vaccines
sa smith | April 7, 2011A couple of days ago, Orac directed us towards an article that is one of the funniest pieces of 'Science Journalism' I have ever seen, anywhere. See, those of us on the 'non-kook' side of things have marvelously eloquent writers like Carl and Ed, and inquisitive investigatory journalists like Trine. Sure theyre 'educational', but their work is depressingly devoid of 'WTF LOL!!' moments like this piece by an apparent anti-vax 'science' journalist, Sharyl Attkisson:
The author is Helen Ratajczak, surprisingly herself a former senior scientist at a pharmaceutical firm. Ratajczak did what…
oracknows | April 5, 2011I'm not infrequently asked why the myth that vaccines cause autism and other anti-vaccine myths are so stubbornly resistant to the science that time and time again fails to support them. Certainly useful celebrity idiots like Jenny McCarthy are one reason. So, too, are anti-vaccine propaganda websites and blogs such as Age of Autism and anti-vaccine organizations like Generation Rescue, the National Vaccine Information Center, and SafeMinds and the organizations that publish them. However, these are clearly not the only reason. Alone, these people and organizations are in general quite…
tsmith | April 4, 2011Next to Ebola, my favorite virus would probably be smallpox (Variola virus). I mean, now that it's eradicated in nature, what's not to love about the mysteries it's left us--where it came from, why it was so deadly (or, not so deadly, as in the emergence of the "mild" form, variola minor), and will a new poxvirus emerge to take its place? The topic is particularly germane since the debate still rages on about the fate of the world's smallpox stocks. Smallpox has killed untold millions and influenced the destiny of societies; and as Michael Willrich details in his new book, Pox: An American…
sa smith | March 31, 2011Every Spring, you can count on a handful of posts here at ERV on allergies. Ive got em. I hate em.
But I recognize that in many ways, Im 'lucky' as far as allergies go. I only have to deal with them for a few months of the year, I can move somewhere else and not have to worry about them at all anymore, and even though my symptoms are annoying, they certainly arent life threatening.
Not everyone with allergies is this lucky.
Some people are allergic to 'indoor' things that are around year-round. And some of the 'indoor' stuff isnt as simple as not owning a cat-- some people are allergic to…
tsmith | March 28, 2011There has been a surge of interest recently in science denial, particularly revolving around the issue of vaccines. Last year saw the release of Michael Specter's Denialism; in the last few months, three others have been released: Seth Mnookin's Panic Virus, Robert Goldberg's Tabloid Medicine, and Paul Offit's "Deadly Choices." More about each of them after the jump.
"The Panic Virus" by Seth Mnookin focuses on the general topic of media-fueled science denial, using vaccines as the case study. Like Offit's recent "Autism's False Prophets, Mnookin details a bit of the history of the anti-…
sa smith | March 22, 2011Because I am having so much fun at mah conference, I missed my chance to plug a Q&A ninja/journalist Trine Tsouderos hosted with Paul Offit, vaccine inventor.
Im sorry you all missed the chance to participate (Im hoping most ERV readers are Respectful Insolence readers, so you all got the info that way). I mean, Im having so much fun interacting with people working with HIV-1 vaccines right now, and I get all giddy nuts about that, and you all could have gotten a taste of it by having the chance to interact with Dr. Offit.
I sorry :(
BUT!
On the bright side, the Q&A was recorded and…
milhayser | March 22, 2011
Vaccines are a tried and true mechanism for controlling disease, but they are not always a magic bullet. Researchers who study the spread of cholera in Haiti recently modeled what would happen if 150,000 vaccines were administered in Port-au-Prince. They concluded "the benefits would have been negligible." Liz Borkowski writes, "this intervention's small effectiveness is due partly to the slow pace at which full immunity builds up and to the likelihood that many vaccine recipients would've already built up natural immunity." A better way to control a water-borne disease like cholera is…
sa smith | March 3, 2011Scientific conferences are so cool :-D
It s bunch of really smart people getting together to pow-wow about a common interest, sharing their newest data, brainstorming new ideas, trouble-shooting, arguing, finding new collaborators-- its just so friggen cool :-D
Unfortunately, us smaller labs can only budget for one/a couple of these a year, so I am missing out on the 2011 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections :( Its also kind of a downer that Average Joes/Janes arent really allowed to come, not that most people could take a week off work to attend anyway.
Lucky for us…
sa smith | February 27, 2011Air travelers may have been exposed to measles
WASHINGTON (AP) - Public health officials are warning travelers and workers present at four U.S. airports on two recent days that they may have been exposed to measles from a traveler arriving from London.
Authorities said Saturday that a New Mexico woman later confirmed to have measles arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport late in the afternoon of Feb. 20. Two days later, the measles-infected traveler departed from BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport near Baltimore on an evening flight to Denver, Colo., and then on to Albuquerque, N.M.…
sa smith | February 18, 2011HAHAHAHAHAHA!
For the lulz:
60 Lab Studies Now Confirm Cancer Link to a Vaccine You Probably Had as a Child
Posted By Dr. Mercola | February 18 2011 | 104,627 views
SV40, a cancer-causing monkey virus. The puzzle began in 1994, when Dr. Michele Carbone, a Loyola University researcher, found the virus SV40, which had never before been detected in humans, in half of the human lung tumors he was studying. Since then, 60 different lab studies have confirmed the results, and SV40 has been found in a variety of human cancers, including lung-, brain-, bone-, and lymphatic cancer.
