Reactions to story from ScienceBlogs

• 

  About the Vaccine Court Lawyers

  http://www.autismvox.com/about-the-vaccine-court-lawyers/
  184 days ago in Autism Vox · Authority: 289

  Regular reports are coming in about the vaccine court (heres Left Brain/Right Brain on some expert witnesses and, if youre in the mood for some Swiftian monkey business about what some proponents of a vaccine-autism link consider newsworthy research, go
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  RFK Jr. Was Wrong About Vaccines - Owes Apology!

  http://skepticdad.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/199/
  102 days ago in SCIENCE-BASED PARENTING · Authority: 28

  Here’s a blast from the past for you - Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Scarborough Country spreading myths about vaccines and autism.  The claim that the increase in the number of vaccines in 1989 influenced the rise in autism is disingenuous.  Even Amanda Peet knows that, despite the number of vaccines, the number of antigens are far less today than before, and that mercury is found in much higher quantities in an average glass of tap water and fish.  It is now common knowledge that autism rates have continued to rise, despite the fact that thimerosal has been removed from new childhood vaccines for seven years now.   At the time of the above video, RFK Jr. put together a slick little article that was based on cherry picked data, misleading language, and blatant fabrications.  And yet, his Scarborough interview is still taking up a waste of cyberspace and raising the vaccine threat level to orange because people trust the Kennedy name. RFK Jr. says that there are “hundreds and hundreds” of studies proving that thimerosal causes autism.  I’m interested to see these “hundreds and hundreds” of quality studies.  Where are they?  He said that he’d post them on his web site, but I couldn’t find them.  He also dismisses any study that disproves the link between thimerosal and autism as “junk science” without proving his accusation.  Then he completely lies to say that the case against thimerosal is based on “hundreds and hundreds” of studies when I doubt that he could provide even one study that doesn’t have the sullied names of father and son amateurs Mark and David Geier.  And where, pray tell, are these quality studies now that thimerosal exposure has decreased significantly in the face of rising autism diagnoses?  I’m sure that we’ve all noticed how RFK Jr. has dropped off the vaccine-activism map.  Or at the least, he hasn’t published any nonsense since the Rolling Stone article that smeared the truth.  I plan to ask him where he stands now that he has been proven wrong when he visits the Cincinnati Zoo this fall.  He will be giving a presentation, and I’m hoping that the audience will have a chance to question him on his honesty and ethics.  Maybe I’ll ask him for the apology he owes to America. In the meantime, take a look at Amanda Peet’s interview on Good Morning America.  Now that’s one celebrity who deserves our full attention:  the type of pro-vaccine celebrity who says… “don’t pay attention to celebrities”.  Instead, she urges the public to trust the peer reviewed doctors and scientists who have done the research and studied the facts.  And those Anti-Vaccine activists who want to stain the reputations of these respected doctors and scientists by pointing to their disclosed conflicts of interest, should also point out that their favorite poorly done studies rely on undisclosed conflicts of interest, which are much more suspect, in my opinion.
• 

