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Andrew Wakefield – what were you expecting to happen?

28 Jan

The first of Andrew Wakefield’s days of judgement unfolded today amid hectic scenes of supporters running screaming from the room as the inevitable damning judgements were read out.

Wakefields action was proven to be dishonest and misleading, he was found in breach of managing public finances and that the funds he was in control of were not used for their intended purposes and a whole myriad of others. One of the most shocking is that it was found proved that:

You caused Child 2 to undergo a programme of investigations for research purposed without having Ethics Committee approval for such research.

And thats Andrew Wakefield’s career toasted in the UK. Read the whole thing at your leisure.

I would have gotten this post to you sooner but I was accompnying my two step-daughters to their H1N1 vaccinations as the decisions were being handed down.

Age of Autism to Autism Families: Make your children suffer

24 Nov

Your pretty red house is engulfed in a roaring fire. You keep feeding the fire. Maybe petrol will help. Pour it on. Maybe some oil. Pour that on too. You don’t know. Nobody knows. Some guy you met on the internet tells you he’s a fireman and that the best way to stop a fire is to try and smother it with bone dry hay.

Your burns are bad. Your kids burns are worse. Do you throw them out of a window where a few other ‘firemen’ are holding on to a sheet made of melting plastic? Or do you push them down the stairs, where the rest of the injured and dead families are?

Thats my response to the utterly asinine response Kim Stagliano posted on the Age of Autism blog today to the Chicago Tribune’s series of articles on the quacks and hacks infesting the autism community. She wheels out the same old strawmen…

That’s my response to the Chicago Tribune accusing us of performing “uncontrolled studies” on our kids. (Our medical doctors are thorough and safe, by the way.)

I know of at least two doctors associated with the biomed movement who are on sex offenders registers. I know of one DAN! doc who is associated with the death of a child. I know of one other who hospitlaised a child. I know another who performed exorcism on autistic kids. I know another who is under investigation for more than one complaint.

And why does it bother journalists like Trine Tsouderos and Pat Callahan that some of us are improving our children’s lives?

I can’t speak for these journalists but I’ll speak as the parent (and step-parent) of two autistic kids. You’re not improving your childs autism. Thats the claim that these journalists are challenging. I challenge Kim Stagliano or Mark Blaxill to show the autism community where a biomed treatment discussed by the Tribune led to a measurable and scientifically documented improvement in their child’s autism. In fact, I can’t think of a child belonging to the founders of Autism FAIR Media, Generation Rescue, Age of Autism, SAFE MINDS or the NAA that has either been cured of their autism or made any sort of progress towards that end result as a sole consequence of biomed treatments. Why? Because in terms of curing/recovering/treating autism *they do nothing* . As a direct consequence of that obvious fact, parents continuing with detox, urine injections, exorcism et al are – as the Tribune indicate – experimenting on their children.

John Stone/Polly Tommey claim oversight

26 Sep

The first official sounding of the death knell for the ‘hidden horde’ hypothesis of autism (it must be vaccines because there aren’t 1 in 160/150/100 adult autistics) was recently sounded (as reported by Anthony) when an NHS study announced that the rate of autism amongst adults was 1% – exactly the same as for kids.

Fully aware of the implications for their beloved anti-vaccine hypothesis John Stone and Polly Tommey write/star in a recent post on that repository of all things bullshitty – Age of Autism.

NHS Autism Report suggests the increase in autism in recent years was all down to an oversight

Says John Stone, trying to reassure his readership theres still life in the terminal old dog of the hidden horde hypothesis. And why does he say this?

“Are we really able to believe all that we hear on such important subjects, or is there a stronger hand with adifferent agenda behind it?”

Ahhhh, of course! When a piece of science/news story doesn’t support your point of view then it _must_ be the work of….oh, whoever – Illuminati? Out of control government? GAVI? Take your pick.

But surely Stone and Tommey have better reasons than that…? Don’t they?

Well no, not really. They didn’t like the perfectly valid Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule that was used. Although they don’t refer to it by name, instead they cherry pick questions to try and demean the validity of the test.

The report was based on adults living in households throughout England and the assessments were done in two stages. Stage One asked individuals to rate how well they agreed with 20 statements about their likes, dislikes and abilities – such as whether they preferred going to ‘libraries’ or ‘parties’.

