autism
oracknows | October 16, 2008Was it just me, or did anyone else find it jarring when suddenly John McCain interjected special needs children and autism into the debate last night? As you may recall, a few months ago he was tripped up by the antivaccine fearmongers who think, despite an absence of scientifically compelling evidence supporting their view, that vaccines cause autism. Now that Sarah Palin is on the ticket, he's doing it again, this time in the context of discussing her qualifications to be President. As part of a response to a question about why the country would be better off if his choice of a running mate…
oracknows | October 16, 2008I thought I had seen it all.
Ever since I first discovered the antivaccination movement that is utterly convinced, despite all evidence to the contrary, that mercury from the thimerosal preservative that was in many vaccines until the end of 2001 or, more recently, vaccines themselves cause autism, I've been amazed at the panoply of dubious ideas proposed about how vaccines might bring this about. There is, of course, the claim of neurotoxicity from mercury, even though the symptoms of mercury toxicity do not come close to matching those of autism. Then, of course, there is the related claim…
oracknows | October 12, 2008NOTE: This post, which is related to a discussion of Dr. Paul Offit's Book Autism's False Prophets, originally appeared over at The ScienceBlogs Book Club. However, now that the book club for this particular book has concluded, I am free to repost it here for those who may not have seen it and to archive it as one of my own posts. Besides, I know the antivaxers are more likely to see it here...
On Friday, while discussing what is perhaps the aspect of Autism's False Prophets that is at the same time the most important set of observations (namely, how the media and government miscommunicate…
oracknows | October 11, 2008NOTE: This post, which is related to a discussion of Dr. Paul Offit's Book Autism's False Prophets, originally appeared over at The ScienceBlogs Book Club. However, now that the book club for this particular book has concluded, I am free to repost it here for those who may not have seen it and to archive it as one of my own posts. Besides, I know the antivaxers are more likely to see it here...
One of the major points made by Dr. Offit in Autism's False Prophets is how badly the media deals with scientific issues and stories in which science is a major component. Indeed, he devotes two full…
oracknows | October 11, 2008NOTE: This review of Dr. Offit's book Autism's False Prophets originally appeared over at The ScienceBlogs Book Club. However, now that the book club for this particular book has concluded, I am free to repost it here for those who may not have seen it and to archive it as one of my own posts. Besides, I know the antivaxers are more likely to see it here...
Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste...
Well, not really. I might have one of the two. Or not.
Be that as it may, I'm Orac, and I blog regularly at Respectful Insolence. In the more than two and a half years I…
oracknows | October 10, 2008...Dr. John Kiely, a.k.a. EpiWonk, will school you otherwise. (I had to attend a function for work last night; so no new insolence for you right now. Maybe later. Hard as it is to believe, I do sometimes have to let my job interfere with my blogging. Fortunately, I've been meaning to plug Dr. Kiely's post since it came out.)
After telling the harrowing story of his brush with serious complications from the measles as a child, he sums up the current day know-nothing, "green our vaccines" antivaccination movement succinctly and accurately:
Meanwhile, the modern anti-vaccination movement, which…
kevleitch | October 9, 2008Dr. Offit has never been shy about coming out with his opinions about vaccines and their lack of association to autism. Good. I genuinely thank him for doing so. He has been willing to put himself in the line of fire for what he believes is the right thing to do. In the course of doing this he - and his children - have been subjected to threats and abuse.
He knows that this can be the price you pay for becoming entangled with anti-vaccinationists. But he also knows that this is a subject that must be tackled.
He knows that this is not just a local issue. It is international. Non-vaccinators…
oracknows | October 7, 2008...it'll be because the flu vaccine poisoned me, of course!
That's right. Today I got my flu shot, complete with thimerosal and formaldehyde! I do put my money where my mouth is, so to speak. No word on whether there was any of the dreaded Polysorbate 80 in the vaccine, though. Oh, well. Maybe next time.
Also, while we're at it, my latest post over at The ScienceBlogs Book Club is up and ready for your perusal. Read it, enjoy it, trash it if you like. Just don't ignore it.
You know how much I hate it when my posts are ignored.
oracknows | October 6, 2008As you may remember, the evening after the Hollywood face of the antivaccine P.R. machine Jenny McCarthy was scheduled to take part in a web chat. At the time, I suggested sending questions in to the Oprah website, to see if any would get through. I'm sure there was some serious screening and vetting of possible questions; so I suggested trying to word them in such a way as to indicate Jenny's ignorance without triggering the censors. Apparently never was heard a discouraging word in the web chat (big surprise there), but apparently one rather clever wag did manage to get a question through…
oracknows | October 3, 2008...at The ScienceBlogs Book Club has been posted. Go forth and enjoy. As always for these Book Club Posts, no comments are allowed here. Got a response? Hate my guts? Think I'm in the pocket of Big Pharma, Big Government, and the Illuminati, too? At least for this post, say it over there!
kevleitch | October 2, 2008In his entry today, Orac asks the question "How can we physicians and scientists deal with antivaccinationism? What "frames" can we use to combat the likes of Jenny McCarthy?".
