vaccines
oracknows | September 9, 2012Although I focus mostly on medical topics, such as vaccines, alternative medicine, and cancer quackery, I don't limit myself to such topics. True, I used to write a lot more about evolution and creationism, the paranormal, and other standard skeptical topics, but over the last couple of years I've realized where my strength is and where my niche is. So I continue to do what I do, but that doesn't mean I've lost interest in those topics. I've just learned that there are those who can do them as well as I can, while the number of people who can do what I do with respect to quackery and medical…
oracknows | September 7, 2012On the antivaccine front, this year began with antivaccine hero Andrew Wakefield filing suit against investigative reporter Brian Deer, the BMJ, and Fiona Godlee (the editor of BMJ) for libel based on a series that Deer published in the BMJ outlining the evidence for Wakefield's scientific fraud in his (in)famous 1998 Lancet case series. This resulted in a massive rallying of the antivaccine troops around Wakefield, as well as temporarily making him appear relevant again after so many much-deserved humiliations and defeats, in the wake of his having had his license to practice medicine in the…
oracknows | September 7, 2012Believe it or not, after nearly eight years blogging and around five years before that cutting my skeptical teeth on that vast and wild (and now mostly deserted and fallow) wilderness that was Usenet, I have occasionally wondered whether what I'm doing is worthwhile. Sometime around 1998, after I first discovered Holocaust denial on Usenet, and a year or so after that, I found the home of all quackery on Usenet, misc.health.alternative. From around 1998 to 2004, Usenet was my home, and that's where I fought what I thought to be the good fight against irrationality, antiscience, and quackery.…
oracknows | September 6, 2012I must admit, there are times when I see something that someone else has written and, in a fit of intense envy, wish very much that I had written it. This is just such a time, and Tony Ballantyne has written just such a piece. Even better, his piece, entitled If only..., was published in Nature! That's right, the editors of Nature itself agree (or at least thought it interesting enough to publish): No science for you! What are you waiting for? Read it!
Of course, it's all a fantasy. In particular, I like the part asking why so many people are proud to be "bad at math" who would be utterly…
oracknows | September 4, 2012About a month ago, I deconstructed a typically dishonest and deceitful attempt by that Overlord of Quackery on the Internet (in my opinion, of course), Joe Mercola, to claim that the acellular pertussis vaccine doesn't work. It was a typical Mercola bit of prestidigitation that, as so much antivaccine propaganda does, took a grain of truth (that there have been outbreaks among vaccinated populations) and ran with it to construct a fantasy world in which pertussis outbreaks are somehow an indictment of all vaccines, which, of course, don't work at all, ever, under any circumstances, anywhere…
oracknows | September 4, 2012Over the long weekend, I came across a bunch of things that in normal times I would have blogged about, but because I was trying to chill, work a little on the yard, and also work a bit on grants, I intentionally took Monday off of blogging. As I get back into the swing of things, work-wise, blogging-wise, and otherwise, I thought it would be a good thing to make sure not to miss at least one thing I saw that doesn't require a fill Orac-length discussion but should be pointed out nonetheless. It's a little blurb that appeared on the antivaccine website complaining about vaccination…
oracknows | September 3, 2012Why is it after a three day weekend, it always feels as though I have to "catch up"? After all, it's only one day more than the average weekend, and I didn't really do anything that different. A little yard work, out to dinner, a bit of grant writing, a bit of chilling, that's it. Maybe it's because pseudoscience and quackery never rest, while, my never-sleeping, computer-inspired moniker notwithstanding, I do. I have to, particularly as age creeps up on me. In any case, right before the Labor Day weekend, I felt a disturbance in the antivaccine crankosphere. It began Wednesday, with a post…
oracknows | August 27, 2012I might as well lay it on the line right at the beginning. It's not as though it will surprise my regular readers given what I've been writing here, most recently about when Rob Schneider played the Nazi card to express his opposition to California Bill AB2109. It's a bill that does something very simple and very necessary; basically it requires that parents seeking a nonmedical exemption from school vaccine mandates actually visit a health care professional to provide informed consent before an exemption is granted. Yet, even suggesting that maybe—just maybe—nonmedical exemptions are too…
sa smith | August 22, 2012The Thinking Atheist did a show last night on 'A world full of woo'-- I stopped by for a few minutes to talk about anti-vaxers, but there is a lot more to the episode, including an interview with Dr. Harriet Hall!
TA is super-- Last year he recorded and produced all of the videos for FreeOK. He said my presentation for FreeOK2 should be up in a couple of weeks, but in the mean time, here is TA--
And here is Teresa MacBain!
* MENDOZAAAAA!!!
oracknows | August 17, 2012A couple of days ago, I did one of my usual bits of pontification about alternative medicine, this time around pointing out how religion facilitates the magical thinking that undergirds so much pseudoscientific medicine and how the belief systems that underlie so so much of alternative medicine resembel the belief systems that underlie religion. However, in retrospect, I suspect that I might have gone a little too far. Although the two share many aspects, alternative medicine is not in general a religion (with the possible exception of reiki, which, for all intents and purposes, is faith…
oracknows | August 10, 2012As the last full weekday of my vacation passes, I thought about whether I'd bother to post anything or not, given that I happen to be traveling. After yesterday's post, the subject of which was profoundly depressing to me because I hate it when quacks take cynical advantage of a grieving family to promote their antivaccine agenda, I thought I'd post something a bit more positive.