…If the full range of ability had been included in the NHS report, alongside the verbally fluent, high functioning adults living at home, there would surely be far more than 1 in 100. So, either there are more adults than children with an ASD and autism is on the decline(!?) or there is something wrong with the report.

A quick glance at many mainstream autism orgs claim on prevalence would show Stone that yes, there are more autistic adults than children. This report could indeed be interpreted to show a decline in autism.

People will claim that thats counter intuitive but it really isn’t. As autism has become more recognised, better diagnosed and there are more centers worldwide for its early detection, child numbers have not risen but have become more apparent. This is true across the whole ‘spectrum’.

Taking the NAS numbers on prevalence They say that at a rate of 1 in 100 children gives a total of around 133,500 kids with an ASD. This leaves 366,500 adults. A rate of 0.8%.

So the estimate prior to the new report was 0.2% out. But Stone was right, there are now (and always were) more ASD adults than kids. Thats because there are more adults in the general population than kids. In terms of whether the _rate_ of autism has decreased there’s no research to compare this to but an estimate of 0.8% is pretty damn close to 1%. In real terms the NAS were only out by 733 adults. So I would say that this report reflects reality – with no doubt regional variance and other factors, the adult rate is (and always was) around 1%.

But the stoopid continues apace:

One thing is clear, however, the report has no relevance to children withautism like my son Billy and the many thousands like him.

Quoth Polly Toomey who somehow missed the point that this was a study of adults and thus was never going to have much relevance to her children.

We’re then treated to the science of Carol ‘try me shithead‘ Stott who personally received over £100,000 of legal aid money to prop up the dead MMR hypothesis. She claims (after further digs at ADOS) that a ‘further detailed critique’ will be appearing in that robust science journal AutismFile….owned and operated by one Polly Tommey.

So there we have it. This new study, which whilst far from 100% perfect is also far from the dead dog portrayed by the purveyors of science at The Autism File and Age of Autism. They think theres a conspiracy to ‘big it up’ and refuse to see the statistical truth. ASD hasn’t ever been in epidemic, theres been a stable rate for a long time. These dealers in anti-vaccinationism will just have to deal with that.

Wakefield, distortion and the Sunday Times

3 Jul

The journalist Brian Deer has done as much as anyone to investigate the background to what Ben Goldacre describes as the MMR Hoax. In the course of his investigations he discovered undisclosed conflicts of interest by Andrew Wakefield that led to most of the authors of the original paper in the Lancet withdrawing their names and the editor publishing a retraction.

Then in February this year Deer published his latest investigation. The Lancet paper had already been dismissed as bad science. Now, if Deer’s findings were correct, it would seem that some of the data had been deliberately falsified. Wakefield responded by complaining about the article to the Press Complaints Commission. The Times stood by its story and also forwarded all details to the General Medical Council who are still investigating Wakefield over allegations of misconduct.

And that was it until this week, when Thoughtful House, the clinic that Wakefield has established in Texas, issued a press release announcing

Press Complaints Commission Orders Sunday Times to Remove MMR journalist’s Stories on Dr. Wakefield from Paper’s Web Site

It goes on to suggest that this “interim order”

appears to indicate there are questions about the accuracy of the Deer stories.

Of course it does no such thing. Thoughtful House even quote Stephen Abell of the PCC as saying that

Given the ongoing nature of the dispute the articles should be removed from the newspaper’s website until this matter has been concluded. This would not be an admission of any liability on the part of the newspaper.

The wording reveals what actually happened. The Sunday Times has not been ordered to take down the articles. The PCC decided to postpone its investigation until after the GMC reaches a decision on the allegations of misconduct. This makes sense. If Wakefield is found guilty the complaint will fail. Meanwhile the PCC has asked the Sunday Times to remove the article from its website until matters can be resolved and the Sunday Times has agreed. That tallies with the email I received from the PCC

The PCC has considered the matter initially and has elected to stay its investigation until the conclusion of the GMC inquiry. It has reached no formal decision on the substance of the complaint and there is no published ruling on our website.

The Commission has asked that the paper remove the articles temporarily until the conclusion of the PCC investigation. This is without any admission of liability on the paper’s part.

