“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…

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

For Measles deaths look here:
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.
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?

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.

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.

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.

Sporadic, spontaneous Creutzfeld-Jakob disease also seems to have been always with us, usually unnoticed because there have been so many other mysterious ways to sicken and die. Now most of the other mystery illnesses have been uncovered. Creutzfeld-Jakob disease can occur without a cause – so to speak.

But there seems now to be no significant doubt that a minor outbreak of CJD cases with a different profile has occurred recently, now seems to be declining, and science does not strongly differ from common sense in associating a rare but temporarily increasing human brain disease with a widespread animal brain disease when humans are eating the brain tissue of the animals in question.

The precise point at which the nuumber of apparent confirmed cases of a new disease justify a public health programme against it is difficult to choose, particularly if the public health programme interferes with someone’s business. The matter of electricity supplies has just come up again. I think that the matter of BSE and CJD was treated correctly by scientists and also by legislators, although BSE itself should have been taken more seriously.

I also think that the overall risk to health and life of a diet including more than a sparing amount of red meat still outweighs the risk of CJD at its highest – and animal nerve tissue is now mostly excluded from human diet. From animal diet – I don’t know, but I hope so.

re BSE/new variant CJD (nCJD) – as I understand it we were due to have had an explosion in the numbers of cases of nCJD over recent years after all of the BSE scare a while back, instead I understand that the numbers have fallen. I also believe that our understanding of prion disease is not that great and particularly the transmission of BSE to nCJD – a friend of mine was disecting human brains for a neuro-anatomy BSc and was told that there is no certainty that anything stops prions – gloves, hand washing or even sterilisation! the nCJD thing is still at best an unknown and from my point of view seems to have fallen off the radar but similarities to the MMR/autism thing are probably valid

just joshing of course, my point is that there are many out there who support the rational and scientific approach to journalism – so why aren’t any of them journalists…?!