category: History • Humor • Politics • Sports • World War II
The ignorance and stupidity, they burn:
Why, yes, actually, we did "allow" Nazi Germany to host the Olympics back in 1936. Hitler even presided over some of the ceremonies. The sign is so wrong that at first I wondered whether it was a Photoshop job, but apparently it's legit.
I realize this photo is from around three week ago, but I didn't see it until Ed pointed me to it yesterday. Given my interest in World War II history and the Holocaust, you just knew I couldn't resist it once made aware of it. True, it's not as hilariously dumb as Tony Zirkle, but it does reveal a shocking level of historical ignorance. It also waters down the legitimate protest against China's treatment of Tibet.
Posted by Orac at 10:20 AM • 22 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
May 10, 2008
Category: Alternative medicine • Antivaccination lunacy • Medicine • Quackery
...more outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases like pertussis:
Erik Ferry thought little of the sniffles and cough his 12-year-old daughter came down with in February.
But the coughs became more frequent and violent, and the bug hung on for days, then weeks.
Concerned it was more than just a cold, Ferry took his daughter to the doctor, and a dose of antibiotics cleared things up. Only later did he learn that several of the girl's classmates at the East Bay Waldorf School in El Sobrante had the same symptoms.
And it was only this month that Ferry, who lives in Berkeley, learned that a bout of pertussis, or whooping cough, was sweeping through the school like a bad rumor: Sixteen students have been diagnosed, and health officials suspect many more are infected.
The outbreak was so severe that school officials had to shut down the school to control it. The reason for the outbreak? I think you know the answer to that one already:
Contra Costa Health Services temporarily shut down the private East Bay Waldorf School on Friday in an effort to control the outbreak, which health officials say spread quickly because fewer than half the students at the school are immunized.
Students and staff will be allowed to return to school Monday, Contra Costa Public Health Director Wendel Brunner said, but all parents must prove their children are on antibiotics.
Read on »
Posted by Orac at 11:30 AM • 69 Insolent response(s) • View blog reactions
Orac is the nom de blog of a humble pseudonymous surgeon/scientist with an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his miscellaneous verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few will. (Continued 