So no order was issued, no judgement was made and there is no suggestion of impropriety by Deer or the Sunday Times. All the suggestions come from one source, Wakefield himself. His friends on the web may try to pretend that this is further proof of the brave maverick doctor’s innocence in the face of a vicious campaign against him. I think they are clutching at straws.

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Citalopram no good for autism

8 Jun

An interesting study for me personally as it involves a crazymed I’m familiar with – Citalopram (the generic name) brand name Celexa in the US and Cipramil over here in Blighty.

Citalopram is an anti-depressant of the class SSRI which means ‘selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors’. In plain english an SSRI based crazymed stops serotonin being reuptaken and therefore your neurons wallow for longer in it. This is, apparently, good. Why? I don’t know, I am not a scientist, I am a user 🙂 Well, I’m not anymore, I take a different sort of anti-depressant crazymed called Venfalaxine which is an SNRI. I don’t know how that works either but it does and thats good enough for me. Hopefully it has plenty of formaldehyde and monkey kidneys in it.

Anyway, I had no idea that Citalopram was used off-label for autism and when I heard about this study my first thoughts were ‘what the hell did they expect it to do?’ Shortly followed by ‘Citalopram is some serious shit’.

What the hell did they expect it to do? They expected it to reduce repetitive behaviours.

Seriously.

They put these kids on heavy duty SSRI’s because they flapped their hands and rocked back and forth. Excuse me for being a little rude here but so fucking what?

Apparently

Side effects were more common in the children taking Celexa, the researchers found. Those on Celexa were more likely to have increased energy levels, impulsiveness, decreased concentration, hyperactivity, mechanical repetition of the same movement or posture, and sleep problems.

Oh wait, all the symptoms of the beginnings of what to me sounds like hypomania. Which is (gasp!) a side-effect of most if not all SSRI’s.

Because they flapped and rocked and swayed and liked routine. Good call.

“A medication that we thought would be helpful for these repetitive behaviors was no better than placebo,” he [Bryan H. King] says. “That calls into question how or if we should use [Celexa] or even related medications for this purpose.

Yeah? Does it? How about we call into question the necessity of drugging the shit out of a kid because s/he likes to rock and flap?

I have to wonder, I really do. How the hell did this study – which to me sounds more like torture – ever get past an IRB?

Apologies for the rant but this is appalling to me.

Andrew Zimmerman Finally Speaks

24 Mar

A year ago I tried to talk to Andrew Zimmerman about the Hannah Poling case and was told:

Dr. Zimmerman…….is not able to publicly discuss this patient. As a participant in this case, the family provided consent for Dr. Zimmerman to share information with the court, but we do not have parental consent to discuss the patient publicly – as we are bound by HIPAA privacy regulations, as in any healthcare setting in the U.S.

And in the year that has followed the Polings have not allowed Zimmerman to publicly comment once. Now I’m beginning to understand why.

Sullivan told me that yesterday the Expert Witness reports for the Respondents were made public and that Zimmermans was eyebrow raising to say the least.

Furthermore, there is no evidence of an association between autism andthe alleged reaction to MMR a nd Hg, and it is more likely than not, that there is a genetic basis for autism in this child.”

“Michelle Cedillo’s developmental regression was likely to have been
preprogrammed before birth to emerge, as it does in Rett syndrome, long after birth.”

“Autism, in most cases, begins before birth, and the maternal
“environment” in the womb is likely to be important in the process.”

“there is no scientific basis for a connection between measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine or mercury (Hg) intoxication and autism.”

“Autism is primarily a genetically determined disorder.” There is a
hypothetical basis, but very limited evidence, for environmental factors
(such as stress or the drug terbutalinel l) that may act together with
an individual’s genetic susceptibility to increase the risk of autism.
There is strong evidence that the origins of autism begin before birth,
based on genetic and anatomical studies as well as chemical findings at birth in children who go on to develop autism. The usual time
period when autism appears and is diagnosed during the 2nd and 3′” years of life reflects the dynamic nature of the child’s developing brain and the appearance of pre-programmed disordered expression of genes and preexisting cellular abnormalities that result in the child’s regression with loss of language and social skills.”

Recall once more that this is the man – along with Jon Poling himself and along with John Shoffner (who also doesn’t think much of Polings beliefs) who co-authored the only piece of science performed on Hannah Poling.