At first no one…
sa smith | February 16, 2011There are lots of controversies in viral research.
Not just woo ones, like whether HIV-1 exists and causes AIDS, but real controversies that have been going on for some time, like whether HIV-1 infects dendritic cells or DCs just carry-->pass on virions.
The public hears about the stupid stuff, but dont know (dont care?) about the real controversies. This travesty has a third negative effect, in that sometimes the public never hears the resolution to the stupid stuff, thus it lives on in word-of-mouth whispers and the internets underbelly, long after science has soundly whooped the stupid…
oracknows | January 21, 2011
Over the last three weeks, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has been publishing a multipart expose by investigative journalist Brian Deer that enumerated in detail the specifics of how a British gastroenterologist turned hero of the anti-vaccine movement had committed scientific fraud by falsifying key aspects of case reports that he used as the basis of his now infamous 1998 Lancet article suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and a syndrome consisting of regressive autism and enterocolitis. Indeed, Deer even went so far as to describe Wakefield's fraud as "Piltdown medicine,"…
gregladen | January 17, 2011It is very reasonable for a parent to worry about vaccines. For one thing, most of them involve sticking the baby or child with a sharp object, thus making the little one cry, and it would be abnormal to not have an automatic reaction to that. For another thing, they are drugs, in a sense. When the little one is ill, and you call in to the health care facility in the hopes that there will be some useful advice, most of the time you hear "No, we no longer recommend giving [fill in the blank with a medicine you thought might work] to children under [one or two months older than your child].…
oracknows | January 13, 2011It is with some trepidation and more than a little regret that I begin writing this piece. The reason for my hesitation is that, by doing so, no matter what I say I'll be inserting myself into what appears to be a disagreement among people all of whom I admire very much. I don't really want to do it, but I feel obligated, because the issues brought up in the disagreement are important, and reasonable people can disagree--sometimes strongly--about them. I also believe that someone whom I admire greatly has made a regrettable mistake.
Over the last week or so, I've been blogging a lot about the…
sa smith | January 9, 2011I have nothing against media whores, per se.
Kathy Griffin do what she gotta do to pay the bills.
Snookie is enjoying her 15 minutes of fame. The Situation actually appears to be making the most of the situation.
But then you have the kinds of media whores like Chris Mooney. The whores who deny their true selves and pretend they are actually contributing to society. A vapid little git, speaking out both sides of his mouth and throwing allies under the bus whenever it suits his whorish needs. Thus I suppose it didnt come to anyones surprise that a man who professes to care so much about…
sa smith | December 13, 2010I dont know about you all, but if you ask me to picture an anti-vaxer, I picture a white, middle-to-upper-class woman who lives on one of the Coasts.
Its 'liberal' anti-science, along with anti-food-technology and animal liberation, a counterpart to 'conservative' anti-science like Creationism and global warming denial.
So living in OK, Im totally used to 'conservative' anti-science... but when a 'liberal' anti-science situation pops up, Im like 'WTF??'
One that keeps getting me is anti-vaxers/anti-vax sympathizers. In Oklahoma?? Wat??
Yes, we have them here too. Some are still the middle-…
oracknows | November 30, 2010Homeopathy is among the most ridiculous of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine therapies." I realize that I've made this point over and over and over again, but it bears repeating because, no matter how often homeopathy is shown to be utter and complete woo, homeopaths always seem to bounce right back, Gish galloping between the bullets of science in order to repeat the same unsupportable claims, nonsense about the "memory of water," and comparisons of homepathy to vaccines. Another reason that homeopathy is an excellent example to discuss is because--well, let's face it--it's…
kbonham | November 13, 2010Last week, I talked about strategies to improve vaccine efficacy and safety. Most of those strategies were in the context of standard, inject-into-your-arm vaccines, but what about totally new delivery methods? This week, there was a review in PLoS Pathogens of strategies for generating vaccines that you can swallow:
Enhancing Oral Vaccine Potency by Targeting Intestinal M Cells
The immune system in the gastrointestinal tract plays a crucial role in the control of infection, as it constitutes the first line of defense against mucosal pathogens. The attractive features of oral immunization…
kbonham | November 6, 2010I have a love/hate relationship with Nature Reviews: Immunology. It comes out once per month, and is usually packed with easy to read articles about fascinating (to me) topics, and each is filled with tons of great references so I can dig into the issue more. On the one hand, I get really excited about all the great things to read and new ways to expand my knowledge. On the other hand - that's a lot of reading. My Instapaper queue is about 80% Nature Reviews (15% other papers, and 5% random crap).
This month is no different, but I decided to have the goal of blogging about the ones that I…
sa smith | October 26, 2010Dear Age of Autism--
Dont ever link to ERV again.
I dunno whether you know this or not, but I get paid per page view. If you link to me, it means my check for the month is tainted with your filth. That makes me want to puke.
There is no point in you linking to me. Neither you, nor your readers, have anything to offer ERV or its readers.
lisa-- What a stupid website. Why are you wasting your life this way. Go do something useful. Start a dry-cleaners or something. At least then you would be contributing to society.
Wow, just...wow--The level of maturity and intelligence posted here is a…