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Paul Offit in the New York Times

13 Jan

Paul Offit is in the NYT today talking about his book:

A new book defending vaccines, written by a doctor infuriated at the claim that they cause autism, is galvanizing a backlash against the antivaccine movement in the United States.

which is true. For the first time in the nearly six years I’ve been blogging about autism and vaccines, things are happening beyond the stale, jargon filled denouncements appended to the end of news pieces about autism and vaccines. Doctors in the US and UK are wising up to the very real health dangers – and dangers posed to autism research – posed by the antivaccine/autism lobby. I’ve seen health experts on TV over here, read many interviews with actual doctors and scientists in both countries and am aware of plans to carry the message much, much further and harder than ever before. Its about time.

Offit again mentions the threats he’s received and Dr. Gregory A. Poland mentions threats his kids, something that Offit has also received, as have I and several other autism parents who don’t believe vaccines cause autism. Some scoff at that according to the NYT article. I would suggest that that displays a level of arrogance and head-burying that is unhealthy.

However, I think some of the scientists involved are naive or simply don’t understand the level of blind fanaticism they are dealing with:

If the surgeon general or the secretary of health or the head of the C.D.C. would come out and make a really strong statement on this, I think the whole thing would go away,” said Dr. Peter J. Hotez, president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute, who has a severely autistic daughter…

With respect to Dr Hotez, thats living in a fantasy world. What would happen is that certain factions would simply do what they try to do to Dr Offit, Dr Poland, Dr Shattuck, him (if he knew it), me, Kathleen, Kristina, Amanda, Orac, Joseph, Do’C (the list goes ever on) and now Josh and Ben from Change.org – they would suggest that the Surgeon General had become a pharma shill. They would wheel out the same tired old statements from ex-heads of NIH etc, people who have no relevance and no ideas and the whole thing would just go around and around.

To be 100% honest, the best thing to do with these people is buy them an island somewhere, transport them to it and let them live out their lives totally organically and naturally. Two birds, one stone.

But seriously, you will never, ever get through to these people. They cannot be reasoned with. To quote Lord Byron:

Those who will not reason are bigots, those who cannot are fools, and those who dare not are slaves.

Leading members of Generation Rescue are quoted in the piece:

We have hundreds of fully recovered children. I’m very frustrated that Dr. Offit, who’s never treated an autistic child, is spending his time trying to refute the reality of biomedical recovery.

He…condemned threats generally, saying he had received some himself. “No one should ever do that to another human being,” he said.

This is a constant source of puzzlement to me as I keep hearing about these ‘hundreds of full recovered children’ (didn’t it used to be thousands?) and yet a search of PubMed for these case studies show nothing at all.

So where are they? Much like David Kirby with his claim HHS have said vaccines caused Hannah Poling’s autism when they have not, this is yet another soundbite with no substance at all to back it up. How long can one keep making such wild claims without a shred of evidence to support them? How long before one’s own conscience starts to trouble you?

Many doctors now argue that reporters should treat the antivaccine lobby with the same indifference they do Holocaust deniers, AIDS deniers and those claiming to have proof that NASA faked the Moon landings.

I agree. But whilst we live in a society that thinks Jenny McCarthy is capable of offering medical advice and the media love celebs more than people it ain’t going to happen. Medical science needs to carry on fighting and fighting harder.

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.

Autism community show their compassion

6 Jan

I’ve refrained from blogging about the death of Jett Travolta because I don’t really know what to say about it directly. I’ve mentioned the lad before in passing and his dad in terms of the suggestion that Jett was autistic and his mum and dad were refusing to recognise his autism because their scientologist beliefs wouldn’t let them. I definitely have opinions about the life and death of Jett Travolta but, hey guess what? Maybe right now isn’t the time for me to air them?

In fact, whilst I think about it, maybe this isn’t the time for any autism group to air them when those opinions are simply carefully veiled hit-pieces designed solely to try and draw attention to ones own ideas about autism causation. Distasteful isn’t the word when you read something like the below from Dan Olmsted:

We don’t know why Jett Travolta died, but we do know that our environment is making more and more of our kids sick while the medical community and public health officials deliberately avoid investigating “the equivalent of a metallic chemical,” whether it’s found in commercial products, vaccines or carpets with spilled mercury. Our kids are paying the price.

which appeared at the end of a piece he wrote on AoA trying to link Kawasaki disease (which the Travolta’s say Jett had), acrodynia (a form of mercury poisoning) and autism. The man has absolutely no shame or decency.

