Fifteen Years After Autism Panic, a Plague of Measles Erupts 668
DavidHumus writes "Some of the longer-term effects of the anti-vaccination movement of past decades are now evident in a dramatic increase in measles. From the article: 'A measles outbreak infected 1,219 people in southwest Wales between November 2012 and early July, compared with 105 cases in all of Wales in 2011. One of the infected was Ms. Jenkins, whose grandmother, her guardian, hadn't vaccinated her as a young child. "I was afraid of the autism," says the grandmother, Margaret Mugford, 63 years old. "It was in all the papers and on TV."'"
Jenny McCarthy (Score:5, Informative)
Should be seen and not heard. Nor should anyone listen to her.
Re:Jenny McCarthy (Score:5, Informative)
Adding up [jennymccar...ycount.com]. And Barbara Walters, that ignorant fool, just hired her.
Once again, Barbara, this isn't a "controversial" opinion, it is a murderous one. People die because of this.
Re:Jenny McCarthy (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't just tell us, call the advertisers of The View and tell them.
Re:Jenny McCarthy (Score:5, Insightful)
Barbara has fallen for a good bit of woo over the years. Back in the day when she had Uri Geller on, she bought his schtick hook line and sinker; and this even after Randi came on and did the same psychic tricks.
Re:Jenny McCarthy (Score:5, Funny)
even after Randi came on and did the same psychic tricks.
Obviously Randi is psychic, too. He probably uses his psychic abilities to prevent others from being able to use theirs.
Re:Jenny McCarthy (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Jenny McCarthy (Score:4, Insightful)
"Controversial" just means ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Once again, Barbara, this isn't a "controversial" opinion, it is a murderous one.
"Controversial" just means the media talking heads are talking about it. It's a propaganda tool that lets them discredit anything, sew doubt in the viewers'/listeners' minds, and divide and distract the population.
1) Pick an idea held by many people. (If that's because it's well-researched, produces prosperity and/or political stability, or otherwise sound, it's particularly suitable because it will be strongly held.)
2) Find some ideal held by a few that contradicts it. (If it's some unresearched or refuted-by-research tinfoil-hat idea, an attractive political ideology that leads to strife, etc. that's especially effectivce as well.)
3) Talk about them as if the first is in question and the second is just as well founded.
4) Because you're talking about them, label them both "controversial", thus lowering the credibility of the first and throwing the issue into doubt.
5) Confused viewers tune in to try to figure out which is right. Never tell them, so your raitings stay high.
6) Profit!
If this leads to children suffering from and dying of loathsome diseases, political strife, tyrannies, wars, economic collapse, and so on, laugh all the way to the bank and goto step 5).
People die because of this.
You betcha!
(And then they wonder why people are waking up, turning them off, and getting their news and analysis from the Internet.)
Re:Jenny McCarthy (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Jenny McCarthy (Score:5, Funny)
Yuck! She should not even seen.
Once upon a time, maybe, but no more. Please, for our sanity's sake, no more.
Re:Jenny McCarthy (Score:4, Interesting)
Jenny McCarthy should be paying huge punitive damages into the public health care system now.
Re:Jenny McCarthy (Score:5, Funny)
She's doing Darwin's work.
Re:Jenny McCarthy (Score:5, Insightful)
She's not the problem. The teaching of critical thinking, or lack thereof, is the real problem.
hard to even parody (Score:3, Insightful)
And here we have an illustration of your garden-variety Daily Mail reader [google.com].
Re:hard to even parody (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't really blame her; she's probably doesn't have the kind of technical background that innoculates you against quackery. Nor do I really blame Andrew Wakefield; he's proven himself to be a poor scientist and generally a colossal douche, but in science there are mechanisms in place to deal with that (peer review etc). The real blame does indeed lie with the newspapers, who don't have a fucking clue about science and will send out the same guy who does the cinema reviews to cover a medical story. He of course studied Hispanic literature or whatever and doesn't know the first thing about science reporting, and falls prey to every logial fallacy and unconscious bias along the way.
Newspapers should take truth and accurate reporting seriously. They should have a science editor with a scientific background who can check the work of the reporters. If they're not going to do it, and the consequence is panics and deaths, then perhaps we (i.e. our government) need to do it for them via a regulator.
Re:hard to even parody (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:hard to even parody (Score:4, Insightful)
Yea, if anyone is to blame it's him.
It's not even a case of poor science, he flat out lied and knowingly acted unethically; for his own self interest and pay off.
Re:hard to even parody (Score:5, Insightful)
The newspapers facilitated him for their own self-interest. So they're all just awful, awful people, Wakefield and press alike.
