So it's been a while

[draggonlaady]

since I read Bad Science. I'm catching up on back issues. Which means lots of links for you lovely folks.

Once more into the breach on Autism vs vaccination... a specious correlation so wide-spread into 'common knowledge' that clients have declined vaccinations for puppies despite my best efforts to educate that them that 1: vaccines don't cause autism, 2: dogs don't get autism anyway, even if vaccines did cause it in humans (which they don't-see 1), 3: dogs get Parvo regularly, 4: even if autism DID happen in dogs, and even if it WERE caused by vaccination, it's not fatal, and 5: Parvo kills dogs in a disgusting and decidedly uncomfortable manner (and we'll just not even get started on distemper...)

http://www.badscience.net/2008/12/its-not-my-fault-i-fall-into-repetitive-self-parody-you-started-it/

Comments

[evil-egg.livejournal.com]

I was always under the impression that A. the germs in a vaccination shot were dead, or as near to dead as such a simple organism can get, and B. that they "acted" on the bloodstream and immune system, not the nervous sytem.

Didn't some comedian or Internaut once suggest that people who don't want their children to get vaccinated should have to do a thousnad-word essay on "Why [disease] Isn't So Bad"?

[draggonlaady.livejournal.com]

Depends on the vaccination whether or not the organism is dead. Some of them are 'modified live' which means they take a strain of the organism that's not virulent enough to cause disease and give it in very small doses. Some of them are genetic bits inserted into a canary pox virus carrier and given live. Some are whole dead or just parts of the original organism, given with an irritating adjunct to induce a bigger immune response.

The point of any vaccination is to cause an immune response, so that if your system encounters the organism you're vaccinating against, it'll have immune cells primed and ready to fight it.

So no vaccine should directly affect the nervous system. What your immune system does with its response may, in theory, affect a lot of things. Usually the worst that happens is that you have an allergic reaction (yay, aren't hives fun?), but when using modified live vaccines, it's possible to get a less severe variant of the disease, especially if you're stressed or immune-suppressed (this is why some people feel cruddy for several days after getting an influenza vaccine).

That said, there have been several studies that have found no causative link between autism and vaccines, and only one that ever did. That one has since been shown to have been picking up false positives, and the article I linked has links to a couple of papers that explain why those false positives were detected.

So the frustration is that the media will continue to run stories about the "great vaccine debate" and have any crackpot out there that can talk fast enough explaining in great detail how vaccines kill babies, because fear sells papers. While in actuality, there IS no "great vaccine debate" by anybody that knows anything about them. But THAT doesn't sell papers.

[evil-egg.livejournal.com]

Yeah. God forbid anyone should ever feel at ease about the world, 'cause otherwise the newspaper magnates wouldn't be millionaires! Shock and horror!

Almost makes inventing the printing engine seem not worth it.

[draggonlaady.livejournal.com]

Yah. Media has its good points. Stoking up unreasonable fear is not one of them, but it certainly seems to be something that the various outlets are good at.

[kresentia.livejournal.com]

Someone shoot me. Or the stupid people.
I can understand the fear for your kids (and just wait until we get small pox and polio back! Then they can really be afraid!) but at least ask questions before deciding that totally different vaccinations for your dogs are a problem! (Isn't it one specific vaccination that is "linked" to autism rather than vaccinations in general?) Sigh. People hurt.

[draggonlaady.livejournal.com]

The supposed association is with the MMR vaccine, and has been proven incorrect. Not that the media care to report that.
Also, apparently, the study that got everyone so freaking worked up was on TWELVE kids. Twelve. We'll go on and disregard the hundreds of people involved in dozens of studies all over the world that show that the vaccine has a very low side-effect rate, no association with autism (other than signs start showing about the same time as the kids' vaccine series), and the increased incidence of things that DO hurt people (like, you know, measles and mumps and rubella) since people have stopped using the vaccines.

[kresentia.livejournal.com]

Oh the joys...