vaccines
palmd | February 5, 2009A delusion is usually defined as "a fixed, false belief". Anyone can be wrong, but to persist in being wrong despite all the evidence is the hallmark of delusional thinking. In their latest senseless rant at HuffPo, infectious disease promoters David Kirby and Robert Kennedy, Jr. cling to thin strands of tainted reality as the gaping maw of insanity opens beneath them.
Of course, delusions are very closely related to lies. The only difference is that liar doesn't believe his bullshit, while the psychotic does. It's hard to know where K and K fall. There latest article, entitled, "Autism…
gregladen | January 12, 2009A study recently published by Irva Hertz-Picciotto and Lora Delwiche of the M.I.N.D. Institute, UC Davis, addresses the question of an apparent rise in the frequency of diagnosed autism in California.
This study is quickly becoming the focus of attention as the various factions with an interest in autism square off on assessing its validity. In the mean time, the study itself is rather modest in what it attempts and what it concludes.
Let's have a look.
To date, there are three kinds of explanations given for this rise in Autism rate:
1) There is some artifact in the system such as…
amillikan | January 12, 2009This week, our regularly scheduled "Science Saturday" feature has become "Science Monday" due to some technical difficulties during our most recent upgrade. But the video is now up and features some of our very own bloggers, Janet (AKA Dr. Freeride) from Adventures in Ethics and Science, and Peter Lipson (AKA Dr. Pal) who contributes to Denialism Blog and regularly hosts thrilling podcasts.
This week, Janet and Dr. Pal explore the ethics behind different issues in medicine and science such as conscience clauses (for example, in which pharmacists can withhold prescriptions from consumers), the…
revere | January 12, 2009DemFromCt's excellent post at DailyKos alerted us to the fact that this year's vaccine appears to have a mismatched influenza B component. Each year vaccine makers try to anticipate the strains that will be circulating 6 months hence, based on surveillance data. They have been fairly good with their guesses but things seem to be getting more complicated in recent years and mismatched strains are becoming more common, that is, the vaccines don't protect as well or at all against the strains that are actually circulating. There are three strains in the yearly "flu shot," two influenza A strains…
revere | November 15, 2008One of the good things about the pandemic flu threat (if you'll let me put it that way) is the stimulus it has provided for vaccine technology. While current flu vaccines are still mired in horse and buggy technology of egg-based production, all sorts of alternative ways of making antigen or stimulating an immune response are being worked on. Most of them involve the major antigens of the flu virus, hemagglutinin (the H part of subtype designation) and neuriminidase (the N part). They are on the viral surface and easily "seen" by the immune system. There is also a little bit of another…
revere | October 27, 2008Earaches, respiratory infections and diarrhea are the bane of existence for young parents. All are potentially the result of contagious agents. The most common agent for diarrhea in infants and children is rotavirus, a double-stranded DNA virus, that CDC estimates causes 400,000 doctor visits, 200,000 emergency room visits and 55.000 to 70,000 hospitalizations each year in the under 5 year old age group. Infection produces significant immunity, and while there are seven different serotypes (A through G), 90% of infections are serotype A. In addition to diarrhea, rotavirus infections cause…
revere | October 20, 2008Flu season is upon us and with it the perennial question, should I get a flu shot. In 2006 the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) extended its 2004 recommendation that children 6 months to 23 months be vaccinated (2 doses) to now include children 6 months to 59 months (<5 yyears old). I'm in a targeted group to get vaccinated (over 65 years) and my three grandchildren are in the targeted group for children (one will slide into the window during flu season). What do we know about the usefulness of getting vaccinated? It's been studied, but unfortunately the results are…
revere | October 12, 2008I am still trying to retrieve my lower jaw from the floor, where it fell after reading this:
When Indonesia's health minister stopped sending bird flu viruses to a research laboratory in the U.S. for fear Washington could use them to make biological weapons, Defense Secretary Robert Gates laughed and called it "the nuttiest thing" he'd ever heard.
Yet deep inside an 86-page supplement to United States export regulations is a single sentence that bars U.S. exports of vaccines for avian bird flu and dozens of other viruses to five countries designated "state sponsors of terrorism."
The reason:…
scientificactivist | October 6, 2008The winners of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine have been announced, and the prize has been awarded for early discoveries that have subsequently led to vaccines or treatments of two widespread virus-caused diseases. Half of the prize was awarded to Harald zur Hausen "for his discovery of human papilloma viruses causing cervical cancer" and one-fourth each was awarded to Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier "for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus." For more, check out the official press release or the more detailed description of the prize-winning…
revere | October 6, 2008A story in CIDRAP News by the always excellent science journalist Maryn McKenna provides food for thought:.
A flu vaccine manufacturer's decision not to build a US facility has highlighted the perpetual mismatch between flu-shot supply and demand--and the reality that the mismatch may undermine plans for pandemic flu vaccines.