Re:hard to even parody (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd like to see the papers that ran those lies as fact sued also. I can understand the original stories perhaps but once the truth became fully known they had an obligation to sensationalize that just as heavily as they did the original lie. Instead they were strangely quiet about the fact they were taken in and little was said about it. This is where their responsibility for the deaths begins.
Re:hard to even parody (Score:4, Insightful)
I do blame her.
She had access to a Dr who does have that technical knowledge. All she had to do was ask.
Wakefield's Patent (Score:4, Insightful)
For your convenience, here is one of Wakefield's actual patents [espacenet.com]
Re:hard to even parody (Score:5, Insightful)
The insidious bit of this particular story was that there was a supposed cover-up in which doctors were hiding the "truth" for various reasons. At that point her choice was:
a) Newspaper: if you get the MMR jab, your child might get autism, which is an incurable disability requiring a lifetime of support. Even Tony Blair refuses to say whether his kids have had it so it must be true, and the government/NHS is lying to you.
b) Doctor: if you don't get the MMR jab, your child might get measles which in a few cases can lead to complications or even be fatal.
Ordinary, lottery-playing people aren't really in a position to judge the probabilities involved, even were the newspapers' position true.
Re:hard to even parody (Score:4, Insightful)
Erh... when I have a medical question, should I consult a doctor or a newspaper? Hmm...
Well, what do I say? There are people who call tech support to argue with them that their "friend" told them they should do something different...
Re:hard to even parody (Score:5, Insightful)
J schools are the problem.
Or maybe it's just that the media thrives on controversy, not on informing the public.
Re:hard to even parody (Score:4, Insightful)
Wakefield was discredited by his peers in medicine and is held up as a hero by goons on the internet. Phil Jones was discredited by a bunch of goons on the internet and is held up as a hero by his peers. I'm not sure that the two are comparable.
You .... (Score:5, Insightful)
DR;PW (did not read;pay walled)
Re:You .... (Score:5, Insightful)
Modern society counteracts evolution by protecting the weak and stupid. Things are unlikely to improve unless we really improve the quality and availability of education.
You can't fix stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Things are unlikely to improve unless we really improve the quality and availability of education.
Education cures ignorance, not stupidity. In the immortal words of Ron White, "you can't fix stupid".
Re:You can't fix stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
I prefer, "some people are educated way beyond their intelligence."
Re:You .... (Score:5, Insightful)
Modern society counteracts evolution by protecting the weak and stupid.
Ironically, this is also exactly what vaccinations do.
So is counteracting evolution good or bad?
Re:You .... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You .... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You .... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm 63. That's old enough to remember the newspaper headlines over an outbreak of polio and seeing pictures of iron lungs in magazines, and being quarantined when I got measles.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/01/what-america-looked-like-polio-children-paralyzed-in-iron-lungs/251098/ [theatlantic.com]
I was in first grade when the first polio vaccine was administered to us.
This was a rite of passage alright. A passage from fear and disease.
Human lifespan increases in the second half of the 20th century were from decreased childhood mortality. It is not just a 'rite of passage'.
Fear leads to Hate, Hate leads to Measles (Score:3, Insightful)
I enjoy telling the pharmacist that it's okay, I already have autism.
---
It concerns me that there's a growing distrust of medicine. Every day it seems there are more and more people who insist, "Doctors don't know anything." It's a very disturbing phenomenon that's getting people killed.
The medical community needs to start doing something about this.
Re:Fear leads to Hate, Hate leads to Measles (Score:5, Insightful)
It concerns me that there's a growing distrust of medicine. Every day it seems there are more and more people who insist, "Doctors don't know anything." It's a very disturbing phenomenon that's getting people killed. The medical community needs to start doing something about this.
Two things. Yes, medical professionals need to act more scrupulously. But also, education needs to be advanced. People don't understand science so when doctors tell them something they weren't telling them yesterday they get all in a tiff.
As long as the system is so clearly corrupted by money, though, people aren't going to trust health care professionals. As long as big pharma is taking meds off the market and replacing them with inferior versions in order to drive down demand for a generic and force people to continue to pay them, we're all going to know it's a scam. As long as doctors continue to prescribe whatever drugs the reps are wining and dinind them over, we're all going to know it's a scam. As long as hospitals continue to charge whatever the market will bear, we're all going to know it's a scam.
Trust (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as the system is so clearly corrupted by money, though, people aren't going to trust health care professionals.
People didn't vaccinate their kids because they heard a (false) series of stories on the news. The problem wasn't that they didn't trust their doctor too little but rather that they trusted the news too much. If you saw a steady parade of (dis)information from a news source you regard as credible, why would you doubt it? Saying vaccines cause autism is a nice sound bite which is easy to understand whereas the counter argument that there is no credible evidence of any link is harder to explain.
