autism
oracknows | August 25, 2009Geez, I wonder if Larry Moran knows about this. If he doesn't, I'm going to make sure that he does. I'm also guessing that he won't be pleased. He doesn't like pseudoscience at all. He detests "intelligent design" creationists. Based on that, I'm guessing that he won't like it at all to learn that the Canadian version of the autism "biomedical" antivaccine quackfest known as Autism One is metastasizing from its usual location in Chicago every Memorial Day to held at the University of Toronto in October, as this advertisement shows:
If you live in Canada, the Northeastern United States, the…
oracknows | August 24, 2009The anti-vaccine movement is nothing if not plastic. It "evolves" very rapidly in response to selective pressures applied to it in the form of science refuting its key beliefs. For instance, when multiple studies looking at the MMR vaccine and autism failed to confirm the myth that the MMR causes autism or "autistic enterocolitis," most recently late last year, it was not a problem to the anti-vaccine movement. Neither was it a major problem to the movement when multiple studies similarly failed to find a link between mercury in the preservative thimerosal that used to be in most childhood…
oracknows | August 23, 2009I must admit that I've never heard of Margerite Kelly. Apparently she's some sort of advice columnist for the Washington Post. Apparently she's also fairly clueless, if her column from last Friday is any indication. At least, she's clueless about autism. In her column Diagnosing Autism Is Never an Easy Process, she betrays a whole lot of ignorance about autism, autism treatments, and the quackery that is being sold to parents as a "cure" for autism.
A parent writes to Ms. Kelly about her two-year-old nephew, who is throwing tantrums and showing signs that concern her that he may be autistic.…
oracknows | August 20, 2009This time, the evidence comes from New Zealand:
Notified measles cases so far this year are already seven times higher than the total number of measles cases last year.
The reason? The third-lowest immunisation rate in the OECD, despite the fact immunisation is free and widely and readily available. Our immunisation rate is about 83 percent - to be effective it needs to be 95 percent.
This video goes into more detail.
Whenever vaccination rates fall below the threshold of herd immunity, the door is left open for diseases once thought vanquished to return with a vengeance, first through…
oracknows | August 19, 2009Time and time again, I've had requests from readers for good resources for countering the nonsense emanating from the anti-vaccine movement. Time and time again, I've pointed out sites like Every Child By Two and The Vaccine Education Center.
Now, thanks to the efforts of some friends of mine, especially Steve Novella, there is another handy dandy resource that was just announced today:
Vaccines and Autism on Science-Based Medicine
It includes a list of SBM posts about vaccines, an overview of the question, and a list of key studies. This page is a work in progress; so we appreciate any input…
oracknows | August 19, 2009As a "prominent" (as hard as I find it that anyone would apply the word to me) blogger about the anti-vaccine movement, somehow I ended up on the Every Child By Two mailing list. ECBT, as you may recall, is the organization founded by former First Lady Rosalyn Carter and former First Lady of Arkansas Betty Bumpers to promote vaccination against childhood diseases. It's a fine organization, and a much delayed counterweight to antivaccine propaganda mills like Age of Autism, Generation Rescue, the National Vaccine Information Center, and the up and coming antivaccine doctors' website Medical…
oracknows | August 18, 2009Vacation or no vacation, something's bubbled up in the comments that I consider worth commenting about. If you remember (or even if you don't), about a week and a half ago I wrote about how Dr. Bob Sears, author of The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Choice for Your Child, has let the mask drop. I entitled the post Dr. Bob Sears: Stealth anti-vaccinationist? This time around, I was half-tempted to remove the question mark, based on the comment of a commenter by the 'nym of Science Mom, who turned me on to this post by Dr. Bob in the forums of his website entitled Weekly Disclaimer about SM and…
oracknows | August 15, 2009It's amazing where anti-vaccine nuttery will metastasize to when you're not looking.
This time around, Tom Chick (who, I'm told but don't know for sure, is actually Jack Chick's son) warns us about a new Wii game by Ubisoft called Your Shape. It sounds as though it's nothing more than another of "personalized" exercise guides, but what it does have that other such exercise guides lack is a certifiably loony anti-vaccine wingnut as one of its "health experts." Indeed, as Tom points out, this is what Ubisoft says in its press release:
In addition to being the face of Your Shape featuring Jenny…
oracknows | August 13, 2009Let's face it, I've been at this "anti-antii-vax" thing for quite a while now. This December, this blog will have been in existence for five years. Even before that cold, gray Saturday afternoon nearly five years ago when, on a whim, I started up a blog on Blogspot that became the first incarnation of Respectful Insolence, I had been a regular presence on the Usenet newsgroup misc.health.alternative for at least three years before that. There, besides quackery, I got my first taste of the lies of the anti-vaccine movement from the likes of denizens of the newsgroup like Jan Drew and Ilena…
oracknows | August 7, 2009I'm soooo envious.