No wonder the Poling’s were so keen to keep Zimmerman quiet.

Thanks to Sullivan for some of this.

Who carries the authority?

19 Feb

The recent Omnibus decisions are hoped by some to stem the tide of rabid anti-vaccine beliefs espoused by people who shame the name of autism advocacy. On Salon, Rahul K. Parikh says:

In the case of autism, science and reason have too often failed to reach people. And consequently they have turned to the courts. For those of us who believe in the scientific method, the autism trials have not been necessary. But judges, unlike doctors in their cold white coats, still command a great deal of respect, and so perhaps the court’s recent ruling will sink in and finally persuade parents to regain their confidence in vaccines.

Never happen Rahul, never happen. These same anti-vaxxers have already began spin campaigns not only against the legality of the verdicts but against the three Special Masters themselves. To this group, the Special Masters command no respect whatsoever and neither do their verdicts. Take this piece of rampant stupidity from Barbara Loe Fisher:

The U.S. Court of Claims special masters are hampered from considering evidence which has not yet been published in the medical literature regarding potential associations between vaccines and the development of regressive autism

I don’t see how it is possible to make a dumber statement. What she’s saying is she wanted the Special Masters to look at unpublished science. As is well known, unpublished science is not like an unpublished novel. Unpublished science means its science that has not been put through the rigour of peer review, not had its methods examined to ensure they are transparent and reproducable, not had its conclusions reviewd to see iof they are accurate and not had its data examined to see if it is usable. This unreviewed, unpublished ‘science’ is what got us to this stage in the first place. A ten year multi-million pound, dollar and euro effort to close down bad science.

So how does she and people like her get away with saying such things? *Just because they can* . Because people believe extremes and people believe celebrities. People believe bloggers and people believe those who have shared (or think they have) experiences. I’m not saying its right but its true. If anyone genuinely believes this ruling will shut the door on these people they’re wrong. For confirmation of that you need look no further than Rolf Hazlehurt, father of one of the kids who made up the three test cases from the Autism Omnibus.

If we win, we keep going.
If we lose, we keep going.
If we win, the going will be easier.
If we lose, the going will be more difficult.
However, the Court rules, we will keep going.

You have to understand. This is not about scientific truth – or even truth at all – to these people. Its about winning and its about pushing their antivaccine beliefs as fast and far as they can. Even as they claim to not be anti-vaccine they write emails to others clearly showing they are. One of these emails will come to light very soon I believe. Expect to see very familiar names on it.

To these people science has no authority. Doctors have no authority. The Special Masters have no authority. The only people who have authority – real authority – can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. David Kirby. Jenny McCarthy. Maybe Dan Olmsted. If one of these people were to bow to the obvious and say so publicly then we might have a very different scenario. But they won’t. They have too much invested in esposuing the anti-vaccine line.

Mainstream media have a lot to apologise for also. The red tops, the broadsheets and all those hundreds of little bitty TV channels all over the US that gave the anti-vaxxers airtime in the name of impartiality and allowed them to scare away facts and reason, they need to reverse that policy.

But more than that, scientists and doctors need to get online and blog, get on Twitter and use them. Talk to people in their own language. Screw decorum. Ask people who’ve been using their blogs to support vaccines for _years_ what to do and how to do it. People like Oracand Ben Goldacre are prime examples.

This needs to happen because we’ve already lost one generation of kids to their loony parents. The loony parents who only recognise the authority of celebs, authors and each other in nests of email lists and blogs. If we want to give up another generation to the reach of the internet then keep on keeping on and hope that Rahul K. Parikh is right. But he’s not.

The Guardian – purveyors of bad science

14 Jan

I’ve watched for awhile as the UK media whips itself up into a frenzy over the latest bit of autism research from Simon Baron-Cohen. I wanted to see if they could manage to curb themselves and their tendency to reduce everything to soundbite. Of course they couldn’t. The idea they could is silly.

However, call me an old Lefty but I thought The Guardian might do a little better than it has. It not only started this silly pre-natal testing storm-in-a-teacup, it continues to push it in the most credulous way.

