vaccines
oracknows | February 5, 2010Thanks to Andrew Wakefield, it's been pretty much vaccine week for me. Well, mostly anyway, I did manage to have some fun with Mike Adams and the immune system, but otherwise it's been all vaccines all the time this week. As I mentioned yesterday, at the risk of dwelling on one topic so long that I start driving away readers, I've just decided to ride the wave and go with it until it's over. Unless something blows up over the weekend, I rather suspect that, for all intents and purposes, it'll be over as of today and I can move on to other topics starting Monday. At least I hope so.
But there'…
oracknows | February 4, 2010Here we go again (rest of the post below the fold because there is a video that autostarts):
"Irreprehensible"? "One in nine" are being diagnosed with autism? Where on earth did he get that figure? Can't CNN find more intelligent people to feature when it comes to reporting about the Wakefield retraction? Someone capable of putting together a rational argument, rather than a nearly incoherent bunch of conspiracy mongering strung together in seemingly random order? His arguments are painfully obtuse, and thus far there's only one skeptical voice in the comments.
On the other hand, this is…
oracknows | February 3, 2010If I am wrong I will be a bad person because I will have raised this spectre.
Andrew Wakefield, March 3, 1998.
Interview in The Independent.
The martyrdom of brave maverick Saint Andy continues apace, it would appear.
As you recall, last week, after an interminable proceeding that stretched out over two and a half years, the General Medical Council in the U.K. finally ruled on the question of whether Andrew Wakefield, the man whose incompetently performed, trial lawyer-backed study published in the Lancet in 1998, acted unethically. The answer, not surprisingly, was a resounding yes, or,…
sa smith | February 2, 2010I hesitate to write about this, as Im sure its going to be taken and amplified by Teh Crazy... but I suppose I better just get a head start...
Isolation of an Infectious Endogenous Retrovirus in a Proportion of Live Attenuated Vaccines for Pets
Well shit.
Researchers took a dozen cat/dog vaccines from manufacturers in Japan and Britain, and looked for a specific cat endogenous retrovirus, RD-114. Why this cat ERV? Cause the viruses in these vaccines are passaged in cat cell lines to attenuate them. Cat cell lines that contain and can produce ERV RD-114. Whats RD-114? Welp, um, its…
oracknows | February 1, 2010...from, of all places, a Daily Kos diary.
Although the post itself is quite good, some of the comments make baby Jesus cry. There's even one repeating the old myth about H. pylori and how Barry Marshall and Robin Warren were supposedly "ostracized" for their "heresy" back in the 1980s.
Still, it's good to see that the GMC ruling is having an effect as far as spreading the message about Andrew Wakefield.
oracknows | January 31, 2010
Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue.
Well, not really. Maybe it looks more like I picked the wrong NIH grant cycle to be submitting an R01. After all, the deadline for my getting my grant to my university's grant's office coincided very closely with the announcement of the General Medical Council's ruling in the Andrew Wakefield case on Thursday. As I pointed out in a brief post yesterday, the complete 143-page ruling can be found here (if you want to avoid AoA or Generation Rescue) or here (if you want to annoy J.B. Handley by showing traffic coming from this blog…
oracknows | January 30, 2010Thanks to having been up all night Thursday night and most of the night a couple of days before that working on a grant, I know I haven't had a chance to write about the GMC's ruling on Andrew Wakefield's unethical conduct in conducting his "clinical research" that according to him linked the MMR vaccine to autism. That dubious and possibly even fraudulent research ultimately fueled the anti-vaccine movement in the U.K. and, aided and abetted by the sensationalistic and credulous U.K. media, Wakefield started an MMR scare that persists to this day, having led to vaccination uptake rates…
oracknows | January 24, 2010Mike Adams is confused.
I know, I know. Such a statement is akin to saying that water is wet (and that it doesn't have memory, at least not the mystical magical memories ascribed to it by homeopaths), that the sun rises in the East, or that writing an NIH R01 grant is hard, but there you go. Speaking of writing an NIH R01, that's exactly what I'm doing now, hence the decreased blogorrhea over the last few days, but sometimes trying to cram a five year project into the 13 pages (one page for specific aims and twelve to describe the project) makes my head hurt so much that reading and…
oracknows | January 22, 2010One week ago, The Chicago Tribune added yet another excellent addition to its recent series of articles exposing the dark underbelly of the anti-vaccine movement and, more importantly, the quackery that permeates the "autism biomedical" movement promoted by anti-vaccine groups such as Age of Autism. The first installment in the series, written by Tribune reporters Trine Tsouderos and Pat Callahan, examined Mark and David Geier's Lupron protocol for autism (which I had written about three years ago under the title Why not just castrate them?), and the second shone a light under the rock…
scientificactivist | January 12, 2010Have you gotten your H1N1 flu shot yet? If not, it's still not too late. Due in part to the successes of the public health campaign against H1N1 influenza, people have begun adopting a rather casual attitude toward it. This is problematic, because due to an extent to initial shortages of vaccine, a very large portion of the population remains unvaccinated and susceptible to another wave of flu outbreaks. In fact, I only managed to get my H1N1 flu vaccine about a week ago, when my place of employment began offering it to workers who weren't part of the original target group.
