vaccines
grrlscientist | June 1, 2010tags: HIV and 'Flu -- The Vaccine Strategy, microbiology, epidemiology, virology, vaccines, medicine, public health, viruses, influenza, HIV, Seth Berkley, TEDTalks, TED Talks, streaming video
Seth Berkley explains how smart advances in vaccine design, production and distribution are bringing us closer than ever to eliminating a host of global threats -- from AIDS to malaria to flu pandemics.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers…
ddobbs | May 28, 2010Here's what I distracted myself with this morning. Don't mix these at home.
Wired Sci examines how Testosterone Makes People Suspicious of One Another. And that's a hell of a photo.
New Flu Vaccines Could Protect Against All Strains If all goes well, of course. Not to count on at this point, but an interesting look at one direction in vaccine development. I covered another approach in an Technology Review article last year, when I also looked at the weird history of adjuvants. (If you want, check out my complete vaccine coverage. You can find also some other good ones at the Technology…
sa smith | May 27, 2010If you want to stab yourself in your face, AutismOne has a live-stream for their speakers available:
Free live streaming by Ustream
Im watching some presentation now (dial-up, w00t!). This woman (Laurette Janak, qualifications: Mom) is 'teaching' Paul Offit some 'science' with cartoon figures. She is really sciencey and not even remotely crazy. Quote someone in the chatroom "She really knows her stuff!" LOL!
*wanders into the kitchen to find a knife for face stabbing*
oracknows | May 24, 2010Regular readers know that I have a tendency every so often to whine about when writing about the antics of the anti-vaccine movement seems to engulf this blog. Yes, it's true. Every so often I get really, really tired of the bad science, pseudoscience, magical thinking, misinformation, and even outright lies that emanate from various anti-vaccine websites and blogs. This week, I promised myself I would try not to do it. There are times when duty calls, and this is one of those times. For better or for worse, as hard as I still find it to believe, somehow I've become one of the top bloggers…
oracknows | May 24, 2010It's been a long time comin'
It's goin' to be a Long Time Gone.
And it appears to be a long,
appears to be a long,
appears to be a long
time, yes, a long, long, long ,long time before the dawn.
- from "Long Time Gone" by Crosby, Stills & Nash
Oh, happy day!
It's finally happened, more than six years after investigative reporter Brian Deer first reported Wakefield's massive conflicts of interest and dubious activities related to his "research" suggesting a link between the measles strain in the MMR vaccine and inflammation of the gut in autistic children, nearly three years after the…
oracknows | May 23, 2010
An old Chinese combined proverb and curse is said to be, "May you live in interesting times." Certainly, with respect to vaccines, the last few years have been "interesting times." Unfortunately, this week times are about to get a lot more "interesting" as the Autism One quackfest descends upon Chicago beginning today. Featuring prominently in this quackfest will be an anti-vaccine rally in Grant Park on Wednesday featuring some really bad, anti-vaccine fundamentalist Poe-worthy "music" and a keynote speech by Andrew Wakefield himself. If you want evidence that Andrew Wakefield is being…
oracknows | May 23, 2010Andrew Wakefield's back, and he's sure trying to come back big.
I knew when I last wrote about his utter humiliation and disrepute that he wouldn't stay away for long. In fact, he stayed away longer than I thought--a whole three months. Unfortunately, though, he appears to be on a full media blitz to try to rehabilitate his image in the wake of his having been found to have committed research misconduct, leading to The Lancet retracting his article that started the anti=vaccine MMR scare back in 1998, which further led to NeuroToxicology withdrawing his execrably bad "monkey business" study…
sa smith | May 14, 2010A while back I wrote about how the lead researcher at the Whittemore Peterson Institute, Judy Mikovits, is speaking at Autismone, a huge anti-vax rally in Chicago later this month.
I thought Judy was just a crank. Dime a dozen, whatevs.
Turns out things are worse than that.
Much much worse than that.
Its cranks all the way down.
Vincent Lombardi, first author on the original 'XMRV causes Chronic Fatigue' Science paper, founded some weird testing company several years back. This weird testing company was then bought by Harvey Whittemore (father of The Princess That Cant Be Named), and turned…
sa smith | May 13, 2010This post is really frustrating to write.
Its frustrating because this paper could (should) be FANTASTICALLY COOL, but it was just really frustrating to read:
Mosaic HIV-1 vaccines expand the breadth and depth of cellular immune responses in rhesus monkeys
You all know there is a TON of genetic diversity in HIV-1. That has been a huge barrier for vaccine design. You put one HIV-1 variant in a vaccine, people are exposed to another, they still get sick. Our vaccines are eliciting a very narrow immune response. Our immune systems are only seeing exactly what our vaccine tells it to see.
