autism
oracknows | December 4, 2007Remember how I speculated that appointing die-hard antivaccinationists to the new federal panel on autism research and policy would be a propaganda boon to the antivaccination movement and the mercury militia? Surprise, surprise! It's already happening. Even less of a surprise, first off the mark to gloat is everybody's favorite whore for the mercury militia appearing (as usual) in his favorite house organ of antivaccination propaganda, The Huffington Post. First, of course, he has to "frame" things to represent himself as the brave, brave iconoclast, fighting against those evil scientists…
purepedantry | November 29, 2007I wrote earlier today about mercury and autism, and how I thought a criticism of an earlier paper on statistical grounds was fair. Some of the commentors including Orac took me to task saying that the original analysis was indeed better. After thinking about it for most of the day, I changed my mind. The more I think about the original study and the re-analysis, the more I think that the original study got a fair conclusion and performed fair statistical analysis. On a second look, I think the re-analysis may have been nitpicking unfairly.
Marginal results or not, it is barely ever OK to…
purepedantry | November 29, 2007I was struck by this paper that came out in the Journal of Child Neurology, looking back at previous study of mercury levels in autistic children. DeSoto and Hitlan looked back at Ip et al. 2004, a case control study that compared the blood and hair levels of mercury in children with autism to those in children who didn't have autism.
The Ip et al. study found no statistically significant increase in the levels of mercury in the children with autism as opposed to the children without. However, on further analysis the DeSoto and Hitlan realized that Ip et al. had made an error in…
oracknows | November 29, 2007We've had one example this week of people with minds so open that their brains fell out at the Oxford Union, which invited Holocaust denier and British National Party leader Nick Griffin to "discuss free speech." Now, sadly, I see another, this time it's the United States government, which has invited die-hard antivaccinationists to be on a major federal panel about autism:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Advocates who believe vaccines may cause autism will join mental health professionals and neurologists on a new federal panel to coordinate autism research and education, the U.S. Health and Human…
oracknows | November 23, 2007I know, I know.
Picking on Jenny McCarthy over her now frequent idiotic statements about autism and her parroting of the myth that vaccines cause autism is like shooting fish in a barrel, boxing a one-armed opponent, playing tennis with a blind man (like the infamous Saturday Night Live sketch from so long ago, in which Stevie Wonder was shown playing tennis), or [insert your favorite metaphor or simile here]. I guess that America really is the land of opportunity, though. After all, where else could such a bubble-head go from being Playboy Playmate of the Year, to a raunchy MTV star who made…
oracknows | November 16, 2007It may take a long time, but sometimes justice does eventually move to act against a wrong:
A Butler County doctor will stand trial on charges he caused the death of a 5-year-old autistic boy by negligently ordering a controversial treatment, a district judge ordered Thursday.
Dr. Roy Kerry of Portersville ordered chelation therapy - which the federal Food and Drug Administration approves for treating acute heavy-metal poisoning, but not for autism - on Abubakar Tariq Nadama in 2005. During a third treatment, on Aug. 23, the boy went into cardiac arrest and died.
Kerry, 69, is charged with…
oracknows | October 31, 2007Having gotten into the whole idea of blogging about peer-reviewed research yesterday and even using a spiffy new icon to denote that that's what I'm doing, originally I had planned on looking up another interesting article or pulling one from my recent reading list and blogging about it. Then, realizing that Breast Cancer Awareness Month is over after today, I happened to come across an article that reminds me of something that's appropriate for today, namely Halloween. Yes, it's that mercury maven of mavens, that tireless crusader who thinks he found that the Amish don't get autism and,…
oracknows | October 22, 2007I was thinking of calling this post Jenny McCarthy and Julie Deardorff: Two crappy tastes that taste crappy together, but I've already used that joke with Jenny McCarthy and Oprah Winfrey. Besides, Julie Deardorff isn't nearly as famous as Oprah, although, as I've discussed before, she's probably even more credulous than Oprah towards the lastest dubious feel-good story about autism. Of course, this means that Deardorff and McCarthy are custom-made for each other, and, unfortunately, the antivaccination columnist for the Chicago Tribune has finally hooked up with the former Playmate of the…
oracknows | October 18, 2007Whatever criticisms I may have had for prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris otherwise, one area that I'm totally down with both of them on is their criticism of the undue respect and consideration we as a society give to religious ideas. This consideration is rarely, if ever, based on the merit of the ideas, but rather solely because they are religious ideas. Many of these ideas, if they were not based on religion, wouldn't be given anywhere near the respect or deference that they are now. But, because they are based on a faith in the supernatural, for some reason we as a…
oracknows | October 15, 2007Today is a very sad day in the autism blogosphere. The news I am going to discuss saddens me and should sadden anyone concerned with autism, particularly in combating the antivaccination hysteria and the outright quackery that flows from it promulgated by so many these days, from J. B. Handley to Jenny McCarthy, who couldn't be more different other than their being twits.
One of the longest-running and best autism blogs, Left Brain, Right Brain, is closing.