But even Olmsted’s lack of social skill pales into insignificance when compared to the group Autism United who apparently tried the most appallingly bad taste PR stunt to promulgate their message.

This is a difficult time for John and Kelly, and our prayers are with them,” said Ain. “But this could be an opportunity for them to use their son’s death and their celebrity to help thousands of parents, who are caring for sick youngsters.

Yeah, because if one of my kids had literally _just_ died the first thing I’d feel like doing is jumping in front of a TV camera and ‘using my childs death’.

Jesus Christ. Gave the family a break yeah? Whatever his beliefs were and whatever my opinions about them are, I hope I can see the truth about how John Travolta felt about his son.

If there’s anyone out there who sees that and can’t see that the man loved his boy then there’s something wrong with you. If there’s anyone out there who feels that this is a good time to start *using* Jett Travolta’s death to further their own crackpot ideas, there’s something wrong with you.

Age of Autism's reporter of the year 2008

3 Jan

Age of Autism’s reporter of the year for 2008, David Kirby, made something of an error yesterday. On the Huffington Post, the following headline appeared:

Obama Transition Team: “Recovery from autism is neither possible nor desirable”

You see, David was alluding to the fact that Kristina Chew and Dora Raymaker head been appointed by Change.org to be their autism bloggers. Trouble is that somehow he got the idea in his head that Change.org was actually Change.gov’s website.

Change.org is actually a social action networking site run by people who took the time to sift through the applications they received and interview those they shortlisted. They were very, very knowledgeable about the split in the autism community and decided that rather than rely on the sort of scare-mongering and factless blogging that permeates the vaxosphere they would get their facts about autism from a professor with an autistic child and (gasp!) an autistic person themselves.

Lets be clear about the size of David’s error here (in case the post is now gone I have a screenie for you to grab) davidkirbyoopsie

David has pretty much just accused the Obama transition team – without doing the most basic of fact checking – of wanting to leave autistic children to ‘a nightmare without end’.

A lot of David’s post is factless twaddle and made me quite angry to read. He (like everyone else on his side of the autism divide) states there are thousands of recovered autistic kids? Where? Where are the case studies? Certainly not in PubMed.

David claims Kristina doesn’t speak for the ‘countless thousands’ of parents he knows who think vaccines injured their kids. So? AoA don’t speak for the ‘countless thousands’ if not millions of parents that exist all over the world who don’t think vaccines cause their child’s autism.

I have a very strong suspicion in fact that David didn’t actually visit the website of Change.org. If he had he would’ve seen instantly just by the design of the site that its nothing to do with the transition team. I think some AoA bigwig forwarded on Kristina’s posts and ‘asked’ David to blog about them pointing out all the key ranty elements David mentions in a style that is not usually his.

Perhaps the most damage will be done by the paragraphs:

The President Elect has an old, dear friend going all the way back to Chicago, with a young son on the autism spectrum. That friend will soon be a Senior White House Official.

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

I’m afraid David, that by placing words in the President elects mouth – and utterly wrong words at that – you have demonstrated a certain hubris.

Not only are you wrong that Obama has shown any inclination to say that, Kristina Chew has shown no inclination to say that either. Unlike you, she is parent to an autistic child and you have just said that she feels it is not desirable to help her son. I hope you have the grace to apologise to her publicly as these words are far from true. Maybe you should try spending some time away from the anti-vaxxers and spending some time with the _actual_ autism community – a community who work damned hard with their children. They just don’t subject them to meaningless, expensive and dangerous experimentation.

Update
Age of Autism are obviously not HuffPo readers – they just posted their own copy of the story. And then just as quickly deleted it, but not quickly enough to beat the mighty G. aoaasses click for bigger.

