It’s a pretty typical hypocritical Orac strategy to point out the low quality of posters only when the poster takes a position against his while ignoring the same tactic used by the IOM who holds the same position as him. Beware of attributing much more than entertainment to Orac’s writing.

As with your writing, which illuminates little, other than your bias.

Regarding citing poster presentations, one has to look at it in the context of the other evidence. Citing a single poster presentation is pretty weak evidence. However, including a poster presentation as a citation with a lot of citations of publications in good, peer-reviewed journals is not a problem, because then the poster is simply a small piece of evidence. Moreover, if the poster was ultimately published in a peer-reviewed journal, then the article should be cited instead of the poster.

Anyway, given that this vaccine research is only going to be given space as a poster presentation, it certainly seems that those reviewing the abstracts didn’t view it as anything massively significant: if they expected this research to have a large impact on the field, one presumes that they would have made space for them to be full paper presentations.

LOL, thank you for that. I looked into this twice now (I have the IOM information) and couldn’t find it twice.

It looks like they changed the name and that’s why I couldn’t find it. The original title from the IOM document was: “Thimerosal and Developmental Problems Including Autism”

I gotta go. You all have fun with this….”

Fun? Do you think it’s fun seeing idiots trying to define our children with shitty research? Do you think we enjoy seeing our kids compared to monkeys that were sacrificed and tortured for no good reason?

You don’t want to find out why your kid is autistic, you want to prove to the world what you think you already know. Real fun.

The IOM in their 2004 report noted:

United Kingdom. Miller (2004) presented to the committee a cohort study that examined whether certain NDDs, including autism, are related to exposure to TCV’s. Regarding this study, forthcoming in the journal Pediatrics, the committee focused only on the analyses examining the autism outcome. The study was based on data from the U.K.’s General Practice Research Database (GPRD), which is similar to the U.S. VSD; About 500 general practices in the United Kingdom contribute data to the GPRD, which is about 5.7 percent of the population. The study’s data cover 1988 to 1999 and include patient consultations, referrals, and vaccine information.

This was to be published, as noted in the IOM report, in Pediatrics. I believe you will find it below:

http://pediatrics.aappublicati...../114/3/584

Even more ironic, to borrow a phrase, it wasn’t a poster. It was a presentation made directly to the IOM while they were deliberating.

“Miller (2004) presented to the committee…”

I guess the search is ended.

I put little credence in Orac’s writing, although he certainly provides entertaining reading.

Perhaps he should also point that the IOM used as evidence a poster presentation (1 of only 3 epidemiological studies) in their 2004 conference conclusions(Miller 2004). Even more ironic, I can’t find any trace of that study ever having been published—I guess that speaks to its quality.

It’s a pretty typical hypocritical Orac strategy to point out the low quality of posters only when the poster takes a position against his while ignoring the same tactic used by the IOM who holds the same position as him. Beware of attributing much more than entertainment to Orac’s writing.

If he has any comments it should be along the lines of those here. Posters don’t provide enough information to determine quality so we should withhold judgement until we see the details and can do a proper evaluation.