autism
oracknows | January 12, 2014There was a time when I used to blog about Jenny McCarthy a lot. The reason, of course, is that a few years ago, beginning in around 2007, she seized the title of face of the antivaccine movement in America through her "advocacy" for her son Evan, whom she described as having been made autistic by the MMR vaccine. She even described his diagnosis thusly to Oprah Winfrey in 2007:
Right before his MMR shot, I said to the doctor, I have a very bad feeling about this shot. This is the autism shot, isn’t it? And he said, “No, that is ridiculous. It is a mother’s desperate attempt to blame…
oracknows | January 10, 2014I realize that everyone, is looking forward to my deconstruction of Mike Adams' quacktacular attempt at being a real scientist (well, some of you, anyway). I must confess, though. I was a bit disappointed. And, being like Dug the Dog (a comparison I so frequently make), my attention was easily distracted. I'm sure I'll get back to Mikey eventually, but he really did show such a lack of imagination in his "big announcement" that I'm actually having a hard time motivating myself to apply any "Insolence" to it. It just doesn't seem worthy of the effort it would take, at least not right now.
In…
oracknows | January 8, 2014Long day in the OR yesterday. By the time I got home, believe it or not, I was too beat to deliver one of my characteristic rants full of Insolence and science that my readers all know and love (well, mostly love). Consequently, today's a perfect day for a quickie. (No, not that kind of quickie; get your minds out of the gutter!) I'm referring to an observation that a reader sent in the other day about the upcoming yearly autism "biomed" quackfest known as Autism One. It's a little ditty I'd like to call Bleach Enema Karaoke:
It’s Kalcker’s Kerrioke Lounge hosted by the CD Community at…
oracknows | January 1, 2014This is not what I wanted to write about for my first post of 2014, but unfortunately it's necessary—so necessary, in fact, that I felt the obligation to crosspost it to my not-so-super-secret other blog in order to get this information out to as wide a readership as possible.
I've always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with Facebook. On the one hand, I like easily how it lets me stay in contact with family and friends across the country, people whom I would rarely see more than once or twice a year, if even that. On the other hand, I have the same privacy concerns that many other…
oracknows | December 13, 2013Thanks, Daily Kos.
Well, not really. You'll see why in a minute, but first here's the background. There's a general impression out there that the political right is associated with the antiscience that includes anthropogenic global warming denialism, denial of evolution, and denial of aspects of reproductive biology that don't jibe with their religious beliefs, and that consensus while the political left's brand of antiscience includes antivaccine beliefs and fear mongering about genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Of course, as I've discussed many times before, it's more complicated than…
dr. dolittle | December 12, 2013 Image from www.Nematode.net.Credit: http://www.latech.edu/ans/faculty-staff/liberatos-james-d/parasite-pict…
Believe it or not, scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in collaboration with Coronado Biosciences are intentionally infecting people who have autism with whipworms from pigs (Trichuris suis), although generally considered non-pathogenic to humans.
For some individuals, an elevated inflammatory state contributes to repetitive and irritable behaviors associated with autism. Researchers have observed that allergic responses (measured by skin prick tests) are higher in…
oracknows | November 14, 2013A couple of weeks ago, I noted a new trend among the antivaccine glitterati, or maybe I should refer to it as a new trope. That particular trope is to refer to anyone who has the temerity to stand up for science, support vaccines, and criticize antivaccinationists like the crew at the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism or the moms full of the arrogance of ignorance over at The (Not-So) Thinking Moms' Revolution as "bullies." Part and parcel of this trope is to try to portray aggressively countering the antivaccine misinformation that flows from such sources in a seemingly unending stream as…
oracknows | November 8, 2013The other day, I pointed out that Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, was following in the footsteps of the former chair of the committee, likely the quackiest, most antivaccine Congressman who ever served in the House of Representatives. Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN). I guess that since Burton retired at the end of the last Congress, someone has to step up to the plate when it comes to pushing the antivaccine agenda. Issa is doing that by holding a hearing a year ago on "autism" that was in reality a thinly disguised excuse to castigate…
oracknows | November 1, 2013There's been a post over at the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism that I had meant to address when it first broke its head through the surface of the stupid to spew more stupid. Fortunately, nothing much was going on in the blogosphere that compelled me; so this was a good time to revisit the post and take care of some unfinished business, particularly given that there have been followup posts since then. It also goes to show how antivaccine cranks like to misuse language, sometimes unintentionally (which is probably the case here) and sometimes intentionally (too many examples over the…
oracknows | October 26, 2013The other day, I wrote about how the George Washington University School of Public Health screwed up big time (there's really no other way to put it that doesn't involve liberal use of the f-bomb) by allowing vaccine-autism quack Mark Geier to assist a graduate student in epidemiology (who shall not be named, even though I know who it is—and whose naming will result in comments being deleted or edited) in the final thesis project for an MPH in epidemiology. I based my blog post on other posts by Autism News Beat and Reuben at The Poxes Blog.
