sadly - another: Aliana has SSPE

While social media are a-buzz with stories of a CDC whistleblower - let's remind ourselves why everyone should vaccinate their children (and themselves).

Max, Micha and Natalie have already died. Angelina, who turned 9 years last week, is still fighting. We know their names, because the measles vaccine has significantly reduced the incidence of SSPE, the fatal complication, that shrinks a child's brain, many years after infection.
Now, another girl has been diagnosed - learn her name - celebrate her life - vaccinate your kids, so not one more child has to join the exclusive club:

Aliana was born in early 2010 - a "good measles year" in Germany, with "only" 780 cases. Aliana was one of them - she fell ill as a 6 months old infant, it is not clear who infected her. Then she recovered, at least so it appeared. Aliana grew, she was an open, friendly girl. She quickly found friends, because everyone liked to play with her. In retrospect, she maybe fell more than her peers, but then again, she was still little. But suddenly, Aliana started to forget everything, she couldn't speak as well as she used to. Then, motor problems started, she stumbled, and fell. Unfortunately, the original diagnosis of epilepsy was wrong and 4 weeks ago, Aliana was diagnosed with SSPE. Her grandmother describes the indescribable [my translation from the German]:

I am the granny of a girl who loved life, played games, was friendly to all, and so kind. When I sang songs with her, she immediately knew the lyrics by heart. I could tell you so much more about this little girl, but it breaks my heart how slowly, everything gets lost.

This has to stop! Every case of SSPE, a fate like Aliana's and her family's heartache can be avoided. Check your and your children's vaccination records. Everyone should get/have gotten 2x MMR to protect themselves and babies like Aliana from measles.

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.

Buy this Book Before Big Bad Pharma has it Pulled off the market

Here's Ben Goldacre holding the first copy of his new book "Bad Pharma" (I will hold mine tonight, squee):

Those of you who have followed the story of "Bad Science" will know that the first edition was missing a chapter, because the dangerous quack discussed in that story was suing Dr. Goldacre. The chapter appeared online after the law suit and was added to the second edition of the book.

Now Ben might be facetious when he asks his readers to buy the book before it gets pulled, but it is not an unrealistic worry given his previous experience and industry practise. What can you expect? Luckily, Ben Goldacre generously shares the whole Introduction here:

So to be clear, this whole book is about meticulously defending every assertion in the paragraph that follows.

Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies doesn’t like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug’s true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in its life, and even then they don’t give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion. In their forty years of practice after leaving medical school, doctors hear about what works through ad hoc oral traditions, from sales reps, colleagues or journals. But those colleagues can be in the pay of drug companies – often undisclosed – and the journals are too. And so are the patient groups. And finally, academic papers, which everyone thinks of as objective, are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the companies, without disclosure. Sometimes whole academic journals are even owned outright by one drug company. Aside from all this, for several of the most important and enduring problems in medicine, we have no idea what the best treatment is, because it’s not in anyone’s financial interest to conduct any trials at all. These are ongoing problems, and although people have claimed to fix many of them, for the most part, they have failed; so all these problems persist, but worse than ever, because now people can pretend that everything is fine after all.

In short - the book that everyone should read and that could be the beginning of something amazingly beautiful: evidence-based medicine.

For those of you in the US - ask a European friend to send you the book or bridge the time until January 2013 with reading Ben's excellent blog.

NOTE: I linked to Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com up there, but if you have a chance, support your local book store and buy it there.

Edited to add: David Colquhoun, the excellent pharmacologist and skeptic has weighed in. I have changed the book link to a store which pays taxes in the UK following his example.

Chalkboard is the New Comic Sans

It seems that Chalkboard is replacing Comic sans as the font of choice for woo. This image is popping up on all sorts of Facebook pages:

Not once? Nope, every time a new vaccine is licensed, it is tested against the current schedule (and the old vaccine against the same disease, if there was one). We had previously addressed this anti-vaccine lie - here is the list, by no means exhaustive, as a reminder:

Hexavac with Hepatitis A

Hexavalent vaccine with Rotateq

DTaP with Hib

PCV-13 with all infant vaccines

MMR and Varicella

PCV-7 with MMR, Hib and Varicella

Pediarix with Hib and Infanrix-hexa

New Hib with all infant vaccines

MMR with Varicella

MMR-V with Hib-HepB

MMR-V with all infant vaccines

Meningococcal-C with Hep B and Pentacel

Pentacel with PCV-7

Lies do not become "truer" when you use chalkboard - take the course if you don't believe us.

ETA: ohh look, the Skeptical Raptor has expanded on the links, so you don't have to click on every one of them.

The MASTERPLAN - The Hidden Agenda for Global Scientific Dictatorship

Oh * my * word - I just stumbled across the below (hat tip to Omri)



Scientific World Domination is looming, and the only people to open our eyes and prevent the worst (e.g. getting sprayed with toxins by Chemtrails, or our children getting poisoned by fluoridated drinking water) are the 9/11 Truthers. They advertise

Dr. Andrew Wakefield has pioneered research into the possible links between the MMR vaccine and autism and has been victimised ruthlessly by his own profession, including being struck off by the General Medical Council in the UK for daring to speak out, despite other researchers, both before and after his evidence was published, now showing the same links between the MMR vaccine and autism. (my bold)

The bold is, of course, as bold as it is wrong.

I am not sure whether I should laugh or cry - the decline of Andrew Wakefield into this scene, down (I guess) from the Anti-Vaccine movement, deeper into the anti-science realm of conspiracy theorists is both consequential and kind of sad.

Off to stroke my cat...

Vaccines dumped from new Ask Dr Sears website?

I just caught a glimpse of the new Ask Dr. Sears Website. It was terrible slow loading when I first saw it, but the the landing page was all re-structured and modern in nice greens and oranges (I like that, very purdy).



Since we have been posting on the vaccine discussion board (justthevax passim), I thought I should take a stroll through the new page and have a look what the vaccine area looks like now. Well, this morning, there was none. While the "all categories" page did not load all too well, both on the left category bar



and on the middle all categories bar, there were no vaccines.



but they certainly had been there on the old page.



UPDATED TO ADD - indeed, no "Vaccines Area" - the search for "vaccines" only leads to Dr. Bob, not to further info (bites tongue):

closeup

I wonder whether this is going to be amended, or, whether in a year of pertussis and measles outbreaks that have cost 10 infants in the Sears' home state of California their lives, and have put many kids in hospital, the Sears have decided to drop this potentially contentious part of their web presence.

In any case - since the Sears' vaccine book discussion board has now disappeared, I hope you do have a good doctor and I can recommend our forum and, if you want a bit of a mixed audience, also the Immunization Discussion forum on Babycenter - see you there!