Dec 18 2009
Measles
It looks like the H1N1 pandemic is fading fast. I am amazed at how lucky we were, at least in the hospitals where I work. A month ago all the ICU beds were full, most of the ventilators were in use and we were wondering how we were going to triage the next batch of patients who needed advanced life support and we had none to offer. Then, right as we reached maximum capacity and had no more wiggle room, the rates plummeted. We skated right up to the edge of the precipice, looked down, and did not have to jump.
The pandemic has not been as bad as expected, but it was still no walk in the park. Nationwide H1N1 killed maybe 10,000, with 1,100 in children and 7,500 among young adults (ref). Oregon has had 1200 hospitalizations and 68 deaths. We had about 8 deaths from H1N1 in my hospital system. We would have had twice that number, but one of our hospitals is a trauma center and offers ECMO (Extra Corporeal Membrane Oxygenation) and we managed to save a number of people who would have died if they had been in a lesser hospital. The national statistics mirror our experience. None of the deaths were in the elderly. Pity the vaccine was slow to be produced as it could have prevented the majority of those deaths.
Are we done with H1N1? Will it become part of seasonal flu? Will it have a third comeback, fueled by holiday travel? Will it mutate and increase virulence? Will it recombine with avian flu to generate a new strain? Is this THE pandemic that comes every 30 years or so, and we will not see another until after I am long dead?
How am I supposed to know? I can’t see the future. Or can I? Mr. Randi, listen up: I am thinking I will be eligible for that million dollar prize. I am receiving future information from the Large Hadron Collider, curiously delivered inside a baguette. I think I can predict the next infection to sweep the US.
Measles.
Easy call, huh?
I have seen a grand total of one case of measles in my career. It was in an unimmunized young male who picked up measles traveling to Africa. I had not expected to see another case thanks to immunization. I am no longer certain that will be the case.
Measles, due to the rubeola virus, is a typical virus, with the usual fever, cough, runny nose, red eyes and a generalized, maculopapular, erythematous rash. One of many childhood infections that have plagued mankind. Measles is very infectious, with 90% of household contacts exposed developing the disease. It is one of those infections that is easy to acquire in the waiting area of a doctors office.
Case fatality rates in the West are low, about 0.3%, while in the third world it kills up to a third of infected children. About one in a thousand get encephalitis.
In the old days, everyone developed measles with about 3 million cases a year, with relatively little, but devastating, morbidity and mortality.
“Before measles vaccine, nearly all children got measles by the time they were 15 years of age. Each year in the United States about 450 people died because of measles, 48,000 were hospitalized, 7,000 had seizures, and about 1,000 suffered permanent brain damage or deafness.”
Much of this is preventable by the vaccine. No vaccine is perfect, and the measles vaccine is no different. Measles vaccine is about 90-97% effective in preventing infection, depending on the population studied. Or to think of it another way, 3 to 10% of the population would remain susceptible to the disease even if we had 100% of the population vaccinated.
Thanks to Dr. Andrew Wakefield, fear of MMR induced autism is highest in Great Britain and as a result measles vaccination rates have fallen. Perhaps it should now be Mediocre Britain, at least where vaccines are concerned.
Vaccination rates have fallen in England, and at one point 20% of children were susceptible to measles, mumps and rubella. Since the English refer to vaccination as ‘the jab’ I am surprised they get anyone to take the vaccine. It’s like referring to colonoscopy as riding the python. Who would want that?
“A particularly significant decline was observed between 2000 and 2004, which can arguably be attributed to deterioration in public confidence about the safety of the MMR (Reference).”
As a result, measles boomed.
All due to Dr. Wakefield’s report in the Lancet, which evidently should have been published as work of dark humor in Punch.
“More importantly, the controversy appeared to affect parental decision-making. Uptake rates for MMR in England fell from 87.4% in 2000-01 to 79.9% in 2003-04, the lowest figure at any time since the widespread introduction of the triple vaccine in 1990-91. The decrease was especially significant given that the single vaccines alternative was only available from private medical clinics, at a cost of around £200.
The Wakefield study has been widely discredited, and MMR uptake has recovered to an extent: in 2007 vaccination rates stood at 84.6%. Meanwhile, measles notifications in 2006 and 2007 were the highest for almost a decade. (Reference)”
I wonder, as an aside, about responsibility. One of the refrains of the antivax crowd is that big pharma is protected from any liability from vaccine injury. Big pharma cannot be held responsible. I wonder, when the causes of autism are finally elucidated and vaccines are definitely exonerated as we have the answers to the etiology of autism, if Dr. Wakefield, AoA and Ms. McCarthy will assume the responsibility and liability for all the morbidity and mortality their actions caused. I am sure they will happy to step up to the plate and offer restitution to the affected families.
There was, of course, another paper out of Poland, “Lack of Association Between Measles-Mumps-Rubella Vaccination and Autism in Children,” this month exonerating the MMR as a cause of autism. Poland has an interesting history with regards the measles vaccine:
“The MMR vaccine was introduced in Poland later than in most other European countries. For the past 10 years, the MMR vaccine has been gradually replacing the single-antigen measles variety. When it was first introduced, MMR was not covered by the national health service of Poland. Parents who wished to vaccinate their children with MMR, as opposed to the single mandatory measles vaccine, had to pay extra. For this reason, few children were immunized with MMR. The Polish mandatory vaccinations schedule did not include MMR for all children until 2004.”
As a result,
“Poland’s heterogeneous population (ie, vaccinated with MMR, vaccinated against measles only, nonvaccinated) serves as a unique sample group for studying the debated association of these vaccines with autism in children.”
In comparing the three groups they found no association between MMR and autism. None. In fact, they found “a lower risk of developing autism for children vaccinated against measles, with the lowest risk being found for children vaccinated with MMR.”
This finding is dismissed by the authors as perhaps
“the decreased risk of autism among vaccinated children may be due to some other confounding factors in their health status. For example, health care workers or parents may have noticed signs of developmental delay or disease before the actual autism diagnosis and for this reason have avoided vaccination.”
Dr. Gorski also thought the finding was a fluke. Part of the argument against MMR being protective being that having one child in the family with autism would make it unlikely for other children in the family to get the vaccine out of fear of the vaccine causing autism when, in fact, it is due to perhaps inherited causes. The lack of vaccination actually being a marker for families with other predispositions to developing autism.
I am not certain that is true. As the authors report:
“This serves as evidence that, despite extensive media coverage of the debated association between MMR and autism, public acceptance of this vaccine remains very high. The situation in Poland is different to that of many European countries, where MMR vaccinations by age 2 years fell more than 10% and were followed by measles outbreaks. In this time, Poland’s already high rate of measles immunization even slightly increased.”
Seems that the Poles were immune to the anti-MMR hysteria, although I cannot say with certainty. If so, then the finding of the protective effect of vaccination, given the study population, may be valid.
Me? I think everything is due to an infectious disease. Infections are the One True Cause of All Disease. While this is the first study to demonstrate the protective effect of the MMR, remember that measles, mumps and rubella are neurotropic viruses with encephalitis a known complication. There has long been a suspicion of viral infections altering the brain to unmask schizophrenia and there is an association between borna virus and OCD. Could a subtle neurologic infection exacerbate a predilection towards autism? I do not think it is out of the question. But that is my delusion.
Vaccination rates have fallen in some segments of the US population as well. In the US, low vaccination rates are found primarily in the children of the well-to-do and often are clustered in alternative schools. There are dozens of schools with vaccination rates under 80%, with some schools having vaccination rates of 5% (reference).
Well, fine, you may say to yourself: they can get the measles or other vaccine preventable diseases. At least it will stay in the those enclaves of unvaccinated children. My kids are vaccinated and in schools where vaccine rates are high. My kids are safe. I would have thought the same thing.
Herd immunity and the models that try and predict what levels of immunity are needed to protect a population are based on the assumption that unimmunized people are randomly distributed in a population, not clustered in alternative schools.
In the Journal of Infectious Diseases this month is a description of a measles outbreak in Canada where clusters of unvaccinated populations helped perpetuate a measles outbreak even though overall community vaccination rates were high (“Long-Lasting Measles Outbreak Affecting Several Unrelated Networks of Unvaccinated Persons”):
“Despite a population immunity level estimated at ∼95%, an outbreak of measles responsible for 94 cases occurred in Quebec, Canada. Unlike previous outbreaks in which most unvaccinated children belonged to a single community, this outbreak had cases coming from several unrelated networks of unvaccinated persons dispersed in the population. No epidemiological link was found for about one-third of laboratory-confirmed cases. This outbreak demonstrated that minimal changes in the level of aggregation of unvaccinated individuals can lead to sustained transmission in highly vaccinated populations. Mathematical work is needed regarding the level of aggregation of unvaccinated individuals that would jeopardize elimination.”
The graphic shows how schools acted to magnify the epidemic:
The isolated measles virus was genotyped and almost all isolates were identical, demonstrating how infectious measles can be with what was presumptively minimal contact.
As the discussion said:
“An important assumption of mathematical models predicting elimination, however, is the random distribution of susceptible persons in the population. In reality, unvaccinated individuals are not distributed at random. Religious groups opposed to vaccination are often tightly knit communities. Our outbreak involving 2 unrelated alternative schools attended by children whose parents were resistant to vaccination on philosophical ground demonstrated that these persons also aggregate. The spontaneous interruption of this outbreak, despite the current level of aggregation in unvaccinated children, suggests that endemicity was not likely to be reestablished in this population. The continued propagation throughout many generations of cases, however, raised the possibility that a minimal change in the overall vaccine coverage in the population or in the level of aggregation of unvaccinated individuals can lead to sustained but protracted transmission despite an immunity level near 95%.”
Lest you think this outbreak epidemiology is limited to measles, the US northeast experienced a similar outbreak with mumps, where clusters of unvaccinated populations help magnify the spread of disease.
A child with mumps came to the US from, hey, I’ll be damned, England, thank you Dr. Wakefield, where, thanks to low uptake of the MMR (the second M standing for mumps) there is a mumps epidemic. The index case went to a religious camp and gave it to the other campers, who in turn went to other collections of unvaccinated people to start their own epidemic and so on. In this case there was little spread into the wider community that “might be attributable to generally high vaccination levels and little interaction between members of the affected religious community and persons in surrounding communities.”
It appears that collections of unvaccinated people may serve to magnify the ability of diseases to spread in a community. Those unvaccinated children in the alternative schools may be unlikely to keep their infections to themselves.
My million-dollar prediction? Measles will be imported into the US in a student from Mediocre Britain. That student will visit an alternative school and start an epidemic in the school. Measles will be spread from school to school and into the community and will be difficult to control.
It will occur in 2012. The Mayans, along with the other indigenous peoples in North and South America, were killed by the millions by vaccine preventable illnesses like measles, pertussis, mumps and smallpox. The real reason the Mayan calendar ends in 2012 is the end of the world will be due to the return of vaccine-preventable diseases.
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234 Responses to “Measles”
You may want to make a brief comment on the reasons for the 1-3 year lag between vaccination rates and disease rates even though it should be obvious.
I can already guess how the anti-science crowd will use these graphs, since I’ve seen it before. They’ll start the graph at 2001 or 2002, and say, the incidence of measles went down as vaccination rates came down and then started to skyrocket just as vaccination rates increased.
Do antivaccinationists also eschew smallpox and polio vaccines? Or do they oppose only vaccines for diseases they believe to be minor? Just wonderin’.
And yes, the world does need more Mark Crispin. So how about picking up the frequency of QuackCast now that swine flu has gone back to play with the swine and the birds?
And finally, your observation about a possible link between viral infections and mental disease is intriguing. Can you suggest a brief reading list?
Crap. Crislip. Crislip. Crislip. I’m infected with the evil Crispin virus.
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I’ve heard that polio was decreasing anyway…..it’s just coincidental that it happened when we started vaxing, as it would have been eradicated anyway. Ugh, I can’t even type that without throwing up in my mouth a little.
Superb article, thank you very much.
@Mark Crislip
Regarding H1N1, according to Vincent Racanielloover at the TWiV blog/podcast, he is predicting a return of H1N1 based on past pandemic strains:
http://www.virology.ws/2009/12/01/swine-origin-influenza-h1n1-as-of-now/
“The wording suggests that the pandemic is over, but I would not agree. Based on the patterns of previous pandemics, it’s likely that a third wave of infections will occur later this winter. ”
@windriven
Anti-vaxxers hate all vaccines and keep the bottom of their goalpost well greased for easy movement. The can be compared to creationists, who slip-slide their language and stances to get their foot in the door. Unfortunately, as evidenced by the uptick in measles, whooping cough, and other previously rare diseases, these folks have a tangible effect.
“English refer to vaccination as ‘the jab’ I am surprised they get anyone to take the vaccine. It’s like referring to colonoscopy as riding the python. Who would want that?”
I actually laughed out loud sitting here at work reading that. That was too funny!
“English refer to vaccination as ‘the jab’ I am surprised they get anyone to take the vaccine.”
That reminds me of a time when I needed to have blood work done when I was younger. The women in the lab had me waiting while they talked business among themselves. It was the first time I had encountered the use of “stick” for the work they do. They spent a good 10 -15 minutes talking about sticking this and that. Then they got around to doing my stick. After they revived me I suggested that they may want to reconsider their terminology around their patients.
I dunno — we Americans call them “shots”, and I think I’d much rather be jabbed than shot.
(Insert standard Americans-and-their-guns joke here.)
I’ve always been baffled at the persistence of this claim. I can understand a newbie falling for it, but it’s fairly easy to debunk. Big Pharma has some protection from liability, but it’s not zero. You’d think the recalls that seem to happen every year or so would be enough evidence to put that claim to bed, but apparently it’s not.
Note for anyone reading this thread: manufacturers are not free of liability for the vaccines they manufacture. Their financial risk is mitigated by requiring all claimants to go through the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program first (which is funded from a small tax on each vaccine dose), but if you don’t get adequate satisfaction there, you can still sue the manufacturer.
windriven:
Smallpox isn’t worth discussing; the only people who will get that vaccine are military personnel, and they really don’t have much say in the matter. (You can decline on medical grounds, but having a personal objection is generally prohibited on principle in the military.) But polio? Some antivaxxers will accept that one, on the basis that it’s “bad enough” to warrant vaccinating. But many won’t. Some feel that it’s too rare to be worth vaccinating against (oblivious to the fact that it’s only mass vaccination that keeps it rare). Others believe it wasn’t that bad a disease in the first place. (Seriously.)
Yes, people eschew the polio vaccine today. The human rabies vaccine, too. I don’t think there are too many polio or rabies parties, however. But you can Google around to find the lorem ipsum of a doctor of chiropractic advocating vitamin C against polio and rabies — with no vaccine. Not that a chiropractor would recognize a case of rabies if it up and bit him on the hindquarters.
In the career of an alternative doctor, how many of their patients will come down with rabies or polio? Alternative medicine is nothing if not irresponsible, the relative few people sacrificed in the service of staying true to one’s ideals should provoke nary a shrug. Hey, when you’re infallible, it’s hard to be humble. A preventable outbreak of measles warrants less than a shrug. Woof, woof.
A very fine article, Dr. Crislip, except for one little thing: the suggestion that MMR is actually protective against autism. Your talk of “subtle neurologic infections” does not compare well to your prior description of measles as an overt “typical virus” whose sufferers were readily recognized as such during epidemics. Is there any evidence that many of the autistic children in Poland (or anywhere else) had actually been ill with measles, mumps, or rubella, or that any of these diseases can infect (only?) young children and cause brain damage even while they show no typical signs of a viral infection, or that MMR is partly protective against any other mystery viruses? If not, you pulled this idea out of your *ahem* hat, and it’s no more scientific than the countervailing claim that MMR causes autism. If you likewise offer up unproven and unlikely ideas that, if adopted, would happen to support your preferred course of action, it weakens your appearance of greater objectivity.
One of the most characteristic features of people with autism is a larger brain with more neurons and in particular a larger number of minicolumns (the smallest structures that neurons are aggregated in). The number of minicolumns is fixed at ~8 weeks gestation, around the time that the teratogens that cause autism-like symptoms also have their effects (thalidomide is somewhat earlier).
Maternal infections do have effects on the in utero environment, and these do have neurodevelopmental effects, in particular there appears to be excess schizophrenia in children exposed to flu in utero (which is why maternal vaccination against flu is so important).
What Wakefield published was fraud not just a mistake. One of the people working with him had used PCR on each and every sample that Wakefield tested and found only false positives and told Wakefield before the Lancet paper was published. PCR was many orders of magnitude more sensitive and more specific than the immunological tests Wakefield got positive results with. To report positive results using tests that are less sensitive and less specific on samples where more sensitive and more specific tests have found nothing is fraudulent.
It was fraud, Wakefield lied and people died. Not a close call.
@ apteryx
Huh? Crislip was pretty clear that the observation that MMR vaccination appeared to have something of a protective effect vis a vis autism was interesting but speculative.
“Could a subtle neurologic infection exacerbate a predilection towards autism? I do not think it is out of the question. But that is my delusion.”
I don’t see how this detracts in any way from his blog. Dr. Crislip did not offer his conjecture as something to “be adopted.” Neither do I believe that his “preferred course of action” is to ramp up MMR vaccination as part of an autism prevention campaign. MMR vaccination stands on its own.
I share your concern that definitive assertions of fact be backed by clear and compelling data. But I reject the notion that speculation has no place in the discussion.
Dr. Crislip: I am a bit mystified by your comment regarding 1,100 pediatric deaths attributable to H1N1. Is this your extrapolation/estimate? The CDC says 212 pediatric deaths so far for all influenza types combined.
@wales
Go here: http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/pdf/december10.pdf
I have no idea if this is where Dr. Crislip got the information but it is consistent with his numbers.
Re the use of the word “jab” in the UK: I found a cartoon where a nurse is standing under a measles vaccination poster and the doctor is asking her what the government is doing about the “jabless.”
Mark, your second paragraph says that H1N1 has killed “maybe 10,000″ nationwide, but the NY Times article from Nov 30 puts the number at around 3,900.
I was at a party a week ago, where a friend told me he had heard 10,000 in the US, and I told him that I thought that number sounded too high, so I’d want to see it sourced. After seeing your intro here, I was ready to email him that he was right, but then I followed the link from your article to the Virology Blog to the NY Times article, and found the 3,900 number.
That’s a big difference – which is it?
The 10,000 number was recently invented by the CDC. 4,000 was their previous estimate. Apparently 4,000 dead were not scary enough to move all the unwanted vaccine off the shelves
Curt, see the link provided by windriven.
So with all these infectious diseases having disappeared due to vaccination, shouldn’t autism (always, according to the AAP, present as mental retardation or geekiness) have disappeared as well?
Sid, did you miss this bit in the comment above:
Vaccination does not prevent genetic conditions (for instance many of the genes associated with autism, Down Syndrome, Rett’s Syndrome, Prater William Syndrome, etc). It does, however help prevent mental retardation due to getting the diseases. See Impact of Specific Medical Interventions on Reducing the Prevalence of Mental Retardation, which says:
@Sid Offit: no, Sid, as long as there are those of us who are willing to reproduce with the geeks instead of the trolls, autism will always be around.
