BBC News: Measles in the UK

IVAN3MAN sent me this link about measles in the UK.  The thing to note here is that the UK is not some third world country here, but one of the more modern nations on earth.  Yet people are needlessly suffering due to the lies of one person.  Some basic facts for you before I present the article (emphasis mine):

Measles cases in Europe

Jan-April 2011

• France - 7321*
• Spain - 657
• Switzerland - 390
• UK - 345
• Germany - 276*

*Jan-March figure / Source: EUvac

Measles Q&A

• How safe is it to take children to mainland Europe who have had two doses of the MMR vaccine?

It gives 99% protection against the measles virus.

• What if they have had only one dose of MMR?

One dose is better than none, but two doses is better than one. If you are concerned about travelling to an outbreak area you can bring forward the second MMR dose. Speak to your GP about it.

• What if my children are not vaccinated at all?

The advice is to go to your GP and arrange for them to be immunised as soon as possible before you travel. Measles is a dangerous viral illness which can be fatal.
BBC Health - Measle

MEASLES FACTS

• It is a highly infectious viral illness
• It causes a fever, coughing and distinctive red-brown spots on the skin
• Measles is contracted by breathing in tiny droplets created when an infected person coughs or sneezes
• Possible complications include pneumonia, ear and eye infections and croup
• Serious complications include inflammation of the brain (encephalitis), which can be fatal
• Measles in pregnancy can cause miscarriage, premature labour or a baby with low birth weight
• The most effective way of preventing measles is the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine
• There is no link between the MMR vaccine and autism

Measles outbreak prompts plea to vaccinate children

By Philippa Roxby Health reporter, BBC News

Parents in England and Wales are being urged to have their children vaccinated after a tenfold rise in measles cases in the first four months of the year.

The Health Protection Agency reported 334 cases compared with 33 in the similar period last year.
The outbreak is thought to be linked to an epidemic in France, where 7,000 cases have been reported since January - more than in the whole of 2010.

The HPA says it is "crucial" that those at risk are fully immunised.

It says the latest cases are mainly among unvaccinated people under 25 years old and are centred on "small clusters in universities, schools or families or associated with travel abroad".

Worst-hit are London and the South East, with 104 and 102 confirmed cases respectively in the first quarter of this year.

Recently the Health Protection Agency sent out letters to some primary schools and further education colleges in London warning of the risks of taking children who are not fully immunised to mainland Europe.

'Potentially dangerous'

Dr Mary Ramsay, head of immunisation at the Health Protection Agency, warned parents and young adults of the importance of immunisation.

"Although MMR coverage has improved over the last few years, we cannot stress enough that measles is serious and in some cases it can be fatal.

 CLICK HERE TO READ REST OF STORY.

Science Daily: Errors in Protein Structure Sparked Evolution of Biological Complexity

A common refrain from theists about evolution and why they don't believe it is because they can't accept that humans are the end product of "chance" (i.e. following just laws of biology, physics, chemistry, etc. without any guidance).  The idea that we're all some sort of cosmic mistake seems to insult their sense of worth or importance.  So I read this article with a certain sense of amusement.

Errors in Protein Structure Sparked Evolution of Biological Complexity

ScienceDaily (May 21, 2011) — Over four billion years of evolution, plants and animals grew far more complex than their single-celled ancestors. But a new comparison of proteins shared across species finds that complex organisms, including humans, have accumulated structural weaknesses that may have actually launched the long journey from microbe to man.

The study, published in Nature, suggests that the random introduction of errors into proteins, rather than traditional natural selection, may have boosted the evolution of biological complexity. Flaws in the "packing" of proteins that make them more unstable in water could have promoted protein interactions and intracellular teamwork, expanding the possibilities of life.

"Everybody wants to say that evolution is equivalent to natural selection and that things that are sophisticated and complex have been absolutely selected for," said study co-author Ariel Fernández, PhD, a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago and senior researcher at the Mathematics Institute of Argentina (IAM) in Buenos Aires. "What we are claiming here is that inefficient selection creates a niche or an opportunity to evolve complexity."

"This is a novel bridge between protein chemistry and evolutionary biology," said co-author Michael Lynch, PhD, professor of biology at Indiana University. "I hope that it causes us to pause and think about how evolution operates in new ways that we haven't thought about before."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE.

Just the Vax: Still no independent confirmation of Wakefield's claims

Sometimes people will not accept being wrong.  No matter how often they are told they are wrong, or how poorly they came up with their information.  It's well known that Wakefield not only lied and fabricated his data, but he also had a serious conflict of interest.  Yet people insist on saying that he was somehow right.  So a lot of people are spending a great deal of effort to continue to prove him wrong.  And a lot of other misguided folks think he was somehow right despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary...