Generation Rescue and Change.Gov

2 Jan

Sometimes you put off a project and it goes stale.  The moment has passed, the project never gets done.  Then again, sometimes you put off a project and it gets more interesting

Such is the case of a comment I saw on Change.Gov. I saw it and thought I’d include it in a future blog post I am considering (let’s see if I write it before it goes stale!). But, instead of missing the window to blog it, enough has happened that it is even more interesting.

Change.Gov is the Obama transition team’s website. In the spirit of open government, they are allowing people to submit questions for review. Other citizens (not only US, by the way) can vote on how important a topic is and, one assumes, the subjects with a lot of votes will get noticed by the transition team.

Given that, I was not surprised to find a question submitted by Generation Rescue’s Kelli Ann Davis. The question is copied below:

“Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey were named 2008 Couple of the Year (www.ageofautism.com) due to their advocacy work for Generation Rescue. Why hasn’t the Transistion Team made autism a top priority and sat down with the leaders of this organization?”
Kelli Ann Davis, Reno, Nevada

Since I first saw this, Orac has blogged about it. Not only did he blog it, but he did a very uncharacteristic move: he called for a poll mob ala P.Z. Myers. Yep, Orac got people to log in to Change.Gov and vote on Ms. Davis’ question. Given that one has to actually register before voting, the effect is impressive. At this point, 200 people are voting against Ms. Davis’ comment vs. 137 pro. I don’t recall the numbers from when I first saw it, but I do know that the votes were more “pro” than “con” when I first saw it.

This has not gone unnoticed by the good people at Generation Rescue. Kim Stagliano recycled not only the Age of Autism’s methods (name calling) but recycled an old post by Mark Blaxill as well. Frankly, I am amused. I found the original post by Mr. Blaxill amusing (not in the way he intended, I am sure), and I find it amusing still.

But, that is not enough to really blog about, at least in my book. Rather, I think it is worth taking the time to put in public why I opposed Ms. Davis’ comment.

Go back and read it again. The first thing that strikes this reader is the disingenuous nature of the comment. Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey were named couple of the year by the Age of Autism? Huh? I guess if they figure that the Obama (or, as Ms. Davis spelled it for some time, “O’Bama”) team doesn’t know the history of their blog, that might work. However, for those of us who know the Age of Autism as a rebranded “Rescue Post”–the blog of Generation Rescue–it is an odd move, to say the least:

Generation Rescue, which they call “Jenny McCarthy’s Autism Organization” voted Jenny McCarthy and her boyfriend “Couple of the Year”. Were I, a blogger on LeftBrain/RightBrain, to name Kev “LeftBrain/RightBrain’s pick of autism leader of 2008”, would you be impressed? See what I mean?

But, the disingenuous nature of Ms. Davis’ question is just the symptom, not the real problem. Actually, I see two big problems with Ms. Davis’ proposal. (1) It has all the appearance of self promotion, both for Generation Rescue and for Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey. And, (2) No surprise, I am sure, but I find Generation Rescue’s “Couple of the Year” to be highly inappropriate representatives of the “autism community”.

Let’s look a bit closer at these concerns, shall we?

First, keep in mind that Generation Rescue is an organization led by business people and PR people. Even without that, it’s pretty clear that they want to break out into being accepted as a mainstream autism organization. What better way than to say that they are advising the administration on autism issues? As to Jenny McCarthy, is there anyone who doubts that she has been rebranding herself as an autism “activist”?

Still wondering about the self promotion angle? Imagine the talk show circuit next year (and as many years into the future as Jenny McCarthy autism books sell):

“Oh, yes, Oprah, as I was just saying to Barack….”

In addition to Jenny McCarthy potentially cashing in on any meeting, how long before Generation Rescue would be touting themselves as advisers to the administration?

We are talking about the people who grossly inflated the number of people who attended the Green Our Vaccine Rally for effect. I’ve heard estimates of 500 to 1,500 attendees from people who were actually there. GR claims 8,000. If they would do that, they would play a meeting with the Obama team to the hilt.

