As A Parent, I Just Know Chemical X Isn't Safe

I'm not sure why people should care what Jenny McCarthy thinks about autism or parenting, but they do care. I disagree with how she views autism. She talks of healing, of recovery, as though autism were in some manner analogous to a physical or mental disease rather than, as I view it, a kind of human mind that is not well accommodated for in a society in which it was once rare. If that were all she had to say, then I suppose we could consider this a strong difference of opinion. But of course there's more.

Jenny McCarthy on Autism and Vaccines

I do believe sadly it's going to take some diseases coming back to realize that we need to change and develop vaccines that are safe. If the vaccine companies are not listening to us, it's their f___ing fault that the diseases are coming back. They're making a product that's s___. If you give us a safe vaccine, we'll use it. It shouldn't be polio versus autism.

All I can do is sigh. Jenny McCarthy is a high-profile human being, so her views carry weight. The least she could do is honour the responsibility that carries and keep up with the scientific evidence, the expert views. But instead she continues to push the tired old vaccines = regressive autism canard, whilst suggesting that parents should be prepared to accept the resurgence of diseases which kill and maim people. McCarthy feels secure enough in her knowledge of vaccination and autism biology that she can make that undoubtedly harmful claim. She's basically making herself an expert opinion, without having to do the hard work that would really require.

I have a radical suggestion. Jenny McCarthy should present herself as an expert on things in which she is experienced. So parenting, sure. We may disagree with her, but she can certainly have that. Parenting with an autistic kid? Same deal. Virology? Vaccination? Autism biology? Cohort studies? Meta analyses? Risk factors? When she starts citing the studies, the analysing the data that back her up, rather recycling the anti-vaccination nonsense, I might start listening to her views on those.

Holy F**king Sh*t: Daily Mail debunks MMR autism link

This post may be unsuitable for minors or people upset by scenes of total doublethink.

Well, the day has finally come. The Daily Mail has finally joined the rest of the world in accepting that MMR is safe, and that the 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield has been "debunked" (even though the study never says that MMR causes autism, a press release did and it was debunked 10 years ago). Measles is on the rise again, and that's actually a big deal. Kids are getting sick, people have died and someone is going to hang. This isn't just Wakefield's fault of course. No, he should not be a scapegoat! There are others to blame. Us, apparently. In a remarkable display of doublethink, the Daily Mail points the finger at "middle-class MMR refuseniks". Parents who somehow bought the press-release pseudoscience presented by Wakefield (minus the et al). They must have picked it up off Reuters, the wiley middle-class (yet strangely uncritical and credulous) bastards.

Of course, the Mail don't mention the media frenzy that followed the "confirmation" of Wakefield's 1998 work (by, er.. Wakefield). The evidence-free total bullshitstorm that presented Wakefield's speculations directly to that middle-(and working-) class audience as if it were yet another scientific "breakthrough". The torrent of jargon filled trash that published everything that vaguely supported the hypothesis but ignored the dozens and dozens of studies debunking it, milking that story for every millilitre of newspaper sales it had. And how could they, since up until a month ago the Daily Mail were still doing it? Still implying that MMR was dangerous. But today they've hit the reset button. And I feel like I just fell through the looking glass. It's funny, in a totally horrifying kind of way. Well, let me just say, so that we can be clear. And you'll have to forgive me for my profanity because it just feels like that sort of moment.

THIS WAS YOUR FUCKING FAULT, YOU MORONS.

I mean, seriously. Read your own articles. People are going to hang for this, but the media are the ones judging who, so the list will doubtlessly be restricted to:

-A. J Wakefield
-The Middle Classes

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

Update 18:08: It's even crazier than I thought. A search for "MMR" on the Daily Mail reveals a similar article in 2008 blaming "mothers" for the oncoming measles epidemic. This article sits amongst yet more panic pieces calling MMR "controversial" and cagey coverage of the research that 'disproves MMR jab link to autism' (the quotes were in the headline as if incredulous). Clearly, the Mail spent 2008 being eased into a gentle but enormous u-turn.