I was responding to this:
measles, mumps and rubella area neurotropic viruses with encephalitis a known complication. There has long been a suspicion of viral infections altering the brain to unmask schizophrenia and there is an association between borna virus and OCD. Could a subtle neurologic infection exacerbate a predilection towards autism? I do not think it is out of the question
It sure looks like you are making the case that measles is way less worrysome than H1N1.
“Nationwide H1N1 killed maybe 10,000″
and
““Before measles vaccine, nearly all children got measles by the time they were 15 years of age. Each year in the United States about 450 people died because of measles”
Yeah; he was speculating that maybe the mild correlation isn’t purely coincidental (as Orac suggested some time ago) but might actually be causal (if perhaps some people developed autism as a result of having a genetic predisposition and then developing a viral infection at a critical juncture). While the speculation is interesting, I don’t personally think it’s very likely. I think it’s coincidental for the reasons that Orac described. Families with one autistic child are less likely to vaccinate the second, but if autism is genetic, then the second child has an elevated risk of autism to begin with — ergo, we should expect to see slightly more unvaccinated autistic children than we’d expect if anti-vaccinationism were randomly distributed.
So I personally doubt that Crislip is right about that.
@Sid: You wrote, “So with all these infectious diseases having disappeared due to vaccination, shouldn’t autism … have disappeared as well?”
Not. Nothing Dr. Crislip wrote suggests that, not even close. I can see a vague relationship between the passage you cited and your question, but the link is tenuous indeed. Dr. Crislip was hypothesizing a “not out of the question” link between autism and an unspecified/unknown viral infection, not a link with a known viral infection that has been eliminated by vaccination.
Paul Ingraham – Okay, but he was also hypothesizing that the MMR vaccine could be directly protective against autism. No “unspecified/unknown viral infection” is included in the MMR shot, so how could that vaccine protect babies from it? That’s like saying that the polio vaccine might reduce the risk of deafness because a virus (mumps) may cause deafness. You guys would line up to go bananas if an anti-vaccine activist offered a hypothesis this weak and unlikely as being worthy of anyone’s consideration. Authors here really need to abide by the standards they set for others.
I got my death rates from
http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/estimates_2009_h1n1.htm
and added a reference in the text.
In future, instead of numbers for vaccine, since different studies can give different estimates, I am going to use, representing increasing amounts: lots, gobs, buckets, tons and a real shit load. We had buckets of deaths from H1N1 with gobs in children.
I was speculating re: how the vaccine could be protective. I alluded to the fact it was probably not the case (it is my delusion). I do not practice medicine or give medical advice based on speculation with no biologic plausibility: meridians, water memory, subluxations, etc.
I speculated that MMR prevents neurotropic infections that ’cause’ autism, not that the vaccine itself prevents autism.
But it is fun to speculate.
Excellent article, Mark.
Thank you.
i will just have to bite my lip on this one. I see no reason to beat the vaccine horse AGAIN.
I do however want to start another fire here. I cant wait to see what gets throw at me this time. What do any of you know about Silver Sol?
I have seen many sites promoting it, it is FDA approved and has a US patent to cure malaria. The CDC also lists it as an agent that will kill the swine flu.
so go ahead start throwing stuff, i just can’t seem to find much negative info on it, and i am sure if i ask here, someone will act like a bigshot and pretend to know all about its negative effects.
Hi Ho Silver
Hi Ho Silver, the audio version
Because the world needs more Mark Crislip.
Proof that a sucker is born every minute. A quick search for “silver sol fda” brings up a Warning Letter:
Silver Sol is the star in the Deneb system around which the planet Zenn-La is found, home of Norrin Radd.
Or am I missing something?
chris
it isnt collidal silver
here you go FDA approval
http://www.bioportfolio.com/search/silver_sol_32_ppm_FDA_approved_drug.html
oh BTW it was the same search you did
silver sol fda
i guess you just missed these? it was the first result.
there is tons of studies on this stuff…
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19945827?dopt=Abstract
Have you actually read either of those pages. If you have, I really suggest you work on your reading comprehension. Be sure to download and listen to Dr. Crislip’s podcast on colloidal silver.
The first link is just a web search dump, and none of the pages show that the FDA has approved the Silver Sol product. The FDA has extensive lists of approved drugs that are easily found and read (one is a 136 page pdf file). I checked, there is no Silver Sol listed, the only product with “silver” in its name is silver sulfadiazine (mentioned in Dr. Crislips posting here called “Hi Ho Siler”, it is not taken internally).
Now you went and posted a study on a film coated with silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) titled Fabrication of porous chitosan films impregnated with silver nanoparticles: A facile approach for superior antibacterial application. Compare that study with what is on the Silver Sol webpage (first link when you search)….
The study description of the subject: porous chitosan-silver nanocomposite films
The website description of the subject: Silver Sol, in essence, is simply silver particles dispersed in purified water.
Now, you do understand that there is a difference between a solution in water and a film? Surely the engineering college you went to made sure you could tell the difference between a solid and a liquid. If you listen to the Hi Ho Silver podcast you will learn that silver is commonly used as a surface antiseptic, but not ingested.
Now, let us continue comparing the two things:
The study claim for the silver coated film: the examined antibacterial activity results of these films revealed that porous chitosan-silver nanocomposite films exhibited superior inhibition.
Now the Silver Sol website: Broad-spectrum antimicrobial (some silvers have been shown in vitro to destroy bacteria, both forms of viruses, fungus and other significant diseases including the following: MRSA, SARS, malaria, anthrax poisoning, gram-negative bacteria, gram-positive bacteria, Hepatitis C, AIDS, and influenza
Hmmmm, perhaps it is time to write a letter to the FDA informing them of these claims. Especially with claims like these:
From the page titled “Silver Sol’s Attack Strategy: Chemical Structure”:
From the page titled “Silver Sol’s Attack Strategy: Resonance”:
From the page titled “Silver Sol’s Attack Strategy: Magnetic Disruption of Viral DNA” (you claimed to be an engineer, did you not take freshman physics or chemistry?):
Oh, and this is a real knee slapper on the page titled “Silver Sol’s Attack Strategy: Cellular Communication”:
Sugars are carbohydrates, molecules that consist of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms in specific shapes. The shapes determine what kind of sugar it is, like fructose, lactose, glucose, ribose, and even cellulose (plant fiber). Silver particles do not have a coating of sugar. Now there is such thing as sugar made to look like silver, they are often used to decorate cookies during the holidays.
Really, backer, take a basic course in biology. Reality is much more interesting than the fairy tales you get from those colloidal silver websites.
ah! found it, the FDA approval is for a topical creme that kills MRSA
Then post it the link! Also post the FDA website link of its approval.
Also I bet the stuff is really silver sulfadiazine, which is an effective topical antibacterial. MRSA is a bacteria, it is not a virus.
chris –
you REALLY need to do more research before you open your mouth. First of all i am not touting this stuff, just trying to get differing opinions on it. Second “silver sol” seems to be a generic term. apparently you think, that i think that silversol.org is the end all on information about the stuff.
And then there is this….
A preliminary malaria trial occurred at the Air Force Hospital in Ghana where the Medical Officer in Charge was Dr. Evelyn Kwabiah. The five patients treated by Dr. Kwabiah all had positive outcomes. Dr. Kwabiah reported that patients with malaria who had received the ASAP 10 (silver sol): recovered faster than those re-ceiving conventional treatments; recovered where conventional treatments had failed; or, that the ASAP 10 (silver sol) functioned as a prophylactic preventing the recurrence of malaria.
chris –
you REALLY need to do more research before you open your mouth. First of all i am not touting this stuff, just trying to get differing opinions on it. Second “silver sol” seems to be a generic term. apparently you think, that i think that silversol.org is the end all on information about this stuff.
And then there is this….
A preliminary malaria trial occurred at the Air Force Hospital in Ghana where the Medical Officer in Charge was Dr. Evelyn Kwabiah. The five patients treated by Dr. Kwabiah all had positive outcomes. Dr. Kwabiah reported that patients with malaria who had received the ASAP 10 (silver sol): recovered faster than those re-ceiving conventional treatments; recovered where conventional treatments had failed; or, that the ASAP 10 (silver sol) functioned as a prophylactic preventing the recurrence of malaria.
Why no linkies?
Pubmed search on “malaria silver sol” brings up a total of two papers. These are the titles: “Functional and biochemical modifications in skeletal muscles from malarial mice” and “Preconquest Peruvian neurosurgeons: a study of Inca and pre-Columbian trephination and the art of medicine in ancient Peru.”
No papers on either PubMed or Google Scholar by anyone with the name “Kwabiah” with a first initial “E.” (patent applications are not peer reviewed science)
Five whole patients is underwhelming. Also, you do know that malaria is also not caused by a virus? Right?
Got a hit with “silver malaria ghana” on PubMed: Seasonal malaria attack rates in infants and young children in northern Ghana. It is a from the Naval Research Center, and none of the authors are “Kwabiah.”
This is amusing. You really do not know how to distinguish reality from fantasy.
Also, looking around for some kind of information on Ghana malaria trial with silver, I saw someone flogging that study in 2005, only it had a different name (Silver BioticsTM). Truly, if there was really anything to it, something in the real medical liturature would have shown up in almost five years.
Also, you now claim it is a gel that works on MRSA. How is that supposed to work on malaria? Make up your mind on what it really is.
I am pretty sure I am not the one who needs to learn how to do “research.”
chris
you never cease to amaze me…didnt i distinctly say i am not touting this stuff?
trust me i am more skeptical about these products than anyone. that is why i am asking, but obviously you arent qualified to answer these questions
here is the link to an article about the FDA approval.
http://news.biocompare.com/News/NewsStory/270294/American-Biotech-Labs-Obtains-FDA-Approval-For-New-Wound-Care-Gel-Product.html
Reading comprehension fail. I said “Also post the FDA website link of its approval.” That would be a link that includes “fda.gov” in the URL.
Since that press release is dated April 2009, I went to the list of additions and deletions of FDA approved drugs and looked. Tell me where it is here:
http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Drugs/InformationOnDrugs/UCM163758.pdf
Since you fail at research, here you go:
http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/cdrh_docs/pdf9/K092826.pdf
It is an antibacterial cream for wound dressings. Which is a known use for silver. Again, not for malaria for viruses. You really should listen to Dr. Crislip’s Quackcast, “Hi Ho Silver.”
Review: backer you said:
So far we have seen:
1) That a product is a gel, a coating on a film or even a cream is being discussed. That was not really made clear.
2) a warning letter from the FDA about Silver Sol claiming to kill H1N1
3) That the malaria study has been mentioned with same researcher name, same country (though occasionally differnt hospitals), but with different product names in the past five years, and the research has not made it to the standard scientific literature. It looks more like an urban legend, not real scientific evidence.
4) The FDA approval is for a wound dressing cream, which is a traditional use of silver compounds for the last several decades. That is nothing new, and was discussed by Dr. Crislip on this blog and on his podcast, both with the title “Hi Ho Silver.”
4) This discussion of silver has nothing to do with measles, which is a virus. There has been absolutely no evidence that any silver compound works “in vivo” on a virus, and definitely not on measles.
chris-
You obviously cannot read, and for some reason you continue to berate me even though i have made it clear that i am not touting the product. I am simply wanting QUALIFIED people to look at it. like i have said before THIS ISNT YOU. I wouldnt cheat off of you in an elementary school math quiz.
Really what i want is for people to be open to new ideas, if they don’t hold up fine. But again you wouldnt be in that group since you have no apparently have no discernment skills. I have been told countless times that things were impossible only to figure out how to do them myself and improve upon them.
But just to let you know i have found (no thanks to you since you apparently just want to work against people) that it was listed by the CDC to kill the flu virus as a disinfectant, NOT in vivo. So those claims made by the makers were initially misleading. i does however have more studies on malaria. Not just the one i mentioned. it seem to have potential for some sort of medical application, but until people swallow their pride and try new thins we simply will never know. THIS is why i do not trust allopathic medicine, because it seems to be more about pride, than progress.
And BTW i did read the hi ho silver blog, maybe you should berate Dr. Crislip about being a proponent of honey, I am sure you think it is nothing more than snake oil too.
backer:
Why are you reluctant to post links?
I only found stuff going on the very little information you gave. You said it was FDA approved, so I searched the FDA website, which clearly confirmed Dr. Crislip’s posting “Hi Ho Silver”, that silver has been used as a antiseptic on wounds, but not injested.
Now I will search the CDC website. Nope, mostly find stuff on a rabies virus transmitted a silver haired animal, or virus research in Silver Springs, MD, something involving a Dr. Silver … nothing much. I did find a disinfection guide, http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dhqp/pdf/guidelines/disinfection_nov_2008.pdf … it has this to say about silver:
Which is only against bacteria, and only on surfaces or skin, exactly echoing the same comments made by Dr. Crislip in his Hi Ho Silver posting made last October.
I would suggest that any further comments you make on “Silver Sol” and its wonderful uses be done on that page, and you make a real effort to include the links to the wonderful pages that reveal all that wonderful information to you.
Because there is no way to intelligently discuss this if you leave out critical information.
backer,
Sounds like it’s a disinfectant or a topical antibacterial compound. I have no idea how it compares to other disinfectants. The burden of proof is on the company producing it to do comparison studies with known disinfectants or topical antibacterials to show non-inferiority or superiority. Until I see such studies, I cannot tell you what I think of it. I wouldn’t use it unless there was nothing else available.
@ moderator
backer is apparently delusional. S/he seems to make stuff up and throw it out as coming from CDC or FDA. Might someone explain that CDC and FDA are elements of the United States government and that their documents are not transmitted to people via their dental fillings?
@ Chris
a valiant effort but ultimately a waste of time and talent. It astounds me that backer claims to have FDA citations but offers only links to bizarre or tenuously related sites. It is impossible to comprehend his/her object in these posts. Grenade thrower? Dung stirrer? Certainly neither explaining a cogent point of view nor attempting to understand your clearly stated argument is on the menu.
@ Dr. Crislip
It is not you who is missing something. Apparently Norrinn Radd is not the only inhabitant of Zenn-La.
Thank you, windriven. Though last evening I was biding my time while waiting for teenage daughter to let me shovel out her room. Dealing with backer was the lesser of two evils.
We still need to deal with daughter room (we are attempting to move her into bigger room being vacated by brother who now lives at college).
@ backer
The silver issue seems to be pretty well put to rest but I wanted to put in my 0.2 on honey.
If you think this is some kind of magical cure for a dirty wound you need only take a basic course that involves concepts such as tonicity and osmosis and you will find that its based on a well understood biological phenomena. Just because it “comes from nature” doesn’t make mystical. You can do the same thing with sugar, or just about any other benign water soluble molecule.
On another note, first time reader and poster. Pretty excited to have found a site like this.
Cheers!
windriven, chris
how many times do i have to mention that i am not touting this stuff? you both seem to think i believe it works without question.
i am EXTREMELY skeptical about things like silver sol. however when i present it as a new possibility i am faced with animosity. I cannot figure out why? oh wait, i know it is because you are all followers, and you have no creative initiative, you have no vision, and you will never be a leader. It is helpful to have dissenters though since it is a motivating factor. Sadly, however dissenters are the ones that get stepped on while leaders are heading to the top, then they bitch that they got passed over.
these links are the reason i posted the subject in the first place, i am trying to push you lemmings into getting out of line and do something useful, like these people are.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008NRL…..3..129R
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18505176
http://www.physorg.com/news124376552.html
http://www.physorg.com/news7264.html
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/151947.php
All the kings horses-
it is funny that you say this because i have a friend who is an orthopedic surgeon. I asked him once if they ever used honey in wound dressing. I have been using it for years on cuts and scraps, and thought he would know about it as well. Instead he laughed at me, and actually thought i was joking, after assuring him i was quite serious, he just thought i was crazy. He would poke fun at me almost every time he saw me about the honey, that is until his hospital ordered honey impregnated bandages. So apparently they don’t teach the…”basic course that involves concepts such as tonicity and osmosis” in medical school or in residency.
“So apparently they don’t teach the…”basic course that involves concepts such as tonicity and osmosis” in medical school or in residency.”
Maybe he slept through or skipped that class?
weing-
It does seem like a disinfectant and from what i have been able to dig up it seems middle of the pack. i saw on chart comparing it to alcohol, bleach, etc. (i just can’t seem to find it again) and it was middle of the pack behind the usual suspects. I however am more interested in things like these…
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008NRL…..3..129R
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18505176
http://www.physorg.com/news124376552.html
http://www.physorg.com/news7264.html
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/151947.php
it seems as though it might hold promise for something more
More appropriate discussion at Hi Ho Silver.
@ backer et al
Give me a frigging break. Do you ever do honest research or do you just regurgitate stuff that you pick up on wacko-loon sites? Or do you just make this stuff up?
Serious researchers have investigated the use of honey as a wound dressing – an age old remedy. In one recent blinded RCT studying honey in wound care, no advantages were found and: “More patients in the honey-treated group reported ≥1 adverse event and ulcer pain than in the usual care group (table).”
Evid Based Nurs 2008;11:87 doi:10.1136/ebn.11.3.87
As even Yogi Berra reputedly noted, “you could look it up.”
Now isn’t it time for your thorazine?
chris-
I have a post “awaiting moderation” i guess if you provide links it goes into moderation? But while we are waiting i would like to ask you this. If you or one of you family members were to catch the flu would you take tamiflu or would you consider an “alternative medicine” like sambucol?
sambucol- no known side effects
Tamiflu-(listed below)
I have first hand experience with this one…
Torsade de pointes (a serious rapid heart rhythm/”ventricular tachycardia” accompanied by an EKG abnormality)
After taking tamiflu as a prophylaxis last year when my wife and child had the flu, I experienced this. This is what lead me to distrust allopathic medicine. I do still think doctors, for the most part, do a great job and are a good sources of knowledge. However they are simply too busy to research all of the “remedies” out there so most often you get prescribed the en vouge prescription.
