“I’m too young (42) to recall the full details of the whooping cough saga of the 1970s: did that have the same general feel, or was there more basis to it?”

- There was more basis to it.

Whooping Cough vaccine presented a small but real risk of brain injury to some children. However when whooping cough was prevelant, this was far outweighed by the risks of the disease itself.

As a result of this vaccine uptake was high, and Whopping Cough was almost eradicated.

At some point theoretically the risks of the vaccine to an individual then outweigh the risks of the disease.

An parent could choose to ‘cheat’ the system – relying on ‘herd immunity’ for their child’s protection.

Of course if this selfishness spreads – then herd immunity will be compromised and there will be an outbreak amongst unvaccinated individuals.

Which despite all the warnings was exactly what happened – partly as a result of irresponsible media reporting by journalists who supported parents who were doing what was “best for their children”.

Totally in the spirit of those Thatcherite times of course

Newer vaccines have reduced side-effects – although the American Medical system conspires against vaccination there, and there are unneccessary outbreaks – Worldwide about 300,000 kids die from it each year…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pertussis#Whole-cell_pertussis_vaccine_controversy

For Measles deaths look here:
http://www.hpa.org.uk/infections/topics_az/measles/nots_and_deaths.htm

To quote:
“In 2006 there was one measles death in a 13 years old male who had an underlying lung condition and was taking immunosuppressive drugs. Prior to 2006, the last death from acute measles was in 1992. Other measles deaths shown above are in older individuals and were caused by the late effects of measles. These infections were acquired during the 1980s or earlier, when epidemics of measles occurred.”

I don’t know when the scare started, but there have been small numbers of deaths throughout.

Brian Deer, of course, has an account of the matter that argues that the courts may well have got this one wrong when they awarded compensation for whooping cough vaccine damage.

The Intertubes are playing up so I can’t verify this URL but I think that it is still correct.
http://briandeer.com/dtp-dpt-vaccine.htm

Did the Observer produce this Bad Science just so that you would be able to write about how bad it was the next week?

vCJD also looks suspiciously like what you would get if you suddenly got funding etc to look much more closely at a population than you ever had before.

Concern over health effects of high voltage power lines is not the same thing as concern over low frequency electromagnetic fields. There’s a hypothesis that ionisation of the air by the high voltage can charge microscopic particles and make them more likely to enter people’s lungs, for example. I have no idea what the current (sorry) consensus on that hypothesis is, but it doesn’t involve a direct biological effect of the EM field.

I do agree that it seems a lost of trust in science and government over health was a result of the BSE scare. I was trying to show that at least some positives came out of BSE. There are none yet for MMR. Also, there was and is genuine concern regarding BSE/nvCJD, there is only falso concern regarding MMR/autism.

I am considerably younger than you so was merely a twinkle in my mummys ovary for the 70’s. But I was talking to her about whooping cough the other day. She thinks the scare was pretty much the same as the MMR thing and she knew many middle class flaky arts and humanities types who refused to get their children vaccinated with the result that several got whooping cough.

And an absolutely massive mistrust by the general public of the pronouncements of both science and government on topics of controversy. I can’t offhand think of an event pre-BSE in which government and science looked quite so shifty and self-interested: the Windscale fire, perhaps. And I can’t see the MMR hoo-hah would have gained remotely as much traction as it did without the BSE wrangle. The MPA page on MMR (http://www.hpa.org.uk/infections/topics_az/vaccination/071102_MMRpreferable.htm ) explicitly makes the link.

I’m too young (42) to recall the full details of the whooping cough saga of the 1970s: did that have the same general feel, or was there more basis to it?

Having said all that nvCJD seems to be a disease where only a tiny amount of genetically susceptible individuals are at risk of acquiring it. Maybe the story was overblown but initially there really wasn’t much research on the issue. The end result of the scare was better animal welfare, better quality processed meat and a better awareness of what makes good quality meat in the consumer. It is hard to identify any benefit from the MMR scare.

Well, the period of exposure is 1980 to 1990, roughly. The exposure to beef is essentially the entire population, to nerve tissue probably slightly slanted towards younger and/or poorer. There’s been about 150 cases; that’s perhaps three in a million of those exposed. Those cases don’t appear to have anything to identify them has being extensively exposed: some young, some veggie.

The fringe / crank suggestion that vCJD was actually a symptom of organo-phosphate poisoning, say, is hard to exclude from a purely epidemiological perspective: I think I recall reading there was a slight bias towards non-urban areas. The reality is that any epidemiology of a condition affecting 150-odd people over twenty years is going to be almost impossible to assess, unless they have some screamingly obvious common factor. The prions themselves are slightly more visible than homeopathic `medicine’, but as a causative agent the understanding is approximately zero.

To drag this back on topic: is the evidence for BSE causing vCJD any better than Wakefield’s `evidence’ that MMR `causes’ autism? Tiny numbers of cases extrapolated to large population-wide rates? Inexplicable mechanisms involving agents at the limits of detection, which differing labs are unable to replicate? Mysterious disparity between the number of people exposed to the alleged agent and the number affected with the allegedly connected disease? Claimed increases in conditions whose diagnosis is subtle and contentious? Campaigns by distraught parents to fund increasingly surreal treatments? It’s all there, you know.

And that’s another bloody funny thing.

I suppose we must accept that the trailer for that BBC programme was misleadingly edited, but she was in a snot about something and that seems not to have attracted any comment.

p.s. Forgot to add earlier: bloody excellent job Ben. The swearing is a triumph

There is an interesting hypothesis regarding vCJD, prion protein homo/heterozygosity derived from what happened with kuru and suggesting we might be in for some more cases due to a long incubation period.

Seems that the only way that you get any sort of a proper apology from the media in this country is if you’re in your 80s and you wear a crown. Oh, and you have to be Queen too.