vaccines
revere | March 11, 2010The latest study on flu vaccine effectiveness in children has been well discussed in the MSM and the flu blogs, so I'll point you to those excellent pieces (Branswell, crof, Mike Coston at Avian Flu Diary) and just add some things not covered elsewhere. The full text of the article is available for free at JAMA and it's a pretty good read, so if you want to see for yourself what is involved I urge you to read it, too. First, let me back up a bit and connect this to the controversy about observational and randomized clinical trials we've been discussing here of late (before my grant writing…
oracknows | March 10, 2010Well, that didn't take long.
Remember when the grande dame of the anti-vaccine movement, Barbara Loe Fisher, decided that she would try to harass, intimidate, and silence Paul Offit through the filing of a frivolous libel suit against Dr. Offit, Amy Wallace (the journalist who interviewed Offit for an excellent article last year), and Condé Nast, the publisher of WIRED, which ran the article? Well, the judge has ruled, and that ruling is...dismissed!
The text of the ruling can be found here.
There are some awesomely awesome passages in this ruling, which is a slapdown that, while not as epic…
oracknows | March 9, 2010Way back on May 25, 2005, I first noticed something about a certain political group blog. It was something unsavory, something vile, something pseudoscientific. It was the fetid stench of quackery, but not just any quackery. It was anti-vaccine quackery, and the blog was Arianna Huffington's Huffington Post, where a mere 16 days after its being unleashed upon an unsuspecting world I characterized the situation as Antivaccination rhetoric running rampant on The Huffington Post. It was the start of a long running series that rapidly resulted in parts 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 in the course of a mere…
oracknows | March 8, 2010I haven't written much about this before, at least not in this context, but vaccine scares are nothing new, nor is execrably fear mongering journalism about vaccines. Those of you who read Paul Offit's Autism's False Prophets or Arthur Allen's Vaccine probably know about a particularly egregious example of both that occurred in the early 1980s and concerned the DTP (diptheria-pertussis-tetanus) vaccine. In 1982, the local NBC affiliate in Washington, DC aired a special report entitled DPT: Vaccine Roulette. Indeed, Vaccine Roulette was the prototype of the muck-raking, sensationalistic sort…
oracknows | March 4, 2010Now that's what I'm talking about! This is what we need to see more of! A father whose child underwent the quackery that is the Defeat Autism Now! (DAN!) protocol is suing the doctors who administered it for malpractice:
The father of a 7-year-old Chicago boy who was diagnosed as a toddler with autism has sued the Naperville and Florida doctors who treated his son, alleging they harmed the child with "dangerous and unnecessary experimental treatments."
James Coman and his son were featured last year in "Dubious Medicine," a Tribune series that examined risky, unproven treatments for autism…
sa smith | March 3, 2010Your immune system is like an onion ogre parfait.
Its has lots and lots of layers.
You have intrensic immunity-- Abilities every single one of your cells has to defend itself from viruses. VpuTetherin would be a good example of this, as would APOBEC and Trim5a. Pick a cell in your body-- it can make these proteins. Doesnt have to be a special immune cell.
Then you have innate immunity-- Certain immune cells are not specific for any particular pathogen, but they can identify patterns that are 'wrong'. They see things your body knows aint right, like double-stranded RNA (your body doesnt…
oracknows | March 3, 2010
Help! Help! I'm being repressed.
Somehow, that is the image I have gotten in the three weeks since the very last shred of Andrew Wakefield's facade of scientific respectability tumbled. As you may recall, at the end of January, the British General Medical Council found Andrew Wakefield, the man whose trial lawyer-funded, breathtakingly incompetent, and quite possibly fraudulent study in 1998 launched the most recent iteration of the anti-vaccine movement, not to mention a thousand (actually, many more) autism quacks, guilty of gross research misconduct, characterizing him as "irresponsible…
oracknows | February 22, 2010I'm beginning to wonder if maybe, just maybe, the tide is starting to turn when it comes to the public zeitgeist regarding the anti-vaccine movement. Not only have there been a lot of stories lately that eschew the false "balance" that used to be so common in news stories about vaccines, but even comedy magazines are dumping on the anti-vaccine movement. For instance, Cracked.com has an article entitled 5 Things The Media Loves Pretending Are News. What's #5?
Let's ask the idiots about science:
When it comes to matters of opinion or personal beliefs, it is absolutely the duty of the news…
oracknows | February 21, 2010I must admit that I never saw it coming. At least, I never saw it coming this fast and this dramatically. After all, this is a saga that has been going on for twelve solid years now, and it's an investigation that has been going on at least since 2004. I'm referring, of course, to that (possibly former) hero of the anti-vaccine movement, the man who is arguably the most responsible for suffering and death due to the resurgence of measles in the U.K. because of his role in frightening parents about the MMR vaccine.
I'm referring to the fall of Andrew Wakefield
Wakefield has shown an incredible…
sa smith | February 19, 2010Antibodies are normally a good thing. Neutralize viruses and bacterial toxins, tag bacteria for complement so they get blown up, tag invading parasites/worms/ew so your immune cells can kill them, antibodies even make nice cancer therapies.