The reason I was so outraged and dismayed is…
oracknows | October 24, 2013NOTE: There is a followup to this post here.
Last night, I had a function related to my department to attend, which means that I didn't get home until after 9 PM. However, two blog posts have come to my attention that demand a response from me because they involve an old "friend" of the blog. This "friend" is someone whose scientific and medical misadventures over the last eight years since I became aware of him are legion. This is someone whose "biomedical" treatments for autism were based on an unshakeable belief that mercury in thimerosal, the preservative that was used in many childhood…
oracknows | October 13, 2013If there's one thing that the antivaccine fringe wants above all else, it's legitimacy. They crave it almost above all else. They want to be taken seriously from a scientific standpoint. Unfortunately, what they fail to realize is that to be taken seriously from a scientific standpoint you really need to demonstrate that you actually understand science. At the very least you can't be spouting pseudoscience, but that's what antivaccinationists do constantly. Virtually every argument they make trying to demonstrate that vaccines are the root of all evil (or at least cause autism, autoimmune…
oracknows | October 8, 2013I realize I've been remiss. After all, three or four weeks ago, I pointed out that the week of October 7 to 14, this very week, was going to be Quackery Week. Well, it wasn't actually I who first declared this week quackery week. It was actually our very own U.s. Senate, which, as I pointed out, passed S.Res.221, which declared:
A resolution designating the week of October 7 through October 13, 2013, as “Naturopathic Medicine Week” to recognize the value of naturopathic medicine in providing safe, effective, and affordable health care.
Given that the vast majority of naturopathy is quackery…
oracknows | October 3, 2013Ever since I first started writing about antivaccine conspiracy theorists (but I repeat myself) back in 2005, it's always been assumed by many who combat this particularly pernicious and dangerous form of quackery that antivaccine views tend to be more predominant on the political left compared to the political right. I used to believe that as well, but over the last few of years have questioned this bit of "conventional wisdom." At the time, I based my questioning of the thesis that antivaccine views are more common among those whose politics lean left than among those whose politics lean…
milhayser | September 29, 2013The U.S. "war on drugs," besides failing to meet its goals, has demonstrated a stubborn ignorance of the effects that different drugs have in the human body. Granted, some drugs cause degeneration and are properly outlawed. Opiates such as heroin and stimulants such as cocaine and methamphetamine take a harsh physical toll and leave users addicted to the chemical. But classified along with these truly dangerous drugs are some of nature's most mysterious medicines. New research shows how marijuana, psychedelics, MDMA and even ketamine have positive physiological and psychological effects that…
oracknows | September 24, 2013Does anybody remember the Canary Party? As I described two and a half years ago when I first became aware of it, the Canary Party is a weird mutant hybrid of antivaccinationists convinced that there are "toxins" in vaccines that are making all our children autistic, "health freedom" activists, and, more recently, Tea Party activists. The name of the party was chosen based on the old story about how miners would keep canaries in the mine because they were more sensitive to toxic gases. The idea was that, if the miners saw their canary collapse, they knew they'd better get out of that shaft…
oracknows | September 23, 2013Antivaccine warriors hate science because it does not support their fear and loathing of vaccines. At the same time, they want to use it to justify that very same fear and loathing of vaccines. However, as much as antivaccinationists hate scientific studies that fail to find a link between vaccines and autism or vaccine additives like the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal and autism, there's a certain set of studies that they hate more than any other, and these are the so-called "Danish studies." Indeed, I learned of this hatred a long time ago, when Kristjan Wager wrote a guest post…
oracknows | September 18, 2013If there's one thing I've learned about antivaccinationists, it's that they're all about the double standards. For instance, to them if Paul Offit makes money off of his rotavirus vaccine, he's a pharma shill, a hopelessly compromised "biostitute" (as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called him) or "Dr. Proffit", and therefore to be dismissed on that basis alone regardless of his knowledge of science. If I happen to get a small grant from a pharmaceutical company, even though it isn't even enough to pay the full salary of a postdoctoral fellow, or receive a small amount of money for my blogging from a…
oracknows | September 17, 2013I love this video. There's really little else to say other than the tagline: "Vaccines: And now my kids don't die." Vaccines truly are a wonder drug. You know it's good if Orac can't construct a 3,000 word post around it and decides just to let the video speak for itself:
oracknows | September 11, 2013My goodness, when it rains, it pours, to use a cliche. (And I'm not about anything if not throwing in the odd cliche in my writing from time to time.)
Just yesterday, I discussed the resurrection of an antivaccine zombie meme, namely the claim that Maurice Hilleman admitted that the polio vaccine that was contaminated with SV40 in the early years of the polio vaccine causes human cancer and that the polio vaccine also brought AIDS into the US. That came hot on the heels of another antivaccine zombie meme three weeks ago, specifically the claim that Diane Harper, one of the main clinical…