vaccines
sa smith | July 16, 2012The 'debate' over the HPV vaccine has thus far has been a tug-of-war with radical religion/conservative politicians/nutbar anti-vaxers on one side, and the lives of women on the other side.
The HPV vaccine has been A Female Issue.
Turns out the people opposing the HPV vaccine were damning male children, as well.
Though I wrote about how HPV can cause head/neck/throat cancers in both genders before, there is more and more evidence coming to light that everyone, male and female, will benefit from the HPV vaccine series:
Local Inflammation and Human Papillomavirus Status of Head and Neck Cancers…
oracknows | July 15, 2012Like so many other skeptics, I just returned from TAM, which, despite all the conflict and drama surrounding it this year, actually turned out to be a highly enjoyable experience for myself and most people I talked to. As I've been doing the last few years, I joined up with Steve Novella and other proponents of science-based medicine to do a workshop about how difficult it is to find decent health information on the Internet, and how the "University of Google" all too frequently puts quackery on the same level as reliable sources of medical information because all that matters for most search…
sa smith | July 11, 2012Herd immunity-- If a lot of people are protected from a pathogen then the people who arent protected, are still protected. The higher the percentage of 'protected' people, the better herd immunity works.
Here is a simple animation of how herd immunity works.
While we generally think of herd immunity as it relates to the very young/old, immunocompromised, those who cannot get vaccinated for medical reasons, this concept matters to all of us. Like I said in my talk at FreeOK last year-- your immune response to a vaccine is random, so there are some of you reading this article whos parents…
oracknows | July 10, 2012About a week and a half ago, I took note of a rather unhinged rant by comedian Rob Schneider about vaccines in which he trotted out an antivaccine movement's greatest hits compendium of pseudoscience, misinformation, and logical fallacies, all in the service of opposing California Bill AB 2109. Antivaccine activists hate this piece of legislation in particular, the reason being that it would make it just a little more difficult for parents to obtain philosophical exemptions from school mandates. Right now in California, parents basically just have to sign a form, no questions asked, no other…
sa smith | July 9, 2012File this under "Cool, but not the best experimental design and maybe a bad idea in humans (but maybe a good idea under some circumstances)"--
Effects of Novel Vaccines on Weight Loss in Diet-Induced-Obese (DIO) Mice, pdf: www.jasbsci.com/content/pdf/2049-1891-3-21.pdf
Somatostatin is part of several chemical pathways in your body-- one of them is the inhibition of Human Growth Hormone and Insulin-like Growth Factor-1.
There has been some suggestion in the scientific literature that treating humans/animals with GH or IGF-1 could lead to weight loss... Which has lead to some people going to…
oracknows | July 6, 2012What would we do without the Internet?
It's become so necessary, so pervasive, so utterly all-enveloping that it's hard to imagine a world without it. Given how much it pervades everything these days, it's easy to forget that it wasn't that long ago that the Internet was primarily the domain of universities and large research groups. Indeed, the Internet hasn't really been widely and easily available to the average citizen for very long at all. Go back 20 years, and most people didn't have it. For example, Netscape Navigator, the popular browser that made the Internet accessible, wasn't…
oracknows | July 5, 2012A couple of years ago, I gave a talk to a bunch of Chicago skeptics that was co-sponsored by the Chicago Skeptics and the Women Thinking Free Foundation. At the time, I had no idea that the organization was that new, but I did know that I was very impressed by the turnout to my talk and the camaraderie demonstrated by the two groups, between which there was a lot of cross-pollination. In the interim between then and now, WTF distinguished itself in skeptical activism, but its members are probably best known for its Hug Me I'm Vaccinated campaign.
The other day, Elyse announced that Women…
sa smith | July 3, 2012If you are reading this blog, you already know all about how a huge portion of your genome is parasitic junk DNA (~40-45%), a fraction of which is retroviral junk (ERVs, ~9%). If youre new here... SURPRISE!
Sure, we have a gene here, a promoter there (maybe) that was domesticated for human genome use, but its junk, and that is a good thing. I mean, if our genome was 9% retrovirus and every one of them was active, we would all be dead from the insertional mutagenesis alone.
So your genome and cells have evolved lots of ways to make sure your junk DNA stays junk... but I guess ERVs are like…
oracknows | June 29, 2012Remember California Bill AB 2109? I've written about it at least a couple of times before. In fact, for some reason, the comment section of this post on AB 2109 suddenly come alive again a couple of days ago, with antivaccinationists infiltrating it, much to the annoyance of my regular commenters. It turns out that the reason was that a couple of days ago AB 2109 came up for discussion in the California Senate Health Committee (and passed to be sent out to the full Senate for a vote), after having passed the California House a couple of months ago. I also now know why antivaccinationists…
sa smith | June 26, 2012File this under 'Religion has nothing to do with morality'--
Some religions have a problem with a vaccine that, when dosed appropriately early enough, virtually eliminates risk of cervical cancer, as virtually all cervical cancer is caused by HPV. Its even better if males get the vaccine as well, not only because if fewer males get HPV, fewer males can transmit HPV to females-- but also because the HPV vaccine might protect against non-cervical HPV cancers (which males can get).