Tamiflu-
Dry mouth occurs from 4% to 36% of cases
Nausea occurs from 15% to 36% of cases
Increased sweating occurs from 5% to 34% of cases
Ejaculation problems occurs from 13% to 28% of cases
- in males
Urogenital malformations (birth defects involving the reproductive organs and urinary tract) occurs from 13% to 28% of cases
Headache occurs from 15% to 27% of cases
Drowsiness occurs from 9% to 24% of cases
- in men and women
Insomnia and other sleep problems occurs from 8% to 24% of cases
- in men and women
Muscle weakness occurs from 14% to 22% of cases
Diarrhea occurs from 6% to 19% of cases
Constipation occurs from 5% to 16% of cases
Decreased sex drive occurs from 3% to 15% of cases
- in men and women
Dizziness occurs from 7% to 14% of cases
- in men and women
Stomach/upper abdominal discomfort occurs from 2% to 13% of cases
Loss of appetite occurs from 2% to 12% of cases
Mania (an emotional disorder with an exagerated feeling of well-being and hyperactivity – can cause racing thoughts; distraction; increased sexual urges; sleeplessness; irritability; anger; delusions; hyper-religiosity; talkativeness; rapid speech; buying sprees; grandiose plans; abnormally elevated mood) occurs in 11% of cases
Tremor (shakiness that has a regular “back-and-forth” rhythm) occurs from 4% to 11% of cases
- in men and women
Impotence (inability to achieve an erection or to ejaculate) occurs from 2% to 9% of cases
- in males
Nervousness (easily excited or agitated) occurs from 2% to 9% of cases
- in men and women
Accidental injury occurs from 3% to 8% of cases
Gas/gassiness occurs from 4% to 8% of cases
Infection occurs from 6% to 8% of cases
Sinusitis (infection/inflammation of the sinuses) occurs from 4% to 8% of cases
Abdominal pain occurs from 4% to 7% of cases
Breathing problems occurs in 7% of cases
Lung damage/destruction occurs in 7% of cases
Lung diseases occurs in 7% of cases
Agitation/excitation occurs from 2% to 5% of cases
Anxiety (fear or dread out of proportion to situation – often with restlessness, tension, pounding/rapid heartbeats, or rapid breathing) occurs from 2% to 5% of cases
Back pain occurs from 3% to 5% of cases
Distortion of vision occurs from 2% to 5% of cases
Muscle pain/soreness occurs from 2% to 5% of cases
Yawning occurs from 2% to 5% of cases
Abnormal dreams occurs from 1% to 4% of cases
- in men and women
Blurred vision occurs in 4% of cases
Burning, prickling, tickling or tingling occurs from 1% to 4% of cases
- in men and women
Inability to concentrate occurs from 2% to 4% of cases
- in men and women
Inflammation of the nasal passages (rhinitis) occurs from 3% to 4% of cases
Numbness or tingling (”pins and needles”) occurs from 1% to 4% of cases
- in men and women
Sore throat/throat irritation occurs in 4% of cases
Vasodilation/widening of the blood vessels (may cause a drop in blood pressure) occurs from 2% to 4% of cases
Chest pain or tightness occurs in 3% of cases
Depersonalization (”unreal” feeling, or loss of sense of identity) occurs in 3% of cases
Extreme muscle tension occurs from 2% to 3% of cases
- in men and women
Heart palpitations (irregular rapid beating or pulsations of the heart) occurs from 2% to 3% of cases
Increased appetite occurs in 3% of cases
Muscle spasms occurs from 1% to 3% of cases
- in men and women
Skin rash occurs from 2% to 3% of cases
Urinary tract infection occurs in 3% of cases
Vomiting occurs from 2% to 3% of cases
Weight gain occurs in 3% of cases
Abnormal accommodation (adjustment of lens shape to achieve proper focus) occurs in 2% of cases
Abnormal menstrual bleeding (in females) occurs in 2% of cases
Allergic reaction to drugs occurs in less than 2% of cases
Bronchitis (inflammation/infection of the upper airways – may cause cough; sputum) occurs from 1% to 2% of cases
Change in taste sensation occurs in 2% of cases
Cough occurs from 1% to 2% of cases
Depression occurs in 2% of cases
Distortion of taste/abnormal taste occurs in 2% of cases
High blood pressure occurs in 2% of cases
Joint pain occurs in 2% of cases
Lack of emotion occurs in 2% of cases
Mania (an emotional disorder with an exagerated feeling of well-being and hyperactivity – can cause racing thoughts; distraction; increased sexual urges; sleeplessness; irritability; anger; delusions; hyper-religiosity; talkativeness; rapid speech; buying sprees; grandiose plans; abnormally elevated mood) occurs in less than 2% of cases
- especially in people with bipolar disorder (psychiatry diagnosis with rapidly changing moods – from depression to abnormal mood elevations)
Memory loss occurs from 1% to 2% of cases
- in men and women
Muscle destruction/damage (”myopathy” – can cause muscle pain/achiness, weakness or tenderness; and abnormal blood test for creatine kinase) occurs in 2% of cases
Shaking chills occurs in 2% of cases
Skin sensitivity to sunlight (photosensitivity) occurs in 2% of cases
Vaginitis (inflammation of the vagina) occurs in 2% of cases
Vertigo (dizziness, loss of balance, feeling that the room is spinning) occurs in 2% of cases
- in men and women
Fast pulse/rapid heart rate (frequent)
Itching (common)
Sleep disturbances (frequent)
- in men and women
Torsade de pointes (a serious rapid heart rhythm/”ventricular tachycardia” accompanied by an EKG abnormality called “QT prolongation” – almost always caused by a medication) (common)
Paxil CR has sometimes caused these symptoms, but the percentage of occurrences is unknown. Please note: no drug should be ruled out as causing symptoms, even if the symptom is not listed.
Abdominal bleeding
Abnormal blood tests – hypophosphatemia (a decrease in phosphorus levels – when severely low may cause muscle weakness, tingling sensations, tremors, and bone weakness, confusion, memory loss, seizures, and coma)
Abnormal blood test – high “alkaline phosphatase” levels (usually due to liver, bone or kidney condition)
Abnormal blood test – high CPK (creatine phosphokinase) levels
Abnormal blood tests – increased number of gamma globulins (proteins in the blood involved in the immune response)
Abnormal breaths sounds – stridor (high-pitched, noisy breathing sound heard with a stethoscope when airways are narrowed or blocked)
Abnormal increase in blood levels of ketones (usually occurs in people with diabetes when blood sugar is very high)
Abnormal kidney blood test – elevated “BUN”
Abnormal lymphocytes (type of infection-fighting white blood cell – may predispose to infections)
Abnormal production of breast milk (without nursing or having given birth)
Abnormal thinking
Abnormal walk
Abnormally low blood sugar
Abnormally sensitive/increased hearing due to nerve irritation
Abscess (collection of pus) that starts in a hair follicle
Acne
Acute kidney failure
Aggressive/violent behavior
- when the drug is stopped or dose is decreased
Agranulocytosis (a severe sudden deficiency of white blood cells – may cause serious infections, sudden fever, chills)
Alcohol/drug-related problems
Alcoholism
Allergic reactions (may include a sudden severe drop in blood pressure; rapid heart rate; skin rash, itching, hives; itchy, runny, congested nose; red itchy, watery eyes; shortness of breath, wheezing, cough, hoarseness, chest tightness; nausea, vomiting, abdominal cramps, diarrhea; irritation of the stomach and esophagus)
Amblyopia – decreased vision in one eye (due to such large differences in the two eyes that the brain cannot process images coming from both) – may occur due to drugs or when eyes point in diferent directions
Anaphylaxis (a severe allergic reaction – that usually occurs quickly and includes flushing or reddening, rapid heart rate, chest tightness, difficulty breathing, or faintness)
Anemia (low levels of “hemoglobin” – a substance in red blood cells which carries oxygen)
Anemia (low red blood cell count)
Anemia due to iron deficiency
Angioedema (an allergic reaction that can involve sudden hive-like swelling of the skin, face, lips, tongue, throat; swollen arms and legs; difficulty breathing)
Antisocial behavior
Aphasia (inability to speak or to understand speech – usually due to a stroke or other brain condition)
Aplastic anemia (anemia due to decreased bone marrow function)
Arthritis (joint inflammation)
Asthma
Behavior changes (2 case(s))
- when the drug is stopped or dose is decreased
Bipolar disorder (psychiatry diagnosis with rapidly changing moods – from depression to abnormal mood elevations)
Bladder infection
Bleeding between menstrual periods/spotting (in females)
Bleeding from stomach ulcer
Bleeding gums
Bleeding into the retina (light-sensitive lining at the back of the eyeball)
Bleeding problems
Blistering rash
Blockage of the intestines (may cause severe spasms of pain, abdominal distention, vomiting, absence of bowel movement, fever and dehydration)
Blood abnormality – high eosinophil count
Blood clot in lung
Blood clots
Blood clots in the lungs
Blood in stools
Blood test abnormalities – Increased bleeding time
Bloody diarrhea
Bloody or black stools
Bloody urine
Body spasm
Bone marrow problems (with abnormal white or red blood cell counts)
Breast atrophy/wasting away or decrease in size
Breast enlargement
Breast inflammation
Breast pain/tenderness
Bruising
Bruxism (clenching or grinding of teeth)
Bulimia (eating disorder with binge eating, often followed by self-induced vomiting)
Bundle branch block (condition in which the electrical impulses in the heart are blocked to delayed – may cause fainting, near-fainting, or slowed heart rate)
Burning, or tingling sensation around the mouth (perioral paresthesias)
Burning, prickling, tickling or tingling (single study)
- when the drug is stopped or dose is decreased
Burping/belching/gassiness
Bursitis (inflammation of the joint lining)
Canker sores
Cataracts
Changes in electrical activity in the heart – “heart block” (may cause slow heart beat; dizziness; faintness/fainting; light-headedness; weakness; shortness of breath; chest pain)
Changes/problems with sexual performance
Chest discomfort/angina
Cholinergic side effects (caused by drugs that stimulate the part of the nervous system – “autonomic nervous system” – that controls muscles of the internal organs such as the heart, stomach, glands, and blood vessels – can cause a drop in blood pressure, abdominal cramps, bloody diarrhea, and shock/stoppage of the heart)
Chorea (irregular rapid jerky movements usually affecting the face and limbs) (13 case(s))
- even with a single dose
Choreoathetosis (irregular rapid jerking movements of the face and limbs accompanied by slow, constant writhing movements)
Cogwheel rigidity (muscle stiffness in which attempt to force a limb to bend results in a jerking motion – occurs in people with Parkinson’s disease)
Colitis (inflammation of the large intestines)
Confusion/disorientation occurs in 1% of cases
- in men and women
Congestive heart failure (symptoms may include shortness of breath, swelling of the legs, weight gain, shortness of breath worsened by lying down, awakening from sleep short of breath, dizziness, consusion, sweating)
Contact dermatitis – an allergic reaction caused by contact
Coordination problems (”ataxia”)
Coronary artery disease (heart disease that involve the blood supply to the heart)
Coughing up blood
Cutaneous vasculitis (inflammation of small blood vessels that affect the skin and cause rash, but may involve other organs of the body as well) (2 case(s))
Deafness
Decrease in REM sleep (the sleep time during which dreaming occurs) (single study)
Decreased ability to initiate (start) movement (such as with Parkinson’s disease)
Decreased blood flow to the brain
Decreased bone density (thinning of bones or “osteoporosis”)
Decreased movement or activity
Decreased night vision
Decreased or slowed movement
Decreased oxygen to the heart due to blockage of the coronary arteries (blood vessels that supply the heart)
Decreased reflexes
Decreased sensitivity to touch
Decreased sweating
Dehydration
Delirium (abnormal mental function – such as confusion; disorientation; hallucinations; agitation; or extreme excitement – usually caused by a disease or drug intoxication)
Delusions (strongly held thoughts/ideas that are not consistent with reality)
Dental cavities
Destruction/death of liver tissue (a few cases reported)
Diabetes
Diarrhea
- when the drug is stopped or dose is decreased
Difficulty reaching orgasm
Difficulty starting urination/delay in urination
Difficulty walking
- when the drug is stopped or dose is decreased
Digestive tract inflammation
Digestive tract problems
Digestive tract ulcers
Discomfort (pain, burning, etc.) with urination
Disruption in sleep cycle – reduced sleep time (single study)
Disruption of sleep cycle – changes in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep (single study)
Disruption of sleep cycle – increased awakenings (single study)
Dizziness (single study)
- when the drug is stopped or dose is decreased
Double vision
Drooping eyelid(s)
Drug dependence (potential for drug abuse)
Drug withdrawal symptoms (develop when drug is stopped – may include agitation, restlessness, anxiety, depression, insomnia, tremor, increased blood pressure, nausea, abdominal cramps, blurred vision, seizures, sweating)
Dry skin
Dysarthria (difficulty articulating words due to impairment in the muscles used in s
@ Chris
In my experience it is often cost effective to rent a backhoe when emptying out a teen’s room. It saves time and in cases where teenage boys are involved, it keeps you at a reasonable distance from noxious odors.
windriven-
then explain away these…
http://www.dermasciences.com/showpage.php?sid=48&id=1&pid=37&show=p
Ah poor pathetic slacker, including links does not flag moderation. We post links all the time to journal articles and related sites.
While I do not speak for Chris, I would not routinely think of Tamiflu in the event of influenza. Most cases are managed with proper hydration, fever management, and OTC meds for symptomatic relief. In the unfortunate circumstance of life threatening course I would seek treatment by a pus whisperer with an MD and careful adherence to science based medicine principles. I am confident that sambucol (an extract of elderberries) would not be part of the therapy.
On the other hand I highly recommend elderberries for jam or in pies. They’re tiny berries that grow in clusters somewhat reminiscent of Queen Anne’s Lace. They’re a pain to remove from the stems. And I recommend latex or nitrile gloves and an apron because the deep purple juice stains hands and clothing alike. But the resulting confections are worth every bit of the time and trouble.
@ slacker
“then explain away these…”
Happily.
1. The site that you linked to is a manufacturer of honey dressings and all of the posters are presented in exactly the same style suggesting that they are recreations of the original posters and may or may not reflect the original poster accurately;
2. The site claims the PDFs as “Peer-reviewed clinical posters.” But posters are not peer-reviewed; they are used to present research – often early and incomplete – that has not been published in peer-reviewed journals. I did not read each of the posters on the site but I read the first three. Did you? They don’t suggest that honey is superior to other treatments. They are not the results or large or blinded studies. They are interesting clinical observations;
3. No one on this site to the best of my knowledge has suggested that honey is terrible – only that honey has not been demonstrated to offer better results than therapies currently in use.
Now how about telling us what exactly your point is? Answering your poorly framed and barely-documented ‘challenges’ is tiresome and increasingly pointless. If you are trying to have one of these alternate therapies seriously discussed on these pages, frame your challenge meaningfully.
I am coming to believe that you actually do not understand the scientific method and that we therefore do not share a common language in which to debate.
Can you understand that if, for instance, I eat a salad for lunch on Tuesday and find a one dollar bill on the sidewalk when I leave the restaurant and then have salad again on Friday and, mirable dictu!, find another dollar bill on the sidewalk when I leave, that in scientific terms that does not constitute proof that eating salad is the true path to wealth?
backer,
All that means is that sambucol has not been tested to the degree that tamiflu has. Do you know what percentage of people taking sambucol have accidents or experience flatulence? I don’t. There is no data. You cannot make the claim that there are no side effects from it unless you do the studies.
backer,
Are you asking practicing physicians to use untested and unproven treatments on their patients? Forget about it. I am not conducting research on my patients. I am not set up for that. Too much red tape to make it practical for me. I leave that to academic centers.
Tamiflu mentioned here in a link so that slacker can just click on it
Thanks windriven. There will be a backhoe to dig out the driveway of the house being built next door, perhaps I should borrow it.
weing-
that is why i said no KNOWN side effects
there are tests to the efficacy of sambucol, on pubmed…small test but none the less it shows to be promising, they are also currently undergoing a much larger test with the product. Also i am sure that if the side effects where as severe as the ones listed with tamiflu we we DEFINITELY know about them, as hundreds of millions of bottles have been sold. what i am saying. i personally have used it in my family with TREMENDOUS results.
windriven-
here i will post it again, scroll a little farther until you get the the “Peer-reviewed journal articles” section
http://www.dermasciences.com/showpage.php?sid=48&id=1&pid=37&show=p
windriven-
oh and in case you miss this one…
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17927079?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
No known side effects means that we don’t know what they are.
I do not practice anecdote based medicine. That is dangerous. There is such a thing as standard of care. Should something go wrong, I’d be legally screwed. I’ll wait for the study results. BTW, how do you know your results were tremendous. I’ve had the flu, taken nothing but symptomatic treatment and rest. Should I call the result tremendous?
What exactly do you believe the Blaser paper to mean? To quote the abstract:
Full healing was achieved in seven consecutive patients whose wounds were either infected or colonised with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Antiseptics and antibiotics had previously failed to irradicate the clinical signs of infection
Did you read my earlier post about finding a dollar bill? I am unwilling to spend 10 pounds sterling to read the entire article but it is clear from the abstract that this is an interesting clinical observation, not a randomized controlled study.
I will say again, no one here is arguing that honey is evil, only that it is not a proven clinical treatment. The study of honey in wound treatment may well be a profitable inquiry. That does not mean that it should be a first line of therapy today.
You may recall that there was a time that an extract of peach or apricot pits was touted as a cure for some cancers. There are proponents of all sorts of treatments and therapies AND VERY OFTEN ONE CAN FIND ANECDOTAL STUDIES to support their use. But generally these, upon rigorous investigation, are found to be worthless. Do you seriously suggest that those entrusted with our health care should jump on every half-witted miracle berry extract or folk remedy eschew scientifically vetted therapies in their favor? If, for instance, your child were thus treated and promptly succumbed, would you tell your physician, ce’est la vie, I guess honey only works in cases of …
windriven-
ok here you go…
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18666717?itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum&ordinalpos=5
No i suggest using discernment to determine if there might be a better alternative to big pharma. If there is…then use it, thats all. It seems in the case of honey as wound care that it might be merited for an MD to try it as a remedy.
Tabby on a crutch! Did you read the abstracts of any of these?
“here i will post it again, scroll a little farther until you get the the “Peer-reviewed journal articles” section
http://www.dermasciences.com/showpage.php?sid=48&id=1&pid=37&show=p”
They relate interesting clinical observations about wound care and honey. That, dear reader, is the BEGINNING of the process, not the end.
The most compelling of the publications you offered, J Clin Nurs. 2009 Feb;18(3):466-74. Epub 2008 Aug 23., concluded thusly: “RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE: This study confirms that Manuka honey may be considered by clinicians for use in sloughy venous ulcers.” And even this is based on an unblinded study.
The other interesting study that included a reasonably large test population (still only 100 patients) J Am Soc Nephrol. 2005 May;16(5):1456-62, demonstrated only that honey was no better than standard chemoprophylaxis in patients with central venous catheters.
So again, read this stuff before you post it as proof that honey is some sort of miracle preparation.
What many of these papers demonstrate is that science based medicine is open to the potential of treatments like honey, that the potential mechanisms of action are being investigated and that science is doing exactly what it is supposed to do.
What exactly are you proposing?
This will be my last post on this thread. I’m growing weary.
“No i suggest using discernment to determine if there might be a better alternative to big pharma. If there is…then use it, thats all. It seems in the case of honey as wound care that it might be merited for an MD to try it as a remedy.”
The study you cite, J Wound Care. 2008 Jun;17(6):241-4, 246-7, is an RCT but not apparently blinded. If you read the abstract you will find that the study suggested that honey was more effective than hydrogel in treating MRSA but less effective in treating pseudomonas aeruginosa.
Is it your position that AquaMed is BIG PHARMA and Derma Sciences is small pharma? Is there some importance to chosing small pharma over big pharma? Should an MD try honey in cases of venous leg ulcers or in wound treatment in general? And when should the MD have included honey in his/her armamentarium? Based on what?
Honey advocates have made some interesting observations and conducted some preliminary studies. This is a wonderful thing and may lead to important clinical advances. But the finish line is still a long way off.
weing-
point taken…maybe i should say no side effect observed to date.
