autism
oracknows | May 14, 2009I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism.
The reason for the hate part should be obvious. AoA is, without a doubt, a cesspool of pseudoscience and anti-vaccine propaganda. All while oh-so-self-righteously denying that its agenda is "anti-vaccine," AoA on a daily basis lays down articles blaming vaccines for autism, while setting up websites attacking vaccine science, taking out full page ads attacking vaccines as causing autism, gloating when learning of declining vaccination rates in the Ukraine, and high-fiving (blogospherically speaking)…
oracknows | May 8, 2009I know, I know it seems like the proverbial shooting fish in a barrel, but some creature that I can't identify is having a fight somewhere in the neighborhood, freaking out my dog, and now I can't go back to sleep; so why not blog? In any case, I found out last week that Jenny McCarthy is on Twitter as JennyfromMTV.
Now, when I first saw it, I thought it had to be a spoof, someone pretending to be Jenny. No one could be as inane as to Tweet things like:
Im inside a hyperbaric chamber. This thing makes me feel amazing.
About to fly to jersey. Security stole my sugar free jelly out of my purse…
oracknows | May 7, 2009Unfortunately, Orac has been feeling a bit under the weather since last night--so much so that he actually did something he rarely does and stayed home from work.
But enough with the third person schtick. If I feel better later, maybe I'll post something. Hopefully I'll be back to 100% tonight and can produce the usual Insolence that readers know and expect for tomorrow. Right now I can't say. What I can say, however, that, whatever I post, at least today it won't be about Jenny McCarthy's and J.B. Handley's appearance on The Doctors yesterday. My gastrointestinal status is tenuous enough as…
oracknows | May 6, 2009If there's one thing about the anti-vaccine movement in general and one of its chief mouthpieces for propaganda, the Age of Autism blog, in particular, it's rank hypocrisy. One of the key tenets of anti-vaccine ideology is an unrelenting distrust of big pharma. While that in and of itself would not be entirely unreasonable, given the documented chicanery of that large pharmaceutical companies have indulged in from time to time, but on AoA the crew takes such mistrust beyond reasonable skepticism and straight into tinfoil hat territory. Indeed, "pharma shill!" is one of their favorite cries…
oracknows | May 6, 2009A while back, Mark Hoofnagle coined a term that I like very much: Crank magnetism. To boil it down to its essence, crank magnetism is the phenomenon in which a person who is a crank in one area very frequently tends to be attracted to crank ideas in other, often unrelated areas. I had noticed this tendency long before I saw Mark's post, including one Dr. Lorraine Day, who, besides being a purveyor of quackery, is also a rabid anti-Semite and Holocaust denier who had treated arch-Holocaust Ernst Zündel with "alternative" therapies when he was in jail awaiting trial, and a conspiracy theorist…
amillikan | May 5, 2009
The billionaire media icon Oprah Winfrey sealed a contractual deal with notorious anti-vaccination supporter Jenny McCarthy Monday that will enable McCarthy to spread her belief that vaccines cause autism across several platforms. This viewpoint is vehemently opposed in the scientific community, as it remains virtually unsupported after years of rigorous scientific investigation and, if heeded as true, has lethal consequences in the form of diseases like measles, mumps and rubella. With support from Oprah, McCarthy is slated to host a syndicated talk show and maintain a blog. According to…
oracknows | May 4, 2009...comes, from of all places, Gawker:
Oh, good, Oprah is going to give Jenny McCarthy a talk show, because she wants your kid to die of the measles.
McCarthy, a famous celebrity from the long-defunct Playboy magazine and much missed MTV channel, has been on a crusade to find an evildoer responsible for her son's autism. She settled on vaccines, because why not. And now she spends a great deal of time on TV explaining that the mercury that has not been vaccines since 1999 is giving all the kids autism, but it can be cured with Chelation therapy, which has so far only killed one or two autistic…
oracknows | April 29, 2009Sometimes I wonder just how people can be so messed up. I know, I know. I spend considerable time writing about fools and charlatans, but this is a different kind of messed up, in which hatefulness is added to the ignorance. Consider this story, sent to me by a reader:
"I'm 4 years old," he said, "and I have a sister named Olivia, and I ride my bike all day long."
He lives in a piece of suburbia that seems picturesque: the Venzano development in San Marcos. His parents, Gary and Marla Trussle, moved the family here five months ago.
"I thought it would be good for the children," Marla Trussle…
dgmacarthur | April 28, 2009A new paper in Nature reports the results of a large genome-wide association of autism. After some fairly heroic data analysis, the researchers have managed to tag one region of the genome as containing a common variant that contribute to the disease, with odds ratios on the order of 1.2 (the paper actually reports six variants in the same region, but these all appear to be tagging the same underlying causal variant).
The finding is getting fairly glowing press coverage, but let's keep it in context: an odds ratio of 1.2 means that individuals carrying the variant have their risk of the…
edyong | April 28, 2009The autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), including autism and its milder cousin Asperger syndrome, affect about 1 in 150 American children. There's a lot of evidence that these conditions have a strong genetic basis. For example, identical twins who share the same DNA are much more likely to both develop similar autistic disorders than non-identical twins, who only share half their DNA.
