autism
oracknows | April 14, 2015I spent a nice long weekend in New York at NECSS, which has grown to quite the big skeptical conference since the last time I was there five years ago. The Friday Science-Based Medicine session went quite well and, as far as I could tell, appeared to be well-received; so hopefully we will be doing something like it again next year. And, heck, I got to meet Bill Nye. How cool is that?
One topic that came up over and over at NECSS had to do with what is the best way to communicate science and, in particular, contrast it to the unfortunately all-too-common denialist antiscience doctrines of the…
oracknows | April 9, 2015Later today, I'll be on my way to New York City to take part in the Science-Based Medicine portion of NECSS. I'm very much looking forward to it, not the least because I haven't been to New York in five years but even more so because I look forward to meeting up with the rest of the SBM crew and those interested in science and skepticism and trying, in my small way, to impart some little bit of what I've learned over the years about quackery, pseudoscience, and how to counter them. As a result, blogging might be more sporadic than usual for a few days. I mean, I haven't even quite finished my…
oracknows | March 30, 2015As I write this, I'm kind of beat.
The reason for this is simple. Traveling sucks the energy out of me, and I just got back from almost four days in Houston for the Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO) meeting. Yes, I was a mere dozen (at most) miles from that Heart of Darkness known as the Burzynski Clinic for a few days, and I didn't even succumb to the temptation to catch a cab out there and take a selfie with the Burzynski Clinic in the background. Part of the reason was that it would just be more expense than it's worth. The other part of the reason is that it would be a bit hard to…
oracknows | March 16, 2015I've been writing a lot of posts on what I like to call the "antivaccine dogwhistle." In politics, a "dog whistle" refers to rhetoric that sounds to the average person to be reasonable and even admirable but, like the way that a dog whistle can't be heard by humans because the frequency of its tone is higher than the range that humans can hear, most people don't "hear" the real message. However, the intended audience does hear the real message. The way the "dog whistle" works in politics is through the use of coded language recognizable to the intended audience but to which most other people…
oracknows | March 12, 2015How quickly things change.
If there's one thing I always feel obligated to warn my fellow pro-science advocates about vaccines and the antivaccine movement, it's that we can never rest on our laurels or assume that the tide is turning in our direction. The reason is simple: Antivaccinationism is a powerful belief system, every bit as powerful as religion and political ideology. It's powerful not just among antivaccinationists, but also because it taps into belief systems that are very much part and parcel of being an American. In fact, depressingly, yesterday I learned of a perfect example of…
oracknows | March 10, 2015Anyone who's read this blog knows my opinion of Mike Adams, the proprietor of the quack website known as NaturalNews.com. It is not favorable, to put it mildly. All you have to do to realize that is to type his name into the search box of this blog and see what comes up: Anger at his attacks on celebrities who have died of cancer; mockery of his pretending to be a scientist and attacking Jimmy Kimmel for "hate speech" about vaccines; alarm at his threats delivered with somewhat plausible deniability against scientists; further alarm at his "natural biopreparedness" and homeopathy for Ebola;…
oracknows | March 10, 2015The human mind is amazing in its ability to compartmentalize. Many are the times when I've come across people who seem reasonable in every other way but who cling tightly to one form of pseudoscience or another. On the other hand, as I've noticed time and time again, people whose minds have a proclivity for pseudoscience tend not to limit themselves to just one form of pseudoscience. Indeed, my surgical and skeptical bud Mark Hoofnagle coined a term for this latter phenomenon, namely "crank magnetism." It's basically a pithy term to describe how people who are into one form of pseudoscience…
oracknows | March 3, 2015The last couple of days have been unrelentingly serious and depressing, with posts on the (probably) preventable death of a young Australian woman named Jess Ainscough of a rare cancer because she made the mistake of choosing the quackery that is the Gerson protocol rather than conventional medicine. Unfortunately, the "natural health community" will almost certainly learn nothing from her story, in which Ainscough, facing the very unpleasant prospect of a radical amputation, instead chose Gerson therapy and became an evangelist for that particular form of cancer quackery and "natural healing…
oracknows | February 26, 2015Poor Andy Wakefield.