I wish I was making this up, but some religions reject the HPV vaccine because it will turn little girls (its…
tsmith | June 22, 2012This is the fifteenth of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Cassie Klostermann.
One of the major accomplishments that public health professionals pride themselves in is the reduction of people getting sick or dying from preventable infectious diseases. Unfortunately, these debilitating, historic diseases that health professionals had once thought they had under control are starting to rear their ugly heads once again in the United States (U.S.). One of these diseases that I am referring to is measles. Measles is a highly contagious virus (from the genus Morbillivirus) spread through the air…
oracknows | June 8, 2012
Sometimes I feel like Dug, the talking dog in the movie Up, in that when it comes to blogging I'm often easily distracted. The reason I say this is because there's been a "viral" (if you can call it that) video floating around the antivaccine quackery blogosphere that antivaccinationists are passing around as though it's slam-dunk evidence that vaccines aren't safe. It's called the Chalkboard Campaign:
Basically, it's one long series of chalkboard images touting pseudoscience and antivaccine misinformation over and over again, all over a sappy pop music soundtrack, using the tag line from…
oracknows | June 5, 2012Remember Vox Day?
Newer converts to the glory that is Orac (or at least to the ego that is Orac) might not know who Vox is because it's been a while since I've discussed his antiscience attitudes. By and large, this is probably a good thing, given that Vox denies evolution, has been antivaccine from way back, and apparently thinks nothing of suggesting that the U.S. emulate Hitler's methods of ejecting Jews from Germany to take care of our illegal immigrant problem. Truly, Vox is an example of crank magnetism at work. Particularly amusing is the way that he trumpets his membership in Mensa…
sa smith | June 1, 2012I have no idea how I missed this insane bit of news last year:
The CIA organised a fake vaccination programme in the town where it believed Osama bin Laden was hiding in an elaborate attempt to obtain DNA from the fugitive al-Qaida leader's family, a Guardian investigation has found.
As part of extensive preparations for the raid that killed Bin Laden in May, CIA agents recruited a senior Pakistani doctor to organise the vaccine drive in Abbottabad, even starting the "project" in a poorer part of town to make it look more authentic, according to Pakistani and US officials and local residents…
sa smith | May 31, 2012I can think of at least two 'worst nightmares' for vaccine designers.
Your vaccine looked super in animal models and such... but it turns out to be directly harmful to people. And not 'some' people. All people.
Your vaccine actually does the opposite of what you want it to do-- instead of preventing the disease, it makes people more prone to the disease.
That second one is a nightmare come to life for a group of HIV-1 scientists:
Extended follow-up confirms early vaccine-enhanced risk of HIV acquisition and demonstrates waning effect over time among participants in a randomized trial of…
oracknows | May 30, 2012Remember Dr. Jay?
Regular readers know about whom I speak. I'm talking about Dr. Jay Gordon, pediatrician to the stars' children. Dr. Jay has been a fixture on this blog on and off for seven years, first having popped in as a commenter way back on Respectful Insolence, Mark 1, when I first noted him promoting antivaccine nonsense claiming against all science that vaccines cause austism on—where else?—that wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffington Post. Since then, Dr. Jay has assiduously denied that he is antivaccine, all the while spewing antivaccine canards hither, thither, and yon…
oracknows | May 25, 2012It's that time of year again.
What am I talking about? Regular readers know. They know that sometime around the Memorial Day weekend every year, usually beginning a couple of days before the extended weekend and into the weekend itself, there lands in the Chicago area a quackfest of such unrelenting quackitude that it has to be seen to be believed. Basically, it's the antivaccine and autism "biomed" movement Woodstock, except that it happens every year. Any and every quack and die-hard antivaccinationist who still believes believes against all evidence that vaccines cause autism is usually…
sa smith | May 23, 2012HAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I feel like Stewie Griffin. I DONT LIKE CHANGE!!!
Give us a minute, we will figure it out (hey, I figured how to get pages of comments so Our Epic Threads dont take over 9000 years to load! dont have to top it off at 5K!!!)
In the mean time, Skeptics of Oz have my talk uploaded! Its broken up into the first half (my talk), the second half (the Q&A), and then a little third part to finish off the Q&A!
sa smith | May 9, 2012Anti-vaxers are horrible people-- They refuse to receive the recommended/required vaccinations and put everyone else (not just the very young, very old, or otherwise immunocompromised) at risk of contracting preventable diseases.
Anti-vaxers are horrible parents-- They abuse their children with their own personal ignorance and fears, dooming the poor things to preventable diseases and their associated side-effects, and turn their children into little disease spreading monsters (see above, see this years Superbowl, see the day-care fraud story).
Anti-vaxers are also horrible pet owners-- Back…
sa smith | April 30, 2012February 2009--
Republican senators, led by a Susan Collins (R-ME) stripped Obamas stimulous package for funding to the CDC and pandemic flu preparedness:
"Everybody in the room is concerned about a pandemic flu, but does it belong in this bill? Should we have 870 million dollars in this bill? No, we should not."
Stimulus bill headed for passage minus pandemic funds
The sums removed included $420 million for pandemic flu and $430 million for biomedical advanced research and development, he reported.
March 2009--
Swine flu is born in La Gloria, Mexico. It quickly travels to the US, with…