It would be one thing if the trials and tribulations of everyday life had led Kev to make this decision, as they do for so many other…
oracknows | October 13, 2007The Skeptical Surfer informs me of a rather disturbing programming decision by PBS:
I first caught wind of the autism film "Beautiful Son" through the surfing community. Surf filmmaker Don King has an autistic son. Being a filmmaker, Don always has a video camera at hand and has documented his "journey" of discovering that his child has autism. This, along with other footage and interviews, have become a film about autism called "Beautiful Son."
[...]
The film has not yet premiered, but there is enough supporting evidence via a web site and film preview to draw a few conclusions. Let's start…
oracknows | October 10, 2007One development that will increasingly pose an interesting and perhaps uncomfortable question for newspapers is the increasing addition of blogs run under the banner of newspapers. I'm not sure if it's cluelessness about the blogosphere leading newspapers to think that they can have bloggers write whatever they want under the newspaper's banner and not have it reflect on their reptuation, but reputable papers have in some cases allowed some seriously credulous people to spread misinformation in a seemingly respectable form.
This thought occurred to me when I was made aware of a blog entry by…
oracknows | October 3, 2007Yes, it's true that PZ probably gets ten times the amount of crank e-mail that I do. It's also true that, because he has the most popular ScienceBlog, his readers have a tendency to put extra effort into their "correspondence" with him. But I do occasionally get the long, rambling screed from an alternative medicine aficionado or a tirade from a Holocaust denier telling me that Hitler was actually a really great guy who couldn't possibly have ordered the extermination of European Jewry. But, what am I to make of this e-mail? (Below the fold):
From: Adam Smith
To: oracknows@gmail.com
DateOct…
oracknows | September 27, 2007I'm almost beginning to feel sorry for the mercury militia.
Think about it. They've been claiming for the past several years that the mercury in the thimerosal used as a preservative in childhood vaccines is a cause of autism. If you believe Generation Rescue, A-CHAMP, SAFEMINDS, and various other activist groups, vaccines are the root of all neurodevelopmental evil, culminating in what to them seems to be the most evil of evil condition, autism. Yet, in study after study in the new millennium, no correlation has been found to implicated their favorite bête noire thimerosal, which serves as…
oracknows | September 23, 2007ERV explains: Vaccines strengthen superpowers.
Take that, Jenny McCarthy!
oracknows | September 22, 2007I have to tip my hat to Kevin Leitch. I really do. He's done something that I couldn't manage to force myself to do, at least not completely.
He's subjected himself to the entire episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show in which Jenny McCarthy showed up to plug her new book about her fight to "save" her child from autism, Louder Than Words: A Mother's Journey in Healing Autism.
Far be it from me to attack Jenny McCarthy for wanting to help her autistic son. Her devotion is admirable, and virtually all parents, other than crappy parents, want to help their children. The problem is that, in seeking to…
oracknows | September 20, 2007I don't know how I missed this one, but it jut goes to show that antivaccination ignorance with respect to autism is truly a bipartisan affair. You have folks like Representative Dan Burton on the right, and on the left you have this particular Daily Kos diarist, who falls like a ton of bricks for the recent Generation Rescue "study" of autism rates in vaccinated versus unvaccinated children:
The first ever study comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated children was completed with startling results.
Vaccines Caused Autism
Vaccines Caused Asthma
Vaccines Caused ADHD
The study was privated funded…
oracknows | September 14, 2007Regarding Dan Olmsted's latest foray into autism pseudoscience at Rescue Post, Kev asks, "Why aren't you scared to death?"
Olmsted's latest happened to appear while I was on vacation a couple of weeks ago, and there's so much other interesting stuff out there to blog about since I got back that I never got around to addressing yet another of his attempts to blame autism on mercury. This time, though, just like J.B. Handley and others who have been steadily backing away from the "mercury in vaccines causes autism" hypothesis (mainly because each new epidemiological study that comes out fails…
oracknows | September 10, 2007Way back when I first started my blog, one of my favorite blogs was A Photon in the Darkness, in which Prometheus regularly demolished quackery, particularly autism-related quackery. Sadly, Prometheus' blogging has become more and more sporadic over the last year or so, with gaps sometimes longer than a month between posts. I was worried that he might be retiring permanently from the blogosphere. That would be a great loss.
Recently, however, Prometheus has been a bit more active. In fact, he's even moved his blog to a new location: http://www.photoninthedarkness.com. Moreover, he's recently…
oracknows | September 9, 2007Kevin Leitch informs me that DAN/ARI are asking people to leave a message for Andrew Wakefield.
Yes, that Andrew Wakefield, the man who almost single-handedly started a scare over the MMR vaccine, the man who was paid by lawyers and was either so clueless, careless, and/or dishonest (take your pick) that the lab where he did his research where he "found" measles RNA sequences in the guts of autistic children didn't do even the most basic controls to eliminate false positives.
Not surprisingly, essentially all the messages are nauseatingly supportive and full of praise. Here's a sample:
Thank…