autism
oracknows | July 12, 2006Like most bloggers, I suspect, I like to know who's linking to me. Unfortunately, the majority of bloggers appear not to use TrackBacks, and even when they do for some reason the TrackBacks often don't register. Couple that with a level of comment spam that sometimes outnumbered my legitimate TrackBacks by at least 200:1, and you see that TrackBacks aren't a great way of knowing who's linking to you. Consequently, a couple of times a week, I do quick Technorati and Google Blog Searches on the URL of Respectful Insolence to see who happens to be linking to me.
That's how I found this brief…
purepedantry | July 10, 2006I haven't had time to read it all yet (it is sort of long and technical), but a new model by Grossberg and Seidman purports to explain how normal cognitive processes go wrong in autism -- a pretty tall order but it looks like they deliver. Here is a description from the press release:
A new model of the brain developed by Dr. Stephen Grossberg, professor and chairman of the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University, and Dr. Don Seidman, a pediatrician with the DuPage Medical Group in Elmhurst, IL, sheds light on the triggers of behaviors commonly associated with autism…
oracknows | July 10, 2006I had tried to give the Dr. Mark Geier and his son David a rest for a while, as I suspected my readers may have been getting a little tired of my bashing them, no matter how deserved that bashing may have been. After all, they do shoddy science in the service of "proving" that mercury in vaccines causes autism. They concoct dubious IRBs riddled with conflicts of interest to "approve" their research. When the evidence that this is not the case becomes more and more compelling, they add a twist of a claim that many autistic children suffer from "precocious" puberty," which requires treatment…
oracknows | July 6, 2006The mercury militia and MMR scaremongers aren't going to like this, not one bit.
What should greet my in box upon my arrival at work after a long Fourth of July weekend, but an alert of a new study of a large population of children in Canada that utterly failed to find an epidemiological link between thimerosal or MMR vaccination and autistic spectrum disorders. It's the latest in a continuous line of epidemiological studies and, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive epidemiological study to look at exposure to both MMR and thimerosal-containing vaccines. (The MMR vaccine, being a live…
oracknows | June 28, 2006Damn you, Kathleen.
Every time I think that I can give the whole mercury/autism thing a rest for a while and move on to less infuriating pastures, you keep finding things that keep dragging me back to the pit of pseudoscience inhabited by Dr. Mark Geier and his son David. The first time around, Kathleen found the Geiers misrepresenting David Geier's credentials on published journal articles to make it appear that David Geier had done the work reported in the articles at George Washington University when in fact he had not. I found David Geier's appropriation of the name of George Washington…
oracknows | June 21, 2006It's been a very interesting week for those of us who try to keep an eye on antivaccination warriors who scare mothers with claims based on either no science or bad science of dire consequences that will come from vaccinating their children.
A very interesting week indeed, kind of like that old curse, "May you live in interesting times."
Last week, eight years after his study that set off scare whose repercussions continue even now, Andrew Wakefield was finally called to account for professional misconduct for unreported conflicts of interest and highly unethical and unprofessional behavior.…
oracknows | June 19, 2006Time flies when you're having fun.
Hard as it is to believe, it's been a year since RFK, Jr. first posted his ridiculous conspiracy-mongering piece on Salon.com. Ever since moving to ScienceBlogs back in February, I had planned on reposting this article on the anniversary of its original appearance. Unfortunately, for some reason I misremembered the date as being later last June than it really was, leading me to forget completely about reposting on the day it should have been reposted, namely last Saturday. Oh, well, better late than never. If you're curious about how I plunged head first…
oracknows | June 12, 2006Well, it didn't take The Spoof long to comment on the Andrew Wakefield affair. Choice bits:
While on holiday in the US in 1997 he was introduced to a creationist nutter called Professor Hugh Fudenberg who claimed to cure autistic children by giving them samples of his own bone marrow.
And, my favorite:
Wakefield was recruited for a sum not less than the publicly reported thrity peices of silver and began being tutored in Fudenberg's "transfer factor technology" - the secret key to mastering miracle cures for childhood autism syndrome.
This theory was based on a curious supposition that…
oracknows | June 12, 2006When it rains it pours, eh?
While I happen to be on the topic of vaccines and autism again today, here's a surprising story:
Andrew Wakefield, the doctor behind the scare over a potential link between the MMR jab and autism in children, is to face four charges relating to unprofessional conduct at the General Medical Council, it is reported today.
Mr Wakefield, a surgeon who became a gut specialist, could be struck off the medical register and debarred from practising in the UK if the GMC finds him guilty of serious professional misconduct.