Keep in mind, these are the people who publish blog posts claiming that HHS Secretary Leavitt stated in public that of course the government knows vaccines cause autism. To back that up, they claimed that someone overheard a conversation outside a church (if I recall correctly). If it were journalism rather than cheap blogging, that would be in the running for irresponsible story of the year. But, instead, it is just an example of the extreme lengths Generation Rescue and their team are willing to go to in order to keep their story alive. What would happen if they were able to talk about closed door meetings with people close to the Obama administration?

Moving on to my second concern: are Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey really appropriate as advisers to the transition team? Leave out the obvious questions of the whether people who propagate bad science and, in so doing, are endangering public health. I don’t have the space here to go into what has already been covered so well by Kev on this blog (and many, many others on other blogs, e.g. AutismVox or I Speak of Dreams ). Let’s just say I’d rather have Mr. Obama listening to the sources Mr. Bush used to formulate the decision to go to war with Iraq than listening to Jenny McCarthy on autism.

For example, remember how Jenny McCarthy’s story about her encounter with Barbara Walters changed dramatically between her book version and her interview version? Can we really have someone talking to advisers to the President of the United States and then “remembering” the exchange in whatever way puts her in the best light?

Consider that hypothetical Oprah show quote I had above. Flesh it out:

“Oh, yes, Oprah, as I was just saying to Barack, vaccines caused an epidemic of autism. I could tell he was listening and understood all too well, but I think that even he is afraid to admit the truth in public”.

As to Jim Carrey…well, remember his major stumble at the Green Our Vaccines rally? When asked what vaccines could be left out of the schedule, he said “tetanus”. Seriously, he had just spoken at a rally, but he hadn’t even done the homework as to what his own side thought. Sorry, he isn’t an expert who should be advising the administration, he is still at the level where Generation Rescue people should be being coaching him on what to say. Somehow I am flashing on the stories that have been leaked about coaching sessions with Sara Palin (Africa is a continent?). No, no, no. This is not a man I would want representing me even if I did subscribe to the Generation Rescue story. He just doesn’t have the depth of knowledge to meet the task.

To conclude, let’s answer one of the questions implicitly raised by Kim Stagliano’s blog post–why are people voting against Ms. Davis’ question? My answer: people aren’t voting against Ms. Davis’ question because it’s Kelli Ann Davis. They aren’t voting against it because it is promoting Generation Rescue or Jenny McCarthy (even though those are valid reasons). They aren’t voting against it because Orac told them too. They are voting against it because what Ms. Davis is proposing is a bad idea.

At least, that was my reason.

[Note: I made minor changes in this post shortly after publishing it]

Two new blogs you need to read this new year

31 Dec

You may recall, Dear Reader, that earlier this year Change.org made a big splash when they advertised for an autism blogger for their increasingly popular social action network website. From blogs all over the autism blogosphere, readers and potential authors were urged to apply, apply, apply.

Of course it goes without saying that this was in itself a political act – I doubt very much if Change.org were quite prepared for the utter deluge of applications that hit them. I have it on good authority that applications ran into the thousands and has been by far the biggest launch Change.org have held.

Age of Autism, with its usual inherent crassness, not only informed their readers of this but also posted the private home phone number of one of the owners of Change.org. As ever, the people on that side of the fence show a startling lack of good social skills for a group that believe genes play a secondary role to vaccines.

Did I apply? Yep. Did I get it? Nope. Am I happy about that? I actually am. I would’ve loved to have carried a neurodiversity message into the heart of the largest growing social action network on the web today but although I made it to the final round, I didn’t make the final hurdle. C’est la vie.

So why am I happy? Because in a burst of what can only be described as genius planning from Change.org they have decided to appoint not one, but _two_ autism bloggers.

So what? I hear you say. Well, so, the first blogger is the truly amazing Kristina Chew. Someone whos blog will be required reading. Someone who is quite firmly on the side of autistic people.

But the absolute best thing is the second blogger. Change.org decided that they would have an autism blogger who was autistic. They settled for Dora Raymaker – an ASAN Director alongside Ari Ne’eman.

This makes Change.org the very first non-autie run political (with a small p) organisation in the US to appoint an autistic person to talk about autism. Think about that. Change.org beat ASA, Autism Speaks etc to appoint an autistic person to express an autistic viewpoint.