Still no independent confirmation of Wakefield's claims

One of the things that anti-vaccines groups desperately want to have, is the scientific support for their claims. A lot of parents know that rigorous studies, peer reviewed, published in scientific journals and indexed on Pubmed are the standard in discussions about medical care. Therefore, the anti-vaccine brigade are trying to maintain that, really, countless scientific studies across the globe have shown that vaccines are bad for you.

The anti-vaccine, pro-any-conspiracy theory website Whale.to (the citation of which automatically invokes Skopie's Law), provides a neat shopping list that staunch supporters of the long debunked “MMR causes inflammation of the gut which somehow causes autism and Andrew Wakefield is really a hero” notion can use to spam evidence based discussions, as recently seen on the Shot of Prevention blog where Marsha McClelland of the “We the People United for Vaccine Education Misinformation” Yahoo group copied and pasted in support for Andrew Wakefield.

CLICK HERE FOR A LIST OF PAPERS THAT SHOW WAKEFIELD WAS AND IS STILL WRONG.

Don't Panic!

Natural News encourages you to Panic!

When you are more paranoid than this android then you need to take it down a notch.

No seriously, do not panic. These guys are quacks and tools who are spreading a lunatic mistrust in medicine solely to encourage the sale of their own snake oil. 

Just the Vax: Infant Mortality and Vaccines

Sadly, most people can't tell the difference between good science, and bad science.  So when a study shows up that seems to support an idea that has been debunked already, alarm bells should go off.  Catherina at Just the Vax has found one such article and tears it apart.

Sadly, the debunking of this study will not travel anywhere near as fast as the lies this article spreads.  This sort of irresponsible reporting will further lead to many preventable deaths by people who are not armed with a good background in science.  After all, this paper could be used to support the Stork Theory of human reproduction after all!

Infant mortality and vaccines

Oh goodness, here I wanted to go to bed early and then I stumbled over this latest "peer reviewed" paper in a journal "indexed by the National Library of Medicine" (see the anti-vaccine faction gloating at those fantastic quality indicators) and "proving" with an correlation co-efficient of 0.992 and a p of 0.0009 (so "sciencey") that:

Nations requiring the most vaccines tend to have the worst infant mortality rates

Authors of this little gem, in the journal Human & Experimental Toxicology, with the impressive impact factor of 1.307 and a proud ranking of 58th of 77 in the area of Toxicology (yes, that would put them into the bottom quarter) are Think Twice's own Neil Z. Miller and Medical Veritas' Gary S. Goldman. I wonder why Miller and Goldman didn't publish their paper in Medical Veritas (here is the link to the journal, please don't go blind), seeing that item 7 in their mission is: "Create a movement to address the adverse vaccine reactions and vaccine-related injuries afflicting children and adults". I guess that is because parents have clued in that "peer review" and being indexed on PubMed is a quality measure (although very obviously no guarantee for quality).

In any case - Miller and Goldman took a list of countries and looked at the number of vaccines they schedule for infants and they also looked at infant mortality. And then they correlated one with the other, a fail safe way to find causal relationships: Storks deliver babies p=0.008.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE.

Vaccine Times: South Korean Autism Study

Quite often people will use the argument that autism rates have increased dramatically as a result of vaccines.  The proposed mechanism for this increase has been bandied about, and the anti-vax pro-disease contingent can't get their act together on this.  The insistence that Thimerosal was supposed to be the cause, yet rates have continued to climb, even though vaccines have been free of Thimerosal for a decade is of no matter (or the really embarrassing fact that MMR vaccines never contained Thimerosal to start with!).  So this study on autism itself was interesting.

South Korean Autism Study: did autism rates triple overnight?

One of the points that anti-vaccine proponents keep bringing up is how autism prevalence has been going up over the past few decades. They notice how autism diagnoses have gone up and correlate that with an expanded vaccine schedule, then finally make the leap to imply it was the vaccines that caused autism. When we say that an expanded definition and expanded surveillance is what has in big part resulted in the increase, they laugh it off. That is not possible, they say; the increase must be a real increase of actual cases.

Recently, a new study came out of South Korea. It was a 5 year study that looked at all children in a South Korean community, not just high risk kids, or those that went to the doctor. They found an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) prevalence rate of 2.6%. By comparison the current rate is estimated to be 1/110 or 0.9%. By looking at all children, vs. just those in the high risk groups, as has been the practice generally, the prevalence rate almost tripled.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE POST.