I appreciate your position here, but let me ask you. Lets say your arent fully comfortable with something like tamiflu because of the side effects. Would you be willing to “suggest” something like sambucol? after all there are studies to verify that your suggestions
my 3 yr daughter had a confirmed case of the flu (along with my wife, who gave it to my daughter). I gave her sambucol because i wasnt comfortable with the side effects of tamiflu in children. she had a fever for exactly 1.5 days, and no symptoms on day 3. I consider that tremendous. Oh, and my wife who got nothing was sick for 8 days. my daughter, who caught the flu from my wife, was actually well before my wife.
here is one of the studies…there was another done in norway but i don’t have time to find it right now.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11399518
“here is one of the studies…there was another done in norway but i don’t have time to find it right now.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11399518”
The most striking increase was noted in TNF-alpha production (44.9 fold). We conclude from this study that, in addition to its antiviral properties, Sambucol Elderberry Extract and its formulations activate the healthy immune system by increasing inflammatory cytokine production.”
Backer The anecdote and the in vitro studies mean little. This outcome in healthy people should arouse concern. How do you know thaT
windriven-
please show me where i proposed this.
agree 100%
so what do we do in the mean time? throw a potentially promising treatment out the window because it doesnt have enough proof? where the hell does that get us…nowhere. Your position is self defeating, you propose that this is promising but we shouldnt use it until it has more proof, so if we shouldnt use it how can we get more proof?
I am almost positive i am taking you out of context…how does it feel?
this does not represent a sterotyped response of the body to a noxious influence of this drug?
Sorry about the split post. Here it is joined up–
“here is one of the studies…there was another done in norway but i don’t have time to find it right now.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11399518”
The most striking increase was noted in TNF-alpha production (44.9 fold). We conclude from this study that, in addition to its antiviral properties, Sambucol Elderberry Extract and its formulations activate the healthy immune system by increasing inflammatory cytokine production.”
Backer The anecdote and the in vitro studies mean little. This outcome in healthy people should arouse concern. How do you know that this does not represent a sterotyped response of the body to a noxious influence of this drug?
It has been quite difficult to ascertain your point in this thread. If I have mischaracterized your position about honey I apologize. But I reiterate that I have no idea what your actual point is. I will take this to be the thrust, at least at this moment:
“so what do we do in the mean time? throw a potentially promising treatment out the window because it doesnt have enough proof? where the hell does that get us…nowhere. Your position is self defeating, you propose that this is promising but we shouldnt use it until it has more proof, so if we shouldnt use it how can we get more proof?”
And here you are 100% wrong. As weing has noted routine clinical practice is different from practice in a research setting. Until both the potentially beneficial and the potentially harmful ’side effects’ of this or any other therapy are clearly elucidated, they have no place in routine clinical practice.
A few generations ago a promising therapy for ‘morning sickness’ was widely prescribed in Europe. The result was a plague of devastating birth defects. The therapeutic agent was called thalidomide. This from Wikipedia: “The impact in the United States was minimized when pharmacologist and M.D. Frances Oldham Kelsey refused Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for an application from Richardson Merrell to market thalidomide, saying more study was needed.”
In the US a relatively small number of children were born thus handicapped – only because of the insistence on following proper scientific protocols before wide adoption.
And I don’t want to hear that honey or elderberry juice or acai or anything else is ‘natural’ and therefore gets to play by different rules. BS of the vilest form. Foxglove is a natural and beautiful flower. It contains digitalis, a powerful cardiac glycoside that can kill as easily as it can benefit. It became an immensely useful drug only because of careful scientific study and the isolation, purification, and controlled dosage of the compound.
Does anyone else want a discussion of measles, vaccines, infectious disease, etc.
Maybe Backer’s point was to change the subject.
“so what do we do in the mean time? throw a potentially promising treatment out the window because it doesnt have enough proof? where the hell does that get us…nowhere.”
No, we wait for the studies. It takes 10 years and close to a $1 billion to get a new drug on the market. That’s the way it is. Lots of promising drugs and treatments but you gotta do the studies.
“maybe i should say no side effect observed to date.”
No. It means no studies have been done to look for side effects. Not the same thing at all.
backer is now just another off-topic troll who wanders from subject to subject. What is really weird is he posts links that are essentially nothing (one was a “file not found”), so he is just copying and pasting from some sales site without even reading them himself.
Time to ignore the troll.
Though right now a common jokey comment from a college friend is going through my mind: “Your mother wears army boots and your breath smells of elderberries!”
But why should we expect a five minute Internet interchange to overturn deeply ingrained attitudes/beliefs – especially when the subject is as complex as medicine and simmering under the surface there are always little germs of dimly understood truth?
Certainly some (like Tim Bolen, and some others I could mention) are patently insincere. They just want to stir the pot, jerk chains, and create a faint but false climate of doubt within which ridiculous notions and knowing fraud can seem worthy of consideration. They are very few, I think. Others are simply testing their beliefs, or perhaps half-held tentative beliefs against what they perceive to be the opposition.
So we need patience, politeness, and especially not going beyond what the science actually permits us to say with confidence. Not easy, I know. But there is less frustration when short-term expectations are low.
weing-
“No, we wait for the studies. It takes 10 years and close to a $1 billion to get a new drug on the market. That’s the way it is. Lots of promising drugs and treatments but you gotta do the studies.”
Medihoney it is already FDA approved so now what are we waiting for?
chris-
i dont know if it will work this time but here is the 404 link.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008NRL…..3..129R
So what, it is still off topic. Sorry, Dr. Moran, but believe no one should respond to him except at the appropriate place.
Now you sound like a big-pharma shill for Medihoney.
I would want comparison studies. If they are available and look good, I would have no problem with it. Most of the time I refer tough to treat wounds to the wound clinic around the corner.
Mark Crislip,
“My kids are vaccinated and in schools where vaccine rates are high. My kids are safe. I would have thought the same thing.”
Not so fast.
Measles outbreak in a fully immunized secondary-school population
We conclude that outbreaks of measles can occur in secondary schools, even when more than 99 percent of the students have been vaccinated and more than 95 percent are immune.
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/316/13/771
windriven-
I have a tendency to skip the point and just dive into the details. My wife hates this. I also do it sometimes just to see the response to the idea. Sorry if i caused confusion. So now to my point. It seems to me that almost every other article on this site is about vaccines. I don’t really want to get into the whole vaccine debate since it has been beaten to death. that is why i made the disclaimer in the beginning.
what i can’t understand is why so much attention is given to vaccines instead of treatment options. Who cares about vaccines there are people in the developing world dying of measles right now, they need treatments, not vaccines. Tell me how many treatment options are there for measles? Exactly zero. So it seems to me that ANYTHING that shows promise should be tried, especially in developing countries. If there are no other options what do we lose? That is why i mentioned silver sol. I have no idea if it works or if it is even a viable option, it does however seem to show promise, even if it is just anecdotal. So why doesnt someone grow a pair and start giving it to sick people?
Often time people want too much evidence, at some point you just have to try a bunch of new things and see what works.
weing-
now that is the last thing i want to do.
then you are a smart person, this is all that can be expected, and i appreciate your opinion on the matter.
Why are we looking for treatment for measles when we have a great vaccine? (Sorry, you can’t hijack an article on vaccines and try to change the subject because your tired of talking about vaccines – take it somewhere more appropriate.)
Isn’t science-based medicine criticized for treating “symptoms” instead of the cause of disease or instead of preventing disease (total BS, btw)? Why the heck we would wait until people are sick with measles to do something? Increase accessibility and utilization of the vaccine!
Thing1Thing2, the last time you posted that study you were told that was before there was a two MMR vaccine schedule. Did you forget that? This should jog your memory:
I have responded to backer on the appropriate thread. If he dislikes the content of the posts, then he does not have to read them. Take a look at the list on the right hand side of this page. It shows the topics, with the number of posts devoted to each (some are counted twice because there can be multiple tags on one post). You will see that vaccines has 105 posts. Compare that to the following subjects which all have more posts:
Clinical Trials (108)
Politics and Regulation (140)
Public Health (106)
Science and Medicine (334)
Science and the Media (158)
Even though this posting is tagged with both “vaccines” and “Science and Medicine”, you will see that the latter has three times as many posts. If every other posting was on vaccines, it would be half the number of “Science and Medicine.” There are also several other topics that do not overlap “vaccines.” backer’s perception is biased.
backer-
What woofighter said.
I don’t know how old you are but when I was young both small pox and polio were devastating scourges. Smallpox has, for all intents and purposes, been banished from the face of the earth. Polio has ceased to be a problem everywhere that vaccination is universal. If there was a concerted effort, it too could be totally eradicated.
The best fire fighting strategy is fire prevention. Why treat people for measles or anything else that is easily preventable by vaccination? The cost is lower, the suffering is lower and the benefit is much higher.
I have whiplash from this thread: silver for measles, honey for wound care, prophylaxis versus unproven treatment. I’m going to pour myself a glass of very nice Barolo.
funny, as i was perusing the SBM posts i came across a gentleman that has summed up my point quite nicely. (well actually he rants a bit, but hopefully you can catch the drift)
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=473#comment-18672
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=473#comment-18743
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=473#comment-18835
Here in New Zealand we did have a significant increase in measles a few months ago. Approx 160 confirmed and more than 50 probable since May. Over 80% of cases were not completely vaccinated.
http://www.surv.esr.cri.nz/surveillance/WeeklyMeaslesRpt.php
I forgot to mention, NZ has a population of 4.2 million and in 2008 there were only 12 confirmed cases of measles.
SD never had much of a point either. He was mostly incoherent. Not something one should emulate. After reading one SD rant, I mostly ignored him.
But I looked more closely at your links, and realized I did not miss anything by ignoring him. Though now I understand why you are mostly incoherent.
Still waiting for the real data that shows that the MMR vaccine has more risks than measles, mumps rubella.
chris-
there is a fine line between incoherence and brilliance.
Trust me i can tell just by reading his rantings that SD is brilliant.
me too, wouldnt it be nice to have nice clean comparative data to look at? too bad there isnt, one thing i did find which i thought was interesting.
One of the statistics that is thrown about these days is that 1-3 out of 1000 die of measles in developed countries like the United States. If that is the case, however, it begs the question, “Why?” Because, in the past, at least in the United States, the death rate from measles was considerably lower. Prior to vaccination 3 to 4 million measles cases occurred with around 500 deaths. This would make the case-fatality rate .0001% exceedingly small. It makes me wonder why we even bothered.
In the years 1989, 1990 and 1991 combined, however, it was reported that around 55,000 people got the measles and 166 died, making the case-fatality ratio dramatically higher at .003% still small however a SUBSTANTIAL increase. At this rate, fewer than 175,000 cases per year would be necessary to result in the same number of deaths which used to occur when there were millions of cases. makes me wonder if the fatality rate increase is due to the vaccine?
backer-
unsubstantiated statistics that are “thrown about these days” are useless or worse. It you are going to quote statistics you must include a citation.
This is from the CDC:
“The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported yesterday that the rise in measles cases so far this year is mostly imported, due to infected people coming into the US from other countries.
For the seven years up to 2007, an average of 62 cases of measles a year have been reported to the CDC. But this year, up to 25th April, a total of 64 cases, 54 of which are imported from countries outside the US, have been reported. This is the highest number for this time of year since 2001, said the agency. 63 of the 64 patients had not been vaccinated.”
And this from the WHO:
“All regions, with the exception of one, have achieved the United Nations goal of reducing measles mortality by 90% from 2000 to 2010, two years ahead of target. Vaccinating nearly 700 million children against measles, through large-scale immunization campaigns and increased routine immunization coverage, has prevented an estimated 4.3 million measles deaths in less than a decade.”
Don’t make us do all of the research for you. And please read these quotes before you respond.
In your penultimate paragraph you cite 1-3:1000, .03-.1%. In the last paragraph you speak off 55k cases in three years with .003% fatalities. You compare apples (the US) with oranges (the world) and quote unattributed death statistics.
Dude, you have got to slow down and think before you write. People will not take you seriously if you rattle off like a string of firecrackers making a lot of noise but achieving nothing.
And when you say things like: “Trust me i can tell just by reading his rantings that SD is brilliant. ” you mark yourself for derision. SD may or may not be brilliant. If s/he is, s/he works hard to bury that brilliance under a large mound of steaming manure.
ok, here you go just read the opening paragraph
http://www.cdc.gov/measles/
no i didnt these are both US statistics.
i was actually being generous…
1950-1959
500,000 cases anually/ 500 total deaths
so it is actually more like 500/5,000,000
this is where i read it…
http://www.jstor.org/pss/4453053
please correct me if i am wrong
<blockquotAnd when you say things like: “Trust me i can tell just by reading his rantings that SD is brilliant. ” you mark yourself for derision. SD may or may not be brilliant. If s/he is, s/he works hard to bury that brilliance under a large mound of steaming manure.
brilliance has nothing to do with intelligence. I know some very intelligent people that are FAR from brilliant. I say SD is brilliant because his/her line or reasoning is forward thinking. Were Jackson Pollacks paintings brilliant for there content or their impact? I would have to go with the latter.
backer,
I think you should reread your citations. The JSTOR paper indicates 500 deaths per year, not total. That death rate closely matches the CDC figure.
Backer gave it away much earlier in this thread: “THIS is why i do not trust allopathic medicine, because it seems to be more about pride, than progress.” Using that term confirms he’s woo through and through.
Measles case mortality is a tricky subject. Back before the vaccine when it was widespread in the USA and other developed countries the reported incidence and the reported death rates ran to a case mortality of about 0.1% — but the reported cases were miniscule compared to any realistic estimate.
Now we have relatively few measles cases and much better reporting, and the case mortality is running somewhere in the 0.2% range. Even allowing for a disproportionate number of immunocompromised patients, this would suggest that the earlier figures underestimated deaths approximately as much as cases. The reasonable conclusion is that without vaccination, we could expect somewhere in the neighborhood of one death per 1000 population cohort — about 4000 per year in the USA.
In any given year influenza deaths total an order of magnitude higher — but that’s dominated by geriatric patients, where the measles deaths concentrate in the young. In terms of life-years lost, measles is far worse. That’s without considering the neurological sequelae from measles, which once caused the majority of deafness and blindness and a lot of brain damage.
@ backer
you touch on this concept a few times, notably sambucol:
“point taken…maybe i should say no side effect observed to date.”
You are dancing around gap science. you basically assert that because A=/=B and A =/= C, A must equal D. even if we have no proof, whats the harm in trying D? Right?
http://whatstheharm.net/
scott-
I was extrapolating from an article i had read before that said 3-4 million cases with 500 deaths. I couldnt seem to find it so i thought the jstor article was reading 500,000 annual cases with 500 total deaths, since that somewhat jived with what i had previously read. any way i found it
here is it i knew i wasnt crazy…
http://www.measlesinitiative.org/mi-files/Tools/Presentations/Partners%20for%20Measles%20Advocacy%20Meeting/Outbreaks_Emergencies/gallagher%20measles%20initiative%20talk.ppt
look for “Annual Measles Disease Burden
United States, 1950s”
eric G-
but to humor you, here is a source that you might trust about it
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/natural/patient-elder.html
I am actually really glad i found this because our government rates it as a B for influenza
B=Good scientific evidence for this use;
Maybe big brother isnt as dumb as i thought. I wonder why they havent been promoting it during the big flu scare?
hey weing-
in light of the NIH find, would you recommend sambucol?
@ backer-
” ok, here you go just read the opening paragraph
http://www.cdc.gov/measles/ ”
This is the first paragraph of the link you provided:
“Measles is a highly contagious respiratory disease caused by a virus. The disease of measles and the virus that causes it share the same name. The disease is also called rubeola.”
This is apropos of what exactly?
—
“no i didnt these are both US statistics.
i was actually being generous…
1950-1959
500,000 cases anually/ 500 total deaths”
backer, the years you cite are BEFORE routine vaccination started in the US (1963 if I remember correctly).
—
“this is where i read it…
http://www.jstor.org/pss/4453053
please correct me if i am wrong”
Happy to correct you. The article you cite is from 1983, more than 25 years ago. Today the figure is about 65 cases a year. I quote from the CDC:
The number of reported measles cases has declined from 763,094 in 1958 to fewer than 150 cases reported per year since 1997 (1). During 2000–2007,* a total of 29–116 measles cases (mean: 62, median: 56) were reported annually. However, during January 1–April 25, 2008, a total of 64 confirmed measles cases were preliminarily reported to CDC, the most reported by this date for any year since 2001. Of the 64 cases, 54 were associated with importation of measles from other countries into the United States, and 63 of the 64 patients were unvaccinated or had unknown or undocumented vaccination status.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm57e501a1.htm
—
“brilliance has nothing to do with intelligence.”
And finally, the definition of brilliant that I would use is something like this: having or showing great intelligence, talent, quality, etc. (dictionary.com). My previous statement vis a vis SD stands. SD is a rambling grenade tosser who generates much gas but little light. How does that equate with brilliance?
Repeating stuff I did for another thread where backer pushed information from dubious sites (healthsentinal):
Ooh, it took a bit but I found some real information on measles incidence in the first half of the 20th century. It is a table on page 9 of:
http://www.census.gov/prod/99pubs/99statab/sec31.pdf
I could cut and paste the pertinent part of the table and edit out the other diseases. The question is what happened between 1960 and 1970?
Year…. Rate per 100000 of population who got measles
1912 . . . 310.0
1920 . . . 480.5
1925 . . . 194.3
1930 . . . 340.8
1935 . . . 584.6
1940 . . . 220.7
1945 . . . 110.2
1950 . . . 210.1
1955 . . . 337.9
1960 . . . 245.4
1965 . . . 135.1
1970 . . . . 23.2
1975 . . . . 11.3
1980 . . . . . 5.9
1985 . . . . . 1.2
1990 . . . . .11.2
1991 . . . . . .3.8
1992 . . . . . .0.9
1993 . . . . . .0.1
1994 . . . . . .0.4
1995 . . . . . .0.1
1996 . . . . . .0.2
1997 . . . . . 0.1
@Chris-
Fabulous work! Look at the way measles incidence crashes after mass vaccinations began!
@backer-
Repeat after me: I will not drink the Kool-Aid, I will not drink …
windriven, chris
oops second paragraph
http://www.cdc.gov/measles/
this was my intention, i am little confused, i thought you were a little more adept than this, or maybe its me not clearly explaining my position. either way here goes again
my theory is that measles is more lethal now than PRIOR to vaccination, possibly as a result of vaccinations changing the epidemiology of measles.
so here goes…
measles cases PROIR to vaccination 3-4 million annually with 500 deaths
as i explained to scott, i couldnt find the original doc. that revealed the 3-4 million number. I extrapolated from the jstor article to get my numbers. i was thinking the jstor article was describing 500,000 annual cases and 500 TOTAL deaths, since this was somewhat in line with the previous article i read. however this did not seem to be what the jstor article was saying.
Either way it doesnt matter, I ended up finding the original doc. (with the 3-4 million number) and here it is, slide #3…
http://www.measlesinitiative.org/mi-files/Tools/Presentations/Partners%20for%20Measles%20Advocacy%20Meeting/Outbreaks_Emergencies/gallagher%20measles%20initiative%20talk.ppt
so BEFORE the vaccine was introduced the death rate in the US was about .0001% or 1 in 6000-8000
CURRENTLY in the US the death rate is estimated at .001-.003% or 1-3 in 1000
so a minimum of 6 times deadlier than it used to be. this increase could be attributed to one of many possibilities including but not limited to vaccine usage changing the epidemiology of measles.
was that clear?