Nearly a month ago, I attended TAM, presenting there at one of the workshops and taking part in a panel discussion of "integrative medicine" (i.e., "integrating" quackery with real medicine). Leaving aside the…
oracknows | August 6, 2012Ah, vacation. It's time to relax and unwind. Of course, blogging is one way that I relax and unwind; so my being on vacation this week doesn't necessarily mean that I'll stop my usual blogging, but it does mean I'll wind down. One way that I'll slow down is that I'll try to keep my logorrheic tendencies in check. I'll also probably miss a day (or two, or three) of new material, although in its place I'll probably post a couple "greatest hits." (At least, I hope they're "greatest hits" and hope they're as interesting now as they were then—or at least not so uninteresting that no one bothers to…
oracknows | August 4, 2012I tell ya, sometimes I think you guys think I'm a journalist or a 24 hour news source. I'm not, of course. I'm just a humble blogger, and I do what I can within the constraints of my every day "real life." What? I have a real life? You mean I'm not really a supercomputer who can link with any other computer in the galaxy to mine all known data, all contained within a Plexiglass box of multicolored blinking lights? I'm not saying, but I am saying that I do need some down time.
Unfortunately, sometimes big things happen during those down times, stuff I really like to blog about. In the past, I…
sa smith | August 3, 2012Vaccinate your pets #1
Apparently, this summer is going to be a banner year for West Nile Virus. Im not an insect person, so I have no idea how we have mosquitoes when we have had no rain in forever and surging temperatures every day (mosquitoes can lay eggs in dust and dried up grass?), but its shaping up to be a 'bad' year for West Nile.
'Bad' is relative, though. A 'bad' year for West Nile in humans isnt really that bad (compared to other things), so there is not much motivation to formulate a human West Nile vaccine.
Thats not true for horses, however.
Mosquito-born illnesses like West…
oracknows | August 3, 2012Let's travel back in time fifteen years.
It's a time that, for me, at times seems as though it were just yesterday while at other times it seems like truly ancient history. Back then, certainly, I wasn't the blogging powerhouse that I am today. I didn't even know what blogging was because it was so much in its infancy that few people knew what it was. In fact, it was only around 14 years ago that I first discovered Usenet, that vast, sprawling, brawling assortment of discussion groups where I cut my skeptical teeth, so to speak, discovering, as I did, alt.revisionism (often abbrievated a.r.…
sa smith | August 1, 2012The Evolutionary Consequences of Blood-Stage Vaccination on the Rodent Malaria Plasmodium chabaudi
The concept of vaccination is, superficially, simple-- Safely mimic 'infection' so your immune system learns how to fight a pathogen, without needing to get sick from the genuine pathogen. Then if you are ever exposed to the real, scary pathogen, your immune system already knows how to deal with it.
But things dont always go according to plan...
In 1966, a novel vaccine against Respiratory Syncytial Virus was a tragic failure. The lucky kids didnt respond at all. The unlucky kids made a…
oracknows | July 31, 2012I must admit. No matter how long I've been dealing with the antivaccine movement, in particular the pseudoscience, misinformation, and sometimes outright lies they use to demonize vaccines, I can never quite understand the profound persecution complex that so many of them have. After all, they lash out with so much vehemence and outright nastiness at their perceived enemies, trying to harass them at their jobs and get them fired, for instance, and launching Internet smear campaigns against them. That is why I find it disingenuous in the extreme when they then turn around and clutch at the…
sa smith | July 25, 2012Briefly, a lot of our vaccines and antibiotics need to be refrigerated, if not frozen, for them to maintain their usefulness. This makes it problematic to get vaccines and antibiotics to places that need them, but lack proper refrigeration (or electricity, for that matter)-- Its called the Cold Chain.
Some folks at Tufts think they have figured out a way to store some vaccines and antibiotics, which would obviate the need for the Cold Chain:
Stabilization of vaccines and antibiotics in silk and eliminating the cold chain
WARNING: I am not a structure person! But from my understanding, they…
oracknows | July 22, 2012After all the years that I've been writing about vaccines, the science behind vaccines, and how antivaccinationists twist that science to turn what are arguably the greatest medical achievement of medicine and have saved arguably more lives than any other medical intervention devised by human minds into toxic cesspits of horrific chemical corruption that cause autism and destroy children, I thought I had seen it all. And perhaps I have. Sadly, seldum does any new bit of pseudoscience or new fallacious argument trying to claim that vaccines are dangerous surprise me anymore. That didn't used…
oracknows | July 18, 2012During this year's TAM, I had the distinct pleasure of accompanying Steve Novella and Michael Shermer to debate an antivaccinationist at FreedomFest, a conservative/libertarian confab that was going on in Las Vegas at the same time as TAM. That antivaccinationist turned out to be Dr. Julian Whitaker, a man who champions Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski and is one of Suzanne Somer's doctors. There's no polite way to put this, Steve Novella wiped the floor with Dr. Whitaker, mercilessly pummeling him with facts, analysis, and logic to the point where even the audience appeared to be grumbling. Even…