Deadline for the Australian Vaccine Network (AVN)

The inappropriately named "Australian Vaccine Network" or AVN for short was ordered by the NSW Fair Trading Commission to change its name to reflect its staunch anti-vaccine position rather than continue to mislead parents by 21 March 2013.

The future of the Australian Vaccination Network is in doubt, following the government rejection of five suggested new names for the group because they don't reflect its anti-vaccination stance.

The AVN has until March 21 to change its name or it faces deregistration, after NSW Fair Trading Minister Anthony Roberts issued a formal order that its name misleads the public.

The organisation does not present a balanced case for vaccination and has no medical evidence to back its anti-vaccination stance, he says.

The current AVN president, Greg Beattie proffered equally misleading name change suggestions that were rejected.

AVN president Greg Beattie told News Limited it was vital the words Australia and Vaccination remained in the group's name because they defined what the organisation was about.

He said the group had sent a letter to the Fair Trading Department to ask whether they would accept one of five suggested name changes.
These include Australian Vaccination Information Network and Australian Vaccination Choice.

"We can't just change our name under the Association's Incorporation Act, we must go through a process of consulting with our members and we need a 75 per cent majority vote," Mr Beattie said.

Mr. Beattie is able to keep "Australia" and "Vaccination" in their name and in fact can just add an "A" to the acronym to make it reflect what it really is, "Australian Anti-Vaccination Network".  This would be beneficial to them as typing in "AVN" will fetch you a porn site.

The AVN (the anti-vaxx one) has filed an appeal with the Administrative Decisions Tribunal and granted a stay until a hearing which has been set in June.

The AVN is fighting a December ruling by Fair Trading that it must change its name, and the warning was put in place on the condition that the group will not have to change its name until its challenge is heard in June.

However a condition has been set that the AVN must place a prominent warning on their website, blog and Facebook page by 26 March 2013 that directs consumers to the current order and misleading name.

Tribunal president, Judge O'Connor, responded to a bid by the AVN to stay proceedings on Friday by placing a number of conditions on the organisation.
A prominent consumer warning must be published on its websites and Facebook page by March 26.

It will state: "NSW Fair Trading has directed the AVN to change its name because it regards the name to be misleading.

"The AVN is challenging this direction and the challenge is currently before the NSW Administrative Decisions Tribunal."

We'll see what the AVN will do and keep you posted.

Update: Since it is 26 March 2013 in New South Wales, Australia, the AVN website and Facebook pages have been updated with the requisite warning.  Let's hope it serves to caution unsuspecting parents looking for factual vaccine information and irritate the AVN on a daily basis.

Don't panic at CDC's new autism numbers

The CDC has released the new autism numbers (Reuters, full report pdf) and the new prevalence is 1 in 50, or as Seth Mnookin tweeted earlier "1 child per school bus". My first thought, just like Matt Carey's over at LBRB, was that the removal of thimerosal seems not to have stopped the "autism epidemic". This seems to have escaped Dr "vested interest" Bob who is asking why nobody (but him, of course) is alarmed (especially not the CDC).

Meanwhile, the fabulous Emily Willingham, PhD explains the reasons behind the apparent increase. Read her post. Understand. Don't panic. As Emily says:

...if you look at the numbers and the report itself, you’ll see that overall, the numbers of people born with autism aren’t necessarily increasing dramatically. It’s just that we’re getting better and better at counting them. The next step is getting better at accepting autistic people, seeing their potential, and ensuring the supports and resources they need to fulfill that potential.

^ That.

COVRAC Guest blog: Influenza vaccination during pregnancy

We are very grateful to COVRAC, the author of today's guest post, who can be found over at his Facebook page "Chillin' Out, Vaxin', Relaxin' All Cool.

Seasonal influenza disease is dangerous to both a pregnant mother and the fetus. This is generally not in dispute, even by the most staunch antivaxers. But get about three Facebook comments into a discussion over flu shots for pregnant women (perhaps one that goes something like this, and invariably your self-proclaimed educated opponent with tell you in no uncertain terms that influenza vaccine has never been studied in pregnancy.