  Rock Hill, South Carolina Blues

  http://epiwonk.com/?p=62
  165 days ago in Epi Wonk · Authority: 48

  This title isn’t quite correct, but I couldn’t resist, since it sounds so catchy, evoking images of harmonica playing in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Rock Hill is located in beautiful York County, South Carolina, just off Route I-77, about 30 miles from Charlotte, North Carolina. From my nerdy scientist’s point of view, the people of Rock Hill have a lot to be happy about. They have a good local online newspaper, the Herald Online, and an up and coming medicine/health reporter named Mary Jo Balasco. On the 1st of June, Ms. Balasco published two stories. One story was entitled, “The experts weigh in…,” and in this article she interviewed “two experts about the pros and cons of vaccinating children against common diseases and what is known about the causes of autism.” The experts were Dr. Jennifer Shu, spokeswoman for the American Academy of Pediatrics, and Marguerite Colston, spokeswoman for the Autism Society of America. Both Dr. Shu and Ms. Colston gave rational answers to questions about recommendations on vaccines, whether vaccines cause autism, why some people think vaccines cause autism spectrum disorder (ASD), whether vacines can cause adverse reactions in children, whether thimerosal in vaccines is a concern, whether combination shots are dangerous, the possible causes of ASD, the causes of “the rapidly rising rates” of ASD’s, and whether children with ASD can recover. A half-hour search on the internet reveals three things about Herald Online reporter Mary Jo Balasco. First, just a few short years ago she was a reporter for The Johnsonian, the campus newspaper of Winthrop University. Second — no surprise — reporting for the Herald Online isn’t enough to make ends meet. It seems she also runs Mary Jo Balasco Catering on Main Street in Rock Hill.* Third, the very day the story came out (actually two stories; see below) Mary Jo Balasco was at the receiving end of the snake oil venom of the folks over at Age of Autism. The Media Editor at Age of Autism laments, Why couldn’t reporter Mary Jo Balasco find even one expert on our side? Why couldn’t she contact any of the national organizations who do link vaccines to autism? Why is she seemingly unaware of the Poling case, the upcoming rally in Washington, the latest vaccine research from the U. of Pittsburgh, or the comments made by former NIH head Bernadine Healy on CBS News? I’m going to make a guess here. I’ll guess that Mary Jo Balasco is an intelligent human being who stayed awake in high school science classes and knows how to tell the difference between evidence-based knowledge and unscientific rubbish. That perhaps she did consider contacting “any of the national organizations who link vaccines to autisms,” but decided that the idea was wacko. That she was aware “of the Poling case, the upcoming rally in Washington, the latest vaccine research from the U. of Pittsburgh, or the comments made by former NIH head Bernadine Healy on CBS News,” but decided that a court case, people in green shirts on the DC mall, a non-peer-reviewed poster presentation, and a political appointee from the first Bush administration with zero scientific credentials are worthless when a medical reporter is preparing a story involving science. In fact, I think CBS News should be embarrassed that a reporter for a local newspaper is doing a better job than Sharyl Attkisson, who, in her reporting on vaccines and autism, has stooped lower than the lowest of British tabloid newspaper reporting. (More on this in a later post.) Anyway, for the story on autism discussed above, and a story on vaccines (discussed below) Mary Jo Balasco wins Epi Wonk’s Local Health and Medicine Reporter of the Month Award. Now to the second story, which is entitled, “A risk to vaccinate? Some parents are asking that as concerns are raised over links with autism.” In this article, we learn that a lot of parents are worried about vaccinations — that there are “too many, too soon.” Fortunately, for the good of the public’s health, it seems that most pediatrician’s in the Rock Hill area follow the CDC/AAP schedule, although they’re very willing to spread the shots out at the request of parents. So they have Palmetto Pediatrics, Rock Hill Pediatric Associates, and Sunshine Pediatrics — all group practices that follow evidence-based guidelines on childhood vaccinations, but are willing to bend at parents’ request. Then they have Dr. Anthony Castiglia. Dr. Castiglia is board-certified in Family Practice and has an office in Mooresville, North Carolina, which is about an hour’s drive from Rock Hill. Mary Jo Balasco did interview him, so I assume he has pediatric patients from Rock Hill. He said most of the parents with vaccination-age children who visit his practice opt not to immunize their children. He also said, “The most important thing is to have a good immune system and do it naturally, not to do it with vaccines.” In case you’re wondering whether Dr. Castiglia is a graduate of the Jenny McCarthy School of Medicine, I was able to determine that Dr. Castiglia is a 1957 graduate of the Georgetown University School of Medicine. I really couldn’t bear to do more than three minutes of research on the guy, but I do know that Merri and Gary first learned about healing with light from Dr. Castiglia, and that the doctor does “chelation and other IV therapies.” Meanwhile, last week there were seven cases of measles in children in DuPage County, Illinois. So here’s my final question today: With regard to immunizing children, how many Anthony Castiglia’s are there in the U.S? And what will be the long term consequences? *CORRECTIONS: Mary Jo Balasco does not run a catering business on Main Street. Her husband had one and named it for her, but it only ran for six months — many years ago. She graduated from York Technical College School of Nursing at the age of 20. She then worked in Intensive Care Units and Emergency Rooms for 14 years. For the last four years she has been staying at home with two children (age 17 and 15) and taking classes at Winthrop University. In 2006, she decided to “put her nursing license on inactive” to pursue journalism. She was also an intern at the Charlotte Observer. Her “dream is to write for science publications such as National Geographic and Discover.” (I learned all this from e-mail communications from Mary Jo this morning. Apparently, she’s a better reporter than I am.)
• 

  another MMR scare story

  http://rhetoricallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2008/05/another-mmr...
  175 days ago in rhetorically speaking.. · Authority: 32