It is just a theory, and by no means to i firmly believe this to be the case. It does however, IMO, justify further investigation.
Good gravy backer, let the clutch out!
Pre-vaccination you were looking at a fatality rate across the entire cross-section of the American population. Now you are looking at the fatality rate among mostly (see earlier posts for citation) recent immigrants, some of whom may be undocumented, and some others who belong to religious or social cults that eschew SBM in favor of homeopathy or other quackery. No sh*t – they’re more likely to die. By what stretch of the imagination do you intuit this to reflect increasing lethality of the virus?
No jumping around on your answer now backer. Just stick to one theme here and I’ll be willing to work through it with you. But I’m not interested in going off on a merry chase that bounces from one notion to another.
Look at it this way: the lethality for a vaccinated member of a herd with immunity and in a culture that embraces SBM is, for every intent and purpose, ZERO!
windriven
i see no corollary here. It doesnt matter if the people dying are recent immigrants.
if there are 1000 documented cases of immigrants with measles and 3 die, my theory is still relevant. Even if no cases are reported from people indigenous to the US the fatality rate is what is relevant NOT where they are from.
uuuuuuh what do you think .0001% is? for every intent and purpose….ZERO! but for some reason we felt that zero wasnt good enough.
Dammit backer, did you bother to view the entire PowerPoint you linked to above??? The rebuttal to your thesis is right there in the graphs and accompanying text.
This seems ever so much like the embodiment of the adage that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. Except you have led yourself to the water!
Are you familiar with Occam’s Razor? Please go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
Please.
Of course sometimes the simple answer isn’t the right answer. But that puts one in the realm of making an extraordinary claim. And in that case it is incumbent on the claimant to provide extraordinary proof.
Oh backer, I tire of this. How on earth can you say:
“i see no corollary here. It doesnt matter if the people dying are recent immigrants.
if there are 1000 documented cases of immigrants with measles and 3 die, my theory is still relevant. Even if no cases are reported from people indigenous to the US the fatality rate is what is relevant NOT where they are from.”
The immigrants are largely un-vaccinated. Please review ALL of the slides in the very interesting PowerPoint that you linked to.
You have not addressed my objections at all. Un-vaccinated people and those who eschew SBM are at greater risk of dying than those who are vaccinated and who seek treatment from MDs. There is no conundrum, no inexplicable mortality, no nothing except the pathetic stupidity of those who refuse to avail themselves of the available technology.
windriven:
I looked at it twice, and I could not find a slide that dealt with only immigrants. Now I know that a couple of the incidents involving importation from Japan were not immigrants, but people who were temporarily visiting (the one in Grant County, WA was a church conference, and I remember another some other year was a participant of a Little League Tournament).
What was particularly interesting of the map of the State of Washington. The county (Yakima, which I heard pronounced in the most amusing way last week by Dr. Racanello on his 62nd TWiV podcast!) that has a large immigrant population from Mexico had one of the lowest levels of vaccine refusal.
Last week I got to meet a blogger from Mexico, http://papaesceptico.com/, at our local Drinking Skeptically. He told us that while Mexico has lots of fun superstitions and other issues, vaccines is not one of them. There is very high compliance. He is also not an immigrant, he was visiting his sister who may or may not be an immigrant (I believe she has some academic assignment at the university).
windriven-
you are revealing more about yourself than you know.
So? i don’t doubt the efficacy of MMR, i just think it is unwarranted.
So tell me oh surfeiter of vocabulary. If i do go to the doctor what will they give me for the measles?
second…do you realize people that take showers are at a greater risk of dying than those who do not?
Odds of fatally slipping in bath or shower: 1 in 2,232
Sooooooo, that being said a fatality rate of 1 in 6000 seems even more EXCEEDINGLY small when i have almost 3 times greater chance of dying in the shower. I wonder what pharma company is gonna make the “no shower slippy” vaccine.
backer, I have no idea what your last post is supposed to mean. Perhaps you are a genius of such depth that mere mortals such as myself have no hope of grasping your brilliance.
On the other hand, maybe you’re just off your meds.
Examine this sentence:
“i don’t doubt the efficacy of MMR, i just think it is unwarranted”
Now how can a sane person possibly parse that? You seem obsessed with the fatality rate of unvaccinated individuals, you say you don’t doubt the efficacy of the vaccine, but you nonetheless think the vaccine is unwarranted. Do you understand why I’m suffering cognitive dissonance?
So stay out of the shower, backer. But please, stay down wind.
or, like you suggest, i am just crazy, this may be true, but life is more interesting that way.
I really, really like random things that relate in particular ways. Particularly if that thing weighs about the same in relation to itself.
there…i am just crazy
easy…i do not doubt that the vaccine works, never have, just ask chris about it. We went round and round in another debate. I just fail to see why we need a vaccine (in the US) when the fatality rate is so low. that is why i related it to the shower slippage. I just have one simple question for you…
Do you REALLY think i should stop showering just because there is a slight risk of death by slippage?
if you said no, then WHY IN THE HELL do we need to prevent a disease that was 3 times less likely to kill me than my shower?
backer, the only time the MMR will be unwarranted will be when all three diseases cease to exist on the planet.
The slide show you linked showed that as long as measles exists and there is travel between countries the vaccine will be needed. Also, you will note that the outbreak in San Diego was caused by an [b]American[/b] kid who traveled to a developed country in Europe (Switzerland), and then infected a bunch of kids in his school, plus some too young to get vaccinated in a doctor’s office. That is shown on Slide #10.
You should also read the words under the slides. Here is what is said under Slide #8:
And Slide #9:
and Slide #12:
and Slide #13:
and Slide #22:
And Backer, don’t forget that deaths are only part of the story. Measles can be a very serious illness in the very young and in adults. Encephalitis can leave survivors with serious neurological disability and blindness.
It may be true that most healthy and well-nourished children will survive an attack of the measles, but we advise vaccination partly to protect more vulnerable members of the public.
If you do now agree that vaccination works, stand back a bit and look at the whole picture. The MMR vaccine can prevent a lot of human misery and disability, as well as the deaths.
@Backer: ask my mother if measles is harmless. While she (at age
survived them without too many problems, her 2 year old brother nearly died. The neighbor boy across the street, age 5, DID die of measles encephalitis. One of her classmates went deaf (at least, that’s what the class was told – that the one girl would be going to the state school for the deaf). They had 18 out of 25 2nd grade children (my mother’s class) out with measles within a 2 week period. Granted, this was in the 1940’s. However, it was in a city with good sewage, clean water, healthy food.
Ask my mother, her brother, the parents of her friends if they preferred the measles or having an MMR.
Oops..for the Smily, please read as …age 8). Hit the shift key a little too soon!
@ backer
“Do you REALLY think i should stop showering just because there is a slight risk of death by slippage?”
I really couldn’t care less. Your hygiene is your business. Personally, I shower daily.
“if you said no, then WHY IN THE HELL do we need to prevent a disease that was 3 times less likely to kill me than my shower?”
Because measles does kill, because it sometimes leads to permanent disabilities, and because it keeps children away from school, playgrounds and playing fetch with their dogs.
That is asking why someone would be vaccinated against the common cold, were such a vaccine available. Colds rarely kill. But they are a blight on the human condition. I for one would leap at the opportunity to be vaccinated.
Now getting back to the point, YOU should be vaccinated if for no other reason than to do your part in achieving herd immunity so that perhaps some day measles will go the way of smallpox. The risk to you is zero and the benefit to your fellow man is great.
pmoran-
yes i agree, and i think this is more unfortunate than death many times. however i still fail to see it’s warrant in the US.
This is a complete cop out, and again there is no corollary. People say this all the time but somehow it ONLY applies to vaccines. look all i am saying is that in any other circumstance “X” acitivity would be considered safe. let’s take a look…
all of these things are considered safe….
driving
walking
swimming
odds of dying from…(1 year odds)
driving 1 in 6,584
walking 1 in 48,420
swimming 1 in 83,365
measles (during their peak) 1 in 300,000
vaccines arent about helping humanity, they are about humanities desire for control. If we REALLY cared about humanity then we should have addressed driving, walking, and swimming before we tackled measles.
backer-
You neglect the simple reality that driving, walking and swimming all have utility to humans, measles does not. Further, mankind has and continues to address these issues. That’s why we have seatbelts, airbags, clothing with reflective stripes, life guards, and so forth.
And what are we to make of this bizarre locution: “vaccines arent about helping humanity, they are about humanities (sic) desire for control.”
Yes, humans do try to exert control over their environment. That is why we have agriculture, why we live in homes, why we have furnaces and computers. It is one of the characteristics that separates us from howler monkeys. It is why we have science and medicine. It is why the human lifespan has nearly doubled since the beginning of the 20th century.
Be careful in the shower, backer. It’s a dangerous place.
Having 1 in 1000 children die, and more be permanently disabled, is NOT enough to warrant use of the vaccine? If that’s your claim, please do elucidate what WOULD be enough.
In your answer, please keep in mind the fact that the only reason measles rates are currently low is thanks to widespread use of the vaccine. Without vaccination, very nearly every child will contract measles.
Please explain how this is anything other than comparing apples to aircraft carriers, given that deaths from measles may be very easily and safely prevented by vaccination, where there is no equivalent means to prevent road deaths.
Your comparison here completely neglects both risk/benefit and the existence of alternatives.
windriven-
your brightness is dimming…
ah, young one you are so naive. Your statement has no basis, this is what geneticists said about non-coding DNA 10 yrs ago. Hurricanes are another good example of why your statement is false. see here…
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907967,00.html
Biology is simply to vast and complex to know the true impact and possible benefits of something like the measles.
all of these thing would compare to medicine, NOT vaccine.
do seatbelts/airbags prevent accidents? no, but in case you get into one they can help.
let me put it another way…
does penicillin prevent disease? no but in case you get one they can help
do life guards prevent drowning? no they are there if you get into trouble
even your best one, clothing with reflective stripes. does this help during the day? nope
a vaccine comparison to automobiles goes something like this…
We noble citizens of the world are going to do humanity a huge favor, we think since cars cause a lot of death and injury we will ban their use, trust us it is for your own good.
vaccines and global warming could be brothers, we are witnessing humanities desire to control nature once again. Undoubtedly (IMO) it will do more harm than good.
I am sorry but there is no argument that you can propose that logically follows that measles arent safer than driving. It can’t be done i showed you FACTS not opinion. you can ignore the facts, or give excuses, either way, in the US, driving is far more dangerous that the measles. and that is a fact.
backer,
Let me extend your argument a bit. If I were to randomly shoot one person a year, the risk of dying from me shooting you would be far less than the risk of dying from measles in an unvaccinated world, and hugely less than the risk of dying in a car wreck.
Therefore, by your same reasoning, it’s perfectly fine for me to do that. The risk is smaller than others that are accepted, therefore it should be ignored and nothing done about it.
Please go learn at least a little bit about risk – including risk management and risk/benefit analysis – before continuing with such arguments. I’m not sure you realize it, but you’re doing an excellent job of embarrassing yourself from sheer cluelessness.
Measles is safer than driving. So what? That isn’t a reason not to try to prevent measles.
By the way, penicillin does prevent disease when used prophylactically. There are specific indications for that use.
In Backer’s “opinion,” vaccines will cause more harm than good by trying to control nature. Extending that argument, all of medical science constitutes trying to control nature and will cause more harm than good. He’s welcome to his opinions. We are welcome to ignore them.
backer
Ponder this exchange:
Me: “you neglect the simple reality that driving, walking and swimming all have utility to humans, measles does not”
You: “Your statement has no basis…”
Does driving have utility to most humans? Yes.
Does walking have utility to most humans? Yes.
Does swimming have utility to most humans? Yes.
Does measles have utility to most humans? No.
Is backer a whacko? You decide.
Oh, and one more observation. If backer gets to invoke the possibility of some completely unknown benefit to measles infections, I similarly get to invoke the possibility of a BIGGER completely unknown benefit to measles vaccination. Like, it’ll protect us from the mutated measles virus of 2025 with a 99.99% fatality rate which would have otherwise wiped out all of civilization. My completely speculative consideration is actually something that can genuinely be established to be a possibility (albeit a remote one), so that kind of trumps completely unspecified speculative considerations.
Or, we could all admit that it doesn’t make any sense to worry about risks or benefits with no foundation in reality (because such compete unknowns could go in either direction), and confine the discussion to those that can actually be established to exist.
harriet-
so why not ban driving?
my point is that you vax heads always throw out this “we are doing a great service for humanity argument” it is complete crap. There are many more things that would benefit humanity, and i would love for you to dispute me on this one…
would banning driving, in the US, save more lives then a measles vaccine, hell, even a flu vaccine. Yep! so if you want to to a great service for humanity hop on the lets ban driving moral soapbox, because the measles one is falling apart.
scott-
i am so proud of you, i think i might just cry a little, you are finally doing science! This IS a possibility, and now that you have proposed a prediction we can wait and see if it comes true.
windriven-
this is old news, we have already established that i am ceeerazy.
backer said,
“you vax heads always throw out this “we are doing a great service for humanity argument” it is complete crap. There are many more things that would benefit humanity, and i would love for you to dispute me on this one…”
No one is even trying to dispute that. “We are doing a great service” does not equate to “we are doing the greatest possible service.”
IMO the greatest services would be reducing the birth rate worldwide and eliminating smoking. I don’t know how to accomplish that. I do know how to prevent measles.
backer
but to humor you…
from your source:
“Safety and effectiveness have not always been proven. Some of these conditions are potentially serious, and should be evaluated by a qualified healthcare provider.”
backer
you said:
“my theory is that measles is more lethal now than…”
you and Blaylock “MD” could write a paper together. you could title it “here are some things i read that I threw together in order to formulate a ‘theory’ that I won’t bother to test, but in the mean time, you should take all of this conjecture very seriously”
do you know what an actual theory is? you have a “hunch”
backer you said:
“I really, really like random things that relate in particular ways.”
that is a notorious human fallacy. gather data on 100 variables. run a correlation matrix. you will find correlations. doesn’t matter what the are…some will relate.
@ backer
ok, last string post, here’s the rest.
“all of these things are considered safe….
driving
walking
swimming”
by who? I don’t consider driving safe. if i cant swim, how is swimming safe?
“do seatbelts/airbags prevent accidents? no, but in case you get into one they can help.”
yes, but swimming lessons and reflective vests do. to apply your interesting little logic.
vaccines = prevention
medicine = treatment
how does a reflective vest treat a person hit by a car more than it prevents it? likewise, how do swimming lessons treat drowning when you throw a kid in a pool more than swimming lessons prevent such? the answer to your example is valid.
“i am so proud of you, i think i might just cry a little, you are finally doing science!”
that is very odd. this is not science at all. but it somehow validates your “science” as you now call his mock on your absurd speculation, science…
wait…after all of this, what is your point? Seriously
Backer, when you calculate a percentage, could you at least do it correctly. The method is to divide and then multiply by 100.
In your example of 1 in 6,000-8,000, it is 1/7,000*100 = 0.014% (not 0.0001%), you are off by a factor of 100.
1-3 per 1000 is 2/1000*100 = 0.2%
The risk of death from measles when unvaccinated and measles is endemic is about 1 per thousand or so, not 1 per 300,000 (I think your factor of 100 is where you are off). If you are unvaccinated and measles is endemic, you will be exposed to measles and very likely will get measles. The rate goes up and down each year because exposure is stochastic, but if you are exposed enough times, you will get it with a very high likelihood. If you don’t get it one year, you will get it some other year. Until you get it (or are vaccinated), you are susceptible and risk the 1 per 1,000 chance of dying if you get it. Looking at only a short and arbitrary time frame is not useful.
daedalus2u
i was using the same method as the national safety council which states…
“The one year odds are approximated by dividing the 2006 population (298,362,973) by the number of deaths. The lifetime odds are approximated by dividing the one-year odds by the life expectancy of a person born in 2006 (77.7 years). Please note that odds based on less than 20 deaths are likely to be unstable from year to year and should be used with caution.”
http://www.nsc.org/news_resources/injury_and_death_statistics/Pages/TheOddsofDyingFrom.aspx
The only accurate way to compare against their statistics, is to use their methods. these were their methods not mine.
so in 1950 there were approx 150,000,000 people divide by 500 measles deaths and you get…drumroll………….300,000.
backer-
Odds and percentages are different. You are mixing limes and oranges. It’s an OK way to make sangria. Not so good for science.
windriven-
no they arent
backer
I am a physicist and mathematician. I know the difference between odds and percentages. Odds are often expressed as ratios and a percentage is one particular type of ratio, but that does not make them the same no matter how much you insist.
You seem to embrace ignorance with uncommon exuberance. There are many people in this forum who are remarkably generous about sharing their knowledge. I learn something here nearly every day. I wonder why you are here if not to grow intellectually?
I can understand, if not appreciate, your bombastic championing of unusual ideas. But when daedalus2u explains a simple arithmetic principle and you argue and resist, understanding dissolves into contempt. You do understand I hope the difference between matters of opinion and matters of fact. daedalus2u has tried to explain a simple fact that is not open to debate. To believe otherwise would be a delusion, not a difference of opinion.
We have had a little fun going back and forth and one presumes that half of what you say is said purely to provoke a response. But your various interlocutors have also engaged you in the hope that debate might bring a little light to the darkness. I might add that this has been done at some cost in time and effort. If your embrace of ignorance is that unshakable it begs the question of why anyone should bother engaging you.
You occasionally – by accident I’m coming to believe – make interesting points. But it becomes tiresome separating the few grains from the mountain of chaff. And when you insist on things that are simply and demonstrably inaccurate, people incline toward automatically dismissing everything you say. Is that really what you want?
Do yourself a favor. Think through your conjectures before you offer them. Understand your audience and frame your arguments convincingly. In this forum that means including citations for statistics and understanding the citations too. And when someone like daedalus2u catches you out, learn from the experience instead of denying the obvious.
Now I for one am done with this thread.
Ouch. Thread hijacked by “backer”.
On thread, typo alert s/morality/mortality/
But I’m intrigued by the possible meaning of “devastating … morality”.
A valiant effort, windriven. About basic statistics, in an earlier thread, backer claimed to be an industrial engineer and had been educated in basic statistics. Yeah, right!
Maybe he was taught how to lie with statistics. As it turns out, that doesn’t work very well here.
This comment is utter BS. Random speculations are completely unrelated to science.
If banning driving were as cheap and safe as vaccinating for measles, sure that would make sense. Do you REALLY not see the difference here?
I’m going to have to agree with windriven and Eric here. Either you are lying through your teeth and don’t believe a single word you’re saying, in which case discussing things with you is a waste of my time, or you DO believe it, in which case you’re uneducated, uneducable, completely divorced from anything resembling reality, and similarly not worth my time.
backer said, “Biology is simply to vast and complex to know the true impact and possible benefits of something like the measles.”
Tell that to the people who have died (too late) or been disabled by measles. In the meantime, if we ever eradicate the virus from the wild, we’ll always have a stock tucked away in a freezer should the need arise.
windriven-
as i explained to daedalus2u but maybe you didnt read my response.