As long as big pharma is taking meds off the market and replacing them with inferior versions in order to drive down demand for a generic and force people to continue to pay them, we're all going to know it's a scam.
Name one medicine that has been "taken off the market and replaced" with an inferior version.
Re:Trust (Score:5, Informative)
In Canada, Losec was taken off the market as Nexium launched, to ensure patients switched to the new patented drug (Nexium) before the patents on Losec expired.
Now that the Losec patents have expired, Losec is back on the market.
Re:Trust (Score:4, Interesting)
As far as big pharma's concerned, that tactic most likely works very, very well. By the time generics are on the market, few people will want to take it, even if it's superior and cheaper. Remember that people also tie cost into their evaluation of value, such that cheaper drugs are considered "cheap" in the pejorative sense.
Re: (Score:3)
The problem wasn't that they didn't trust their doctor too little but rather that they trusted the news too much.
The problem was that they trusted themselves more than their doctor. The news never said vaccines cause autism, they just said over and over again that some people insisted that there was a leak.
Name one medicine that has been "taken off the market and replaced" with an inferior version.
Start here [wikipedia.org] and look at the replacement for each drug, in most cases with higher risk of side effects etc. In the USA the bar for bringing a derivative drug to market is lower than bringing the original and you do not have to prove that it is even as efficacious as the old version.
Re:Trust (Score:5, Informative)
People didn't vaccinate their kids because they heard a (false) series of stories on the news. The problem wasn't that they didn't trust their doctor too little but rather that they trusted the news too much. If you saw a steady parade of (dis)information from a news source you regard as credible, why would you doubt it? Saying vaccines cause autism is a nice sound bite which is easy to understand whereas the counter argument that there is no credible evidence of any link is harder to explain.
Agreed. But there's an important factor you missed; complacency resulting from the success of vaccinations on previous generations.
I grew up in the late 1950's and 1960's when diseases like measles, polio and others still killed people (especially kids) every year and left others with life changing disabilities. My folks, and their peers, wouldn't have dreamed of refusing vaccinations; they could see the clear and present dangers that resulted from NOT vaccinating.
Roll forward a few decades and vaccination had completely eradicated these diseases in the western world. So when modern parents decided not to vaccinate their kids (due completely unfounded autism scares), they didn't realise the enormity of the genuine risks they were exposing the kids to.
Re the media coverage of the "MMR Scare", which was (and in some cases still is) shameful, it is well covered the chapter "The Media’s MMR Hoax" in Ben Goldacre's excellent Bad Science [amazon.co.uk]. The tabloids, in particular, continued to report Andrew Wakefield's opinions as gospel, long after the overwhelming weight of readily available evidence proved them bogus.
going to have to re-learn these lessons (Score:5, Insightful)
"We don't need these restrictive regulations, we don't have those problems any more."
Re:going to have to re-learn these lessons (Score:4, Insightful)
That's because like we do with diseases, those regulations were meant to prevent bad behavior. But regulations don't remove the behavior, just as vaccinations don't kill off the bug causing the disease.
Deregulation is only possible after when human greed goes the way of smallpox.
Re:Trust (Score:5, Insightful)
Journalists have a long history of lying to their readers but somehow they are still trusted implicitly.
The boring truth (Score:4, Informative)
But that information, counter to what your doctor was saying, would not be nearly as effective, or convincing enough to get on the news n the first place
Yes because the truth is just soooo boring.
if the medical field did not have a long history or getting things wrong spectacularly
Say what? While sometimes science goes down some wrong paths, modern medicine has a spectacular track record. They have DOUBLED live expectancies in the last one hundred years. In what bizarro universe is that somehow a failure?
and was not widely known as being completely corrupted by money.
Medicine is no more corrupted by money than any other profession and arguably less so than many. You'll have a hard time convincing me that journalism is some paragon of integrity and journalists are the ones convincing people of a (false) link between a treatment and a disease.
Also it would of helped if they had not used mercury in the shots.
There is no evidence [cdc.gov] that mercury that used to be in some vaccines ever caused a problem.
Re:The boring truth (Score:4, Interesting)
If you don't believe that the chlorine in salt is the kind that's harmful, I invite you to stick live wires into a tank of concentrated brine and breathe deeply. Mercury in thimerosal is as safe as the chlorine in salt.
Re:The boring truth (Score:5, Informative)
Thanks for insulting me. Now I can take the safeties off the weapons.
Did you really mean to say that out loud? Deary deary me.
