vaccines
sa smith | November 9, 2012One of the more amusing aspects of 'You are only criticizing Islam because you are RACIST AGAINST MIDDLE-EASTERNERS!!!!' is the fact that most Muslims do not live in the Middle-East.
They live in Asia.
Case in point: Indonesia, where about >87% of the population is Muslim. 12.7% of all Muslims live in Indonesia (Iraq? 1.2%).
So naturally, like Christians in the US try to pass legislation to make Christianity The Law (for everyone, whether you are Christian or not), Muslims in Indonesia try to pass legislation to make Islam The Law (for everyone, whether you are Muslim or not).
And,…
sa smith | November 5, 2012Let me break down the overall scheme of vaccination, real quick.
You get exposed to a dead/weakened/chunks of a pathogen (virus, bacterial toxin like tetanus, etc).
Your body reacts to the vaccine 'invader' and triggers an adaptive immune response.
Your adaptive immune system 'remembers' what it has seen, so when you are exposed to the real virus/bacteria/etc, it is already ready, and kills the pathogen before it can make you sick.
That is the ideal situation.
Sometimes your body just ignores the vaccine. The vaccine is dead, so it degrades before your body even sees it, much less develops…
oracknows | October 25, 2012Well, I'm here. That's right. As I mentioned yesterday, I'm at CSICon. As is the case when I'm at conferences, be they skeptical conferences or professional conferences, it's hard to predict the blogging time available. It could be a lot; it could be a little. Or it could be none. (Well, obviously it's not none, or you wouldn't be reading this.) In any case, there was lots of stuff going on, plus there was the second game of the World Series, which made me miss the live recording of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Oh, well. Steve understood. So I wasn't up for any heavy lifting or taking…
sa smith | October 24, 2012Wull... What the hell is the point in a whore vaccine that doesnt turn little girls into whores??
Boy, I hope some scientists are losing their membership in The Evil League of Evil over this:
Sexual Activity–Related Outcomes After Human Papillomavirus Vaccination of 11- to 12-Year-Olds
Risk of the composite outcome (any pregnancy/sexually transmitted infection testing or diagnosis or contraceptive counseling) was not significantly elevated in HPV vaccine–exposed girls relative to HPV vaccine–unexposed girls
Wull... wull goddammit!
*sigh*
Remember how we learned about 'adjusted odds ratios'…
oracknows | October 22, 2012Just yesterday, I commented on a typical whine from the antivaccine crew at the crank blog Age of Autism in which Dan Olmsted became indignant over being reminded that science does not support his belief that vaccines cause autism, that they don't work, and that they are dangerous. Olmsted, clueless as ever about science, viewed being reminded that the science overwhelmingly doesn't support his belief as being akin to George W. Bush trying to convince the country that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction as a pretext to invade or to Richard Nixon urging people to stop investigating Watergate…
sa smith | October 22, 2012Oh lawd oh lawd.
Some folks at Emory investigated the differences in understanding vaccines between parents who got a lot of vaccine info from the internet, and parents who didnt.
Oh lawd.
Parents’ Source of Vaccine Information and Impact on Vaccine Attitudes, Beliefs, and Nonmedical Exemptions
The good news is, this article is Open Access. The bad news is, this means you all can read the paper and smash your heads into a wall with me. YAAAAAAAaaaay...
First-- a bit of translation that might help you read this paper-- 'Adjusted Odds Ratio'. Simply, if it is '1', or the 'confidence interval…
oracknows | October 21, 2012I like the word "manufactroversy."
It's a lovely made up word that combines the two words "manufactured controversy" and is, to boil it down, defined as the art of creating a controversy where none really exists. In the case of science, it's the concerted effort to make it seem as though there is a legitimate scientific controversy when in reality there is not. Indeed, one might say that the very purpose (or at least the main purpose) of this blog is to discuss manufactroversies. These include issues such as quackery, where promoters of pseudoscientific, unscientific, and prescientific…
oracknows | October 7, 2012On Friday, I wrote about the sort of case that outrages me every bit as much as cases of cancer quackery that lead to the death of patients. I'm referring to the case of Amanda Sadowsky, a four month old infant who died after suffering traumatic brain injuries that appeared consistent with shaken baby syndrome (SBS). As I've pointed out before, what I've found to be one of the most disturbing antivaccine claims of all is the assertion that SBS is a "misdiagnosis for vaccine injury." As you might recall, SBS is the name originally given to a triad of findings consisting of subdural hemorrhage…
oracknows | October 5, 2012Remember Alan Yurko?