I imagine that…
revere | January 4, 2010In early September swine flu was just ramping up in the US and there was no vaccine. CDC envisaged adequate vaccine supplies by end of October but in reality this was too optimistic. For a period of weeks, the news was full of stories of long lines at vaccine clinics and the frustration of worried parents who were anxious about the health of their children in a pandemic where children seemed to be most at risk. The flu struck in North America first, but eventually made its way to over 200 countries on every continent, some of them desperately poor. They didn't have to worry about too much…
terrasig | December 28, 2009
In discussing the Christmas birth of a son to ScienceBlogs launcher and science journalist Christopher Mims and his wife, I neglected to note another addition to our tribe of science, from a science blogger specifically.
ChemicalBiLOLogy blogger, Arlenna, gave birth on Christmas Eve to a beautiful girl, pictured here with Mr. Arlenna. In her brief post, "I had a baby!," Arlenna posited:
. . .whoever invented epidurals and started using them in childbirth should win the Nobel Prize.
Despite my lack of training in anesthesiology or obstetrics, I thought I might look into this a bit. I had…
revere | December 23, 2009One of the most dismaying "features" (or is it a bug?) of the US government is the too cozy relationship of key agencies with industries they are either regulating, investigating or affecting in some ways. The revolving door syndrome perhaps reached its peak in the Bush II administration, but it's been a chronic problem going back decades or longer. Yesterday we learned of another example when Big Pharma giant Merck & Company issued a press release announcing it had hired Dr. Julie Gerberding (often referred to by CDC employees simply as "JLG"), the first female Director of CDC (hat tip…
revere | December 17, 2009Irony isn't dead. But it's on a ventilator. No wait. There aren't enough ventilators. So maybe it's just having labored breathing. From February 9:
The target grew out of discussions among a group of moderate Republicans, led by Sen. [Susan] Collins [of Maine], aimed at reining in costs and better targeting federal funds toward job creation. The effort amounts to "rebuilding" the Obama package, according to an individual familiar with the talks. The package would include tax cuts and investments intended to create jobs, such as infrastructure projects, but it would step back from spending…
revere | December 12, 2009We complain when there isn't enough swine flu vaccine and we complain when our health departments don't count all the cases. It's probably good so many people are out of work and can't eat in restaurants, because they aren't getting inspected because all available staff are trying to deal with the flu pandemic:
The current swine-flu wave may have peaked, but thousands of public health workers are trying to vaccinate millions of people against the new disease, fearing that another wave could emerge in the new year. Yet recession-driven budget cuts have thinned their ranks so far that they are…
ddobbs | December 7, 20091. Maybe it was just the headline ... but the runaway winner was "No pity party, no macho man." Psychologist Dave Grossman on surviving killing. Actually I think it was the remarkable photo, which looks like a painting. Check it out.
2. I'm not vulnerable, just especially plastic. Risk genes, environment, and evolution, in the Atlantic. The blog post about the article that led to the book.
3. Senator Asks Pentagon To Review Antidepressants
4. Gorgeous thing of the day: Sky's-eye view of the Maldives & other islands
5. The Weird History of Vaccine Adjuvants, even though it was from Oct 1…
revere | December 7, 2009Any concerns about the current swine flu vaccine inevitably bring up the swine flu episode of 1976. This is not 1976. For starters, this year we have a bona fide pandemic and in 1976 the virus never got out of Fort Dix, NJ. That in itself is a game changer. If there are any risks from a vaccine (and there are usually some risks, even though they are much safer than most over the counter drugs) and they are for a disease no one is at risk for, the risk - benefit equation has nothing on one side and if there is anything, no matter how rare, on the other, it makes it unfavorable for the vaccine…
revere | November 23, 2009The US has ordered 250 million doses of swine flu vaccine, mainly from foreign manufacturers. That's a large proportion of the world's productive capacity. A couple of the biggest vaccine makers, Glaxo-SmithKline (GSK) and Sanofi Pasteur, have promised to make donations to WHO for use in the poorer countries and with some smaller donations that's maybe 160 million doses. Countries like the US that earlier had pledged 10% of their supply have yet to do so, and given the political problems of sending overseas vaccine when there's not enough for US citizens, well, good luck with that. So at best…
revere | November 7, 2009I first read Barbara Ehrenreich in 1971 when she wrote The American Health Empire: Power, Profits, and Politics with her (then) husband John Ehrenreich (Health PAC, 1971). She was by then a PhD in cell biology (Rockefeller University) and anti-war activist. We traveled in the same circles and I knew her slightly at the time. Her next book, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (with Deirdre English) was a new reading of women in medical history. It was an influential text in the emerging women's health movement. Since then she has published many books, several making the…
ddobbs | November 5, 2009Pardon my light posting lately. Flat out with big projects, travel, and the stacking of the wood for the winter.
This, however, is what has jumped out at me from the intertubez of late:
Meet the New Health Care Reform, Same as the Old Health Care Reform
At Top Schools, More Than Half the Profs Have Industry Ties
US: Shortage of flu vaccines leaves healthcare workers vulnerable Our lack of readyness for this thing is sobering -- as is the complacency about same. In my own town, our much-delayed swine flu vaccines for kids is finally being administered this coming Monday. How'd I hear this? It…