  My first instinct on reading this story was here we go again: a fresh round of journalism that refuses to recognise its own role in pushing spurious claims about the safety of the MMR vaccine. The debate "won't go away" because awesomely poor journalism refuses to give up on its favourite scare story and exercise a minimum of credulism. It's reassuring - but not that surprising - to find that the internet is already way out ahead of this recent batch of hackery. Orac at Scienceblogs writes: David Kirby's there in full force, making up numbers about mitochondrial disorders as he's been doing all along. There are also credulous references to Jenny McCarthy and the "Green Our Vaccines"/"too many too soon" toxin gambit, to the horrible monkey study by Laura Hewitson complete with quotes from an interview, and other vaccination canards. All in all, it's horrible journalism. Incidentally, this is The Telegraph: expect the Daily Mail's screeching version in a matter of days. More later this week when I've had a chance to read up.
• 

  More Housekeeping, Less Time

  http://skiingmountimprobable.blogspot.com/2008/05/more-house...
  180 days ago in Skiing Mount Improbable · Authority: 4

  More Housekeeping, Less Time This is one of those days where I'm reduced to going back through my Google alerts and just marking everything more than two days old as "read", otherwise, I'm going to go completely mad trying to catch up. In one of his older routines, Eddie Izzard talks about only doing passive research, letting the research come to him. I do something similar with topics for writing, setting up alerts on topics of special interest (astronomy, geology, evolution, paleontology, the history of science, et cetera) and then seeing what comes back. It can be interesting, but it can also convince me in a matter of moments that there's a lot of absolute nonsense out there on the 'Tubes. Before my projects for the day really begin, I'm trying to get through some of my old alerts, and I realise that I haven't looked at some of the email folders for more than a week, and that I don't have the intellectual energy or acuity to read through all five hundred of them. In situations like this, there's only one thing to do: put on Wilco's A.M. and compile a list: Orac has a great smack-down of anti-vaccinationist nonsense which must be read to be believed. Orac's one of those writers who makes me feel quite dim, and I enjoy the challenge of trying to keep up with him. Here's a list of books that I'm not even going to try to complete - a thousand and one books? I might have read that number of books in total in my life, if I were being really generous with what I classify as a "book" (Target novelisations read in my early teens don't really count). I certainly haven't read everything listed, although there are multiple instances of books listed where I have read other titles by the same author. ERV has a request: Help Get Rid of Sally Kern. Seems like a sound idea to me. The latest lander on its way to Mars, Phoenix, is due to land on 25 May: the BBC news site has the story. Tonight, if you happen to be in the greater Kansas City area, there's a meeting of the Beagle Society at HMS Beagle over in Parkville. The discussion will be a free-ranging talk on evolution, based around articles from the freely available online journal from Springer Publications, Evolution: Education and Outreach. Give it a read, and drop in if you're in the neighbourhood - the talk starts at 7pm. The only topical radio panel game always guaranteed to make me laugh out loud at least once per week, The News Quiz, is back for a new series - catch the podcast or the Listen Again repeats if you can't hear it live. Speaking of Eddie Izzard - we're going to see him on 31 May! I'm so excited that I've temporarily mislaid the tickets. Got two weeks to find them, though. What surprises me is that the tour is coming to Kansas City - last time he toured the US, five years ago, I drove to Chicago to catch him at the Schubert Theatre (and it was a fantastic show). A local appearance will certainly be less costly in travel terms, and I'm certainly looking forward to it. Labels: Housekeeping, News, Science Posted by William Nedblake
• 

  Anti-Vaccinationists Bring a Knife to a Gun-fight

  http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=296
  182 days ago in NeuroLogica Blog · Authority: 249