“i was using the same method as the national safety council which states…
“The one year odds are approximated by dividing the 2006 population (298,362,973) by the number of deaths. The lifetime odds are approximated by dividing the one-year odds by the life expectancy of a person born in 2006 (77.7 years). Please note that odds based on less than 20 deaths are likely to be unstable from year to year and should be used with caution.”
if you are a mathematician the you should know this is the only correct way to compare statistics. further…
I was simply converting a ratio into a percentage so people could see it both ways. Certainly i don’t REALLY have to explain this?
but maybe you can show me how 1 in 4=25% is false?
scott-
You people are so dense. I am not REALLY proposing we ban driving, i am simply saying if provaxers can’t use the moral argument unless they are willing to support this outlandish proposal. It was in response to this…
I am saying that if this is TRULY your argument for vaccination than you should be doing more than vaccination to protect more vulnerable members of the public.
If pmoran is a pro-choice advocate, then he CANNOT claim he is trying to “protect more vulnerable members of the public” (BTW pmoran i am not saying you are)
Backer is using a classic example of the Nirvana Fallacy–
“I am saying that if this is TRULY your argument for vaccination than you should be doing more than vaccination to protect more vulnerable members of the public.”
Translation:
Your efforts to protect the vulnerable members of the public are imperfect, therefore they are useless.
chris-
chris-
oops typo hopefully this one works…
If you must know “industrial engineer” is just a fancy title i give myself so when companies hire me for “consulting” (whatever this means) they can feel all warm and fuzzy. In the real world i just make stuff, lasers, robots, new tools, software, toys, gadgets, whatever comes to mind that day. I just sit around my shop inventing new things, tinkering the day away. Then when i get an idea that really works, i sell it to some random company and then go tinker some more. Honestly i don’t care about titles but if i tell people i am “stuff maker” they usually don’t get it. But the title on my actual business card says “red ninja”. But in face to face interactions with people i can explain that the red ninja was the badass at the end of the movie that got his ass kick by bruce lee, so i am not claiming to be bruce lee by i can ALMOST woop his ass.
perky skeptic-
uhhh no.
i willfully admitted i wasnt ACTUALLY comparing the 2…
“I am not REALLY proposing we ban driving, i am simply saying if provaxers can’t use the moral argument unless they are willing to support this outlandish proposal.”
I am simply showing that the statement…
…is a complete fabrication.
so would pmoran advise AGAINST vaccines to “protect more vulnerable members of the public” that may be prone to vaccine reactions?
If there were 3 deaths related to MMR vaccine (just an example) and no deaths associated with the ACTUAL disease then we would be doing humanity a favor by stopping vaccination until measles related death rose above MMR vax related deaths.
Then and only then could you claim that you were on the side of morality and were willing to do whatever it takes to protect your fellow man. It is called moral imperative.
Backer: “I am simply showing that the statement…
but we advise vaccination partly to protect more vulnerable members of the public.
…is a complete fabrication. ”
===========================
What? Have you missed the point that this is the population within which most deaths occur: the very young, the immuno-compromised, those with illnesses?
While I have in this thread suggested patience with persons such as yourself, you now seem to be laboring non-existent points and making very thoughtless statements.
We don’t HAVE to be polite to you. You seem to be pushing the position that there are obvious errors in the assessment of the evidence relating to vaccination that we and virtually the whole of the rest of the medical population are too stupid (or probably corrupt) to recognize. Every time we talk to you we are having to swallow the implied insult.
What is your purpose here?
I am abjectly stunned to read that backer’s point seems to be that he remains unconvinced that vaccines don’t cause more deaths than the vaccine-preventable diseases.
Am I reading you correctly, backer? Because that is what your comment at Dec 23 3:14 pm communicates to me.
pmoran:
His purpose is to be a troll. That was evident when he started to post completely off topic subjects.
pmoran-
I mean no disrespect, i do however have first hand experience with many MD’s. we all go out and drink and debate and carry on. One night i asked a very simple question. To the 3 MD’s i was drinking with.
Why did you become doctors, i suspected the usual “i wanna help people” shtick. what i heard shocked me. Not one of them said they did it to help people. One said, he liked science, and the challenge of surgery, the next fully admitted he really had no interest in being an MD however his father was so it was a natural progression, and the last said he did it for the respect! (are you friggin kidding me?!) The next thing that shocked me was when the last guy said he did it for respect, the other 2 agreed. Of course they all agreed money was a factor. I was simply appalled.
I even asked a follow up so none of you did it to help others? All 3 agreed that wasnt a significant deciding factor in their decision. They all thought it was admirable that they could help, but not a deciding factor none the less.
I asked another question “so what about when a patient dies?” the consensus response was “you get used to it.” Don’t get me wrong, I can understand this at some level as it goes with the territory, however they went on to explain that you get so enthralled with the moment sometimes you fail to realize that you are actually working on a human being. Again i can sympathize with this position, but it made me think long and hard about the medical community and it’s motivations.
I am not saying that my experience is global across the medical spectrum, however i think if more people were honest with themselves their answers would be similar.
When i stumbled across this site and saw people spouting off things like vaccines are the moral right, it made me think back to my experience, and question the statements being made. Like i have said before I think vaccines have their place, mainly in developing countries.
So i will ask you straight up.
If MMR kills/disables more people in the US than the actual disease is it not the moral imperative to discontinue use?
you can appeal to some unknown future variable and say something like “if we stop using vax then measles rate will increase, eventually causing more death blah, blah, blah” But that would be avoiding my question. it is a simple yes or no question based on the PRESENT.
You ask me what my purpose is…
It is to be a rock in your shoe, and make you think. I don’t care if i am wrong about some things. I just want you to think about them. Because the next time i ask an MD why he became one i want to hear…”So i could move to Africa and be of service”
backer,
True, if the rate of disease in a population is low enough, the risk of the vaccine to an individual is greater than the risk of the disease NOW. That’s a bit short-sighted, because the overall risk to the individual over his future lifetime will be higher than the risk of the vaccine now if lower herd immunity allows the disease rate to increase. This argument does not “appeal to some unknown future variable” but to known facts. When vaccination rates fall, disease rates increase; when vaccination rates rise again, the disease rates decrease again. We have seen this over an over in different countries with various vaccine-preventable diseases.
Your arguments about why people become doctors are not convincing. I don’t think most people really know why they do things; I think their “reasons” are largely rationalizations made up after the fact. And even people who go into medicine for the money can ALSO be sincerely dedicated to helping people. Anyway, those arguments have nothing to do with the question of whether measles vaccine is safer than risking measles.
I am pretty sure all provax in this forum are not even physicians who actually treated a single case of measles or have had managed vaccine-injured patients let alone have administered a measles vaccine. As a parent would you actually believe these persons who pretend to know more about measles? Trolls can always talk the talk anyway.
Harriet-
this is why i like you…you are honest about things…i know, i know, you have said before many others will readily admit such things, but you are the only one i have come across here.
i realize this is your position but i am still skeptical about the use of the vaccine. I look at things like scarlet fever, SARS, black death, even 1918. NONE of these had a vaccine and they all died out on their own. It makes me wonder that if we would have just left well enough alone that measles wouldnt have ended with the same fate? To further this, it also make me wonder if the vaccine propagates the disease, surely you have wondered these same things?
sorry harriet, if you do what you love you know it inherently. There is no need for rationalizations made up after the fact.
Th1TH2-
the other thing they don’t realize is that without us they would have very little to talk to each other about. It might go something like this…
Chris…
vaccines are awesome!
Scott…
tru dat!
Windriven…
yup! yup!
EricG…
HELLLLLZ YEAH! VAX IT UP!
Amateurs who sell snake oil is what they are.
Backer: “If MMR kills/disables more people in the US than the actual disease is it not the moral imperative to discontinue use?”
– and you attempt to further dissociate the question from the reasons that MMR is given with “you can appeal to some unknown future variable —-”
This is dishonest. We have a classic cost/risk/benefit decision and you are trying to transform it into an scarcely relevant, overly simplistic, moral absolute. . Quite ordinary processes of human reasoning and experience allow us to predict what will happen (and already has happened in several countries) when vaccination lessens before a virus has died out completely.
Thankyou for elucidating your “stone in the shoe” position. I am not sure that querying vaccines is the best use of your energies, especially if you are helping to spread doubt and suspicion where there should be none.
Third try…
backer:
That is why we know you are completely clueless.
First, both scarlet fever and bubonic plague are bacterial infections (now can you tell how that makes them different from measles?). Also neither has died out, they are still around. Scarlet fever is caused by Streptococcus pyogenes, which still causes strep throat (like the rest of the Group A strep bacteria). And the bubonic plague still infects about a dozen people per year in the USA. Its vector are fleas on rodents, so if you control rodents there is a less likely chance of infection.
I have read that there may be a vaccine for strep throat sometime in the future, which would be better because of the evolution of antibiotic resistant strains.
Now both SARS and influenza are fast evolving viruses, and both can replicate in birds. Also if a virus evolves to the point of being fairly deadly, it can kill the host before transferring to another thereby limiting how well it transmits. Both were controlled through quarantine, and then their genome changed (the 1918 type did exist in some form or another until 1957). You would know more about this if you have read Gina Kolata’s book Flu
Now tell us how measles are like those four diseases? Can it be treated with antibiotics? Does it have any other vector than humans? Does it continually change?
Using your “professional” credentials, Thing1Thing2, tell us how the MMR vaccine has a greater risk than measles. Measles causes encephalopathy in one out of a thousand cases, please educate us with the real evidence that the MMR causes more injury than that. There should be plenty of research on it since it has been used in the USA for almost forty years.
Research like:
Impact of specific medical interventions on reducing the prevalence of mental retardation.
Brosco JP, Mattingly M, Sanders LM.
Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2006;160:302-309.
Encephalopathy after whole-cell pertussis or measles vaccination: lack of evidence for a causal association in a retrospective case-control study.
Ray P, Hayward J, Michelson D, Lewis E, Schwalbe J, Black S, Shinefield H, Marcy M, Huff K, Ward J, Mullooly J, Chen R, Davis R; Vaccine Safety Datalink Group.
Pediatr Infect Dis J. 2006 Sep;25(9):768-73.
An economic analysis of the current universal 2-dose measles-mumps-rubella vaccination program in the United States.
Zhou F, Reef S, Massoudi M, Papania MJ, Yusuf HR, Bardenheier B, Zimmerman L, McCauley MM.
J Infect Dis. 2004 May 1;189 Suppl 1:S131-45.
Neurologic Disorders after Measles-Mumps-Rubella Vaccination.
Makela A et al.
Pediatrics 2002; 110:957-63
*Subjects: 535,544 children vaccinated between November 1982 and June 1986 in Finland
Lack of Association between Measles Virus Vaccine and Autism with Enteropathy: A Case-Control Study.
Hornig M et al.
PLoS ONE 2008; 3(9): e3140 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0003140
*Subjects: 25 children with autism and GI disturbances and 13 children with GI disturbances alone (controls)
Also, why should we take the both of you seriously? Neither of you has presented any kind of cogent argument with real data. The only thing you have both used is stuff gleamed from the University of Google (and backer’s second post on this thread shows how he fails with that, the first link is just a search dump, and not what he says it is!).
chris-
you make me chuckle sometimes.
i will start with this…
this shows YOUR level of research the black death is unknown and current theories suggest it might have been an ebola like VIRUS
the Black Death killed between half and two-thirds of the population of Iceland, although there were no rats in Iceland at this time.
go do some research and get back to me.
@backer
“discernment”
Warning! Crazy, nut-case religous buzzword.
backer: You can claim that you are NOT touting these things all you want. It’s pretty clear to anyone with a modicum of intelligence and/or reading comprehension skill that you ARE touting them.
Unless, of course, you’re BACKING them rather than TOUTING them.
backer, the contention that the Black Plague was Ebola is not a done deal, it may still up to debate (though not so much recently). I noticed you did not bring up any documentation to show that it was completely settled.
Even if Ebola caused black death, it is still around and has not died out. And certainly not several hundred years ago. Though it is so nasty that it kills everyone before it spreads to the next village.
On PubMed using the search words “black death ebola” brings up 30 papers, using “black death yersinia pestis” brings up almost 1800 hits.. Using Google Scholar shows that there is biological evidence that the Black Plague was caused by yersinia pestis, like this:
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jinh.2007.37.3.371
… and this full paper:
http://www.macalester.edu/~cuffel/molecularplague.htm
And citing that controversy in no way shows that the measles should die out without vaccination.
http://jdc325.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/measles-a-deadly-disease/
backer,
You forgot smallpox. It wiped out almost all the native americans and disappeared without a vaccine. Oh! That’s right! That’s why you conveniently forgot it. But we no longer vaccinate for it. I wonder why?
chris-
just look at wiki…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_the_Black_Death
I never said it was settled just that there are other theories…
however this is interesting (from wiki)…”in 2003 a team led by Alan Cooper from Oxford University tested 121 teeth from sixty-six skeletons found in fourteenth-century mass graves, including documented Black Death plague pits in East Smithfield and Spitalfields. Their results showed no genetic evidence for Y. pestis, and Cooper argued that though “[w]e cannot rule out Yersinia as the cause of the Black Death …right now there is no molecular evidence for it.”
and what do these have in common with measles, they are a disease. It seem to me the trend for disease is 1. start infecting 2. reach upper limit 3. decline (this is where most vaccines are developed)
look i have said it OVER, and OVER, and OVER again. i am not against vax. I think it is more prudent however to focus on NEW TREATMENTS for disease, we would be better served. vaccines take a long time to produce, then you have trials, then you arent really even sure it won’t adverse reactions once it get’s into the general public. Even though i am not a big fan of tamiflu, i think one could confidently say it saved more lives against H1N1 than the vaccine did. We never know when the next SARS epidemic will occur, but if we have readily available treatment it won’t matter as much.
chris-
oops i should have said SARS type epidemic or a totally new disease hopefully you can extrapolate that
weing-
so good to see you again. wanted to share another convenient tid-bit. We just had another bug visit our house, more like a pit stop, my pregnant wife came down with it on friday evening, i quickly administered (do i even need to say it) it was gone by sunday evening.
Then, as expected, my daughter got it. She was feverish when she woke up yesterday. I came home at lunch and checked on her, still feverish, i came home from work checked, fever subsiding, by the time she went to bed, fever gone. she woke up today, no fever, no symptoms. NOT EVEN A FULL DAY. again i will call that MARVELOUS results
BTW did you see the NIH link?
backer on 24 Dec 2009 at 10:45 am “BTW did you see the NIH link?”
Your “NIH link” comes from an unreliable source which the NIH has contracted to provide reviews. If you look at the original literature, which they grade as a B, there are two, pilot clinical trials. One was conducted ca. 1995 and showed good results; but it was published in an inferior journal. Then, ca. 2004, they did another trial with 120 participants which showed good results. Five years later, they still haven’t published a definitive study despite the malady being common and the treatment being cheap and abundant.
The original publication in a poor journal, and the lack of adequate follow-up after all this time, makes me suspicious. Your anecdotes are irrelevant.
joe-
i don’t care what you believe, but the stuff works. they also have a trial that just ended in september. i bet it won’t be too long until those results are out. plus it isnt like this company has gobs of money to do these studies.
backer on 24 Dec 2009 at 1:43 pm “joe- i don’t care what you believe, …”
That is almost too much to bear.
Backer: ‘I don’t care what you believe, but the stuff works.”
In need of a rock in your shoe, Backer?
How ironic! Mainstream medicine would laugh your evidence off the stage if accompanied by such dogmatism.
Yet you just now pretended that WE need to be pushed into a healthy re-examination of OUR views.
pmoran-
no the funny thing is that if the NIH is in the habit of contracting out to “unreliable sources” then we can discount them as a source of reliable information.
if they use “unreliable sources” how can we truly trust ANYTHING they say?
Everyone thank Joe for making the NIH unreliable.
What do the charts at the beginning of this post (Charts 3 and 4) show about the relationship between vaccine uptake and incidence of measles in the UK? So where has it been shown that measles went away without vaccines?
Hello, I used to work as a resarcher for NIH. I am a clinical psychologist, so I come to this from a slightly different angle than many of you MDs. I like to see things from different angles, and to not have a preconception. There are 2 reasoning problems with the original posting in this thread.
1. What is the natural variation in measles occurrence over the years? Unless this is closely analyzed statistically, it is impossible to infer the source of the variation to e.g. drop in vaccination rates. See e.g. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6497312
and
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17878136
2. There is an interesting phenomenon called honeymoon effect with vaccines. This occurs when the vaccine effect kicks in with a certain age group, and it looks like the effect is great. Then after some years, the infection comes back atypically in e.g. younger groups or older groups. Measles is often quoted (www.nvic.org – yes, I actually think it is interesting to read what vaccine refusers write! I bet I will get some non-scientific remarks on that one) in this respect as infants below vaccination age are now hit, since they don’t get immunity from their vaccinated mothers. Adults get measles because their vaccine immunity is decreasing and they have not taken booster shots or the booster shots do not work as well as expected.
It would be great to be able to blame everything on vaccine refusers, but this seems very premature and naive, specially since all statistics and analysis is provided by very pro-vaccination agencies.
I am posting this again without links so I don’t have to wait for moderation.
Hello, I used to work as a resarcher for NIH. I am a clinical psychologist, so I come to this from a slightly different angle than many of you MDs. I like to see things from different angles, and to not have a preconception. There are 2 reasoning problems with the original posting in this thread.
1. What is the natural variation in measles occurrence over the years? Unless this is closely analyzed statistically, it is impossible to infer the source of the variation to e.g. drop in vaccination rates.
2. There is an interesting phenomenon called honeymoon effect with vaccines. This occurs when the vaccine effect kicks in with a certain age group, and it looks like the effect is great. Then after some years, the infection comes back atypically in e.g. younger groups or older groups. Measles is often quoted (www.nvic.org – yes, I actually think it is interesting to read what vaccine refusers write! I bet I will get some non-scientific remarks on that one) in this respect as infants below vaccination age are now hit, since they don’t get immunity from their vaccinated mothers. Adults get measles because their vaccine immunity is decreasing and they have not taken booster shots or the booster shots do not work as well as expected.
It would be great to be able to blame everything on vaccine refusers, but this seems very premature and naive, specially since all statistics and analysis is provided by very pro-vaccination agencies.
researcher2000,
Even if we had a close analysis of measles rates over the years (and we do, don’t we?), that alone would not make it possible to attribute a drop in rates to vaccination. It is possible to infer that a drop in measles incidence is due to the vaccine when we see multiple instances where the vaccination rate drops, the disease rises, the vaccination rate rises again and the disease drops again. And when measles has been eradicated from communities with high vaccination rates but never from unvaccinated communities.
Your other argument, about the honeymoon effect and unprotected infants, would be irrelevant if enough people were vaccinated. Since measles has no non-human reservoir, we can eliminate it from the world forever, like we did smallpox.
“I like to see things from different angles, and to not have a preconception.”
You claim 2 deficiencies in the post and ask, “1. What is the natural variation in measles occurrence over the years? Unless this is closely analyzed statistically, it is impossible to infer the source of the variation to e.g. drop in vaccination rates.