Thimerosal has been shown to break down inside the body in exactly the way it isn't supposed to.
If it breaks down at all (most of it is excreted intact over a period of a few days or weeks) it forms ethylmercury which is not exactly harmless but is not particularly potent. Methylmercury is a lot nastier and anti-vaccination loons often don't or won't realise the difference a single letter makes in a chemical compound name hence the fluff and fluster from ill-informed folks like yourself.
And the chlorine in salt isn't the kind of chlorine that's really harmful, which is why what you're saying is fucking hilarious.
ORLY? What kind of not-really-harmful chlorine are you referring to? All isotopes of Cl are equally poisonous in elemental form and there are no other alternative forms of chlorine in the universe (well, my universe at least. I don't know what it's like where you come from). In table salt the Cl atom is bound very closely to a sodium atom, in Thimerosal the Hg atom is linked to a sulphur atom and an ethyl group, the latter of which results in ethylmercury if the molecule breaks at the sulphur bond. If there is a pathway to produce methylmercury it doesn't seem to be common or prevalent before the byproducts get excreted.
you can't comprehend that Thimerosal isn't the only preservative available.
It's a very good preservative for the specific job of preventing lots of deaths and injury from contaminated bulk vaccine -- see for example the incident (referred to in the Google article about Thimerosal) in 1928 when a batch of contaminated diptheria vaccine killed 12 children out of 21 treated. Thimerosal doesn't affect the vaccine which in many cases is basically a low-grade infection as far as the body is concerned, a soup of protein coats and killed viruses that antiseptics are designed to destroy. Thimerosal is well-proven with a long track record of not being deleterious to the population being vaccinated. What more could you want?
Re: (Score:3)
It concerns me that there's a growing distrust of medicine.
It's not medicine, it's science, and it's a phenomenon that's common across the anglo countries.
Re:Fear leads to Hate, Hate leads to Measles (Score:5, Insightful)
It is distrust of medicine as a science - look at what people are faced with:
- Doctors who wont prescribe birth controls, because of the doctors faith, not the patients.
- Anyone with the title "Dr" (of what, from where) can appear on TV and flog the latest magic beans from the amazon as a cure for everything, unopposed.
- Advertising for every 3 month cycle of trendy "natural/traditional/herbal/secret" cures also attacks pharmaceuticals as "unnatural chemicals"
- Any a time a doctor screws up its a news worthy event
- Everyone has a friend who went to a doctor (or doctors) that misdiagnosed something major (anecdotal: I know someone who saw 4 doctors before the last finally noticed the fist sized tumour growing a creeper up her spine).
- All doctors are paid by drug companies to play golf, everyone knows that.
Is it any wonder when something as scary as "MMR causes autism" hits the headlines, people take notice and don't ask their doctors. Everything in the media screams "don't trust doctors", why take the risk of autism, doctors have been wrong before?
As a parent of ASD diagnosed twins it certainly crossed my mind did it start when they were immunised. Certainly it was a traumatic time and I felt their behaviour changed after, but no, the symptoms were there before but they just were not advanced enough for it to be obvious. It didn't help that doctors kept telling us "they are twins, they will develop late" (see!). My wife and I as two reasonably intelligent people, knowing the MMR link was debunked, still wanted to put off further immunisations - the fear was there, even though we knew it was not to blame. How can you blame other people with less discerning processing and intelligence to make better decisions with so much bad information.
That said I really feel some parents want something to blame - "its not my genes, it was that evil MMR which was just a scam by doctors to sell drugs.". I looked for it when we got the news - something else was to blame, not us. I can imagine others do something similar.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Fear leads to Hate, Hate leads to Measles (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Not so much the medical community, as the educators. Science and math literacy is shockingly low and dropping. . .
Multiple examples:
Australia [experimentalmath.info]
India [scidev.net]
And the US [uncommondescent.com]
Fear that science might upset some religious applecart or pop-culture shibboleth is the mind-killer. . . literally. . .
Re:Fear leads to Hate, Hate leads to Measles (Score:4, Informative)
That's just the pendulum swinging back from "Doctors know everything!"
And both is wrong.
Nowadays, thanks to studies, doctors know exactly that treatment A has a 70% chance to cure illness X, while treatment B has a 95% chance to cure it, but also a 1% chance that the patient loses e.g. his eyesight due to possible sideeffects.
That's pretty exact knowledge, but at the same time making the actual recommendation a bit of guesswork.
Mindless disease fads (Score:3)
Re:Fear leads to Hate, Hate leads to Measles (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a reason for the growing distrust of medicine.