  Anti-vaccinationists who claim, against the prevailing scientific evidence, that there is a link between autism and vaccines, have been busy recently spamming science bloggers (at least those who have posted on this issue before) with new evidence they believe supports a connection. The evidence is a small study involving giving vaccines to macaques and measuring various neurological outcomes. Here’s mine - Kim Spencer left this comment on my recent post about the chelation related death case: when are you going to get down and dirty on the new monkey study? waiting on your opinion on how this could be wrong…. http://www.ageofautism.com/2008/05/pediatric-vacci.html can’t wait for your explanations!!! Notice the implication that I have been somehow avoiding taking on this new study. I am sorry to keep you waiting so long, Kim, given that this study was presented as a series of three abstracts at the latest International Meeting for Autism Research. You will note that they are dated May 16th 2008 - this is my very next blog post. This also bears directly on my first criticism of this evidence - abstracts presented at such meetings do not pass the same rigorous peer-review as full papers published in respected journals. Most abstracts never see the peer-reviewed light of day. But let’s take this study at face value. Unfortunately, abstracts such as this do not include much information. Absent is any detailed description of methodology - all we get is a rough sketch. Here is what we do get. Methods: Macaques were administered the recommended infant vaccines, adjusted for age and thimerosal dose (exposed; N=13), or saline (unexposed; N=3). Primate development, cognition and social behavior were assessed for both vaccinated and unvaccinated infants using standardized tests developed at the Washington National Primate Research Center. Amygdala growth and binding were measured serially by MRI and by the binding of the non-selective opioid antagonist [11C]diprenorphine, measured by PET, respectively, before (T1) and after (T2) the administration of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine (MMR). There are numerous shortcomings of this study, primarily the small N - 13 exposed and 3 controls. Why the disparity in numbers? Why the small numbers? Further, the outcomes that are being measured require careful methodology and some interpretation. They are not binary outcomes like survival vs death. These kinds of outcomes require greater subject numbers to have any statistical meaning. This alone - small numbers with “squishy” outcomes - means that this data is highly unreliable. At best this is a “pilot” study - meaning that it could be used to decide if it is worth doing a real study, but should NOT be used as the basis for any scientific conclusions. There are also many pertinent questions not addressed in the abstracts: 1 - were the monkeys randomized to treatment vs control; 2 - were all of the outcome measures performed by a blinded examiner; 3 - how many different outcomes were measured? Just the ones listed, or were more looked at but not reported (this would provide the opportunity to cherry pick among many variables); 4 - what was the time frame for the series of vaccinations? This last point is important because they say that the vaccines were “adjusted for age and thimerosal dose.” What does this mean, exactly? Was the injection schedule compressed to represent the shorter age to maturity and life expectancy of macaques? This would not necessarily make sense. Macaques probably do not clear ethylmercury (it is this mercury in thimerosal, which is a preservative that used to be in childhood vaccines, that some claim is the cause of autism) any quicker than human infants, despite the fact that they mature quicker. It is also difficult to extrapolate large differences in body weight. In other words - it is not a simple matter to give macaques equivalent exposure to vaccines and thimerosal to simulate the childhood vaccine schedule. We would need to know exactly what choices the researchers made and why. Without all of this information these abstracts are impossible to evaluate. These findings would only be of interest if they ultimately are published in a peer-reviewed journal with a full methods section detailing how the studies were done. Even then, the small numbers render the results highly suspect -so the study would also need to be expanded to a more appropriate number of subjects. There are other specific criticisms of these abstracts. Orac at Respectful Insolence has done his usual thorough job of picking it apart. Specifically he criticizes their methods of analyzing a genome microarray, which Orac does as part of his own research. Orac also points out that perhaps the most suspect feature of this study (to clarify - this appears to be one study that was divided into three abstracts) is the people who carried it out. Listed as an author is Andrew Wakefield - he is the British researcher who started the vaccine-autism myth with his paper linking the MMR vaccine to autism. His research has been subsequently utterly rejected, and he even faces disciplinary actions for questionable ethical behavior. He did not disclose that he had a conflict of interest, for example, as he stood to gain financially as an expert consultant for lawyers who were suing for vaccine injury. Wakefield, therefore, would be highly motivated to produce new evidence to vindicate himself. Another author is Laura Hewitson. It turns out she has a child with autism and is currently a litigant (#437) in the Autism Omnibus hearings - a special court established to determine the merit of thousands of claims for compensation by parents under the claim that their children’s autism was caused by vaccines. Hewitson did not disclose this obvious conflict of interest. Hewitson is also married to Dan Hollenbeck, who regularly contributes to the anti-vaccination website Age of Autism. So what we have here is a small study presented in a loose format as a series of abstracts, without adequate documentation of methods, conducted largely by people who have an enormous motivation for a particular outcome. In the battle of science, this is a butterknife. [IMG [Slashdot]] [IMG [Digg]] [IMG [Reddit]] [IMG [del.icio.us]] [IMG [Facebook]] [IMG [Technorati]] [IMG [Google]] [IMG [StumbleUpon]]
• 