Measels Outbreak in the USA

So, is it only third world countries that have outbreaks of diseases that are easy to prevent?  Apparently not!  Or is the United States getting dragged into the third world status by abject denial of reality and science?  Maybe that is really what the anti-vaxers want?

Anyway, here is a news report from CBS News on the measles outbreak in the US.  It's a public health shame/crime that this is happening.

Vaccine Times: Playing with excel data

Recently I reposted the What do anti-vaxers want article from Vaccine Times.  Well, he has a follow up on that.  I think this plays well into the famous Mark Twain quote about "Lies, damn lies, and statistics" when dealing with data.  That is not to say that data is inherently wrong.  It's more about how people will torture it to come up with a preconceived notion as opposed to letting that actual data lead you to a discovery about the behaviour of reality.  I think Leart does a great job on this post.

Vaccines and auto deaths: a.k.a I can play with Excel too

My recent post, What do the anti-vaxers want, generated a lot of commentary from the anti-vax crowd, much more that I had expected to be honest. I do not intend to go over that commentary here. What I intend to do is to analyse a study that was linked to by one of the anti-vax enthusiasts. This study has been making the rounds lately in the anti-vax crowd (hello Mike “The Health Danger” Adams) because it purports to show a relationship between vaccine doses received and Infant Mortality Rates (IMR). The study in question has been published here, and David Gorski has done a thorough review of it over at Science-Based Medicine blog. I will not repeat what he wrote.

What I intend to do here is to show how easily numbers can be manipulated to show a trend which can then be touted as proof of a relationship. We always say that correlation does not equal causation, yet that is hard for some people to grasp without an example. This study provided the perfect example to illustrate the concept. So without further ado, let us show why this study does not really show anything in connection with vaccines.

What does the study say?

You can read the full thing yourself, but in a nutshell the authors looked at IMR in the U.S. and noticed that for the year 2009 it ranked 34th. They then took the IMRs for the other 33 countries that did better than the U.S. Then they counted the vaccine doses recommended for each country (they used a funny way of counting DTaP as 3 doses each time, but we’ll let that slide for the sake of our exercise). Then they plotted, in a graph, the number of vaccine doses vs. the IMR rate for each country. The results were SHOCKING:

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL POST AND SEE THE GRAPHS!

Vaccine Times: Vaccine Preventable Suffering in Chad

Chad is a country that is ravaged by many problems.  Some are just simply beyond our control.  However, vaccines are one thing that we can do something about.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is doing great work in this area, but we need more.

Vaccine-preventable diseases wreaking havoc in Chad

Tragic news are coming out of Chad; vaccine-preventable diseases are taking many lives and causing immense pain and suffering. Since the beginning of the year outbreaks of meningitis, measles, polio and cholera have been recorded. Here’s a recap of the various outbreaks that have befallen the people of Chad.

Meningitis
Since the beginning of the year, 4,960 meningitis cases have been reported, and  227 people have died. Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) is lending a helping hand and has set up temporary centers to take care of the meningitis patients. MSF has been distributing antibiotic drugs to local health centers so that people can easily access medication, and has launched a vaccination campaign to halt the outbreak. By April 6, 2011, over 607,000 people had already been vaccinated; another 103,000 people to be reached before the end of last month. I have been unable to find more current information on the situation.

Measles
A measles outbreak has also afflicted the people of Chad. As April 24, 2011, a total of 3,438 cases of measles have been reported out of which 30 have died. 23 districts out of the country’s 61 districts had reported measles cases and out of these, 16 districts were experiencing an epidemic of the disease.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE.

15 answers for creationists

In the past few days there has been a new drive by Creation Ministries International in conjunction with Traditional Values Coalition called “Question Evolution” with the focus of restarting the whole Creationist vs. Evolution debate.

15 Questions for Evolutionists

The idea is that recent religious conservatism has increased the chance that creationists can achieve something lasting to spread their superstition in our schools. To help with this they have constructed a leaflet with 15 questions meant to stump the “evolutionist”.

Evolution Does Not Work This Way! Goodnight!!!

  

Before we start, an important thing to remember is that there is no such thing as an evolutionist. There are scientists who believe in the scientific approach who understand evolution takes place and various mechanisms for it. The opposition are not scientists but people who are attempting to disguise religion under the guise of science to push their faith. They do not want to debate science, but want to squeeze their faith into the biology class rooms where it can be taught as a scientific fact.