Garth’s posterous

They...look[ed] at every case of pertussis infection identified in children in the Kaiser Permanente of Colorado health plan over more than a decade, between 1996 and 2007. They randomly matched each case to four controls and looked at the children’s vaccination records. The differences were striking. Only 0.5% of the healthy children had not been vaccinated, compared to 12% of the children who had gotten sick with pertussis.

That means, unvaccinated children are associated with a nearly 23-fold higher risk of getting the disease compared to vaccinated children. [Now this is a tenable correlation and real relative risk.] Deciding not to vaccinate children does not keep them safer from childhood diseases, but puts them at considerably greater risk.

You can read the whole thing by following the link at the top.

So parents need to balance concern about either small or false risks from vaccines themselves against the increased risk that their child will get a serious disease that may even kill him.

See also Lessons from the Vaccine-Autism Wars

I'd also urge anyone interested to follow her links in relation to "tenable correlations" and "relative risks". These are absolutely vital in sorting the wheat from the chaff when it comes to assessing claims in the media about some study claiming to have found some link or other.

All studies are not the same. The number that are poorly conducted pseudo-scientific rubbish with weak findings, but yet get saturation coverage in the media is not only astounding, it is depressing.

Recent claims about red meat, alcohol and high GI diets causing cancer and other illnesses all fall into this category.

Claims are made about the health implications for the general population based upon samples that are not representative of the general population.

The red meat gives you cancer nonsense recently peddled by naive and credulous journalists was a particularly egregious example.

In this case, the sample was formed by those members of the American Association of Retired Persons, ages 50 to 71, who could be bothered to fill out and post back a questionairre sent to them way back in 1995. (So yes, no new research at all was done for this study. It simply involved feeding the prior collected information through a computer that looked for correlations - hence the importance of understanding the difference between tenable and untenable correlations.)

What this means is that they were using an unrepresentative sample of an unrepresentative sample!

Why this wasn't setting off alarm bells for people is beyond me. Though I suspect that in truth, nobody bothered to check.

Correlation does not equal causation. Seems simple enough, but not for many of these researchers. The number of findings based on untenable correlations is appalling.

If you seach through any large enough data set, you will find correlations. Whether these correlations mean anything or are just the result of chance is another question entirely.

All too often it is these simple correlations that form the basis of press releases claiming to have found a link between our food and disease.

Then we have press releases claiming such links when the study's own data says something different.

Again, the recent red meat study stands out for claims that were simply not supported by its own results.

Despite the headlines shrieking that high red meat consumption increased your risk of getting cancer, examination of its results said something else.

While claimed rates for a number of cancers for men who who ate the most red meat were higher than those who ate the least, the difference between the two groups was only 1.4%. Now, I'm guessing, (and yes, this is a guess, but I'm prepared to put money on it), but I suspect that this falls within the study's own margin of error and thus statistically there is no real difference.

However, when it came to women, those with the highest consumption of red meat had lower rates of cancer compared to those with the lowest!

A question arising from this is: why did the study's authors then issue a press release that claimed to have found a clear link between higher rates of red meat consumption and cancer, when their own results said the opposite? (Not that any of this study's results should be taken seriously I'd hasten to add. It is rubbish from beginning to end.)

Part of the answer here is I believe the fact that health is one of those things that has replaced sex as the besetting concern of moral entrepreneurs.

They already "know" that red meat, alcohol, high GI diets, fat etc are "bad" and they need to be seen to be sending the "right" message.

This was obvious with the recent no safe level of drinking for women study conducted in the UK.

You can see the author's predetermined determination to find that alcohol is bad for women, even at moderate levels, and then her consternation at finding that her results don't support her belief.

So she reworks the data this way and that, trying to get the "right" result. In the end she fails.

Her own data clearly shows that fully 95% of women who drank had lower rates of cancer compared to those who didn't.

Only the top 5% heaviest drinkers had poorer health outcomes.

But what does she announce to the media? The "right" result, ie that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption for women.

Now, call me old fashioned, but I would have thought that the right result is what your data actually shows, not what you think it should show.

Vaccines do not cause autism. That was the ruling in each of three critical test cases handed down on February 12 by the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C. After a decade of speculation, argument, and analysis—often filled with vitriol on both sides—the court specifically denied any link between the combination of the MMR vaccine and vaccines with thimerosal (a mercury-based preservative) and the spectrum of disorders associated with autism. But these rulings, though seemingly definitive, have done little to quell the angry debate, which has severe implications for American public health.

 

The idea that there is something wrong with our vaccines—that they have poisoned a generation of kids, driving an “epidemic” of autism—continues to be everywhere: on cable news, in celebrity magazines, on blogs, and in health news stories. It has had a particularly strong life on the Internet, including the heavily trafficked Huffington Post, and in pop culture, where it is supported by actors including Charlie Sheen and Jim Carrey, former Playboy playmate Jenny McCarthy, and numerous others. Despite repeated rejection by the scientific community, it has spawned a movement, led to thousands of legal claims, and even triggered occasional harassment and threats against scientists whose research appears to discredit it.

 

You can see where the emotion and sentiment come from. Autism can be a terrible condition, devastating to families. It can leave parents not only aggrieved but desperate to find any cure, any salvation. Medical services and behavioral therapy for severely autistic children can cost more than $100,000 a year, and these children often exhibit extremely difficult behavior. Moreover, the incidence of autism is apparently rising rapidly. Today one in every 150 children has been diagnosed on the autism spectrum; 20 years ago that statistic was one in 10,000. “Put yourself in the shoes of these parents,” says journalist David Kirby, whose best-selling 2005 book, Evidence of Harm, dramatized the vaccine-autism movement. “They have perfectly normal kids who are walking and happy and everything—and then they regress.” The irony is that vaccine skepticism—not the vaccines themselves—is now looking like the true public-health threat.

Parental doubts about the safety of childhood vaccinations are leading to outbreaks of largely eradicated diseases like measles and whooping cough, doctors warned in a new report.

A U.S. measles outbreak last year — almost exclusively among unvaccinated people — has sparked concern about places where many parents opt out of having their children vaccinated.

In Ashland, Ore., more than a quarter of kindergartners aren’t vaccinated, leading the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to hold a town-hall meeting on vaccination there earlier this year. ...

Too many abstainers can put a town at risk, wrote Dr. Saad Omer, of Emory University in Atlanta, the lead author in the report in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine.

“People need to recognize that in the case of infectious diseases, what other people do impacts my child,” Dr. Omer said in an interview. “If they live in a community that has a cluster of refusers, their risk of getting a vaccine-preventable disease goes up, just by virtue of who they play with.”

Vaccines for diseases like whooping cough aren’t 100% effective for each individual, and some children can’t be vaccinated for medical reasons. That means that eradicating a disease requires vaccinating a large percentage of the nearby population to stop infections from spreading — what’s called “herd immunity.”

Schools with many abstainers have been linked to outbreaks.

A woman asked Tancredo, “What do you think of autism in this country?” She has a 4-year-old with autism. Tancredo said, “I think much of it is due to the number of shots we give to kids . . .” They talked about mercury in vaccines’ preservatives.

5. We support the right of parents to apply for exemptions for their children from school vaccinations requirements for medical reasons, religious reasons, or other reasons of conscience.