We…
oracknows | May 13, 2010One of the biggest examples of either self-delusion or lying that emanates from the anti-vaccine movement is the oh-so-pious and indignant denials that inevitably follow from its members and leaders whenever someone like me has the temerity to point out that they are, in fact, anti-vaccine. The disingenuously angry denials usually take a form something like this, "I'm not anti-vaccine; I'm pro-safe vaccine." (This is Jenny McCarthy's favorite variant of this gambit). Another variant is for anti-vaccine activists to claim that they aren't anti-vaccine at all; they're just "concerned" that…
sa smith | May 7, 2010WARNING: Get a box of Kleenex before you read this post! I am NOT joking.
A few weeks ago I wrote a post on how scientists are using a genetically modified herpes simplex-1 virus to attack metastatic melanoma (an oncolytic, ie kills tumor cells, virus). The results of their clinical trials blew my mind.
Today I found out (thanks to an awesome reader!), that they are trying a similar protocol in a 13 year old kid with rhabdomyosarcoma. What this boy has been through:
Now 13-years-old, Evan was diagnosed with rhabdomyosarcoma in June 2008 at the age of 11...
... He's endured 28 rounds of…
sa smith | May 6, 2010Antivaxers want green vaccines? How about vaccines produced in plants? Solar powered, green leafy plants-- Cant get much more green than that!
The basic idea is that we modify plants to make viral/bacterial proteins, and then we eat the plants, and YAY! Vaccine! How could this possibly work? Doesnt everything just get digested? Well, there are a lot of viruses/bacteria that need your intestines to infect you-- Polio, enteric bacteria like salmonella and E. coli and cholera, rotavirus, norovirus, etc. Then you have viruses/bacteria that just want some kind of mucosal site (eyes, mouth,…
oracknows | May 3, 2010It just so happens that I was up quite late last night doing--what else?--writing yet another grant application (well, two actually). Even though the grants aren't due until Wednesday, Tuesday happens to be my operating room day, meaning I need to get this done and buried by tomorrow afternoon at the latest. In any case, I had been planning on just posting a rerun or two, as is my wont when real life gets so crazy that even my rapid-fire blogorrhea is curtailed, and then someone had to go and send me something that merits at least a brief bit of Insolence. Try as I might not to get sucked…
sa smith | April 28, 2010I almost didnt watch FRONTLINEs 'Vaccine War' last night. I made it to ~5 minutes in, but then they showed a clip of this dumb woman (Jennifer Margulis? Ya I read her papers in Journal of Immunology all the time. Oh wait, shes not an immunologist? Shes just some random nutbar? Ya, lets interview her about the 'science' of vaccines.) and I blew a fuse... but I decided to stick it out, and Im glad I did.
You can go over to Oracs place for a... Oracian break-down of the show.
I just want to put my two cents in. My main take-away message is, contrary to Chris Mooneys baseless, evidence-less…
oracknows | April 25, 2010I haven't mentioned this before. The reason is not because I don't find it interesting or potentially blog-worthy, but rather because it slipped my mind and other things caught my interest last week. Given that the show is going to air beginning tomorrow, I thought that a few thoughts were in order. PBS's Frontline is going to air a show entitled The Vaccine War, and here's a preview:
The press release describing the episode gives me reason for concern:
Vaccines have changed the world, largely eradicating a series of terrible diseases, from smallpox to polio to diphtheria, and likely adding…
oracknows | April 23, 2010If there's one thing that has irritated me (one might even say, irritated me enough to start this blog), it's ideology or religion trumping science. Perhaps the most annoying form of this disease is the tendency of the right wing whackosphere to do everything and anything it can to distort and twist science to agree with its ideology, in particular its religion. One area that I used to write about a lot but don't so much anymore (we bloggers have to subspecialize, I guess, and these days my subspecialty is science-based medicine with only the occasional forays against forms of unreason other…
sa smith | April 20, 2010I dunno if you guys know how good we have it today with vaccines.
Let me try this analogy-- Lets say you want to bake some bread. You have a basic recipe, so you know you need flour, yeast, water, and you make some really basic bread. Except the bread that comes out of the oven is a loaf of cinnamon raisin walnut bread. So, youre happy, cause you got bread, and its good, but you dont know how the hell the cinnamon/raisins/walnuts got in there.
Thats kinda how old-school vaccines worked. Scientist made a vaccine, it worked, yay!... but there was other stuff in that end batch they didnt…
grrlscientist | April 19, 2010tags: The Danger of Science Denial, vaccines, modern medicine, poverty, environmental destruction, science, cultural observation, film maker, animal behavior, Michael Specter, TEDTalks, streaming video
Vaccine-autism claims, "Frankenfood" bans, the herbal cure craze: All point to the public's growing fear (and, often, outright denial) of science and reason, says Michael Specter. He warns the trend spells disaster for human progress.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their…
oracknows | April 16, 2010I'm almost beginning to feel sorry for Andrew Wakefield.
Well, not really. He did bring all the misery that's poured down upon him like an unending waterfall of woe, such as the British General Medical Council (GMC) finding him guilty of research misconduct and soon very likely to recommend that he be "struck off," a delightful British term for removing someone's medical license and thus striking him off the list of licensed physicians. Soon after, the editors of The Lancet retracted his infamous 1998 paper that purported to suggest that there was a link between the measles virus in the MMR…