I am very excited about these two new autism blogs. I am thrilled that these two people beat off the competition (including me) to take a pro-autistic advocacy message to the heart of this website and this new way of campaigning. Well done Kristina, well done Dora – well done Change.org

Truly, a happy new year for autism advocacy.

NB: Official launch is not until 7th Jan so the blog will be in a state of flux for awhile. Don’t go expecting the finish product. But DO GO and join! Its expected to fully OPERATIONAL however by Jan 2nd.

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.

Why?

24 Dec

You know me, I will tell you what I think and why I think it. But there is a line. A few lines in fact. These lines shouldn’t be crossed. Do not attack children. Do not make threats of violence.

In the now infamous EoH, doing these things is seen as ‘venting’. So here’s some venting from EoH for you. I think, as a conversation, it encapsulates exactly why these people need dragging out from under their rock and it encapsulates perfectly the bull that they are not anti-vaccine. Of course they are. They are (some of them) regulars on the AoA blog and stalwart supporters of Jenny McCarthy.

Joe Harris:
Look at how far acting civil has gotten us, teen agers and young adults growing old with us
and never living on their own. Until we get loud and start standing up for our kids, they
will always continue to win even though they are child poisoning bastards vaccines are fuxxking EVIL from the pit of hell. I for one am tired of being the nice guy while they poison more children Fuxxk them to hell and If someone sends them there before god doe’s I for one will not shed a tear. Because all they are is child poisoning and killing Bastards lower than Jeffery dahmer at least he had an excuse mental illness what theirs Greed, and thinking they are God. I don’t think they can make a safe vaccine that why McCormick of the vaccine comm. stated one time “Its as safe as a vaccine can be” If you think about that statement It can be taken two ways, another words a vaccine can’t be safe. Again may they all burn in hell. If this was a card game they have nothing they are just good at Bluffing on the other hand we the parents and the courageous researchers would have four aces. I will not apoigise for my anger for my severly autistic son is really stressing me right now.

___

Lisa: thanks, I needed that 🙂 Lisa

____

Lia Costalas:
Hello… Joe.. i agree with what you posted… all the politeness is getting us anywhere.. Lia

____

sammysouthie: Unfortunately Joe we have become an apathetic society of sheep. Gone
are the days of public outrage and standing up for what is right.
Look at what happens when people vote….They complain and then put
the same people back in office. Seems the Pharmies have been having a
tea party…..They are throwing thier crap into the waters but the
public isnt.This is what happens when you have too much being civil.

_____

Lia Costalas: That is sad.. where are the SAM ADAMS???? (my personal favorite historical agitator)… Patrick Henry???? IT MUST BE US. to become agitators. I am tired.. of “meeting” with senators… ect… and in one ear.. out the other… when AIDS was first identified… wow… did society run to find cure.. cause.. treatement… that is all you heard… talk shows went all out.. NO CENSORING… now… we have censoring on autism… larry king shows cancelled… ect.. ect… Lia

_____

Amy W. Osborne: isn’t that what is behind the vaccination anyway? to injure people just enough so that they are preoccupied and docile, follow orders, etc etc?

_____

sammysouthie: —Makes one wonder, doesn’t it

____

Roz: The only ones left standing will be us. Of course, WE will be preoccupied with curing our little “canaries in the coalmine.” Thank God for them, huh? Now we all have learned an invaluable lesson.

_____

Laura Cox: Anger is ok. We all feel exactly the same way you do. I push it aside
because, if I don’t, it will cripple me, being so powerless to change
the status quo overnight. I can protect my son from further harm, but
I cannot protect all of my nieces and nephews from this grievous act
called vaccination. However, we all need to let it out now and then
(anger) and this is a good place to blow off steam. Our thoughts are
with you.

Autism Speaks endorsed by the United Nations

22 Dec

Its no secret that whilst there are many supporters in the US of Autism Speaks, there are equally as many who are not that keen in both the US and the rest of the world.

I’m of the ‘not that keen’ persuasion personally. I think their history of attempting to silence that voices of autistic people in the name of ‘protecting their brand’ is pretty awful. I think their film ‘Autism Every Day’ in which they set out to portray autism as an unrelenting nightmare for parents – to the extent that they appeared to cast a sympathetic eye on the murder of autistic kids – was about as bad and anti-advocacy as it can get.

