Labour Has A Good Idea
Jon Cruddas is reported as saying in several papers, like here in the Mail, that parents will lose benefits if their children don’t have the MMR vaccination.
I’m all for this, as I know a few people, who were born before vaccination was possible, who after measles have developed problems.
It’ll also help to generate a lot of jobs in the PR and legal areas, as the legislation is fought. So it could be very good for the economy!
David Aaronovitch Blames Journalists Over MMR
In a hard hitting opinion in The Times today, he effectively blames journalists for stoking up the MMR fiasco. Here’s the final paragraph.
The MMR scare was the fault of journalists of all stripes. With honourable exceptions, notably Brian Deer, hacks combined to mislead the public, and now those same journalists want to deny responsibility for it. They shouldn’t be allowed to. Forget phone hacking and paparazzi, MMR is the Hillsborough of my profession.
We need quality journalism in the UK, not scare and celebrity stories that sell papers to the gullible.
The Plight Of The Bees
It would appear that bees are not doing well. Over the years, I’ve known a few people who kept bees and we even had a Primary School teacher called Adams, who was a bee enthusiast and sometime keeper. My physio at the Angel, was even given a jar of Stamford Hill honey from an Orthodox Jewish client. Read why honey is kosher here.
I like my honey and I would miss it, if it disappeared, so I’m watching the arguments on whether neonicotinoids should be banned. Many of the arguments are outlined is this article from the BBC in Scotland, about whether if a ban is brought in, Scotland should delay implementation.
It is the classic argument, where commercial interests, which in this case are farmers and pesticide manufacturers are arguing against the emotions of various lobby groups.
We seem to be getting a lot of arguments like this these days, with fracking, nuclear power, waste incinerators and HS2 producing similar stands-off.
With the bees and neonicotinoids, there is a solution and that is research, performed scientifically over a period of years. But I suspect both sides of the argument, would probably not want to wait for any conclusions and then if it was against their views, they wouldn’t accept it anyway.
Janice Turner in the Times last week, published an article entitled, Hectoring won’t persuade the MMR-deniers. The title alone says it all, about those who are against MMR.
So this argument about bees and neonicotinoids, will buzz on for years.
An Odd Thing With The MMR Vaccine
If I type “MMR Hackney” into Google, I get a lot of sensible advice. Not that I need it, as I’ve had measles.
But if I type “MMR Suffolk” into Google, I get people trying to sell me the single vaccines. But then there has been snake oil salesmen, since before Biblical times!
I think this is disgraceful, as all the sensible advice I’ve had from doctors, nurses and pharmacists say that the MMR is best. And at least a few of those have no axe to grind!
My view is that after having measles and chickenpox together at twenty eight, you should get yourself and any children in your care, the best protection you can. At least, I was only left with two weeks of painful memories.
Andrew Wakefield And The Swansea Measles Outbreak
The Guardian has a well-written piece on the measles outbreak in South Wales. Here’s the introduction.
The Department of Health has dismissed claims by a former doctor who started a global scare about the MMR vaccine that officials were responsible for the outbreak of measles in south Wales.
C and I immunised all our children and we never regretted it.
As someone, who had measles as an adult, i wouldn’t want that to be inflicted on anybody. I was also lucky in that I didn’t get any complications.
My thoughts now are that I hope the epidemic subsides and no-one suffers from catching measles. I would suggest to Wakefield, that he shuts up, as otherwise, I think he might find himself in bigger trouble.
Dr. Rosemary Leonard is Horrified
The very sensible BBC Breakfast doctor is horrified. And rightly so!
So what is she horrified about. A BBC Scotland report has shown that people are turning to homeopathy instead of conventional vaccinations, such as MMR.
These cranks should be stopped as the only way homeopathy can work is by a placebo affect. It has no scientific basis whatsoever.
As someone who has suffered the death of his wife and child in recent years, I would not recommend suffering bereavement to anybody. But some of these stupid parents will find out the pain if they persist in using homeopathy, on their children. You could argue it’s child abuse!