I generally trust my doctors. However, since they are human beings, they are as subject to confirmation bias as anyone else. Probably like more than a few people here ln /., I'm "obese" and have "metabolic syndrome." However, my cholesterol levels are where they should be, and historically always have.. even after 20 years of Type II diabetes.
However, my doctor wants to test my cholesterol every six months (even though there's absolutely no diagnostic value in doing so). Why? The logical side of me wants to just chalk it up to that "confirmation bias": I MUST have high cholesterol because I fit the profile, so the last 10 years of good cholesterol numbers don't mean anything. Additionally, my work provides free yearly cholesterol screenings as part of our corporate wellness program.. so even when I provide those lab results to the clinician he still orders a cholesterol screening.
The cynical side of me walks into the doctors office and sees freebies (pens, clipboards, etc.) advertising Lipitor and it's real hard to begin to wonder if the doctor works for me or the drug company. Somebody who's a bit more paranoid is going to see the correlation between all these cholesterol screenings and the statin drug freebies and go all Jenny McCarthy.
I deal with it the same way every time. When I go to the lab to have the actual lab work done, I decline the cholesterol test, give them a photocopy of my most recent screening from work, and ask that they add it to my chart for me.
Re:Fear leads to Hate, Hate leads to Measles (Score:5, Insightful)
The answer to different medics having different opinions on a non-certain condition isn't to ask non-medics.
If you were building a bridge and two different concrete experts gave you two different opinions, you'd ask a third one or decide which you trust more based on other information. You wouldn't ask a shaman to invoke the spirit of the mountain into wet sand, and build your bridge with it.
Re:Fear leads to Hate, Hate leads to Measles (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a link between the fever that kids get as a result of the immunization that can cause autistic spectrum disorder due to an underlying mitochondrial disorder, but this only happens in less than .01% of the time.
Citation please. You seem to be stating a fact without any sort of substantiation.
Re:Fear leads to Hate, Hate leads to Measles (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm just saying that if I, a very rational person with above average IQ, has fears and doubts about getting his kid immunized for things that are a remote possibility of contracting...
I'm not trying to be insulting or confrontational here, but..
You're actually not being rational. You're obsessing over a syndrome that science has a hard time even defining. All the research seems to indicate multi-factor causes and multiple-path development toward the syndrome. You'd have more luck trying to avoid cancer. At least we recognize most of the mechanisms behind cancer. Cancer is also far more likely.
And that's an important point.
The reason I'm saying that you (and thousands of other parents) and being irrational is that you're worried about protecting your child from a very real risk with possibly severe side effects because of an extremely tiny risk of that treatment being one of the two dozen components which might trigger a syndrome. I could almost understand that tradeoff... if you hadn't driven your car to the clinic -- an action that is probably an order of magnitude more likely to kill your child than the shot is to give them autism.
I repeat this story often when this subject comes up, and I really need to spend some time to find the original article: There was a story about a school district where a parent had spotted a stranger near the school while students were going to buses after school. The school insisted that staff was keeping a close eye on students and offered to increase its presence in the area. A number of parents let their fears override their rationality, and began driving their kids to school instead of letting them take the bus. The more parents who stopped using the buses, the more that followed suit. After a month, the school sent out notices, begging parents to use the buses. Over the month, two children had been killed in car accidents, and two more injured. The stranger was never seen again, and there was never any evidence to suggest they were anything more than a coincidental passer-by. But in order to "save" their kids from an unsubstantiated, extremely rare threat, the parents willingly subjected them to an even greater threat, which had very real effects.
Bad things happen when... (Score:5, Insightful)
large numbers of people follow the advice os someone who has no training, no proof, or even a decent grasp of cause and effect.
Re:Bad things happen when... (Score:5, Informative)
If you read about the back story here, you'll find that that's not at all what happened.
What happened is that the government decided to move us from 3 separate measles, mumps and rubella vaccines to one triple MMR vaccine. Shortly after that move a paper was published that claimed to find a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. That paper made big news, and caused parents to stop their children getting the MMR vaccine. Several papers were then published discrediting the original paper, and the government used this as a reason not to return to the (more expensive, and with more serious side effects) 3 separate vaccines. Unfortunately, by this point the bull had already escaped, and there was mass panic and rebellion against MMR vaccination.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Bad things happen when... (Score:5, Informative)
I would say it's more than simple misconduct. He knowing published false information so he could get a pay off.
Misconduct would be more like, putting a loved one on a potential drug trial to help them get treated. Wakefield is responsible for bringing back diseases to nearly epidemic levels.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6128a1.htm [cdc.gov]
Re: (Score:3)
The paper linked MMR to autistic gastrointestinal syndrome in 12 patients, not the development of autism. It was the head of the study who made the link to autism itself, via a press conference; he was being paid to consult on cases making that claim at the time. It wasn't necessary to discredit the original paper because even it didn't support the claim he was pushing.