To remind those of you not familiar with this particularly odious excuse for a human being, I'll briefly relate who he is and why he's so vile. Alan Yurko is a baby killer, pure and simple. He shook his 10-week-old son to death. Normally, such a pitiful excuse for a human being would not be "worthy" of comment, much less admiration, but not to the antivaccine movement. Yurko was sentenced to life in prison without parole for his crime but somehow managed to find himself the "hero" of a campaign
I first learned of this vile concept when I learned of the case of Alan Yurko…
oracknows | October 3, 2012I'm having a hard time keeping myself from laughing uproariously. I'm talking gut-wrenching belly laughs, the kind that are so intense that you have trouble catching your breath between paroxysms of laughter, the kind that threaten to force the contents of your stomach to go the wrong way, up and out. What, you may ask, is so hilarious that it would make me laugh so hard that it hurts? Let's go back to last week, when I urged my readers to rally the troops to counter a couple of different antivaccine activities, one of which will occur later today. This is the appearance of the Dark Lord of…
oracknows | October 2, 2012About a week ago, I wrote one of my usual meandering posts in which I pointed out the similarities between two different anti-science movements. On the one hand, there are anti-vaccinationists, who fetishize the naturalistic fallacy (i.e., the belief that anything "natural" is better and that anything human made or altered by science is dangerous) and use misinformation, pseudoscience, and bad science to demonize vaccines. On the other hand, we have the movement that is opposed to "genetically modified organisms" (GMOs), who fetishize the naturalistic fallacy, and frequently use…
oracknows | October 2, 2012I suppose it's possible that there might be doubt that Rob Schneider has become a complete and total antivaccine wingnut. Possible, but not reasonable. After all, he's shown his cards and risen to prominence with his attacks on vaccine science made as part of his effort to oppose the passage of California Bill AB 2109, which was finally passed and signed by Governor Jerry Brown, but not without an attempt to water it down by adding a pointless (and probably unconstitutional) set of instructions for implementation in a signing statement. Leading up to this, Schneider had "made a name for…
oracknows | September 30, 2012I've been blogging a lot about California Bill AB 2109. Basically, it's a bill that was proposed as a means of addressing the increasing problem of non-medical exemptions to school vaccine mandates because religious and philosophical exemptions are too easy to obtain. Boiled down to its essence, AB 2109 would require parents to see a pediatrician or health care practitioner for a discussion of the benefits and risks of vaccines and, more importantly, the risks of not vaccinating. You'd think that the antivaccine movement wouldn't have a problem with a bill that in essence requires informed…
tsmith | September 28, 2012Rabies is a disease without a public relations firm. In developed countries, human disease is incredibly rare--we see typically one or two deaths from rabies each year. In contrast, lightning is responsible for about 60 deaths each year. However, worldwide, rabies is another matter. Today is World Rabies Day, a reminder that 55,000 people still succumb to this virus every year--most of them in impoverished regions of Africa and Asia. While cases in the U.S. are typically due to wildlife exposure (rabid bats or even beavers or rabid kitten), infected dogs remain the main vector of infection in…
milhayser | September 25, 2012Could HIV soon follow in the footsteps of smallpox and polio? On The Pump Handle, Sara Gorman says that recent research has "allowed political figures such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to proclaim that the phenomenon of a generation without HIV/AIDS is within reach." But no vaccine has proven effective at curtailing HIV infection, and a new prophylactic called Truvada could select for drug-resistant versions of the virus. On ERV, Abbie Smith explains that researchers have traced the origin of HIV to a single population of chimpanzees in West-Central Africa, thanks to "3108 samples…
oracknows | September 20, 2012It's feast or famine in the ol' blogging world, and right now it's such a feast that I can't decide what to blog about. For instance, there are at least two studies and a letter that I wouldn't mind blogging about just in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine alone. Then there's SaneVax and Dr. Sin Hang Lee, who has apparently released another study again claiming that the anti-HPV vaccine Gardasil is contaminated with—horror of horrors!—DNA. A quick perusal of it tells me that it's probably the same principle of PCR that I've discussed before, namely that it's quite…
oracknows | September 20, 2012I was out late last night for a function related to my work. As a result, by the time I got home I was too tired to blog. (I know, I know, how can a Tarial-cell powered megacomputer ever get tired?) However, I did have enough time this morning before work to act on a tip I got from some of my readers, not having perused one of the wretchedest of the wretched hives of scum and quackery in a couple of days. It turns out that the chief propagandist at the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism has unleashed the cranks on a bunch of high school students who made what sounds like an excellent…
oracknows | September 18, 2012As hard as it is for me to believe when I look back at it, I've been writing about the antivaccine movement now for more than seven years here on this blog and combatting it online for at least a decade now. I like to think that over the years my response has evolved somewhat. Back in the beginning, I used to be a bit more—shall we say?—insolent in dealing with antivaccinationists. It's an easy thing to do because so much of what antivaccinationists write and say is just so darned idiotic. Indeed, even today, I still have a tendency to slip back into my old ways when an antivaccinationist…
milhayser | September 13, 2012On The Pump Handle, Anthony Robbins discusses his tenure at NIOSH, the World Health Organization's drive to vaccinate people around the world, and the fallout of the CIA's decision to use a vaccination program as a subterfuge for spying operations in Pakistan. Robbins writes, "WHO had hoped to complete global polio elimination by 2005, but local armed conflicts and rejection by religious fundamentalists slowed polio campaigns in Nigeria and in Pakistan." Now, the CIA's actions have likely exacerbated distrust of vaccines, which festers abroad as well as at home. Robbins writes that no…
oracknows | September 12, 2012In common colloquial usage, there is a term known as "gaydar." Basically, it's the ability some people claim to have that allows them to identify people who are gay. Whether gaydar actually exists or not, I don't know, but I claim to have an ability that's similar. That ability is the ability to sniff out antivaccinationists. Over the last decade, I've become very good at it, so much so that it's almost instinctual and rarely wrong. My guess is that it's nothing more than my having internalized all the tactics and tropes that antivaccinationists like to use to the point where I don't need to…