Following the publication of a research paper in the…
oracknows | June 12, 2006Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that it's been a while since I've written a substantive post on the fear mongering and bad science that are used by activists to support the claim that mercury in the thimerosal used as preservatives in vaccines is the cause of an "autism epidemic." The closest I've come is using Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s credulous reporting and conspiracy-mongering, in which he uncritically parroted the claims of the worst of the mercury militia and arguing that his recent article in Rolling Stone uses the same sort of dubious and fallacious techniques, showing…
oracknows | May 12, 2006Tara's post yesterday about Mercury and Mythology about how mercury in vaccines does not cause autism and about a recent story demonstrating tht mercury as used in dental amalgams is safe, coupled with Phil Plait's discussion of an article in TIME about autism that seemed a bit too credulous about facilitated communication reminded me that I haven't blogged about autism in a while. Basically, not much has happened that I feel qualified to comment on since Paul Shattuck's article concluding that claims of an "autism epidemic" based on analyses of the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (…
oracknows | April 18, 2006A few days ago, I fisked the antivaccination posturings of a certain "Libertarian Christian commenator" regarding the Geiers' claim that mercury in the thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines is a major cause of autism. Many of the comments predicted that Vox wouldn't respond. (Personally, I was hoping that he would but, based on his nonresponse to my earlier fisking of his antivaccination nonsense, figured that he probably wouldn't.)
Guess what? He actually did respond. Although I don't want this to turn into a prolonged blog exchange, I figured that, since Vox went through the bother…
oracknows | April 13, 2006With all the nuttiness coming out of Tom Cruise in the name of Scientology, it's often forgotten that there are a lot of other Scientologists out there in Hollywood. One of the other most prominent ones is John Travolta. Compared to Tom Cruise, John Travolta seems, superficially at least, the height of reason. Certainly he's a lot less obnoxious about his religion than Cruise is, and he always seems like a likable guy whenever he shows up on the talk show circuit. And, heck, anyone who can earn a commercial pilot's license and fly a 707 around the country has to have something upstairs.…
oracknows | April 13, 2006Oh, lovely.
Before I leave the topic of mercury-autism conspiracy mongering for a while, something perverse has led me to feel the need to point out something I've become aware of: Not surprisingly, it looks as though our favorite "Christian Libertarian" commentator from WorldNet Daily, tireless fighter against women's suffrage, and overall antivaccination loon Vox Day has foolishly and credulously falls hook, line, and sinker for the Geiers' claim in their mind-numbingly bad dumpster-diving paper that autism rates have fallen since the removal of thimerosal in vaccines.
Vox, whom I've not…
oracknows | April 12, 2006Excellent.
Having had to work on a talk last night, I didn't have any time to write anything substantive. Horrified at the thought of this blog going silent on a weekday (going silent on the weekend doesn't concern me much, given that my traffic almost always falls by around 50% regardless of whether I post on the weekend or not, barring any unexpected links from bigger blogs), I thought about doing what PZ did yesterday and recycling one of my more memorable posts from the old blog. Unfortunately, I couldn't come up with topic as likely to draw as much interest as PZ's, and I wasn't sure if…
oracknows | April 10, 2006When it rains, it pours. Last week, we had the Shattuck paper; this week, I'm sucked right back into this topic, at least for today.
A few weeks ago, I commented about a truly frightening direction that autism quackery was taking, with the father-son team of Mark and David Geier's bizarre proposal that chemically castrating autistic children using a drug like Lupron would "make chelation therapy" more effective because, according to them, testosterone somehow binds up mercury, making it more difficult to remove with chelation. Never mind that there is no convincing scientific evidence that…
oracknows | April 6, 2006Over the last couple of days, I've blogged a bit about a study by Paul Shattuck that shows how useless it is to try to use special education classification numbers as a means of proving the existence of an "autism epidemic." Well, at the risk of driving at least one person away, I'm going to comment one last time on this study. (And the answer to that person's question is that I'll blog about this topic when there's something going on that interests me enough to blog about it. He is perfectly free to ignore my posts on the topic if they annoy him so.)
In any case, Paul Shattuck himself showed…
oracknows | April 5, 2006Yesterday, I wrote extensively about a new study by Paul Shattuck that seriously casts doubt upon one of the key claims of those arguing that mercury in childhood vaccines causes autism, namely the existence of an "autism epidemic." These claims are nearly always based on rapidly rising numbers of children being classified as autistic for special education. The findings of the paper, boiled down to their essence, is that it was diagnostic substitution that was largely responsible for this apparent increase. Before 1993, autism and autism spectrum disorders were not even one of the major…
oracknows | April 4, 2006One of the key arguments by advocates claiming a link between mercury in childhood vaccines is that there is an "epidemic" of autism. They'll claim that autism was unknown before the 1930's, when thimerosal was first introduced into vaccines. (Never mind that there are plenty of descriptions of autism-like conditions dating from as far back as the 18th century.) They'll then claim that there is an "epidemic" that accelerated in the 1990's, when additional vaccines were added to the recommended childhood schedule, and that it was the additional mercury from those vaccines that was responsible…
oracknows | March 26, 2006I don't know how I missed this one yesterday, but a new blogger, Dr. Flea, sarcastically thanks RFK, Jr. for making his practice more difficult
The Thimerosal-Autism story will not die. When I say that a patient asks me about thimerosal every day, I am not exaggerating. Here is today's installment, in the form of an email from a mom:
Part of Dr. Flea's response:
I want to be as clear about this as I can. There is no controversy surrounding Thimerosal. There is scientific evidence and there is hysteria. The scientific evidence suggests that there is no link between thimerosal in vaccines and…