On 12th Jan Sarah Boseley (apparently a Health Editor) wrote:

New research brings autism screening closer to reality

A piece that says:

New research published today will bring prenatal testing for autism significantly closer…

This is twaddle. And yet, The Guardian published an op-ed piece (well, blog post) today from Marcel Berlins which leads with:

The prospect of a screening test on a pregnant woman predicting her child’s autism is not far away, and Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, leader of the Cambridge University research team that developed the test…

Again, twaddle. And twaddle on two fronts.

Here’s the truth stated simply: Baron-Cohen’s work is not going to speed up a pre-natal test for autism. Baron-Cohen did not develop any test.

In a piece in Nature, Baron-Cohen explains:

The Guardian [newspaper] is focusing on the issue of screening. The study is not about screening and it is not motivated by trying to develop the screening test. It was motivated by trying to understand possible causal factors in autism…

So not only is Baron-Cohen _not_ developing a pre-natal test, he is quite clear that his work _will not_ speed up the development of a pre-natal test.

And yet two prominent Guardian columnists are writing as if it was a done deal.

In fact, the misrepresentation of the science involved goes beyond the surface of what Baron-Cohen is _not_ doing but what his work _is_ doing. From the NHS website:

The findings are based on a scientific study of 235 children aged between eight and 10, whose mothers had amniocentesis, a test analysing fluid taken from around a foetus. None of these children were autistic, but those exposed to higher testosterone levels showed higher levels of ‘autistic traits’, such as poor verbal and social skills.

So, lets be clear, *none of the kids in this study were autistic* – so touting this study as a potential shortcut to a pre-natal test is several steps ahead of itself.

The study itself was in undergone to further test Baron-Cohen’s theory that autism is an ‘extreme male brain’ disorder. It is worth remembering that this theory is contentious even within the mainstream autism science community.

Psychologist Kate Plaisted Grant, also from the University of Cambridge…isn’t convinced that the findings support the underlying theory. “The broader scientific community hasn’t accepted the idea of the extreme male brain,” she says. Fetal testosterone “may create a special brain, but it doesn’t necessarily create a male brain”.

Psychiatrist Laurent Mottron…says that just because males and people with autistic disorders score similarly in autism questionnaires, this does not mean that autistic traits are the same as male traits. Rather, he argues, it just shows that the test cannot discriminate between maleness and autism.

“For me, it’s exactly the same as saying that two things that weigh the same are both made of the same stuff,” he explains.

There is also the distinct possibility that autistic women have not been counted accurately in the past. I know I have read some research on this but I cannot put my hands on it. Maybe someone in the comments can help me out.

The Guardian need to take a step back and screw their collective heads back on. There should be a debate about pre-natal testing for autism but to me, its not a debate to have until it becomes a realistic possibility. The autism community has enough on its plate right now without getting into a purely theoretical debate.

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Why is David Kirby grasping at straws?

9 Jan

Once more for the record, I like David. I tried very hard to get to see him in London last time he was over and we’d arranged to meet up for a drink but due to my family situation it wasn’t to be. However, I cannot let that stop me from recalling that we have very differing views on a wide range of things to do with autism and vaccines.

I have noticed of late a tendency for David’s HuffPo blog posts to be more than usually full of ‘if’ ‘maybe’ ‘might’ etc. However his skill as a writer buries these ambiguities and makes them appear certainties. I’m not even sure its a concious thing for David. His need to write well sometimes (I think) obscures a clinical need for precision in such delicate areas as he and I write in.

With that in mind, I recalled a post of his from November 2008 entitled ‘Tom Daschle: Friend to Many Autism Families’ in which he describes Mr Daschle thusly:

By nominating Tom Daschle to head up the Department, President Elect Obama has selected a man who has demonstrated an unflinching willingness to question vaccine safety, and to fight for the rights of those people who believe they have been, or may be, seriously injured by certain vaccinations.

I think David might’ve been trying to insinuate that Tom Daschle’s nomination was good for the autism/antivaccine community. Certainly however, as with the autism/antivaccine’s belief that RFK Jr would be appointed by Obama, this nomination might not be quite what that community is expecting. As blogged by Orac today, Daschle’s true feelings on vaccinations were spelt out by the man himself:

Immunization is probably as — as sound an investment as we can make in good health. I can’t imagine that we could do any better than ensure that every — every child is immunized, and that we understand the importance of — of broad-based immunization and the tremendous good health that can come from it.