Why and of whom am I envious? I'll tell you. Phil Plait, a.k.a. The Bad Astronomer, attracts a more famous class of antivaccine loon. He's managed to attract Dr. Joe Mercola himself in the comments of a post about anti-vaccine zealots:
If you TRULY are interested in finding out the truth about this topic you are encouraged to attend the Fourth International Public Conference on Vaccines in Washington DC in October.
http://www.nvic.org/Events/overview.aspx
The top experts in the world on this topic will be presenting and you can really understand the science rather than…
oracknows | August 7, 2009Dr. Bob Sears is the bane of science- and evidence-based pediatricians everywhere. As pediatrician Dr. John Snyder relates, whenever he hears a parent say "I was reading Dr. Sears" or sees a patient in his office holding a copy of Dr. Sears' The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Choice for Your Child, he knows what's coming next: Resistance to vaccination. It would be one thing if this resistance were based on evidence or science-based concerns about the safety of vaccination, but it's not. As Dr. Snyder explains, while playing the "open-minded" "tell both sides" gambit, Dr. Sears credulously…
oracknows | July 31, 2009You may remember a couple of months ago, I took Dr. Bob Sears to task. Dr. Bob, as you may recall, wrote a book that has become the bane of pediatricians everywhere, namely The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child. In this book, Dr. Bob, while oh-so-piously proclaiming that he is "not anti-vaccine," lays down in his discussion of childhood vaccines a credulous treatment of many anti-vaccine canards in a sort of "I don't believe vaccines cause autism, but..." sort of fashion. When last we saw him on this blog, Dr. Sears had decided to let his anti-vaccine freak flag high and…
oracknows | July 31, 2009One of the advantages of having been a blogger for nearly five years is that you gain a sense of perspective after having written about various issues over and over for a long time. True, the disadvantage is that it sometimes becomes difficult to think of something new to say about longstanding issues. Even so, it's still quite useful, every so often, to take a look back over a longstanding issue of interest to the blog (more like a festering sore that keeps getting worse), and a new article in Salon.com gives me a perfect excuse to do just that. The topic has been a frequent topic on this…
oracknows | July 25, 2009Last night, I received an e-mail from a fairly well-known atheist (no, it wasn't Richard Dawkins, although that would have been totally cool) criticizing me for my post about Bill Maher's complete unsuitability for the Richard Dawkins Award. I'm not going to reprint my response to that part, because, well, his criticisms were pretty much a boilerplate of other blowback I've received from the post. What caught my attention more was that he noticed a couple of posts of mine about Jenny McCarthy.
I'll paraphrase, because I don't have this person's permission to post his e-mail. Not that that…
oracknows | July 22, 2009This may be the burningest stupid I've ever seen about vaccines. Maybe. It's so hard to tell given how much idiocy I've seen about vaccines.
I know, it's really, really hard to believe me when I say that what follows deserves to leap right up to the top ranks of brain-melting moronicity. After all, over the last four years, I've delved into the deepest, darkest chasms of pure anti-vaccine stupid. I've subjected myself to the incredible idiocy that is Jenny McCarthy and Kent Heckenlively. I've delved into the most vile cesspits of anti-vaccine propaganda, cesspits so full of misinformation and…
oracknows | July 21, 2009Ever since Jenny McCarthy hitched her fading star to the anti-vaccine movement and managed to get Oprah Winfrey to go along for the ride, she has become the public face of the anti-vaccine movement. Unfortunately, there hasn't been nearly as much blowback as there should be in the mainstream press, although bloggers have been all over McCarthy's promotion of the worst lies of the anti-vaccine movement and advocacy of autism quackery. Then I came across this the other day:
I'm of two minds on this. While it's a good thing to see cartoonists ridiculing Jenny McCarthy and Oprah for their…
oracknows | July 21, 2009If there's one characteristic of the anti-vaccine movement that helps define them as true cranks, it's a streak of conspiracy theory mania. It's not too much of an exaggeration when I wonder if they think that the Lizard Men have taken over the government, the CDC, and the American Academy of Pediatrics in order to use vaccines in a New World Order plot to make all of our children autistic. Or something. I'm never quite sure. Knowing this particular aspect of the anti-vaccine movement, the only thing that surprises me is that they haven't joined the forces arrayed against President Obama's…
oracknows | July 17, 2009I realize that this week in practically every new post I've been mentioning TAM7. It hasn't exactly been intentional, believe it or not, at least aside from my recap a on Tuesday and my request for photos from those of you who attended. Oddly enough, although I mentioned how proud I was to be part of the Anti-Anti-Vax Panel discussion, where I joined Joe Albietz, Steve Novella, Mike Goudeau (skeptic, juggler, entertainer, producer, and writer who has an autistic child), Harriet Hall, and Derek Bartholomaus, I didn't really discuss some of the thoughts that the panel's discussion inspired in…
oracknows | July 14, 2009Rerun time is over.
Very early Monday morning, a plane touched down, a car drove along a dark and deserted freeway, and my wife and I found ourselves finally back at home. True, we did have a late night diversion to Denny's because we were starving, but by 2 AM or so we were back home. Time to go to bed. Time to go back to work. No more Las Vegas. No more The Amaz!ng Meeting.
Now what?
I probably should have written this yesterday, or on the plane. It's really amazing how fast impressions become memory and memory morphs and fades. But I was simply too tired. I used to be able to adjust to a…
oracknows | July 11, 2009I'm currently in Las Vegas at The Amazing Meeting. Believe it or not, I was even on a panel! While I'm gone, I'll probably manage to do a new post or two, but, in the meantime, while I'm away communing with fellow skeptics at TAM7, I'll be reposting some Classic Insolence from the month of July in years past. (After all, if you haven't been following this blog at least a year, it'll be new to you. And if you have I hope you enjoy it again.) This particular post first appeared in July 2008.
I suppose I had better get ready for another e-mail with a wounded, puppy-dog, plaintive complaint of "…