This is an excellent question. I understand exactly why Dr. Offit did not cover this in his book: I think he had a very specific remit in mind and such a question went beyond that remit. Maybe he will do a an AFP 2 or maybe he is hoping another big name in the field of vaccines or autism will step up to the plate the way he has and tackle that. I hope they do too.
My field (I am a Web developer) is that of…
oracknows | October 2, 2008After having posted about Jenny McCarthy, my brain hurt so much from the neuron-apoptosing idiocy that she always delivers that I decided I needed to move on to something that wouldn't assault my reason and quite so much. So I headed on over to that uber-repository of quackery and paranoid conspiracy theories, Mike Adam's Natural News.
It's true. Jenny is so dumb that Mike Adams looks intelligent by comparison, and that's saying a lot. Well, not really. In actuality, they're both black holes of negative intelligence, sucking all knowledge and science out of whatever environment self they land…
oracknows | October 1, 2008I guess that since my resistance failed, and I couldn't resist posting yesterday about the burning stupid that is Jenny McCarthy and her arrogance of ignorance in claiming that vaccines caused her son's autism and her campaigning to "Green Our Vaccines" (in reality, a smokescreen to hide her antivaccinationism), I thought why not go whole hog and get it out of my system? Let's just take in a concentrated dose, as the more Jenny talks the more she discredits the antivaccine movement among anyone with a lick of scientific literacy:
Embedded video from CNN Video
Jenny's on fire with stupid!…
oracknows | October 1, 2008...has been posted over at The ScienceBlogs Book Club.
Head on over. As will be the case for all my posts at the Book Club, please leave comments there, not here. Thanks.
oracknows | October 1, 2008Readers may be wondering why I haven't written about Jenny McCarthy's latest brain dead outburst against Amanda Peet. (Actually, brain dead is too kind a description of it, given that Jenny's retort in essence boils down to her having an "angry mob" on her side making Amanda "completely wrong.") It's because I decided to try to resist for once in my life. And I was doing really good at it, too, even though several readers sent me links to various stories about Jenny McCarthy's outburst. Still, I resisted. Even after antivaccinationist financier J. B. Handley wrote a post demanding of Amanda…
oracknows | October 1, 2008Just a quick announcement here:
The ScienceBlogs Book Club is back up and running, and this time the book under discussion is the latest by that Dark Lord of Vaccination himself, that Darth Vader to the antivaccinationist Luke Skywalker, otherwise known as Satan Incarnate to Jenny McCarthy, J.B. Handley, Andrew Wakefield, Dan Olmsted, and the crew of antivaccinationists spreading misinformation and endangering public health and promoting an amazing panoply of quackery to "cure" autism, Dr. Paul Offit. The book under discussion is Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the…
kevleitch | October 1, 2008In June of 2003, I opened my blog with these words:
Megan was born on 17-02-00 weighing slightly more than usual. The first few months of her life were totally normal- we didn't feel concerned about her health or well-being at all. That changed however when she had her DTP jab.
I know there's been a lot about the jabs (particularly the combined MMR jab) in the news but we (or rather I, Naomi was a lot more dubious than me but I managed to convince her) decided to go ahead with it and on the night of her first lot of jabs Megan began projectile vomiting and developed a temperature that peaked…
oracknows | September 30, 2008Yesterday's post was a result of the feeling that I had been getting too snarky for too long a time without doing some serious science or medical blogging. Not that there's anything wrong with being snarky, but a continuous diet of snark eventually gets dull--and not just to readers. However, science blogging is hard. Posts like that take a lot of work (which is why I have a propensity to write such posts over the weekend and post them on Monday). After I do a serious, thoughtful post like that, sometimes I just need a diversion. Sometimes I need to examine something that allows me to deliver…
oracknows | September 26, 2008You know, I'm really, really beginning to like this Dr. Rahul Parikh guy.
Yesterday, he delivered an absolutely delicious smackdown of that chief propagandist for the mercury militia and antivaccine movement, David Kirby. It was at least seven kinds of awesome, and I was truly grateful to Dr. Parikh for doing it so that I didn't have to. This time around, Dr. Parikh's done me another favor. You see, on Wednesday David Kirby gave a talk to Congressional staffers and a few Congressmen. He was also kind enough to include a link to his slides on the Age of Autism blog, and, indeed, such a huge,…
oracknows | September 24, 2008As you may have guessed, I'm tired of David Kirby. I've slapped down his nonsense so many times before, but, like the Energizer Bunny, he keeps going and going and going, spewing his pseudoscientific antivaccine nonsense, all the while asking that we really, truly believe that he isn't "antivaccine." He just repackages standard antivaccine tropes in clever and dense verbiage to make them somewhat less obvious--but not to those of us familiar with them.
Most recently, he attacked Dr. Rahul K. Parikh, a pediatrician who wrote an excellent and largely favorable review of Dr. Paul Offit's latest…