One of the great things about antibodies is that the cells that make them? They 'remember' what theyve seen before. Thats how vaccines work-- you expose someone to a crappy polio virus, your body figures out how to neutralize it, and if youre exposed to Real Virulent Polio, your body has a cheat-sheet. Your body already has memory B-cells that know how…
oracknows | February 19, 2010On Wednesday, Steve Novella did a nice analysis of the recent study showing that signs of autism can be detected as early as six months of age. However, it was flawed by one clear misstatement, which was brought to his attention in the comments and which he then promptly corrected. Not that that stopped our old "friend" J.B. Handley, chief anti-vaccine propagandist for Generation Rescue from leaping into the fray with a goalpost-shifting, disingenuous, and insulting misrepresentation of the overall point of Steve's post. Par for the course for Mr. Handley.
Today, Steve has responded with a…
oracknows | February 18, 2010Last night, it came to light from a posting on the Thoughtful House Yahoo! discussion group that Andrew Wakefield has apparently resigned from Thoughtful House. I have yet to see confirmation anywhere, although Brian Deer has chimed in that this comes as no surprise to him and that he suspects that Dr. Arthur Krigsman, Anyssa Ryland, and Jane Johnson are behind Wakefield's ouster. However, more interesting is this comment from Liz Ditz. In it, she points out a couple of interesting bits of background.
Tidbit #1 from 2008:
In 2007 alone, Thoughtful House saw 1,500 new patient requests -- or…
oracknows | February 16, 2010I realize that Chris Mooney is a polarizing figure here on the ol' ScienceBlogs, but I have to give him props for doing a damned fine job handling questions about vaccines, autism, and Andrew Wakefield's utterly discredited 1998 Lancet study, which was retracted by the Lancet's editors last week:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
I wish I could say the same thing for Nancy Snyderman. Although she was mostly right, I cringed--big time--when she insisted that there are no studies that show a link between vaccines and autism. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong!…
oracknows | February 16, 2010Remember Mark and David Geier?
I wouldn't be surprised if regular readers may have forgotten about this father-son tag team of anti-vaccine lunacy and autism woo. After all, I haven't written about them since journalist Trine Tsouderos did her expose of their "Lupron protocol" for the Chicago Tribune nine months ago. Long time readers, however, will remember the Geiers. They were one of the very first autism-related topics I wrote about after joining ScienceBlogs four years ago, when I wrote about them in a little ditty I called Why not just castrate them? The reason that I gave my post the…
oracknows | February 15, 2010I feel really, really good today.
The reason? Simple Orac has annoyed Jim Carrey enough to ban him on Twitter. The exchange went something like this. For the first time in a while, I was perusing Twitter (I have a really hard time keeping my Insolence to 140 characters; so I only check my Twitter account maybe once or twice a week) when I saw someone mention a couple of Tweets by Jim Carrey that went like this:
Dr. Andrew Wakefield's studies r being unfairly supressed. His newest vacs vs unvacs study MUST BE PUBLISHED. RT "Show Me The Monkeys!" ;^)
Folks, it's a REAL STUDY of chimps subjected…
revere | February 15, 2010Studying the efficacy (effect under controlled conditions) and effectiveness (effect under real world conditions) of vaccines is a tricky business we've talked a lot about here. How do you know when someone has really gotten the vaccine? Just because you stuck the needle into them? That's a pretty good indication, but it might not be all the information you need. Their weight might be another. And the length of the needle used still another:
In a new study, the researchers report that using a standard 1-inch needle to immunize obese adolescents against hepatitis B virus produced a much weaker…
sa smith | February 13, 2010Hey, you all remember a while back, there was that cheerleader that got the seasonal flu vaccine, and then all hell broke loose?
Turns out, wasnt dystonia, it was psychogenic. And apparently, shes fine now:
Minor problem: Steve Novella, while he is a great advocate for rational, science-based medicine, totally missed the mark with that interview with Inside Edition. It really highlights, for me, the differences in depth of knowledge between MDs and PhDs.
Because he doesnt really understood the virology/immunology behind the seasonal flu vaccine, he says this:
Inside Edition Guy: You might…
oracknows | February 13, 2010The utter discrediting and disgrace of Andrew Wakefield, first by the judgment of the General Medical Council against him and then by the retraction of the crown jewel of his respectability his 1998 Lancet paper that sparked the modern anti-vaccine movement and launched a thousand autism quacks. The reaction of the anti-vaccine loons was very predictable, with Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey producing a hilariously paranoid conspiracy theory and J.B. Handley following suit with more monkey business. Truly, the downfall of their hero, which has been a long time in coming but has finally arrived…
oracknows | February 11, 2010
"Would you like to touch my monkey? Touch him! Love him!"
J. B. Handley wants to touch see Andrew Wakefield's monkeys.
How do I know this? Well, there's just the little matter of his entitling his most recent excretion of flaming stupidity Show me the monkeys! and repeating "Show me the monkeys!" eleven times in the course of his post. My guess is that J.B. was trying to get a vibe going, perhaps like a preacher giving a sermon with cadences leading up to repeating the same phrase over and over again, with the intended effect of getting the audence to repeat the phrase when he says it, with…
oracknows | February 8, 2010It looks as though Generation Rescue's bubble-brained spokescelebrities Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey have finally found their niche. Can you guess where it is? Come on, take two guesses! That's right. They've made it into NaturalNews.com, crossposted from a post they had their handlers make to Age of Autism, entitled A Statement from Jenny McCarthy & Jim Carrey: Andrew Wakefield, Scientific Censorship, and Fourteen Monkeys. Truly, it is one of the most hilarious things I've ever seen on AoA or NaturalNews.com. You'll see why in a moment. Suffice it to say that Jenny and Jim have the most…