I think the owners of Autism Speaks – Bob and Suzanne Wright – are ignorant of the needs of that which they seek to build – a true community of autistic people.

I think the fact that no autistic people serve on the board of Autism Speaks makes a mockery of their very name and very aims. How can you be called Autism Speaks when in fact, _no_ autistic people can speak under your regime? Their press release says they want to:

…promote the dignity, equal rights, social progress and better standards of life for individuals with autism…

Really? Here’s an idea. If you want to promote dignity, then treat autistic people with dignity – don’t assume to speak _for_ them. If you want to promote equal rights, then _give_ autistic people equal rights. Give them a position of power within your organisation from which to speak. These are the kinds of things which will _contribute_ to a better standard of life.

I find it incredible that Autism Speaks are so cynically paying lip service to any number of ideals that seem to establish them as a valid autism organisation. I have no idea what their end goal is and I have no real idea why they are going about this in such a way.

However, I want to publicly state that I have no real confidence in the Autism Speaks that the Wrights have control of. I respect the AS stance on science by and large but that is just one aspect. I have no respect for the way the Wrights comport themselves as advocates for autism and I feel strongly that all they do is pay lip service to lofty sounding ideals which will help them get what they want. I think the UN have made a bad choice here and want to bring this matter to the attention of the many of us (biomedders and ND’s – this is one issue we largely agree on) that view AS with suspicion.

Age of Autism claim 'hundreds of case reports' of recovered children

16 Dec

A post on the Age of Autism about an interview with the New York Times describes how the interviewee believes that:

….none of our health authorities have any explanation of cause or cure [of autism], we have a whole community of doctors and parents who are actually recovering children. And, without ever treating an autistic child, interviewing a DAN! doctor who treats them, or exploring the several hundred case reports of complete recovery and thousands of stories of improvement…

I was fascinated by this. I have not ever seen one published case report of a child recovered by a DAN! doctor in a respected medial journal. In fact, its a common refrain of mine that these things do not in fact exist at all. And here the author of this post is claiming that there are ‘several hundred case reports of complete recovery’. I thought maybe there’d been an upsurge in PubMed so I went to have a look.

I found one case study that referenced DAN! methods: The recovery of a child with autism spectrum disorder through biomedical interventions. This study (for which no abstract is available) is published in ‘Alternative therapies in health and medicine‘ which claims to be a peer reviewed journal and who’s subject matter includes such medical breakthroughs as Reiki, prayer and reflexology. How this magazine got listed in PubMed I have no idea.

Anyway, suffice it to say that it is totally unsurprising that this study got published in such a publication (Eigenfactor here – compare to New England Journal of Medicine for an idea of how good it is).

So, here’s one very dodgy ‘study’. Where are the other several hundred case reports?

It is also well established that those who use Alt-Med and go on to claim recovery also use mainstream therapies (e.g Jenny McCarthy’s child who was on GFCF, some other stuff….and one-to-one speech therapy). In a 2006 study ‘Internet survey of treatments used by parents of children with autism‘, it was established that:

The mean number of current treatments being used by parents was seven….

I haven’t read the ‘study’ in the Altie journal but the experience with Jenny McCarthy’s child, and plenty of others I have read online indicates that this is true for most parents who claim to be recovering their kids biomedically. As such, you have to give weight to the treatments that are established to have some benefit already. And lets also look at the results of the recent Helt study which reported that a non vaccine related, non-biomed set of kids had somewhere between 3 and 25% recovery. This indicates that sometimes, kids just recover. For reasons we are not really aware of yet.

So I am left puzzled as to why the Age of Autism claim there are several hundreds of case reports. I am puzzled as to how they know it was the biomed intervention which precipitated the alleged recovery and I am puzzled as to how they link _any_ sort of treatment to recovery. All in all, it seems like a set of claims that are not reality based are being made. But maybe I’m wrong – if so, please – anyone from AoA – provide a link to the peer reviewed journal published several hundred of case reports that you claim exist.

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