Following that, David made a fairly innocuous presentation from a US Army scientist look much more sinister than it actually was. He claimed that the army listed autism as a possible ‘health effect’ of mercury/thiomersal. It turned out that that was not actually the case.

Dr. Centeno’s presentation, entititled ‘Mercury Poisoning: A Clinical and Toxicological Perspective,’ did mention Thimerosal. However, its inclusion was specifically intended to point out that although there has been some speculation about a potential association between Thimerosal and Autism, currently there is no data or science to support such a claim. Neither the AFIP nor Dr. Centeno have been involved in or conducted research on Autism.

After that was the recent debacle when David mixed up Change.org and Change.gov – the latter being a website of Obama. The former a privately owned enterprise for at least the last 2 years. David thought (and committed to a blog post) that Obama had hired pro-neurodiversity bloggers and he imagined a conversation Obama might have with an autism parent:

It is hard to imagine the President one day saying…“I do not think we should devote resources to finding out what happened to your [autistic child]. I do not believe there is anything we can do to help him, and it is not desirable to even try.

This post made me sad and angry. I thought better of David than that. To say that any of us who do not believe vaccines cause autism do not think it is desirable to help our autistic children is massively insulting. I hope someday David can maybe spend a bit of time with parents who don’t think vaccines caused their child’s autism and see for himself how we help our kids. And maybe an apology might be forthcoming also.

David’s latest faux pas is regarding the latest MIND institute study. In a post entitled ‘UC Davis Study: Autism is Environmental (Can We Move On Now?)’ David says:

Autism is predominantly an environmentally acquired disease, the study seems to conclude. Its meteoric rise, at least in California, cannot possibly be attributed to that shopworn mantra we still hear everyday, incredibly, from far too many public health officials: It’s due to better diagnosing and counting.

The autism epidemic is real, and it is not caused by genes alone: You cannot have a genetic epidemic. It really is time that we, as a society, accept that cold, hard truth.

Here’s the full conclusion:

Autism incidence in California shows no sign yet of plateauing. Younger ages at diagnosis, differential migration, changes
in diagnostic criteria, and inclusion of milder cases do not fully explain the observed increases. Other artifacts have yet to be quantified, and as a result, the extent to which the continued rise represents a true increase in the occurrence of autism remains unclear.

Lets look at that last again:

…the extent to which the continued rise represents a true increase in the occurrence of autism remains unclear.

And yet David seems to to think its crystal clear. The paper itself also contains some direct and fairly easy-to-check errors. For example:

The inclusion of milder cases has been suggested as an explanation for the increase in autism. Neither Asperger’s
syndrome nor “pervasive developmental disorders not otherwise specified” qualify under the category of autism in the DDS system.

Here is what DDS passed on to me in Summer of 2007. I promised not to attribute the quote to an individual so I won’t, but you can email DDS yourselves and ask them.

The current CDER was written in 1978 and updated in 1986, which is why the language is so out of date ( e.g., Residual Autism). California has clinicians in the field who are, of course, using modern criteria in their assessments but then they have to go backwards and try to fit those kids into the 1986 CDER. So you are going to have Aspergers kids, PDD-NOS kids in both categories 1 and 2. Categories 1 and 2 are called ‘Autism.’ But because there are so many clinicians, using lots of different techniques for evaluation, there is a lot of inconsistency and enrollment figures should not be misused as epidemiological data.

Hertz-Picciotto might also be interested in a quote from Rita Eagle PhD of the California Dept. of Developmental Services (DDS) to Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Vol. 34, No. 1, February 2004:

To many clinicians, it appears that more and more children who, in the past, would never have been referred to the regional centers for example, bright but anxious and slightly socially inept kids with average or better IQs and children who, in the past, had been or would have been diagnosed as ADHD, OCD, ODD, anxiety disorder, learning disabilities, psychotic, and so forth are now being diagnosed wit high-functioning autism and/or Asperger syndrome and referred to the regional centers for services.