Just for clarification MMR was introduced about a decade (late '80s) before any of this happened. It wasn't a new vaccine by any means.
Next... (Score:3)
Reminds me of a joke a Welsh priest once told me (Score:5, Funny)
Why wasn't Jesus born in Wales?
Because God couldn't find three wise men and a virgin.
"I keed! I KEEED!"
Should be charged with child abuse (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the infected was Ms. Jenkins, whose grandmother, her guardian, hadn't vaccinated her as a young child. "I was afraid of the autism," says the grandmother, Margaret Mugford, 63 years old. "It was in all the papers and on TV."'"
So she didn't listen to her physician. Sigh...
I'm of a mind that people like this should be charged with child abuse, regardless of their intentions. They are putting not only their own child at risk but other children as well. The science on this topic is unequivocal. Vaccines demonstrably save lives and not getting them demonstrably costs lives. Children who do not get the vaccines (without a documented medical needs exemption) should not be permitted to go to school or participate in activities with other children. Parents who do not vaccinate their children (again without a medical needs exemption) should have to explain to a court why they think they are entitled to put their child and others at risk of some very serious diseases. Yes I'm being harsh and yes I think it is appropriate the the magnitude of the problem. A vague fear of autism which is not based on credible scientific research is not sufficient grounds to not get vaccinated.
a "before" and an "after" in the life of our son (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
So your son was completely verbal and socially proficient before he was 2 years old?
Re:a "before" and an "after" in the life of our so (Score:4)
There was a before an after moment in my life, too. I had perfect vision until in 7th grade when suddenly everything started getting blurry. It kept getting worse. I got glasses in high school and I continued to need stronger and stronger prescriptions. It happened when I hit puberty so suddenly it sounded like that silly old legend that "masturbation will make you go blind" was true. As it turns out, vision problems tend to occur in males when they hit puberty. It had nothing to do with my "me" time.
Correlation does not prove causation. By the way, I had all my vaccinations as a baby. I don't have autism. Same with my brother, and every other kid in my school.
Does anyone know why CDC censored themselves SV40 (Score:3)
Given that vaccines Drs want to give to kids have increased 3x since 1980, and many are for non-lethal diseases like rotavirus or for things like Hep B that a baby is highly unlikely to contract, and given that drug production is imperfect, I think many parents have legitimate concerns and being ordered to unquestionably follow their known-to-be-imperfect doctor's advice feed the backlash against vaccines.
Dr. Sears has good information for parents who want to take an informed, balanced approach:
http://www.askdrsears.com/topics/vaccines [askdrsears.com]
some data (Score:3)
2. Annual measles notifications and vaccine coverage, England and Wales 1950-2009 [hpa.org.uk]
3. Confirmed cases of Measles, Mumps and Rubella 1996-2012 [hpa.org.uk]
#2 is the most interesting, in conjunction with #1. #2 clearly shows the decline in vaccine coverage starting in 1998, the year Wakefield's paper came out in the Lancet. Coverage dropped from 1998 to about 2002, then started climbing again before plateauing in 2004 at a level approximately equal to the coverage rate in 1990. However, #1 shows that the number of reported cases of measles from 2004-2008 was markedly less than in the 1990 time-frame. That's strange. If the coverage level is the same, why would there be 2-3x fewer cases in 2004-2008 when compared to 1990?
Re:some data (Score:4, Informative)
That's strange. If the coverage level is the same, why would there be 2-3x fewer cases in 2004-2008 when compared to 1990?
There's a transient effect of the current infection rate on future rates. If you have the same immunization coverage, but fewer people are infected, the likelihood of a non-immunized person coming in contact with a carrier is lower, thus the present infection rate will be lower.
Re:Outbreak, not "plague"; dont be sensationalist. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you'd had measles as an adult you might feel differently.
Re:Outbreak, not "plague"; dont be sensationalist. (Score:5, Interesting)
Take a look to see if there are any corresponding changes in rate of autism? Here's a nice chance to run a natural experiment--the non-vaccinated become the test group...
Re:Outbreak, not "plague"; dont be sensationalist. (Score:5, Insightful)
Take a look to see if there are any corresponding changes in rate of autism? Here's a nice chance to run a natural experiment--the non-vaccinated become the test group...
There wasn't.
This would have became apparent relatively quickly; this measles outbreak may be 15 years after the fact, but the autism rates would have been affected within the first few years if there was anything in this. They weren't.