Fraud in Medical Research
Whilst thinking about homeopathy in the last post, the story of Andrew Wakefield was also in the news. If you type “Andrew Wakefield fraud” into Google, you get this story from Science-Based Medicine. Here is the first paragraph.
Pity poor Andrew Wakefield.
Actually, on second thought, Wakefield deserves no pity at all. After all, he is the man who almost single-handedly launched the scare over the MMR vaccine in Britain when he published his infamous Lancet paper in 1998 in which he claimed to have linked the MMR vaccine to regressive autism and inflammation of the colon, a study that was followed up four years later with a paper that claimed to have found the strain of attenuated measles virus in the MMR in the colons of autistic children by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). It would be one thing if these studies were sound science. If that were the case, then Wakefield’s work would have been very important and would have correctly cast doubt on the safety of the MMR. Unfortunately, they were not, and, indeed, most of the authors of the 1998 Lancet paper later withdrew their names from it.
Over the next decade, aided and abetted by useful idiots in the media, by British newspapers and other media that sensationalized the story, and the antivaccine movement, which hailed Wakefield as a hero, Wakefield managed to drive MMR vaccination rates in the U.K. below the level of herd immunity, from 93% to 75% (and as low as 50% in some parts of London). As a result Wakefield has been frequently sarcastically “thanked” for his leadership role in bringing the measles back to the U.K. to the point where, fourteen years after measles had been declared under control in the U.K., it was in 2008 declared endemic again.
David Gorski then goes on to show how badly Wakefield conducted his research. Read the whole article and the comments that follow it.
I am of an age, where it seemed in every class at school, there was a someone who had suffered the effects of polio. So to all of these antivaccine Fascists, I ask if they want to go back to those times. I also have friends and relatives, who were damaged by measles and/or mumps, who would have been saved by the MMR vaccine.
Wakefield’s badly conducted research and the fact that it was not properly checked before publishing in the Lancet has left a terrible legacy.
But there are two troubles with medical research!
Suppose, a doctor notices a link between symptom A and disease B, which is outside the normal scheme of things. If he publishes honestly, saying that this might be correct and can anybody shed light on what he has seen, many sufferers will accept what he says has gospel. Tabloid headlines will proclaim a new cure for cancer, when the doctor was just postulating something that might be useful. We see this all the time.
On the other hand, suppose this link goes totally against the established thinking. His research may well destroy the reputations of the great and good in the field. Would they allow his research to be published? Of course not. Horizon, made a programme about the messenger of the body, which turned out to be completely different to established thinking, some years ago. A lot of the programme was taken up discussing the problems of the researcher getting his ideas published.
To return to Wakefield. He definitely was helped by the bandwagon that developed after his research was published. But supposing he had been refused the publication, as his results were against established thinking. I’m with him there as I really hate censorship. But then his research was flawed and shouldn’t have been published.
Was it fraud?
Probably not in the established sense, but I feel Wakefield might have suffered from a fault very common in doctors. They have a theory and try and prove it. I am an engineer and if have a problem then I try and solve it. So if he was guilty of anything, I suspect it was not being honest with himself, his patients and his research. But we’ve all done that. I know I’ve made mistakes by using information in the wrong way. But my research hasn’t been nearly so important.
If fraud was just an isolated event in medical research, we should not be seriously worried, provided that research is properly reviewed and published.
But I have written a piece of software called Daisy.
One of the things it can do is to check the integrity of a set of numbers. A medical professor, showed me how to check a set of observations were consistent. All you do is look at the last digit and plot them as a simple histogram. If they are genuine numbers they will have one pattern and if they are some that have been made up, then they will have a different one.
The professor showed me some research where it was obvious that the numbers had been made to fit the theory.
Another isolated case?
No! A relative of someone I know was struck off for doing something similar.
So it goes on.
To avoid other cases like Wakefield, we need to make sure that all papers, and not just in the medical field, are thoroughly reviewed before publishing. This alone would make sure that researchers used the best methods and the most exacting standards. We should also have a system in place, that would not allow the suppressing of controversial research that would upset the status quo.
The Anonymous Widower 