Truth is that a lot of Hertz-Picciotto 2009 is simply wrong. For an extensive overview of why, please read Joseph’s technical takedown from which I’ll quote his conclusion:

H-P et al. is a surprisingly poor paper. It does not produce any new data in order to support its two main results. It makes an apples-to-oranges comparison between a Finnish epidemiological study and California DDS ascertainment over time. It tells us the obvious about “milder” cases. In the end, I don’t think this is an improvement over the 2002 MIND Institute report to the California Legislature. In fact, it could very well be worse.

The way H-P et al. have gone about trying to show there’s a real rise in autism incidence over time is not a very good way to go about doing things, in my view. There are other ways. For example, I’ve suggested trying to replicate Lotter (1967) in detail. This would not be as easily challenged.

David closes his latest error prone piece with:

But the sooner our best minds in science and medicine come to grips with the fact that these poor, hapless kids have been exposed to the wrong environmental toxins and/or infectious agents at the wrong time, the sooner we can find out how to best treat what really ails them.

This is a prime example of bad science leading the media. David has reported on a paper that has made fairly bad errors and taken them at their word. Sadly, this sort of thing will only continue as long as institutions like MIND (controlled by a man who is dedicated to proving vaccines cause autism) churn out error strewn papers.

New MMR and autism study: no correlation

29 Dec

OK so its not the greatest idea to blog about just an abstract but I hope to have more to bring you soon.

This new study states (again) that there’s no correlation between MMR and autism. In fact, the abstract in its entirety reads:

The MMR vaccination coverage in Malopolskie voivodeship improved rapidly and finally reached a high level during last years. The number of new cases of autism spectrum disorders in children during that time revealed a slightly rising but not significant trend, while the number of childhood autism were stable. Ecological study showed no correlation between MMR vaccination and an increased risk of childhood autism and autism spectrum disorders in children.

Clearly they’re using the phrase ‘autism spectrum disorders’ to mean to everything autism related and the phrase ‘childhood autism’ to refer to what the medical community refer to as ‘severe’ or ‘low functioning’ type of autism.

Now, this study is Polish, written in Polish. I have written to the lead author asking if they have, or expect to have, an English translation and if so if I could have a copy.

But still – the message is clear – there is no correlation between autism and MMR. Neither at ‘general’ ASD level, nor at specific ‘severe’ level.

In 2005, The Cochrane Library performed a meta-analysis and systematic review on Vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella in children. Although it had some harsh things to say about the design of studies trying to track adverse events vs fulfilment of role of the vaccine it was also emphatic in its verdict regarding the MMR and autism:

Exposure to MMR was unlikely to be associated with Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, autism or aseptic meningitis (mumps) (Jeryl-Lynn strain-containing MMR)

So why am I bringing this back up again? Well, because I want to ensure that I understand the role of the Cochrance Library and I want to explain why the term ‘systematic review’ _matters_ so much. For this, I am indebted, once again, to Ben Goldacre’s truly excellent Bad Science – the book.

A meta-analysis is a very simple thing to do, in some respects: you just collect all the results from all the trials on a given subject, bung them into one big spreadsheet and do the maths on that…

….

So, if there are, say, ten randmoised placebo-controlled trials looking at whether asthma symptoms get better with homoeopathy, each of which has a paltry forty patients, you could put them all into one meta-analysis and effectively (in some respects) have a four-hundred-person trial to work with.

Now, the good thing about meta analysis is that it excludes papers of poor quality. Here’s Ben’s example – with Homeopathy again:

A landmark meta-analysis was published in the Lancet….they found, overall, adding them all up, that homeopathy performs no better than placebo….The homeopaths were up in arms…they will tell you its a stitch up….what [the authors] did, essentially, like all negative meta-analysis of homeopathy was to exclude the poorer quality trials from their analysis.

All quotes, Bad Science, pages 54 to 57.

Sound familiar?

So, back in 2005, a meta-analysis was performed by the Cochrane Library on MMR and one of its results was that:

Exposure to MMR was unlikely to be associated with Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, autism or aseptic meningitis (mumps) (Jeryl-Lynn strain-containing MMR)

So – where do we go now? Do we really need to keep on churning out results and studies until every last person on the earth gets the point? Or do we cut our losses, accept that there will always be some idiots who will never get it and…move on….to a research future where we can get back to thinking about autism, how we can help autistic people to live their lives and hopefully a future where children don’t die of vaccine preventable diseases.

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