The research that linked autism with this vaccination was soundly debunked within a few years of being released. The original paper was fully retracted in 2004, and the researcher found guilty of misconduct and fraud.
The full sorry story is documented on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and many other places.
The really sad part is that even a decade after the story was retracted, there are still some people who are convinced that they shouldn't immunise their kids.
The trouble is that we live in a world where these diseases don't scare us any more because we don't see them. They ought to. If you want to know what happens to populations without immunity that are exposed to measles, try reading up on what happened when the Conquistadors introduced it to South America.
Re:Outbreak, not "plague"; dont be sensationalist. (Score:5, Interesting)
The research that linked autism with this vaccination was soundly debunked within a few years of being released. The original paper was fully retracted in 2004, and the researcher found guilty of misconduct and fraud.
True story: As soon as I was diagnosed with asbergers my parents had instant and perfect recollection of how my behavior changed radically after my MMR shot. A shot which happened more than 35 years before the diagnosis.
This despite the fact that anybody who have read the blue book instantly diagnoses my my entire family with various autism disorders.
Scape goat is the word.
Re:Outbreak, not "plague"; dont be sensationalist. (Score:5, Insightful)
Take a look to see if there are any corresponding changes in rate of autism? Here's a nice chance to run a natural experiment--the non-vaccinated become the test group...
There wasn't.
This would have became apparent relatively quickly; this measles outbreak may be 15 years after the fact, but the autism rates would have been affected within the first few years if there was anything in this. They weren't.
The research that linked autism with this vaccination was soundly debunked within a few years of being released. The original paper was fully retracted in 2004, and the researcher found guilty of misconduct and fraud.
The full sorry story is documented on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and many other places.
The really sad part is that even a decade after the story was retracted, there are still some people who are convinced that they shouldn't immunise their kids.
The trouble is that we live in a world where these diseases don't scare us any more because we don't see them. They ought to. If you want to know what happens to populations without immunity that are exposed to measles, try reading up on what happened when the Conquistadors introduced it to South America.
This is a classic "outlier" or "three sigma" case.... people do not see any more the illness, and they think that vaccination is useless. I was born in 1962, so mine is the last generation to actually have suffered through all the then common children's diseases: mumps, measles etc. The only thing I was vaccinated for was smallpox.
now color me paranoid, but not only my son and daughter have been vaccinated against everything there's a common vaccine for, but if it was at all possible I'd have them vaccinated for smallpox too. I know "it's not there any more", but....
It has been proven, time and again, that human mind is not able on average to ascertain risk/rewards for low occurrence events, or to put them in relation to existing risks. This was a case in point.
Re:Outbreak, not "plague"; dont be sensationalist. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Outbreak, not "plague"; dont be sensationalist. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not statistically significant I'd say, but nonetheless incredibly funny.
Yeah, I'm a misanthrope. Deal.
Re:Outbreak, not "plague"; dont be sensationalist. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, but it does depend on outcome. A sample size of 10,000 and an outcome of 5,001 vs 4,999 doesn't tell me that the first option is clearly superior.
Re:Outbreak, not "plague"; dont be sensationalist. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, would you? And how many children would they need to study for it to be statistically significant?
Statistically insignificant is a perfectly valid result - it means the difference is less than your margin of error. In other words, neither option is superior.
Re:Outbreak, not "plague"; dont be sensationalist. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Outbreak, not "plague"; dont be sensationalist. (Score:5, Insightful)
and i would be willing to bet people that had one autistic child is statistically more likely to have a second autistic child...
You would win that bet [nytimes.com]. The risk is about twenty times higher, 1 in 5 instead of 1 in 110.
Re:Outbreak, not "plague"; dont be sensationalist. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but you know what kills more people? The actual disease!
The rates of death and disability are so low they are acceptable vs the disease. It is a very simple tradeoff.
Re:Outbreak, not "plague"; dont be sensationalist. (Score:5, Informative)
Mod parent down all you like, but cracking the numbers is actually a pretty good idea.
Numbers for what? The changes in autism numbers over the past decades are caused by changes in the diagnostic criteria. Your proposal seems more pointless that comparing apples and oranges. (Those can be compared at least spectroscopically, see Scott A. Sandford, "Apples and Oranges -- A Comparison," Annals of Improbable Research, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1995).)
Re:Outbreak, not "plague"; dont be sensationalist. (Score:4, Insightful)
Mod parent down all you like, but cracking the numbers is actually a pretty good idea.
If the non-vaccinated kids have significantly lower rates of autism, we accept that the MMR jab is responsible in some way, even if we don't understand how yet.
If not, we accept that the whole MMR avoidance thing is utter bullcrap.
Sounds like a fair way to run an unbiased experiment to me.