See e.g. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6497312
and
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17878136”
As the abstract for your second citation clearly states, “This body of work has generated simple yet powerful explanations for the epidemics of measles and chickenpox…” so I wonder exactly what your ‘different angle’ is in this regard?
The first citation is a 1984 study of historical trends in measles mortality in Singapore. We are given no suggestion in the abstract of vaccination rates in Singapore from 1959 to 1981, the years covered. But as a point of interest, routine measles vaccination didn’t begin in the US until 1963. The importance of a booster vaccination didn’t become clear until the mid-1980s. So what meaningful ‘different angle’ are you suggesting here?
A willingness to look at things from different angles and to avoid preconceptions is essential to critical thinking. But so is good judgment.
Does anyone have citations about multiple vaccine rate drops and subsequent increases e.g. in mortality. If you just have a link to the abstract, please quote the text as I don’t have access to full articles.
Also it is claimed by anti vacs that there are no double blind placebo studies of vaccination where the outcome is , infection mortality or serious outcomes. I haven’t been anble to find any apart from a study in the Phillipines of pneeumococcal 11 valent vaccine that showed a very modest effect in only a very specific age group.
It seems like either the placebo concept is misunderstood, e,g, in safety trials of HPV vaccines they used a placebo with alluminum! or the endpoints are antibody counts, which doesn’t necessarily prove immunity.
“pmoran-
no the funny thing is that if the NIH is in the habit of contracting out to “unreliable sources” then we can discount them as a source of reliable information.
if they use “unreliable sources” how can we truly trust ANYTHING they say?
Everyone thank Joe for making the NIH unreliable.”
So this is how you respond to my contention that you made a dogmatic claim on evidence that goes nowhere near that required by the FDA or any other mainstream medical body when endorsing a new drug ?
Why should we bother responding to your points, if you completely ignore ours?
pmoran-
It isnt a drug. It is classified “dietary supplement” therefore it will never be eligible for FDA approval. It think it is great that they went through the trouble of doing studies since it is a dietary supplement, and they are under no obligation to prove anything. To me this shows the level of confidence that they have in their product.
researcher2000, exactly how good are you at researching? Why are you asking us to do the research for you?
Read what Dr. Crislip wrote about the increase of measles in the UK after a drop of vaccination. What happened? One graph shows a decrease and the other an increase? Why? With you asking us to do the research which was provided by Dr. Crislip, we wonder if you even bother reading what he wrote, or even what was in the responses.
In the early 1990s Japan decided to drop the use of their version of the MMR vaccine (the difference was the mumps component, use your research experience to figure out what that was!). Did measles go up or down? Here is a hint: http://www.who.int/bulletin/archives/79%283%29272.pdf … what does it say about Japan?
See what was posted at 21 Dec 2009 at 7:28 pm on the incidence of measles in the USA during the 20th century. What happened in the 1960s? Also read the link that was posted 24 Dec 2009 at 1:55 am … What does it say about Italy, Japan, Germany, the USA, and Ireland?
Please tell us why it is ethical to do a randomly controlled double blind study on a vaccine that has been used for almost forty years, versus allowing children to contract three diseases where there is a known bad outcome for at least one out of thousand times? Does the MMR cause something bad to happen once out of 999 times? Look up what happened when measles returned to the USA between 1987 and 1992, here is a hint (which if you really know how to “research” you would have known about): J Infect Dis. 2004 May 1;189 Suppl 1:S69-77. (you are a researcher, you should be able to figure out what that means!).
Please, show us what how good a researcher you are: post any evidence you have that the MMR vaccine has a greater risk than measles, mumps or rubella. It has to be real scientific research, not a random webpage or news article, and definitely no lawyer paid research (ie: nothing from Wakefield).
@backer on 24 Dec 2009 at 9:52 pm “… if they [NIH] use “unreliable sources” how can we truly trust ANYTHING they say?”
One simply needs the perspicacity to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I’ve looked at measles and vaccination in the UK on my blog and I think it’s worth noting the following:
Before and after the introduction of a vaccine –
The 10 years prior to the introduction of the single measles vaccine (1958-1967) brought 863 deaths (and 4,120,936 notifications) and in the 10 years following the introduction (1968-1977) there were 292 deaths (a fall of 571 deaths – or 66%) – and 1,600,979 notifications (a fall of 2,519,957, or 61%).
Vaccine coverage, incidence of measles, and deaths from measles –
In the eight years of the 1980s for which data is available, protection against measles from a vaccine ran from 52% (in 1981) to 84% (1989), and 1989 was the only year in the 80s that saw a figure above 80% – the mean average for vaccine coverage was 66.75%.
Notifications of measles in the 1980s ran from 30,160 in 1989, when coverage was 84%, to 114,948 in 1983 (coverage had not reached 60% in that or the previous two years). The mean average incidence of measles for these eight years was 75,483.
In the nine years for which data is available for the 1990s, coverage was 89-92%. The mean average for vaccine coverage was 91.22%.
The notifications of measles in the 1990s ran from a low of 74 in 1998 to a high of 28,228 in 1990 (1991 was the year in which coverage first reached 90%). The mean average incidence of measles for these nine years was 12,068.
The difference between the 1980s and 1990s in terms of incidence of measles is notable – there were more than six times as many notifications of measles in the 1980s than the 1990s. As vaccine coverage rose, the number of cases of measles plummeted.
The figures from the HPA give us a total of 15 deaths in the 1990s and 89 deaths in the 1980s – six times as many people died from measles in the 1980s than in the 1990s.
This should not be a surprise, given that six times as many people contracted measles during the 1980s as compared with the 1990s – but it does help to illustrate (1) why vaccine coverage needs to be around 90% and (2) that measles is no less deadly now than it was in the 1980s when 90 people in this country died from the disease.
Wow! I just asked a few questions. I thought the point with a site like this was to exchange information. If vaccines were my topic for research, I wouldn’t ask any questions. I hope you don’t think asking questions is against scientific principles. I did research on psychology of course, and it is interesting to see how quickly the tone got adversarial. If I had the time and connections to do in depth research on all these topics, I wouldn’t ask.
“Read what Dr. Crislip wrote about the increase of measles in the UK after a drop of vaccination. What happened? One graph shows a decrease and the other an increase? Why? With you asking us to do the research which was provided by Dr. Crislip, we wonder if you even bother reading what he wrote, or even what was in the responses.”
Of course I read what he wrote, and that is the reason for my question. It seems like it was taken for granted that since vaccination rates went down, very slightly though, this had to be the only reason for the sharp increase in cases. Dr. Crislip doesn’t propose any other hypothesis. Could there be other factors involved? Is there anything wrong in asking these questions? It could e.g. be that a point in time has been reached where the many mothers are not able to give their infants immunity, possibly at the same time as vaccine immunity is decreasing in adults. It could even be attributable to better lab procedures or different procedures for having measles lab confirmed. I don’t say that these hypothesis represent the truth, it is just that alternative hypothesis that should be tested before one jumps to the conclusion that it was the anti vax’s fault.
I read the suggested article about vaccine uptake in UK, Japan and Finland, and it seems quite illogical that using a monovalent vaccine against measles should be inferior to combining measles, mumps and rubella. Do you think the mumps and rubella components lead to better immunity against measles? The article doesn’t say anything about lower measles vaccine uptake. The study from Finland is also interesting. If you have done research, you will know that it is easy to miss a link between two variables if there is a lot of variability in the data. One may even miss it by being sloppy or looking in the wrong places. The Finnish study focused on increased autism as short term consequences. Why look only at short term?
Another thing: It is almost impossible to prove “no connection” statistically. You can only disconfirm the null hypothesis, not confirm it. That is why all this talk about proving there is no link does not make sense statistically.
Another thing: I asked in general about RCTs for vaccine with mortality or morbidity as outcomes, not only for measles. Are there any such RCTs for any vaccine? I could of course search all the RCTs on pubmed, but I got tired when I found one after the other with only antibody counts as outcome, or strange placebo arrangements like for the HPV safety trials.
Thank you for very interesting reference to articles though.
Here is quote from the article on how deadly measles is:
“In the case of the Duisburg outbreak in Germany, measles had a high mortality rate of 1 in 307 as two of the three young people with encephalitis died. The two children who developed encephalitis and died were aged 2 months, and 2 years. The infant was too young for vaccination and would have relied upon herd immunity for protection”
So now it is admitted that measles has become very deadly, possibly (note: this is a hypothesis, we should find out more) for the reason that babies no longer get immunity from vaccinated mothers. Herd immunity is a theoretical construct and may (note: hypothesis) include exactly the transimission of immunity from mother to newborn, if the mother has got real natural immunity.
“In the case of the Duisburg outbreak in Germany, measles had a high mortality rate of 1 in 307”. The deadliness used to be 1 in 8888 (from the mentioned powerpoint presentation on 21 Dec 2009 at 4:15 pm) So measles has become quite a lot deadlier from the 1950s, even with today’s technology!
researcher 2000-
I knew when i saw you pop onto the scene it wouldnt take to long for you to be berated for questioning the status quo. I too asked the same questions as you. I too asked about measles becoming deadlier after the vaccines was introduced, it started here…
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=3131&cpage=2#comment-37651
you can just follow the string from there, like you mentioned, notice how no one here proposed ANY other hypothesis for this, they just rely on ad hominems and poisoning the well tactics to make their case. They go on to attack my statistical methodology, even when i show exactly where and why i adopted this method.
researcher2000 – you seem to be asking for proof that water is wet. There are many interesting questions to examine and debate in medical science. The utility of measles vaccination isn’t one of them. Measles vaccination like evolutionary theory is accepted science. If you have compelling reasons to re-examine measles vaccination it is incumbent on you to demonstrate cause to reopen the issue, not the other way around.
You and your ilk seem to believe that posing childish ‘why is there air’ questions deserves thoughtful answers and the investment in time and energy for formulate them. We are all open to re-examination of any scientific dogma given a reasonably coherent reason to do so. But we are not compelled to play along with you in silly epistemological games.
If you have a coherent thought supported by compelling evidence relevant to re-examining measles vaccination or MMR vaccination for that matter, state your conjecture and the supporting data. Failing that your questions barely rise to the level of college sophomores with too much hash sitting around a dorm posing specious what-if questions.
“Oh dude, what if, like, we’re really the only 3 people alive and like, everybody else is just a figment of our imaginations?”
Researcher, the reason there was a quick transition to adversarial is because many of the “questions” you are asking are anti-vax canards which have been rhetorically asked and answered many times. In many cases those asking the questions have been told the answer, they simply deny that the answer is correct based on their own delusional world view. The simplest explanation for the increase in measles is the reduced vaccination.
Disease transmission is complicated. Every infected person sheds virus at different rates and for different periods, the transmission of that virus from infected person to non-immune person is complex, the quantity of virus that is required to develop an infection is complex and depends on a number of things, the precise conditions of the virus, the immune status of the individual, the presence of anti-measles antibodies, and no doubt other things.
The simplest explanation also has the simplest solution to the problem, increase vaccination rates. When this is done, the incidence of measles goes down. We don’t need a more complicated explanation; the only people who want a more complicated explanation are those who want to deny that vaccination against measles is a good thing and is protective against acquiring a measles infection.
This is a blog by an expert in infectious disease. The other alternatives you have suggested have been considered and they do not explain the data that is observed. The simplest way to prevent measles is with vaccination. This is very effective and very safe. For everyone, it is safer than getting measles. For a few (because of immune system suppression), getting the vaccine is not very safe. It is still safer than getting measles. If people who can safely take the vaccine did so, then people who could not safely take the vaccine would be protected because measles virus would not be circulating in the population. With a high enough “herd immunity” there would be essentially no measles cases because measles virus would not circulate.
For measles virus to circulate, each infected person has to (on average) infect another person before they become non-infectious. If less than one person becomes infected, then eventually the disease will die out. That is where herd immunity is so important; to reduce the number of susceptible individuals that an infected individual can infect before the infected individual becomes non-infectious.
The health care providers on this blog have answered many of these questions many times before. It is pretty old even for those of us who are not medical professionals, but are just hangers-on. People are dying from measles because of anti-vax BS lies. It is hard not to get upset with those who are harming people with their lies.
Backer, there is no evidence that measles is getting any more deadly. It is deadly enough already, and was deadly enough 100 years ago. That is why a vaccine was developed in the first place. The sequence of measles doesn’t seem to have changed that much. The idea that it is now somehow more deadly is pure speculation, speculation that I speculate was generated by anti-vaxers to rationalize why they should not vaccinate against measles.
It is extremely unlikely that measles is getting more deadly because of vaccinations. A mutation in measles to render it more deadly can only occur during an infection. The fewer cases of measles there are, the fewer opportunities there are for measles to mutate into something more deadly. Reducing measles cases from millions per year to hundreds per year is a reduction of 99.99%. Reducing it to tens of cases per year is a reduction of 99.999%.
The prevention of measles produced by the measles vaccine is not like using antibiotics. The anti-measles antibodies are produced by the person vaccinated. The reason the anti-measles antibodies work is because there is cross-reactivity between the measles virus and the antibodies produced in response to the measles vaccine. If an individual was unable to produce antibodies that were reactive to measles, that person would not become immune to measles via the vaccine. That person would also not be able to recover from a measles infection. That person would be killed by a measles infection. That could be a reason why measles seems to appear more deadly. People who are vaccinated but do not generate anti-measles antibodies catch measles when they are exposed and die from it independent of their vaccination status. People who are vaccinated and do generate anti-measles antibodies don’t catch measles when they are exposed. So an epidemic that goes through a mostly immunized population may appear to be more deadly because more of the cases are among people especially susceptible to measles. Those people would die if unvaccinated too.
If the measles virus mutated enough such that the measles vaccine was not effective, the vaccine could be modified until it was effective. There is nothing difficult about doing that, it just takes time and money and the right expertise.
My problem was that “researcher” was asking questions that were answered in the body of the blog posting, and actually discussed in the comments. Dude, if you are just “asking questions” at least read the main blog post first!
While you claim to have read, it seems you did not understand them.
I think it needs to be reiterated that measles has the potential to be eradicated. Once the disease is eradicated, then the vaccine will no longer need to be used. Adverse effects of the vaccine would become a non-issue.
I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but isn’t it possible that the anti-vaxers are in the pockets of the vaccine manufacturers? I can imagine some evil manufacturer or union employees of such a manufacturer seeing a need to maintain a market for their product. Why not support some deluded anti-vaxers and keep the disease going?
Or perhaps they are in the pay of hospital supply companies, funeral parlors, hearing aid suppliers, supplies for the blind (braille books, specialty computer equipment, white canes), and the other things that money was not used on due to the lack of measles.
windriven-
this is why i am extremely skeptical about vaccines, because i see the same dogmatic assertions in evolutionary theory. Most of which have flimsy evidence at best, and by the way evolutionary theory can’t even come close to explaining abiogenesis the current theories are crystals and aliens? cmon and you say i am full of it? ha!
The measles vaccine is most effective way of contaminating the body with measles antigen. Guaranteed. And that’s the goal of vaccination. When will these pro-vax a.k.a pro-contaminants ever learn?
daedalus2u,
“People who are vaccinated and do generate anti-measles antibodies don’t catch measles when they are exposed. ”
There’s nothing to catch anymore since these vaccinated people have already been exposed PRIMARILY to measles from the intentional inoculation of measles antigen in their naive system. You must also understand that vaccines are designed for SECONDARY exposure (although antibody titer does not correlate to immunity).
daedalus2u-
my hypothesis has nothing to do with the mutation of the measles virus, more like the mutation of who gets infected. I theorize it is deadlier now because it is infecting older people, who are more susceptible to complications, instead of children for whom it was intended.
The measles vaccine is a mutated version of the disease. Even my 10-year old niece knows that.
backer:
While this is a little bit off-topic, I want to address one point in your post pertaining to evolution:
Evolutionary theory doesn’t come close to explaining abiogenesis because that is not what it is about. It’s about life forms changing over time, not how they got started in the first place. It’s like objecting to continental drift because it doesn’t explain planetary formation.
One should always be cautious about dogmatical assertions, but one should also take the time to make sure that’s all that are there. Just because someone believes something to be true and is passionate on the subject does not mean that they are merely parroting dogma. They may be, but unless you take the time to talk to them with an open mind, you’ll never know.
Notice how the antivaxers couch their paranoid fantasies in pseudoscientific terms, for instance arrogating the term theory to fevered daydreams that barely constitute conjectures.
Sorry kiddies but in scientific terms a theory requires considerably more than giving voice to a supposition.
And listen to Th1Th2: “The measles vaccine is most effective way of contaminating the body with measles antigen. Guaranteed. And that’s the goal of vaccination. When will these pro-vax a.k.a pro-contaminants ever learn?”
S/He sounds like the crazy-as-a-loon General Jack D. Ripper in the classic film “Dr. Strangelove” carrying on about “precious bodily fluids.”
This thread has become more entertaining than a SouthPark marathon!
calli arcale-
I realize traditional darwinian evolution does not address abiogenesis, however you cannot get around the fact that life must first exist in order for it to evolve. sorry, without explaining a biogenesis you simply have nothing. The only reason i even mentioned it is because windriven paralleled the “fact” of evolutionary theory as accepted science. I was simply demonstrating that the debate is FAR from over and abiogenesis is one of the flaws of the theory. He/she then goes on to assert that if compelling evidence exist the case can then be reopened. This simply is not true in evolutionary theory (e.g. cambrain explosion) so why would it hold true for the vaccine debate.
Just a simple question then: Does anybody know of any vaccine that has been tested with RCT with morbidity/mortality as outcome? I am not talking just about measles. I agreee that the measles vaccine is quite efficient.
Pediatr Infect Dis J. 2010 Jan;29(1):48-52.
Researcher 2000 said: “In the case of the Duisburg outbreak in Germany, measles had a high mortality rate of 1 in 307”. The deadliness used to be 1 in 8888 (from the mentioned powerpoint presentation on 21 Dec 2009 at 4:15 pm) So measles has become quite a lot deadlier from the 1950s, even with today’s technology!
I noted that the Duisburg outbreak had a high mortality rate – if you read all that I have written in my blog posts, you will see that the mortality rate in that outbreak was high not just compared to the 1950s but also when compared to the 1980s and 1990s in Britain (when vaccination coverage was over 90%).
The death rate from measles in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s was around 1 in 7500 – comparable to your powerpoint figure. The Duisburg outbreak had an unusually high mortality rate and was notable for the two deaths that sadly occurred (one of these two deaths was an infant who was too young for vaccination and would have relied upon herd immunity for protection).
“without explaining a biogenesis (sic) you simply have nothing. ”
Don’t be a putz, backer. Any Chippewa can tell you that the Great Spirit Git-chi Man-i-tou created life. Charles Darwin was well aware of this fact and assumed that all intelligent readers would already know this so he didn’t include it in “Origin of Species.” I can prove it because he told me so himself, last night in a dream. So there.
For a guy who is self-named “research2000″, s/he is really crappy at both research (ever hear of PubMed?) and basic reading comprehension.
Re measles mortality. It is possible that measlers could be more deadly in partly vaccinated populations, by afflicting cohorts of unexposed adults, or through a less likely change in the virus itself.