The Streisand Effect

The Jeni Barnett MMR story really has longer legs than many of us sciencey bloggers had hoped. A week after Barnett rehashed every cliché in the anti-vaccination handbook over roughly 40 minutes of hysterical melodrama, the subsequent attempts by both Barnett and her radio station LBC to silence Ben Goldacre's perfectly appropriate criticisms have exploded hilariously in what is called The Streisand Effect. Only the Bad Science followers were paying attention up until the point when LBC's lawyers forced Ben to remove a (rather long) clip of the entire MMR segment of the show in what was a rather dubious and aggressive copyright infringement claim. The Sciencey Blogsphere Collective as not amused. The clip was rapidly copied and redistributed across the interenet, effectively becoming entirely untouchable. Blogs everywhere began to report angrily on the incident and the feeling was almost universally in favour of Ben.

In an attempt to appear open to debate, Barnett's Blog (which rather scathingly dismissed one of her most polite pro-MMR callers as "viscious") called for comments. And the comments came. 121 comments, mostly annoyed but polite attempts to explain to Jeni why MMR is safe and important for public health. A follow-on post by Barnett sneered at the "Bad Scientists" and their "sarcasm". This post prompted a further 81 comments, again the vast majority being critical of Barnett's poorly-informed and irresponsbible stance on MMR.

More blogs reported, more segments of the radio programme were posted, this time in fragments too small and too many to be silenced by questionable copyright infringment claims. Transcripts appeared. PZ Myers rallied his atheist army behind the pro-MMR standard. The Times online noticed the story, and weighed in to defend Ben Goldacre. And, in a quite stunning moment, the great Stephen Fry called for Goldacre to be supported.

Perhaps understandably, Ben's website crashed several times under the weight of visits and messages of near-universal support. Perhaps panicked, Barnett deleted all 200 or so of the critical messages from her own blog and has attempted to move on. No meaningful apology. No recognition of the continuing damage this evidence-free nonsense has done to public health in the UK and Ireland. And of course, no glimmer of having realised that everything she and LBC have done so far, including this, is just making things worse for her and her employers.

For those interested, the deleted blog comments are available at the excellent Quackometer blog.

Why You’re Awesome: Part 1

I thought I'd finish 2008 with the first in what I intend to be a semi-regular series on some of the random cool stuff that's going on with your biology and how evolution got you there.

The first time single-celled organisms decided to switch to communism (i.e. stick together to become multi-cellular organisms like cabbages, hamsters and us), they immediately faced a compromise. Sure, sticking together meant more food and more safety, but reproduction was now a more complicated matter. And as life became more complex, reproduction just got slower and slower. And because the rate that we can evolve is strongly influenced by our reproduction rate, this means that the bacteria and other little blighters that like to infect us have a massive evolutionary edge. We measure the time it takes for organisms to reproduce in terms of generation times, the average time it takes between a new organism being born and it getting around to reproducing for itself. After millions of years of evolution, the differences between the generation times of single-celled organisms such as bacteria and us humans is massive. The average human takes some 25-30 years to reproduce. Bacteria can divide and then divide again in 20 minutes. And so, bacteria and viruses evolve at a simply astounding rate by comparison to us big old lumbering animal types. Although we’ve had immune systems since those earliest days of multi-cellular life, the mutation rate problem was still there. Our immune cells work by recognising patterns- bits of bacteria, the surfaces of viruses, maybe some of the proteins from a parasite. But what good is it having cells that see what’s on the outside of a bacterium when a bacterium can change its outfit a million times before your cells can get their pants on in the morning? Our immune cells had to work in terms of broad patterns, and if one of those patterns changed due to mutation, things invariably got ugly.

Of course, if that had been the end of the story, we wouldn’t be here to talk about it. There’d just be a load of bacteria hanging around wondering where all the easy food went. Evolution, in its elegant non-wisdom, provided a solution. The key was to fight fire with fire. We vertebrates evolved a special group of cells that, when first made by our bodies (and we make loads of them every day), undergo their own randomised mutations. These special mutations occur only within a set part of our genetic code- right in the part which recognises those nasty bugs and parasites. Just by allowing chaotic re-arrangements of that little part of our DNA in a select set of cells, we we’re suddenly back in the game. With enough of these cells, we can now recognise some 10e12 patterns (that’s one thousand billion). In effect, we harnessed the driving force of evolution itself. Tightly controlled chaos. And it worked. Every animal with a spine has those precious cells. The lymphocytes, also called T cells and B cells. They’re awesome really.

Flu virus image from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Public Health Image Library (Public Domain). Lymphocyte image from the National Cancer Institute (Public Domain).