Ohio
oracknows | October 5, 2016Whenever we discuss vaccines and vaccine hesitancy, thanks to Andrew Wakefield the one vaccine that almost always comes up is the MMR, which is the combined measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. In 1998, Wakefield published a case series of cherry-picked patients in which he strongly inferred that the MMR vaccine was associated with autism and “autistic enterocolitis.” Of course, even the way Wakefield spun it, this wasn’t enough evidence to link the MMR vaccine to autism, which is no doubt why Wakefield never explicitly said that it did in the paper describing his case series. My guess has always…
oracknows | June 4, 2014Not surprisingly, being a guy who leans mildly left, I like The Daily Show. Jon Stewart and his writers are incredibly adept at skewering all manner of bovine excrement, be it political, scientific, or otherwise. In particular, the way Stewart and company skewered the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) for its promotion of the chemical industry. Indeed, Samantha Bee, who did the infamous Little Crop of Horrors segment that mocked ACSH for its defense of pesticides über alles and its criticism of Michelle Obama's healthy eating initiative.
Another Daily Show segment by Samantha Bee…
oracknows | January 28, 2014When last I wrote about the sad saga of Sarah Hershberger, the 12-year-old Amish girl from northeastern Ohio with lymphoblastic lymphoma whose parents, Andy and Anna Hershberger, decided to stop her chemotherapy resulting in legal action by Akron children's Hospital to have a medical guardian appointed to make sure that Sarah continues effective science-based therapy of her tumor, I intentionally chose a rather inflammatory title in which I proclaimed that she was coming home to die. I didn't do that lightly. Rather, I did it because I was thoroughly depressed because David Michael, the woo-…
oracknows | July 31, 2013I don't read atheist blogs much, if at all. The reason is that they just don't interest me anymore. Sure, like so many, I went through a phase where I was quite enamored of Richard Dawkins' brand of atheism. Then I read The God Delusion (well, most of it, anyway; I didn't bother to read the last couple of chapters because I had lost interest and couldn't force myself to finish them). These days I tend to think of myself as following the church of dontcareism. I just don't care that much one way or the other about religion, and endless arguments about atheism, "atheism-plus," and the like bore…
tsmith | April 28, 2009Back in 2007, I wrote about an outbreak of swine influenza from an Ohio county fair. The peer-reviewed paper analyzing the swine influenza isolated from that outbreak has just recently come out. From the abstract:
The swine isolate, A/SW/OH/511445/2007 (OH07), was evaluated in an experimental challenge and transmission study reported here. Our results indicate that the OH07 virus was pathogenic in pigs, was transmissible among pigs, and failed to cross-react with many swine H1 anti-sera. Naturally exposed pigs shed virus as early as 3 days and as long as 7 days after contact with…