Beginning in the late 1990s until around six years ago, Andy was the premiere "vaccine skeptic" in the world. His 1998 case series published in The Lancet linking bowel problems in autistic children to the measles vaccine, the one where in the paper itself he was careful not to blame the MMR vaccine for autism but elsewhere was not so shy, launched a campaign of fear and loathing for the MMR vaccine that continues to this day. In his heyday, Wakefield was quite the figure, showing up on the media everywhere, treated with undeserved respect by much of the tabloid press and…
oracknows | February 24, 2015With the Disneyland measles outbreak still going strong and striking far more unvaccinated than vaccinated, it's not surprising that a discussion has begun in some states about lax policies that permit religious and/or philosophical exemptions. In Oregon, for example, the legislature is considering SB442, a bill apparently originally intended to provide a technical fix to the process for obtaining philosophical exemptions to vaccine mandates by giving parents deadlines to submit the required documentation for non-medical exemptions, but the antivaccine troops became totally riled up when the…
oracknows | February 13, 2015If there's one good thing about the ongoing Disneyland measles outbreak that is continuing to spread, if there can be a "good thing" about an outbreak of vaccine-preventable disease that didn't have to happen, it's that it's put the antivaccine movement on the defensive. They are definitely feeling the heat. Their reaction to that heat can range from ever more vigorously proclaiming that they are "not antivaccine" in a desperate bid to convince the unwary and those not familiar with the antivaccine movement that they are not antivaccine, all the while softening their antivaccine tropes…
oracknows | February 10, 2015Sometimes, in order to understand advocates of pseudoscience, such as antivaccinationists, it's a useful exercise to look at their most extreme elements. Admittedly, in focusing on such loons, one does take the risk of generalizing the nuts to everyone a bit much, but on the other hand I've often found that the extremists are basically like the less loony versions on steroids. The advantage, to me, is that they are unconcerned (for the most part) with hiding the craziness at the root of their beliefs. While, for instance, SafeMinds of the merry band of antivaccinationists at Age of Autism (…
oracknows | January 16, 2015
It looks like this year's going to be a bad flu season.
Hard as it is for me to believe, it was only five weeks ago when I discussed an announcement by the CDC that this year's flu vaccine would likely be less effective because it isn't a good match for the influenza strains in circulation this year. Those familiar with how the flu vaccine is developed every year know that the composition of the vaccine depends on the WHO's choice of the three or four strains that its experts deem most likely to cause significant human suffering and death in the coming flu season. Basically, the WHO has to…
oracknows | January 13, 2015
He's ba-ack.
Remember J. B. Handley? He and his wife were the founders of the antivaccine crank group Generation Rescue (GR) back in the day. When I first started blogging, GR was new and shiny, with JB and his wife showing up all over the media blaming autism on mercury. In fact, I think it's worth reminding my readers, for the benefit of newbies (and in this case, newbies could be anyone who hasn't been reading at least five years) just what GR used to say about autism:
Generation Rescue believes that childhood neurological disorders such as autism, Asperger’s, ADHD/ADD, speech delay,…
oracknows | January 8, 2015
So here it is, already a week into 2015. Truth be told, I'm still finding myself having a hard time believing that it's already 2015, but then I say that about every year in early January. Be that as it may, I've already seen one hopeful sign that it could be a decent year when it comes to science refuting claims of the antivaccine movement. In fact, there's already been a study that once again fails to find even a hint of a whiff of a whisper of evidence for a link between vaccines and autism. It comes in the form of a study from Japan published online in Vaccine on January 3 (which, oddly…
oracknows | December 31, 2014She's baa-aack.
Remember Stephanie Seneff? When last Orac discussed her, she had been caught dumpster diving into the VAERS database in order to torture the data to make it confess a "link" between aluminum adjuvants in vaccines and acetaminophen and—you guessed it!—autism. It was a bad paper in a bad journal known as Entropy that I deconstructed in detail around two years ago. As I said at the time, I hadn't seen a "review" article that long and that badly done since the even more horrible article by Helen Ratajczak entitled Theoretical aspects of autism: Causes–A review (which, not…
oracknows | December 23, 2014
Having recently discovered a veritable Library with Doctor Moon of antivaccine misinformation and quackery known as Modern Alternative Mama's blog, Facebook page, Twitter feed, and YouTube channel, I couldn't resist taking one more drought from the same well. It is, after all, almost Christmas, and truly, as far as the blog is concerned, the discovery of Kate Tietje, a.k.a. Modern Alternative Mama, was an early Christmas gift that could not but be opened immediately. Besides, with Christmas coming up in a couple of days, after today I plan on taking a brief blog break until Friday, with…
oracknows | December 12, 2014
After yesterday's post on the depressingly high (and increasing, apparently) rate of personal belief exemptions to vaccination requirements for entering school in the state of Michigan, I felt the need to pontificate a bit further. The reason is that MLive.com has posted some followup stories. Also, I didn't have a lot of time last night to write because I had the pleasure of attending the CFI-Michigan Solstice dinner to hang out with fellow skeptics and heathens. Unfortunately, the topic of the high exemption levels in Michigan came up.
First up on the follow up story parade is one…
oracknows | November 6, 2014
Two months ago, one of the strangest stories ever to be flogged by antivaccine activists was insinuating its way throughout social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and everywhere else, where antivaccine activists were engaged in a frantic effort to get the attention of mainstream media regarding their belief that there was a "CDC whistleblower" who had revealed a "cover up" that results from a CDC study looking at age of receiving MMR vaccination was studied as a potential risk factor for autism had shown that African-American boys showed a more than three-fold increased risk due to MMR…
oracknows | October 31, 2014One thing that happened this week that I didn’t get around to writing about is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jonas Salk, which was October 28. In the annals of medicine, few people have had as immediate a positive effect as Jonas Salk did when he developed the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV). At the time the IPV became available in 1955, annual epidemics of polio were a regular feature of American life, causing panics and closing public swimming pools with a distressing frequency, causing thousands of cases of paralysis per year and many deaths. Indeed, in 1952 one particularly bad…