Well, then. Let's go over the numerous studies of influenza vaccines in pregnant women that have, it is claimed, never been done.

These studies have allegedly never been done on seasonal influenza vaccine in pregnant women. If they had been done, they would clearly demonstrate it to be safe.
http://www.ajog.org/article/S0002-9378(04)02102-7/abstract
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20715555

These were apparently never done on the H1N1 vaccine. It would also have been clearly demonstrated to be safe (if they had been done).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20832495
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21596080
http://idsa.confex.com/idsa/2010/webprogram/Paper3534.html
http://www.ajog.org/article/S0002-9378(11)00775-7/abstract

This study which obviously was never done showed far less premature births in mothers vaccinated during pregnancy.
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1000441;jsessionid=8B7B450C63F7196BE157DB7629B57432.ambra02

This other totally undone study looked specifically at miscarriages in women vaccinated in the first trimester, and did not find an increased risk.
http://idsa.confex.com/idsa/2011/webprogram/Paper30513.html

This one, which might look like a study showing decreased fetal deaths in the H1N1-vaccinated, is really just a bunch of fancy words meaning "404 page not found."
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1207210

This study in the Canadia Medical Association Journal found that pregnancies during influenza season resulted in higher birth weight and less premature birth if the mother was vaccinated against influenza. But you can sooo tell it is CG and not real.
http://www.cmaj.ca/content/early/2012/02/21/cmaj.110754

These figments of your imagination show how influenza vaccination of pregnant mothers protects newborns from influenza.
http://archpedi.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/short/archpediatrics.2010.192
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21058908
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0708630

And finally, this indigestion-induced hallucination here from the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology is a list of studies on the safety of influenza vaccine dating back to 1964. As Scrooge would say, "You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato."
http://www.influenza.org.nz/site_resources/Influenza/Influenza%202010/Safety_of_influenza_vaccination_during_pregnancy.pdf#page=2

Back to reality: These studies have, in fact, been done. An antivaxer will fall back to quoting a vaccine package insert, but it's evident that such a document does not reflect the entirety of the world's research on a given vaccine. Influenza vaccination in pregnancy has been studied in abundance. A flu shot is safe during pregnancy (without a known medical contraindication), does not cause miscarriage, and protects the health of pregnant women and their babies.

Sherri Tenpenny is not a scientific researcher and she does not know how to set up a study

 A couple of days ago, this meme started making the rounds through the internet:

Strange - I have a friend who had the same experience with measles and pertussis (I think it was even third grade that he missed), but he is pro-vaccine as a result. Tenpenny on the other hand is convinced that if a study looked at the "tens of thousands" of unvaccinated children and compared, say, days missed from school, it would find that unvaccinated children miss less school, and that would be a sign that "the unvaccinated kis are healthier" (1:49). Then again, she did miss third grade, because she "was sick, and it was good" (1:55). Or maybe she just is "not a scientific researcher" and does "not know how to set all these things up" (2:01). Listen for yourself:

Bordetella Pertussis Mutations may Reduce Vaccine Effectiveness

A recent report by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has discovered that mutations in a particular gene may be partially responsible for the increase in B. pertussis or whooping cough cases. CIDRAP reports that B. pertussis isolates in some children in the U.S. have been tested and found to have gene mutations in the coding region for Pertactin.

In the US study, researchers looked at pertactin genes from 12 isolates of B pertussis from children hospitalized in Philadelphia in 2011 and 2012. Most of the patients were younger than 2 years old, but the group also included a 9-year-old and 14-year-old.

They analyzed the pertactin genes from the specimens and amplified and sequenced the coding region. They determined the pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) patterns and detected pertactin using Western blotting with antiserum and a strain from the World Health Organization (WHO) as the pertactin-positive reference.

Eleven of the 12 pertussis strains they tested were negative for pertactin. The pertactin allele in all isolates was pm2, but the mutations were different than pertactin-negative pm2 isolates from France, according to the report. (Variants in Japan and Finland had insertion sequences in the pm1 allele.)