On Tuesday, Solvay Pharmaceuticals Inc. of Marietta, Ga., announced that it was canceling plans to build a US flu-vaccine manufacturing plant, a $386 million project that Birmingham, Ala., and Athens, Ga., have been competing for. The plant would have made both seasonal…
sporte | September 27, 2008One of the holy grails of modern medicine is the development of a vaccine against HIV, the virus that causes AIDs. An obstacle to attaining this goal has been the difficulty in stimulating the immune system to make it produce the right kinds of antibodies. A recent finding in Science describes a gene that controls production of these antibodies and may provide insights to the development of an effective vaccine. (1).
Antibodies are special kinds of proteins that bind to things, often very tightly. If they bind to the right molecules, they can prevent viruses from infecting cells and target…
sporte | September 3, 2008PubMed is an on-line database at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) that contains information from scientific literature. Most of the information is related to medical research.
To search PubMed, you use a program called Entrez. You go to the NCBI, select PubMed from the menu, type words into the text box, and start the search. Sometimes that's all you need to do. Sometimes you get several million results and need to use more specific words to limit the results the ones that you really want.
Many scientists use PubMed on a daily basis. But the NCBI has noticed that…
sporte | August 28, 2008Mumps was a common childhood disease when I was a child. We grew up learning that it was better to get mumps as a child because getting it as an adult would make you sterile. No doubt that idea arose from symptoms like swollen glands, swollen testicles, etc. When I looked in PubMed though, I couldn't find much data on sterility (at least not easily).
I did find data on hearing loss.
Death is not a common outcome of mumps. Between 1953 and 1962, there were 162,344 cases of mumps in the U.S. every year and only 39 deaths per year. People, mostly children, did die from mumps, but other…
sporte | August 27, 2008It's déjà vu all over again.
The first chapter in Arthur Allen's book "Vaccine" describes the history of smallpox vaccination in the United States. In 1721, in Boston, the prevailing belief was that to get vaccinated was to intervene with "divine providence." If you tried to protect yourself, it meant that you lacked faith in God.
Today, I read that a mumps outbreak is happening in Vancouver, Canada. So far 116 cases have been confirmed.
Why is mumps, a preventable and serious disease, causing problems in Canada?
photo of a child with mumps by by Barbara Rice, from the Public…
revere | August 27, 2008I have been severely critical (many posts among those here) of the Indonesian government's irresponsible assertions of ownership of potentially pandemic pathogenic viruses isolated from their citizens. The question of Intellectual Property is a difficult one in many instances but when it comes to a public good involving a global scourge, some of the gray areas become more black and white. The world has been struggling with the issue regarding the global influenza surveillance system for two years now, precipitated by Indonesia's refusal to cooperate any longer, resulting in a significant gap…
sporte | August 15, 2008Vaccines work by stimulating the immune system to respond to a specific thing. Most of the vaccines we use are designed to prime the immune system so that it's ready to fight off some kind of disease, like whooping cough, polio, or influenza. Some vaccines can have more specialized functions, like stimulating the body to attack cancer cells, kill rogue autoimmune cells, or prevent pregnancy. We'll look at what they do in later posts, for now, let's look at the kinds of things that can be used as vaccines.
It's an amazing assortment. Even more amazing is that these items don't all work in…
sporte | August 14, 2008A long time ago, I saw a movie called "The Other Side of the Mountain." The movie told the story of Jill Kinmont, a ski racer who contracted polio and lost the use of her legs. I was sad for days for afterward, but also relieved to know that Jill Kinmont's fate wasn't going to be mine. I wasn't going to wake up in an iron lung after a ski race, and neither were my friends, because most of the children in my generation had been vaccinated against the Polio virus.
This image shows a polio survivor learning to walk. The image comes from the CDC Public Health Image Library
We were…
sporte | August 14, 2008Every year people adopt pet dogs, cats, birds, and other creatures and take them to their local veterinarians for all the usual vaccinations and exams. The usual vaccinations protect your pets from diseases like rabies, distemper, Feline Immunodeficiency Virus, and Feline Leukemia. But it's not just pets that get protected by vaccines. Agricultural creatures: fish, chickens, sheep, cows, pigs, and horses receive vaccines and increasingly, wild animals are getting vaccinated, too.
One example comes from the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. They are looking at ways to…
revere | August 6, 2008A curious paper on the 1918 flu pandemic appeared this month in CDC's journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases. It seemed provocative, at least on the surface. It claimed that the conventional wisdom underlying pandemic flu preparations was wrong. It's not the flu virus we should be defending ourselves against but the common bugs of the upper respiratory tract that take advantage of new fertile ground to grow in after the flu virus invades:
Medical and scientific experts now agree that bacteria, not influenza viruses, were the greatest cause of death during the 1918 flu pandemic.
Government…
revere | August 3, 2008We have numerous examples of basic science that becomes unexpectedly useful and other examples of how veterinary science is useful to human health. Once you begin to understand how the world works it gives you tools that can be extended. The first stick used to knock a banana off a tree proved useful for lots of other things as well -- for example, whacking another monkey trying to poach on your personal banana patch (the Second Amendment of the Monkey Constitution gives all primates the Right to carry a club). So it's not such a big surprise that work on bird flu to save humans might have…