Saturday, April 6, 2013

Welcome Necromancers - find the Wakefield threads here

I was wondering why we had a necromancer on an old thread linking directly to Andy Wakefield's site, that one callously disregarding anything but Wakefield's (business) interests. I discovered the potential explanation on page 25 of the Guardian magazine:

In his book Callous Disregard, Wakefield claims his findings of autistic enterocolitis have been "independently confirmed in five different countries". He cites five studies, two of which were authored by his friend, collaborator and Autism Team star Arthur Krigsman. One of those studies appeared in Autism Insights, a medical journal on whose board Krigsman sat in 2010. Two other studies were by Italian doctor Federico Balzola. According to the justthevax blog, the first of these was a case report of a single adult autistic patient with an inflamed bowel, and the second a "meeting abstract" that "never saw the light of day as a peer-reviewed study". The last one, a study by Dr Lenny Gonzalez, while not reporting finding a distinct "autistic enterocolitis", concludes that "autistic children have a high incidence of gastrointestinal disease". (my bold)
Ok, I admit, I am vain, and that section did generate a squee. The whole article is worth reading though, very well researched by Alex Hannaford, who is not shy to call Wakefield's operation what it is "Autism Inc.", a money generating machine. Hannaford tried to proffer Wakefield's (and Polly Tommey's) comments, but they only sent their lawyers' roboresponse (Wakefield did not fabricate data, there is such a thing as autistic enterocolitis, yada yada). Instead, he interviewed (among others) the lovely Autismum Martine O'Callaghan, founder of the cwtch-network, whose autistic son Cledwyn is just as lush as Michael Fitzpatrick's son James, and Ari Ne'eman, founder of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. Not surprisingly, they emphasise the need to improve quality of life of autistic children and adults, by appropriate services (for example schools). Excellent article - read it.

Now for those who'd like to insist that really, Wakefield's works have been independently verified, please read my previous two blog posts:

"Independent" the Wakefield way (really something for the fail blog)

and

Still no independent confirmation of Wakefield's claims 

and feel free to add research you think we may have missed to discuss. Can I ask though that instead of just dropping a link into the comments, or basic copypasta from the usual anti-vaccine conspiracy sites, you leave one article at a time, with a proper, i.e. retrievable, citation and a blurb in your own words (much as we did in those blog posts) stating what was done in those papers and how this supports the "vaccines lead to gut damage leads to autism" notion? Cheers.


3 comments:

  1. And on the comment section of that article there is a brain dead regurgitation of the stupid list of studies, and it includes "4.Journal of Neuroimmunology 2005".

    Hilarious.

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  2. Spam Alert Above...

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