But the hunt for mutations that predispose people to autism has been long and fraught. By looking at families with a history of ASDs, geneticists have catalogued hundreds of genetic variants that are linked to…
palmd | April 23, 2009It's no secret that I think the Huffington Post is an teeming den execrable pseudoscientific snakes. Still, when it comes to fanning the vaccination manufatroversy, they are really off the deep end. Take the latest piece of dreck on Jenny McCarthy, GoD (Google Doctorate). It's written by the infamous "Dr." Patricia Fitzgerald, and this is where I get cranky. Worse than all the drivel spouted by Jenny is HuffPo giving their imprimatur of authority to Fitzgerald. Let me 'splain.
Look, there's a lot of ways to legitimately gain the title of "doctor". The most common are to go to a…
palmd | April 23, 2009Orac isn't known for his sound bites. He tends to write pieces which, in the blogosphere, might be considered rather long, and for good reason---he has a lot to say, and he says it well. But sometimes there is a gem of insolence that is so apt, it must be reshared:
But what really makes this analogy so brain dead is that it was the very epidemiological methods that have so consistently failed to find any correlation between vaccines and autism that led scientists to realize that smoking is strongly correlated with cancer. Jim [Carrey], while accepting the epidemiology linking tobacco smoke…
oracknows | April 22, 2009
After writing about a new low of pseudoscience published in that repository of all things antivaccine and quackery, The Huffington Post (do you even have to ask?), on Tuesday, I had hoped--really hoped--that I could ignore HuffPo for a while. After all, there's only so much stupid that even Orac can tolerate before his logic circuits start shorting out and he has to shut down a while so that his self-repair circuits can undo the damage. Besides, I sometimes think that the twit who created HuffPo, Arianna Huffington, likes the attention that pseudoscience turds dropped onto her blog by…
oracknows | April 20, 2009About a week and a half ago, something happened that makes me realize that the Jenny and Jim antivaccine propaganda tour that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago was clearly only phase I of Generation Rescue's April public relations offensive. About ten days ago, courtesy of J.B. Handley, the founder of Generation Rescue, who in order to have a couple of famous faces fronting his organization has allowed himself to be displaced, so that Generation Rescue has now been "reborn" as Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey's Autism Organization (the better to capitalize on her D-list celebrity yoked to Jim…
oracknows | April 11, 2009Readers may have noticed that we've had a minor antivaccine troll infestation in a couple of previous posts. It's no big deal of course, hardly worth my attention--except for one thing. That one thing is that a certain member of the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism, for which no evidence that vaccines are not associated with autism is strong enough to penetrate its collective Borg-like hivemind and no study suggesting that vaccines are associated with autism is too execrable not to trumpet to the high heavens as "vindication" that the antivaccine cult is correct, arrived to tell us…
oracknows | April 9, 2009Whatever you think of President Obama's economic stimulus package, there's one thing that I, at least, am happy to learn about it:
Vice President Joe Biden announced today that the Obama Administration will make $2.3 billion available for crucial health and human services programs that help to provide care for children and prevent disease. States will receive $2 billion in Recovery Act funding to support child care for working families. The administration also plans to make $300 million in vaccines and grants available to ensure more underserved Americans receive the vaccines they need…
palmd | April 6, 2009I don't know what it's like to be autistic. I don't know what it's like to raise an autistic child. For this knowledge, I have to rely on others, and there are plenty of talented bloggers out there who write about these experiences all the time. What I do know is that there is a cadre of autism "activists" out there who do a great disservice to people who do know something about these experiences.
One such example is Dr. Jerry Kartzinel, who co-wrote Jenny McCarthy's latest monument to her own idiocy. "Dr. Jerry" is infamous among many parents of autistic children for this quote:
Autism,…
oracknows | April 6, 2009
Embedded video from CNN Video
Over the weekend, a lot of readers sent me links to Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey's appearance on Larry King Live. (If you can't stand watching the embedded video of the segment, the transcript is here.) Fortunately for me (and, I hope, you), a "friend" of mine has written a comprehensive takedown of not just the nonsense spewed by Jenny and Jim, but of a new "study" released by Generation Rescue purporting to show that nations with low numbers of mandatory vaccines have low levels of autism. Of course, it shows nothing of the sort.
Find out why at Science-…
palmd | April 2, 2009"You know the moon landings were ginned up on a Hollywood sound stage, right?"
"Hey, how come it's so hard to get the Truth out there about the 9/11 attacks being staged by the CIA/Mossad?"
"I don't know why they think I'm crazy; the aliens really did probe my anus."
We hear crap like this all the time, but these wackos never get ink in major media outlets because, well, they are so clearly paranoid and deranged. So why do we see a similarly paranoid, deranged person like Jenny McCarthy on the pages of Time magazine? Is it because she's more photogenic than most alien abductees? Is it…
oracknows | April 2, 2009Yesterday was long and rough, with the day spent desperately trying to finish a grant application and the evening spent in obedience training with our new dog Bailey, who, let's face it, needs more than a bit of doggie discipline. By the time I got home, had dinner, and was checking e-mail, it was pretty late and--gasp!--I didn't really feel like blogging. Yes I'm aware of that study that claims to link vinyl floors to autism that everyone's been sending me; perhaps I'll get to it tomorrow. Last night it was just too late and I was too tired to try to tackle reading a research paper and…