They quit using the "mercury" preservative that purportedly causes autism over a decade ago, and the rate of autism diagnoses in young children has kept going up.
The doctor that started all of his has been shown to be a fraud, sponsored by an ambulance chaser.
Your experiment would be interesting, but it's not necessary. And the outcome wouldn't convince the True Believers anyway.
Re:Outbreak, not "plague"; dont be sensationalist. (Score:4, Interesting)
This isn't some subjective study where placebos will have an effect. I don't think 2 year olds are going to think "okay, that injection could have just been water, but I'm going to pretend to be Autistic for the rest of my life anyway".
Re:Outbreak, not "plague"; dont be sensationalist. (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, he was exactly factually incorrect. This absolutely is a plague. A plague (as opposed to the plague) is defined as a significant elevation in a disease or pest's levels compared to the recent norm.
That's exactly what's being described here.
The heading is factually correct. (Score:4, Informative)
Since the scientific definition of plague is a particular baccilus (enterobacteria Yersinia pestis), the usage of plague is entirely colloquial rather than medical. This is how you get the accepted term "a plague of $ANIMAL", e.g. rats.
And a 1000 fold increase constitutes a plague of sick people in colloquial terms just fine.
Re:Read Andrew Wakefield's rebuttle (Score:5, Informative)
It's not like he held a press conference calling for a cessation of MMR vaccination and making a causal connection to autism.
It's not like he was secretly being paid over £400,000 by vaccine damage lawyers while the study was being performed, to draw conclusions that the study hadn't made yet.
It's not like he was trying to launch multi-million-dollar biotech companies that depended on the study's results coming out in favour of his hypothesis.
It's not like the data in the paper differ from the original patient records in ways that, by some amazing coincidence, all support the paper's claims.
No, Andrew Wakefield is clearly beyond reproach.
Re: (Score:3)
Your points are excellent, but I think you missed one. The editors of Lancet retracted the paper: http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c7452#ref-9 [bmj.com]
I have heard of authors retracting a paper, but this is the first time that I heard of the editors doing so.
Re:Read Andrew Wakefield's rebuttle (Score:4, Informative)
It's more common than you think, especially in misconduct cases. Almost all of the authors did retract the paper's findings; Wakefield wasn't one of them.
preying on the desperate (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
When the people who know what they're talking about are in widespread agreement about some issue, that's generally an indication that what they're saying is the best understanding of the issue available. If you instead decide to follow the advice of someone who is totally unqualified, that's probably going to point you towards the wrong conclusion. Especially when, as in this case, everything turned out exactly as the experts predicted it would.
There seems to be an enormous distrust to experts in general. First hand experience: When the CSI TV show showed who digital photos could be magnified and give clear pictures in incredible ways, I tried to explain to my wife that this was just absolutely impossible. She wouldn't believe it. It was there on TV, so it had to be true. Never mind that at the time I was actually working in computer graphics, including reading scientific papers how to scale up digital images while making them look slightly less c
Re:And that's why you should listen to experts (Score:4, Funny)
There seems to be an enormous distrust to experts in general. ... I tried to explain to my wife that this was just absolutely impossible. She wouldn't believe it.
That sounds less like a distrust of experts and more like a distrust of husbands!
Re:And that's why you should listen to experts (Score:4, Insightful)
When the people who know what they're talking about are in widespread agreement about some issue, that's generally an indication that what they're saying is the best understanding of the issue available.
But people who are motivated to reject it still will. Cf. evolution, global warming, the shoah (aka holocaust).
Re:This is just fear-mongering itself. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's like driving without a seatbelt on. You're fine, because you're unlikely to have a car crash. Maybe you can drive like this for a decade, until one unlucky day, a drunk guy goes through a red light and into the side of your car at 30 miles per hour. Suddenly not having a seatbelt becomes a huge problem.
Similarly, this community could sit there with its low vaccination levels quite happily, because it's surrounded by a big country mostly composed of people with the common sense to get vaccinated, and because of that, measles has a hard time getting around and reaching these poorly-vaccinated areas. Until one day, someone who happens to have the virus moves in, and it has the run of the place.
It's good that I have nerd immunity! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Herd immunity + Darwinism (Score:5, Funny)
There is something to see here, darwinism. And its might is as magnificent as that of a river.
Evolution is so powerful that it can be stopped by beavers?
Re:Herd immunity + Darwinism (Score:5, Funny)
Well, we'll be dammed.
Re:Vaccination... (Score:4, Informative)
Idiot 2.0
Certain diseases are deadly for new born babies. Don't wait. It could kill your kid.
Vaccines are safe. Diseases are not.