Health

Wakefield: goat milk as measles vaccine

Health, Media
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A week or so ago I posted about Andrew “MMR is bad okay” Wakefield being struck off the medical register and mentioned in passing that he himself had patented a single measles vaccine, to se in place of the MMR vaccine that was supposed to be causing autism in children. He therefore wasn’t just doing bad research with questionable results to reach false conclusions, he seemed to be doing it out of a financial motive. Nobody needs a single measles vaccine if the MMR vaccine is available and safe, after all. What I didn’t realise was just how quacky Wakefield’s patents were:

Wakefield’s patent application’s description of the production of his transfer factor product makes startling reading.

[…]

So, we have measles virus and mice. Then we have the mice lymphocytes and a human cell line. Then more measles virus, for some reason. Then goats, and the final product coming from the colostrum of the nanny-goat. The route of administration described in the patent application is oral, but intramuscular injection is also referred to. There is description of reactions of human patients to this preparation, but absolutely no hint of any of the normal drug testing procedures that would have to be undertaken for any product to be licensed as a safe and effective therapeutic agent. Really, read the original text. It’s a classic example of junk science.

Just how happy should concerned parents be to have something like this injected into their children? Mice? Human bone marrow? Goat’s milk? Measles virus involved in the production process? Absolutely no background literature supporting the process, and no evidence of any safety or efficacy testing?

From the start then, even before he did his notorious “research”, Wakefield seemed to have been deeply involved in pseudoscience and quackery. How than was it possible for the press to take him serious for so long that the safety of the MMR vaccine was actually in doubt, if not amongst medical practitioners, at least amongst the “informed” lay audience, for years? It’s one thing to understand and know that science reporting in general is woefully inadequate almost everywhere. Quite another to know it’s so bad as this, that an obvious quack as Wakefield has turned out to be was believed and barely investigated.

Andrew Wakefield struck off the medical register

Comics, Health, Wingnuts
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Good news for once: “dr” Andrew Wakefield, the lying liar who in no way fudged his research to find a link between the MMR vaccine and autism because he himself would financially profit from an increased demand for a single measles vaccine he had patented is to be struck of the medical register:

The doctor who first suggested a link between MMR vaccinations and autism is to be struck off the medical register.

The General Medical Council found Dr Andrew Wakefield guilty of serious professional misconduct over the way he carried out his controversial research.

It follows a GMC ruling earlier this year that he had acted unethically.

Dr Wakefield, who is now based in the US, has consistently claimed the allegations are unfair. He now says he will appeal against the verdict.

His 1998 Lancet study caused vaccination rates to plummet, resulting in a rise in measles – but the findings were later discredited.

For quick reminder of Wakefield’s crimes, The Facts In The Case Of Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a comic strip by Darryl Cunningham is highly recommended. Not just to get the facts, but also as a good example of how to do a factual comic without becoming boring or preachy. Comes complete with references.

Don’t Talk To Me About Technology

Health, Internet, IT is not magic pixie dust, Life under Capitalism, Media, Meta, TV, UK elections
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Can you believe this shit?

Here I am, a politics and news junkie stuck here in a Dutch hospital for the past 5 months and on the night before the UK election. my overpriced crap hospital tv,(3 euro a day, run by a private company called PatientLine) and hence my access to BBC’s 1 and 2, is fubared.

The greedy, incompetent bastards. The only thing I got nthe tv on for was the election coverage. No wonder I threw the remote at the wall.

Luckily I’ve found a live video link to the BBC’s Campaign Show that doesn’t rely on the execrable iPlayer – now if only I could get a reliable WiFi connection.

But to cap it all the hospital’s free KPN WiFi really is the shittiest on the planet. It’s been kicking me off every 5 minutes all day, which requires a reboot every single time or it locks you out from logging on.

13 years I’ve been waiting to see Labour get it in the neck. I want to kill someone.

Dutch keep bicycling even with Parkinson

Health, Oh Those Crazy Cloggies
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So it turns out even pople suferring so severely from Parkinson’s disease that they can barely walk, might still be able to cycle normally:



Dr. Bastiaan R. Bloem of the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center in the Netherlands thought he had seen it all in his years of caring for patients with Parkinson’s disease. But the 58-year-old man who came to see him recently was a total surprise.

The man had had Parkinson’s disease for 10 years, and it had progressed until he was severely affected. Parkinson’s, a neurological disorder in which some of the brain cells that control movement die, had made him unable to walk. He trembled and could walk only a few steps before falling. He froze in place, his feet feeling as if they were bolted to the floor.

But the man told Dr. Bloem something amazing: he said he was a regular exerciser — a cyclist, in fact — something that should not be possible for patients at his stage of the disease, Dr. Bloem thought.

“He said, ‘Just yesterday I rode my bicycle for 10 kilometers’ — six miles,” Dr. Bloem said. “He said he rides his bicycle for miles and miles every day.”

“I said, ‘This cannot be,’ ” Dr. Bloem, a professor of neurology and medical director of the hospital’s Parkinson’s Center, recalled in a telephone interview. “This man has end-stage Parkinson’s disease. He is unable to walk.”

But the man was eager to demonstrate, so Dr. Bloem took him outside where a nurse’s bike was parked.

“We helped him mount the bike, gave him a little push, and he was gone,” Dr. Bloem said. He rode, even making a U-turn, and was in perfect control, all his Parkinson’s symptoms gone.

How stereotypical is this, that this was found at a Dutch hospital? I found this article via my manager, whose partner is working in this field. He also said that when the NYT saw the video, they at first were cagey about putting it on their site, as the patient wasn’t wearing any helmet…

UK drugs advisor resigns over media driven policies, again

Blinded by Science, Health
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Drugs advisor Eric Carlin resigns from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs over the tabloid driven ban on mephedrone:

Re-Mephedrone; we had little or no discussion about how our recommendation to classify this drug would be likely to impact on young people’s behaviour. Our decision was unduly based on media and political pressure. The report was tabled to the whole Council for the first time on Monday; the Chair came to brief you before the whole Council had even discussed all of the report. In fact, I still haven’t seen the final version.

Mephedrone is still legal, but a spate of tabloid stories in which it is “linked” to various deaths means that it will be banned as soon as parliament has the time for it, despite the lack of direct evidence pf mephedrone’s lethality. Nobody has actually proved that mephedrone has caused any deaths, just that some people who later turned up death had used it at some point, often together with other drugs. Banning it, when it has allegedly become the fourth most popular drug in the UK, just means the selling of it will be turned over to organised crime, rather than smartshops. Is this a clever idea?