After an article on MMR appeared in the Telegraph I wrote a letter, and they printed it: recognition at last. I’m putting it here because to be honest, this blog is kind of my scrapbook…
Their article was ‘Why I am terrified of trusting MMR’ By Beezy Marsh 12/02/2006
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/02/12/nmmr112.xml
Sensitive figures
Your report on the MMR vaccination controversy (News, February 12) says “population-based studies are not sensitive enough to pick up problems that may affect a tiny minority of children”. The figures do not support this assertion: autism has increased from one child in 2,500 to one in 250, an increase the anti-MMR lobby ascribes to the vaccine. A tenfold increase is not a “tiny minority”,and figures this large present no problem for the sensitivity of population studies.
The purpose of vaccination is to reduce the prevalence of viruses throughout the population – and ultimately eradicate them – not to protect an individual child. For example, there has been an increase in mumps, from only 200 cases a year to 40,000 since the anti-MMR campaign began, but the increase has been mostly among teenagers, not un-vaccinated babies.
(Dr) Ben Goldacre, London NW5
Ben Goldacre
Saturday January 21, 2006
The Guardian
I seem to have opened up a whole new front of bad science by looking into the high end hi-fi industry: but that will have to wait for next week. “Scientists claimed yesterday that they have solved the mystery behind the success of Agatha Christie’s novels,” says the Telegraph. “Novelist Agatha Christie used words that invoked a chemical response in Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Goldacre
Saturday November 26, 2005
The Guardian
The moment I saw the press release for the new Bristol Homeopathy study, I knew I was in for a treat. This was a fabulously flawed “survey”, no more, in which some doctors asked their patients whether they thought they’d got better a while after having some homeopathy. Not meaningless data in itself, but the action, as ever, is in the interpretation, and the interpretation was Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Goldacre
Thursday May 26, 2005
The Guardian
· I’d like to open with a sanctimonious moment. I don’t expect anyone else in the world to follow suit, but from now on, if I refer to published academic research, I’ll be giving the full reference, at the foot of the column if there’s space, or at least on the web version. Why this is not standard media practice has always mystified me. “Science communicators” do read original papers and critically appraise them before writing about them, don’t they?
· Anyway, we’ll come back to testicles later. Meanwhile, there are two outbreaks of polio in Yemen and Indonesia. The strain of poliovirus originated – pay attention – in the Kano province in northern Nigeria. What, you may ask, has this got to do with your gonads – or indeed those of the man you love? Well, a couple of years ago Kano was the focal point of a Nigerian Muslim boycott of polio vaccination. Imams claimed that the vaccine was dangerous, poisoned, contaminated and part of a US plot to spread Aids or infertility in the Islamic world. Five Nigerian states boycotted it. Because, as any trendy MMR-dodging north London middle class humanities graduate couple with children would agree, just because vaccination has almost eradicated polio – a debilitating disease which as recently as 1988 was endemic in 125 countries – does not mean it is necessarily a good thing.
· This brings us back to testicles. Because, sadly, the natural world does not quite share my sense of retributive justice, nor does the paramyxovirus that causes mumps. If it were infecting only the innocent unvaccinated offspring of humanities graduates with no understanding of risk, I’d pretend to be sad on their behalf. But no. There were 8,104 cases of mumps confirmed in the UK last year, up from a combined total of 3,907 for all the previous five years, chart fans.
· But mumps cases last year were predominantly in young adults, because young adults as a herd have the lowest immunity. And one in five young men who get mumps can expect orchitis, a new joy for fans of infected and inflamed testicles. If your balls hurt and you’re infertile, you might wish to thank, for their peculiar interpretation and eulogising on the dangers of MMR: Andrew Wakefield, Nigella Lawson, Libby Purves, Suzanne Moore, Lynda Lee-Potter, The Daily Mail, Leo Blair’s tight-lipped parents, and, let’s be fair, every single national newspaper.
BMJ 2005 May 14;330: 1119-20
Literate molecules
Ben Goldacre
Thursday May 12, 2005
The Guardian
• Nobody is inviting me to any premieres for the US hit docudrama What the Bleep Do We Know!? — in cinemas next week — so all I know about it is the Telegraph magazine article that reader Ken Joy sent me. The film features the work of Dr Masaru Emoto, who, the article reports, has a PhD from the Open International University; it doesn’t mention that Read the rest of this entry »
This article is a rough transcript of the most excellent Bad Science Awards 2004 that were held in the Asylum Club on Rathbone St W1, a tiny basement club with a fire safety license for 150. We were expecting 20 people but to general astonishment there were queues down the street, and an unruly crowd who were drunkenly, loudly, and at one point quite violently baying for Gillian McKeith’s blood. Also performing were the excellently frightening and dangerous Disinformation presents “National Grid”, performance terrorism with victorian electrical equipment and rubber gloves, featuring Mark Pilkington of Strange Attractor and Guardian Far Out fame.
Thursday December 16, 2004
The Guardian
Ben Goldacre on the gongs nobody wants to win…
Andrew Wakefield prize for preposterous extrapolation from a single unconvincing piece of scientific data
With its place at the kernel of Bad Science reporting in the news media, this was bound to be a hotly contested category. Were there any Read the rest of this entry »
This article won the £2,000 ABSW Best Science Feature Award 2003
Channel Five’s new drama about the link between MMR and autism makes great TV. But it gets the story, and the science, disastrously wrong. How did we get to such a level of confusion and hysteria about this vaccine? Ben Goldacre unravels the real MMR story
Thursday December 11, 2003
The Guardian
There’s not a lot you need to know about the link between MMR and autism, except that there’s very little evidence to suggest any link at all. You don’t have to take my word for it, because I’ll describe the science later Read the rest of this entry »