But I strongly doubt if we have reliable enough statistics to arrive at accurate case mortality rates over time or in older epidemics.
Even now that measles is probably a norifiable disease in most countries, we are relying upon voluntary reporting of cases by doctors. The vast majority of these will be treated at home, and many will never be seen by a doctor.
The study you mentioned is very typical for the misunderstanding of RCT that seems to be infecting vaccination research.
1. The placebo control is not a real control. A saline placebo would be able to give the answers a RCT is meant to answer. In this case one vaccination schedule was compared to another, and in addition the one trial included many vaccines. How can we hope to find out anything useful with such confounding.
2. The outcome is not infection reactions, morbidity or mortality. It is not really interesting how many antibodies the subjects produce. It is how sick they get compared to real saline placebo controls.
3. Saline placebo is specially important for safety assessment. If the control group gets substances that may e.g. produce brain inflammation, we cannot say anything about the relative safety of the experimental vaccine.
4. Conflict of interest: GSK is heavily involved in the research. Can they be expected to be neutral in testing their own vaccine. It is extremely naïve to believe so. For GSK to evaluate safety of their products is like asking tobacco producers to evaluate if cigarettes are dangerous.
chris-
One thing I dont think you realize is that when people stumble across these type of sites they think they are talking exclusively to well qualified MD’s, not random engineers and med students. They also think that these MD’s have access to research that the average joe doesnt. Many people do not understand that there is no secret internet that only MD’s can access. I thought his introduction made this clear. i would bet he figures, as most people do, that if you ask the “experts” they will be able to point him in the right direction.This is logical and i can’t understand why you always take the tone you (and others here) do. What ends up happening is when you attack people they have no choice but to go on the defense. Even if they do not adhere to a position they end up defending it by default, this happened to me so i can speak from experience.
I am pretty sure Chris does not even carry First Aid or Community CPR card.
Chris,
It is really that you feel you have to attack me, instead of trying to answer my questions. An I think you confuse the word researcher with research librarian. A researcher is one who dies scientific research and publish it, not one who spends his time browsing and “researching” pubmed. I belong to the first category. I don’t know if Chris or any others on the list have really done research, or that you all think research means to find articles on pubmed. It seems like some think that research and article search is the same. Comments like “I can’t do the research for you” points to such a misunderstanding.
That one doesn’t have hands on experience with the nitty gritty of research may also explain the naive attitudes concerning conflict of interest when it comes to the pharmaceutical industry. It is very easy to hide a relationship between two variables just by sloppiness. And prestige sets in very quickly. By chance I discovered that our punchers had done a bad job, and that there was approximately 3% error in a very big dataset. It was impossible to make the other researchers admit this and correct it, since they had already published articles on the dataset. This happened even if there was no financial motivation. So imagine if you depend on a pharmaceutical company for your next grant, and/or for your career. You would be extremely careful not to publish anything displeasing and very eager to find efficacy and safety. Like I said, it is very similar to expecting the tobacco industry to say that tobacco is one of the major causes of death in America.
Attacking me for just calling myself Researcher2000, signals to me an insecure person who doesn’t really have much to contribute with scientifically.
Researcher,
A placebo in this context would contain the exact composition of the test subject minus the active ingredient. With vaccines, that would be the absence of the antigen. A saline placebo would be a different test group. There is no indication of severe adverse reactions in the placebo group, so it’s a pretty safe bet that there would be no severe adverse reactions comparing the placebo with saline, especially with the use of vaccine components for decades in millions of people.
I must be misunderstanding you. I’ve reread your post several times and it appears that you are proposing that we should test vaccines doing challenge studies on humans? In other words, take two groups of people, inject one with the vaccine and one with a saline placebo and then let the measles virus loose on them and see how many get sick or die and compare the two groups? Given our current knowledge of measles from the pre-vaccine era, the outcome of that experiment is pretty grim. Is that what you really want? And you say you are a psychology researcher? That doesn’t trigger any alarm bells about the ethics of human research?
Finally, let’s explore your conflict of interest hypothesis. So let’s say GSK fudged their data to get approval for a new vaccine and then that vaccine is injected into millions. The post-market surveillance matches the pre-approval data. Are you saying that all the government officials worldwide doing the surveillance, the HCP that report the adverse events and the people receiving the vaccines are all lying to to support GSK’s fudged data? That seems like a possible scenario to you? What evidence do you have to support this claim that GSK is fudging the data?
R2k-
Cut all the crap and tell us what you are actually trying to say please.
1. Are you questioning vaccines in general or a specific vaccine in particular?
2. Are you actually challenging antibody counts as a measure of immunity (as opposed to letting n/2 being exposed unprotected???)?
3. Is it the effectiveness of vaccines that you question or the safety?
4. Do you have some empirical basis for your doubts or are your doubts entirely speculative?
As several of us have said, we’re more than willing to engage you if you are serious and coherent. But if you wear a tinfoil hat or just like spinning out vague conjectures to see what response you’ll get, prepare yourself for a rough ride.
And your response to Chris is rat dung. Your posts and your questions have largely been vague and ill-formed. Don’t be surprised that they have elicited sharp responses. And I take particular umbrage at your denigration of library research. Research comes in a number of forms. You may or may not be a laboratory or a clinical researcher. I don’t know. These posts are anonymous. So all we have to go on is the quality of the information therein. So quality library research counts. So does lab data. If you have some original empirical data that exposes vaccination as a crass pollution of our ‘precious bodily fluids’, lay it out for us. But I won’t postpone shaving while I wait.
Finally, it is very easy to create a lot of fog with vague accusations about conflicts of interest but far more difficult to prove them. Do you have a specific allegation to make about a specific study or paper? If so, lay it out along with your proof. But if the best you have is the allegation that Chris is naive because s/he doesn’t reject out of hand any study touched by the evil lucre of Big Pharma, then you deserve whatever vilification you encounter here. The alt.nuts never seem to give much attention to the huge advances in longevity and quality of life that arose from the efforts of Big Pharma.
BTW, did you read Dr. Gorski’s blog today?
Researcher,
Stepping back from the vaccine issue for a second, it is considered unethical to deny the standard of care for RTC. If you take, say a cancer clinical trial, the trial compares the standard treatment with a new treatment and compares them. It would be wrong to deny a cancer patient any treatment at all.
If we say that vaccines are the first line of defense, we cannot ethically deny then to anyone.
Speaking of research. Six months in the lab has been known to save you an afternoon in the library.
[...] link with autism. Consequently, as herd immunity has failed, measles rates have skyrocketed in the UK over the past decade. How does this [...]
weing:
During the family gathering at Christmas I witnessed an interesting rant from a computer engineer. He said that often he will see someone announce (on a webpage, in a user forum, or elsewhere) a bit of code that helps with some kind of programming problem. Except that it is not new, or unique. Often there is an easily found piece of code to do what they were proclaiming, and it is often better and actually supported (often on shareware platforms). All they had to do was actually spend the effort to look for it, instead of spending the effort to create the code.
With a modicum of real research (like actually going to the library and reading some books on the history of vaccines, see list at the end of this rant), this researcher person, would have learned that those double blind trials on vaccines were done. They were done on children living in institutions, the places they would warehouse children with mental and/or physical disabilities.
That isn’t done anymore because it is considered unethical, disabled children are no longer automatically sent to institutions, and there are not as many children permanently disabled by Hib, measles, mumps, rubella, etc. See:
Impact of specific medical interventions on reducing the prevalence of mental retardation.
Brosco JP, Mattingly M, Sanders LM.
Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2006;160:302-309.
This information is easily found by reading about the development of the polio vaccine, and in Dr. Paul Offit’s biography of Maurice Hilleman, Vaccinated! (which has lots of narrative on the history of vaccine developement in the twentieth century). Again, see list at end of rant.
There is no conceivable reason to put a vaccine that has been used safely for almost forty reason through some kind of randomly controlled test. There is no reason to compare to getting measles, the effects of measles are well known. The incidence of measles dropping considerably is a well known effect of the measles vaccines (including the not so good version introduced in 1963, and the MMR introduced in 1971). If you look through the literature you will notice that Merck did conduct the earliest trials of the MMR, I don’t think they paid for the bulk of the following.:
Lack of Association between Measles Virus Vaccine and Autism with Enteropathy: A Case-Control Study.
Hornig M et al.
PLoS ONE 2008; 3(9): e3140 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0003140
*Subjects: 25 children with autism and GI disturbances and 13 children with GI disturbances alone (controls)
Measles Vaccination and Antibody Response in Autism Spectrum Disorders.
Baird G et al.
Arch Dis Child 2008; 93(10):832-7.
Subjects: 98 vaccinated children aged 10-12 years in the UK with autism spectrum disorder (ASD); two control groups of similar age: 52 children with special educational needs but no ASD and 90 children in the typically developing group
MMR-Vaccine and Regression in Autism Spectrum Disorders: Negative Results Presented from Japan.
Uchiyama T et al.
J Autism Dev Disord 2007; 37(2):210-7
*Subjects: 904 children with autism spectrum disorder
(Note: MMR was used in Japan only between 1989 and 1993.)
No Evidence of Persisting Measles Virus in Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells from Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
D’Souza Y et al.
Pediatrics 2006; 118(4):1664-75
*Subjects: 54 children with autism spectrum disorder and 34 developmentally normal children
Immunizations and Autism: A Review of the Literature.
Doja A, Roberts W.
Can J Neurol Sci. 2006; 33(4):341-6
*Literature review
Pervasive Developmental Disorders in Montreal, Quebec, Canada: Prevalence and Links with Immunizations.
Fombonne E et al.
Pediatrics. 2006;118(1):e139-50
*Subjects: 27,749 children born from 1987 to 1998 attending 55 schools
MMR Vaccination and Pervasive Developmental Disorders: A Case-Control Study.
Smeeth L et al.
Lancet 2004; 364(9438):963-9
*Subjects: 1294 cases and 4469 controls
Age at First Measles-Mumps-Rubella Vaccination in Children with Autism and School-Matched Control Subjects: A Population-Based Study in Metropolitan Atlanta.
DeStefano F et al. Pediatrics 2004; 113(2): 259-66
*Subjects: 624 children with autism and 1,824 controls
Prevalence of Autism and Parentally Reported Triggers in a North East London Population.
Lingam R et al.
Arch Dis Child 2003; 88(8):666-70
*Subjects: 567 children with autistic spectrum disorder
Neurologic Disorders after Measles-Mumps-Rubella Vaccination.
Makela A et al.
Pediatrics 2002; 110:957-63
*Subjects: 535,544 children vaccinated between November 1982 and June 1986 in Finland
A Population-Based Study of Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccination and Autism.
Madsen KM et al.
N Engl J Med 2002; 347(19):1477-82
*Subjects: All 537,303 children born 1/91–12/98 in Denmark
Relation of Childhood Gastrointestinal Disorders to Autism: Nested Case Control Study Using Data from the UK General Practice Research Database.
Black C et al.
BMJ 2002; 325:419-21
*Subjects: 96 children diagnosed with autism and 449 controls
Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccination and Bowel Problems or Developmental Regression in Children with Autism: Population Study.
Taylor B et al.
BMJ 2002; 324(7334):393-6
*Subjects: 278 children with core autism and 195 with atypical autism
No Evidence for a New Variant of Measles-Mumps-Rubella-Induced Autism.
Fombonne E et al.
Pediatrics 2001;108(4):E58
*Subjects: 262 autistic children (pre- and post-MMR samples)
Measles-Mumps-Rubella and Other Measles-Containing Vaccines Do Not Increase the Risk for Inflammatory Bowel Disease: A Case-Control Study from the Vaccine Safety Datalink Project.
Davis RL et al.
Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med 2001;155(3):354-9
*Subjects: 155 persons with IBD with up to 5 controls each
Time Trends in Autism and in MMR Immunization Coverage in California.
Dales L et al.
JAMA 2001; 285(9):1183-5
*Subjects: Children born in 1980-94 who were enrolled in California kindergartens (survey samples of 600–1,900 children each year)
Mumps, Measles, and Rubella Vaccine and the Incidence of Autism Recorded by General Practitioners: A Time Trend Analysis.
Kaye JA et al.
BMJ 2001; 322:460-63
*Subjects: 305 children with autism
Further Evidence of the Absence of Measles Virus Genome Sequence in Full Thickness Intestinal Specimens from Patients with Crohn’s Disease.
Afzal MA, et al.
J Med Virol 2000; 62(3):377-82
*Subjects: Specimens from patients with Crohn’s disease
Autism and Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccine: No Epidemiological Evidence for a Causal Association.
Taylor B et al.
Lancet 1999;353 (9169):2026-9
*Subjects: 498 children with autism
Absence of Detectable Measles Virus Genome Sequence in Inflammatory Bowel Disease Tissues and Peripheral Blood Lymphocytes.
Afzal MA et al.
J Med Virol 1998; 55(3):243-9
*Subjects: 93 colonoscopic biopsies and 31 peripheral blood lymphocyte preparations
No Evidence for Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccine-Associated Inflammatory Bowel Disease or Autism in a 14-year Prospective Study.
Peltola H et al.
Lancet 1998; 351:1327-8
*Subjects: 3,000,000 doses of MMR vaccine
Encephalopathy after whole-cell pertussis or measles vaccination: lack of evidence for a causal association in a retrospective case-control study.
Ray P, Hayward J, Michelson D, Lewis E, Schwalbe J, Black S, Shinefield H, Marcy M, Huff K, Ward J, Mullooly J, Chen R, Davis R; Vaccine Safety Datalink Group.
Pediatr Infect Dis J. 2006 Sep;25(9):768-73.
Here are some books I have read on the subject, and also autism, which brought me to this subject (from my spreadsheet of books I check out, so I can keep track of what I check out, which is why some titles are truncated). I read multiple books on the polio vaccine, but it was before i was keeping track. One had a detailed description of using disabled children in institutions for vaccine trials, it was not pretty.:
Guns, germs, and steel : the fates of human societies / by Diamond, Jared M. Book
Deaf like me / by Spradley, Thomas S. Book (1960s rubella epidemic, also on using sign language, the first expressive language my son had)
Lies, damned lies, and science : how to sort through th
Microcosm : E. coli and the new science of life /
Trick or treatment : the undeniable facts about alterna
The blue death : disease, disaster and the water we dri
Vaccine : the controversial story of medicine’s greates
Plagues and peoples / by McNeill, William Hardy, 1917- Book
Yellow fever, black goddess : the coevolution of people and plagues / by Wills, Christopher. Book
The ghost map : the story of London’s most terrifying e
The great influenza : the epic story of the deadliest plague in history / John M. Barry.
Flu : the story of the great influenza pandemic of 1918 and the search for the virus that caused it / Gina Kolata.
Mosquitoes, malaria, and man : a history of the hostili
Panama fever : the epic story of one of the greatest hu (lots on the search for what caused yellow fever, including using prisoners as test subjects)
Snake oil science : the truth about complementary and a
The Cutter incident : how America’s first polio vaccine led to the growing vaccine crisis / Paul A. Offit.
Polio : an American story / David M. Oshinsky.
Survival of the sickest : a medical maverick discovers
Vaccinated : one man’s quest to defeat the world’s deadliest diseases / Paul A. Offit.
Unstrange minds : remapping the world of autism /
The science and fiction of autism / Laura Schreibman.
The island of the colorblind and Cycad Island / by Sacks, Oliver W. Book
Not even wrong : adventures in autism / Paul Collins
Speaking of reading and research, I am almost finished with Dr. Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Science. The penultimate chapter that I am in the middle of is on the “MMR Media Hoax.” It is truly amazing what the UK media did to turn a non-story into what it is today. I really hope that after over four years the GMC in the UK throws the legal book at Wakefield.
Chris
Thanks for all the references!
Just to add that measles virus does not “mutate” to become more or less virulent. Spontaneous mutation rates with measles are not high, and wild type virus has shown remarkable stability. Attenuated measles virus does not revert to wild type virulence either, a fact that is utilised in attempting to use attenuated measles virus to be a vaccine vector for other infections or for tumour vaccines.
The “virulence” of measles is just an incorrect term some have used in this thread for describing the sometimes seen higher mortality associated with measles infection. In the developing world, complication rates are higher, there is a poorer health infrastructure and less access to interventions and treatments that would mitigate the complications, hence the case fatality rates are high.
Case fatality rates for measles in countries like the USA have been declining for most of the century, as nutrition and medical care improved.
The recent apparently high mortality (case fatality rates) among populations such as Duisberg have arisen for one reason – not the increasing virulence or “lethality” of the measles virus, but because the patients who have been infected with measles have been more vulnerable and more likely to die.
These outbreaks have typically caused serious infections/complications in those who have had some form of health problem or immunocompromise, or who have been infants. These groups are NOT vaccinated, and they rely on good herd immunity to avert infection, but as vaccination coverage has dropped, more are exposed to measles and if they catch it, they often are a lot sicker than your average “healthy” child with measles ( hence an apparently higher case-fatality rate in many recent outbreaks).
Vaccination is not making measles “more virulent”, it is the LACK of vaccination and subsequent drop in herd immunity level, which exposes individuals who are more prone to die if/when they get measles that is the cause of the problem.
For those who want to hear this blog posting with pure sarcastic tone, and some added snarky information: Quackcast 39. Measles Update.
Oh, here is a tiny secret “researcher”2000, most of those papers were listed at the obscurely named website “immunize.org”! Some I actually found on my own using PubMed.
Just listened to this article via Quackcast. Originally, I had skipped reading this, thinking I didn’t really need to learn anything else about measles. The podcast proved me wrong! Fascinating, even for us non-medico types.
[...] oregon doctor (in the coalmine, as an infectious-disease specialist) writes about h1n1: “A month ago all the ICU beds were full, most of the ventilators were in use and we were [...]
James Raymond…
This is exactly what I expected to find out after reading the title Science-Based Medicine ” Measles. Thanks for informative article…
I was curious if you could tell me where I could find the following information. Of all the deaths that occurred due to the H1N1 virus, what percentage of those were vaccinated?
I can’t find this information anywhere, and yet, if we are going to prove to the doubters whether vaccines work or not, this information would silence the naysayers once and for all.
Any information and where to get it would be appreciated, but I would stick to areas such as the US where the figures can be trusted.
libby, go here to find out about H1N1 in the USA:
http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/estimates/April_November_14.htm
Now factor in that the vaccine was not available for a limited number until the Autumn of 2009 (October and November), and was only available to the general population this month. The allocation graphs only go back to mid December here:
http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/vaccination/supplygraph.htm
It is a fair guess to say that most who have died from H1N1 were not vaccinated because the vaccine was not available.
I got my H1N1 vaccine earlier today. It seems I am still healthy and am about to go to bed. I even managed to actually walk to and from the drugstore (parking at my local mall is a pain on the weekends!). There was a good line at the drugstore, so there are plenty of people who want the vaccine.
Thanks Chris, but I don’t think this is it.
I understand that sometimes people can’t or won’t get vaccinated and are put at risk, but I’m talking about the raw data that demonstrates that out of all the deaths in a country, there has to be numbers showing how many were vaccinated and how many not.
Let’s not head use “it’s a fair guess”. That’s just not scientific enough.