  Permalink

  http://actionforautism.co.uk/2008/05/19/conspiracies-conflic...
  183 days ago in Autism Blog - Action For Autism · Authority: 29

  Conspiracies, conflicts of interest and the bigger picture. CONSPIRACY Remember the outrageous subpoena against Kathleen Seidel that was recently quashed? Clifford Shoemaker, the author of the subpoena was ordered to show cause, “why he should not be sanctioned under Fed R Civ P 11 – see Fed R Civ P 45(a)(2)(B) which requires that a deposition subpoena be issued from the court in which the deposition is to occur and Fed R Civ P 45 (c)(1) commanding counsel to avoid burdensome subpoenas. A failure to appear will result in notification of Mr Shoemaker’s conduct to the Presiding Judge in the Eastern District of Virginia.” His reply is basically that “a mere mother and housewife” could not possibly have written Neurodiversity.com on her own. She must have been prompted by malice and given material aid by the drug companies to pursue a campaign of intimidation against Clifford Shoemaker, his clients and his pet witness, Mark Geier.  It is alleged that Kathleen is part of a conspiracy to protect the drug companies from the legitimate claims of parents of vaccine damaged children. As Kathleen says in her latest entry, Welcome to My Conspiracy These documents offer a remarkable exposition of the grandiose, cartoonish conspiracy fantasies entertained by advocates of the concept of autism as toxicity and tort, and the arguments of those who seek to justify the perversion of legal processes in order to oppress their critics. CONFLICT OF INTEREST Imagine if a piece of research exonerating vaccines was put forward by a drug company employee whose husband was working for the defense team at the vaccine court. The parents who claim that their autistic children are vaccine damaged would  quite rightly be appalled if such a potential conflict of interest was concealed. This weekend three pieces of research were presented at the International Meeting for Autism Research (IMFAR) in London. All were co-authored by Dr Hewitson, all seek to demonstrate a link between vaccines and autism and the science has already been severely critiqued by Orac. But there is more. Over on LeftBrain/RightBrain Kev has revealed that Dr Hewitson has her own potential conflicts of interest. She and her husband have an autistic child and are pursuing a claim for vaccine injury. Her husband is employed by one of her co-authors, Andrew Wakefield at Thoughtful House. She is affiliated to Defeat Autism Now. This does not necessarily invalidate her work. But one wonders why Dan Olmsted, who is singing her praises over on The Age of Autism, neglected to include these details in his piece. Did he know? Did IMFAR know when they accepted her presentations? Of course it could just be another part of Kathleen Seidel’s conspiracy against anti-vaccine campaigners. THE BIGGER PICTURE It is important to scrutinize the claims of DANites, anti-vaxxers and their friends in the media. But in the wider world of autism there are more serious questions to engage with that pertain to the mainstream research and medical communities who exercise so much more influence over the world of autism than those on the pseudo-scientific fringe. Is it right to refer to autistic people and “healthy” controls in a scientific presentation? How far are we justified in questioning the assumptions and methodology behind a lot of autism research? Under what circumstances, if any, is the medical model capable of yielding useful results? Who is paying attention to the ethical dimensions surrounding informed consent from autistic research subjects? Larry Arnold, an autistic person  who is also an autism researcher and a member of the board of trustees of the National Autistic Society raises these and similar questions in his initial reflections on IMFAR. After the tiresome but necessary task, so ably done by Kev, Orac and Kathleen, of dealing with some of autism’s stinkers it is good to be able to turn to an autism thinker like Larry.

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