Pertactin is a virulence factor for B. pertussis which is an adaptation of the organism that enables it to colonise its host.  Pertactin is an adhesin that promotes adhesion of B. pertussis bacteria to the tracheal epithelium of humans.  Pertactin (Prn) is one of the antigens in the acellular vaccine along with inactivated pertussis toxin (PT), filamentous hemagglutinin (FHA) and fimbriae types 2 and 3 (Fim).  The U.S. group, as reported in NEJM, found both insertions and stop codons that prevented the B. pertussis bacterium from expressing pertactin although the virulence of the pertactin negative strains was the same as pertactin positive strains.

Japan and France have also found pertactin negative strains but with different insertions and deletions in a different allele than what has been found in the U.S. although the net result is the same. The current theory is that these mutations have occurred through selective adaptations against the acellular vaccines.  The pertactin negative strains may not be as virulent as the pertactin positive strains although more research would be necessary to confirm this.

The only significant difference (p = 0.29) was that the time between the beginning of the cough and hospitalization was longer for infants infected with a PRN– isolate; this finding might reflect less severe disease in this group.

Note: I believe that the reported p-value of 0.29 is a typo and perhaps should have been 0.029.

The vaccines still remain effective for attenuating disease severity even with fewer than the age-appropriate dosing schedule of three by six months old.

Vaccination was associated with less severe clinical symptoms (Table 2): the proportion of hospitalizations in intensive care units was significantly lower in the vaccinated group (p = 0.001). Clinical symptoms, such as apnea, syncope, cyanosis, and deterioration of general condition, were also less frequent in the vaccinated group (Table 2). This confirms previous findings (12) indicating that infants who receive 1 or 2 doses of pertussis vaccine are protected to some extent.

Pertussis vaccination introduced in the U.S. in the 1940s (as a whole-cell vaccine) and around the world at various times after that have undoubtedly saved millions of lives.  This finding does not negate the necessity of infants receiving the full series and older children and adults remaining current on boosters in order to prevent widespread morbidity and mortality.  What these findings do is highlight the importance of developing more effective pertussis vaccines while maintaining a high safety profile.

Jake Crosby Throws Fellow Anti-Vaxxers Under the Bus

Anyone following anti-vaccine groups like Age of Autism (AoA), Generation Rescue and SafeMinds (they are really comprised of the same group of core members who have set up multiple fronts in order to appear more numerous than they actually are) will know Jake Crosby, wonder boy "cub reporter" for AoA.

Last November (2012) there was a congressional hearing lead up by California Republican representative Darrell Issa.  Autism parent Brian Hooker revealed a series of meetings he had with rep. Issa and other congress critters.  Mr. Hooker was accompanied by Andrew Wakefield who wined and dined members of the oversight committee that would ultimately hear testimonies from anti-vaccine groups on the topic of autism.  The testimonies and speakers at this hearing has made Jake Crosby very angry and has posted his diatribe on none other than the Bolen Report.

The Cliff Notes version is that Jake has decided to slam his comrades-in-arms, particularly SafeMinds, because they chose to try and appear sane and rational (as sane and rational as one can be given that they believe vaccines cause autism) in front of the congressional committee by refusing to let Jake present his contorted conspiracy theories and instead letting Mark Blaxill speak and trimming Brian Hooker's screed down.  Jake's little hissy fit is a thing of beauty to read as it illustrates the mindset of anti-vaxxers and their slimy tactics to weasel their way onto a platform of legitimacy.

ETA: Since Liz Ditz was so kind to take screen shots of Jake's exposition, I'm including the link to her page here.   Jake recently "spoke" at the IACC public comment session (for a limited value of "spoke" since he launched into a predictably atrocious tirade) so to see him in action, the video is available here (138 minute mark).

Another Family has Changed their Opinion About Vaccination

unfortunately, it took three of them coming down with measles for mum and dad to change their minds: Karl Daw and his 3 and 4 year olds sons were so sick that they had to be admitted to the hospital, the 6 month old baby has been given a measles vaccine now.

Go get your MMRs - there is no reasonable alternative.