No Vaccinations = No School

That’s the law in California since July of last year. If the kids are not current with the required vaccinations, they do not get to attend public schools. 

Is this an attack on our freedom?  Is this the nanny state overruling decisions that should belong to parents?  I don’t think so - and I’m an advocate of freedom.

Upon signing the bill into law the governor released a statement saying, "The science is clear that vaccines dramatically protect against a number of infectious and dangerous diseases.  While it's true that no medical intervention is without risk, the evidence shows that immunization powerfully benefits and protects the community.”  This is absolutely true, yet people continue to fear vaccinating their kids based on fraudulent science by a British doctor who wanted to show a relationship between vaccinations and autism so badly that he falsified results to reach that conclusion.

Wikipedia gives a good summary of the history.  “Andrew Jeremy Wakefield (born 1957, Eton, England) is a British former gastroenterologist and medical researcher who was struck off the UK medical register for his fraudulent 1998 research paper and other misconduct in support of the now-discredited claim that there was a link between the administration of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, and the appearance of autism and bowel disease.” [Emphasis added.]  The next two paragraphs of the article give more information about financial conflicts of interest, ethical problems and withdrawal of support by reputable organizations.

The New York Times archives for Wakefield contains many telling entries including:  “Anti-vaccine film pulled from Tribeca Festival; A measles outbreak in Britain would never have occurred if parents had respected the proven safety record of vaccine; Autism Fraud and Why some still won’t accept that Andrew Wakefield is wrong.”

Yet an NBC report not too many weeks ago was headlined:  “Vaccine Skeptic Message Gets Bolder,”  and going on to say, “The skeptics have taken on a brasher, bolder tone in recent months.”  Once only demanding safer vaccines, “an increasing number now say most or all vaccines are dangerous, and some accuse the federal government, physicians and the mainstream media of colluding with drug companies to deliberately poison children using vaccines.”  Do they believe that saying it longer and louder will make their arguments true?  This is behavior that was once associated with crazy people. 

Do they trust information from a discredited former doctor, celebrities with no medical training and a Facebook support group over that from medical experts?  Do they think raising the ante from unsafe vaccines to intentionally poisoning children to line corporate pockets will make a faulty argument more powerful?  Apparently so.

But these people in their naïve acceptance of a scientific fraud are putting everyone else’s children at risk.  One or two kids in a classroom of vaccinated children may not be a problem.  Who are they going to catch the diseases from if everyone else is vaccinated?  But as the number grows so does the possibility of an outbreak – vaccines are not one hundred percent effective.

This is not an issue of freedom, so much as one of responsibility and critical thinking.  From dangerous behavior comes potentially fatal consequences, and unfortunately, at some point the authorities are forced to step in.

Keeping the FTC Busy

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is the government organization tasked with keeping advertisers honest.  “Its principal mission is the promotion of consumer protection and the elimination and prevention of anticompetitive business practices.”  With all the fears and worries, real and manufactured, about physical and mental health that the pushers of pills and miracle cures take advantage of, the FTC keeps very busy.

I got a tip from a reader to check out the B12 stores that are springing up along the roadside in his state.  They offer Vitamin B12 injections and promise many health benefits.  One Internet site lists 22 areas where B12 helps the mind or body, prevents problems or boosts some function.  But as the reader points out 30 seconds of research on line shows that these injections are a waste of time.

This is quite right.  As this site explains, Vitamin B12 supplements are appropriate only when the patient has a deficiency.  It’s not the cure-all that it claims to be.  Since it is water-soluble, “[w]hen taken in excess, your body eliminates what it doesn’t need…So if you’re not deficient, you’re wasting your money.”  (In one end and out the other.)

The reader goes on to say he reported these false claims to the FTC. They called and thanked him but said they are so backlogged with other investigations that action would take months, maybe years.  What else is keeping them so busy? 

The next week, the answer came, in part, from the Consumer Health Digest, an non-governmental newsletter about deceptive medical claims.  “During the past two years, three marketers of questionable ‘brain training’ programs have settled FTC charges by agreeing to discontinue various claims.”

“The developers and marketers of LearningRx  ‘brain training’ agreed to stop claiming that their programs were clinically proven to permanently improve serious health conditions like ADHD, autism, dementia, Alzheimer's disease, strokes, and concussions and that the training substantially improved school grades, college admission test scores, career earnings, and job and athletic performance.”  

Then there was the case of the Lumosity games claiming to help users perform better at work and in school, and reduce or delay cognitive impairment associated with age and other serious health conditions.  They settled charges that they deceived consumers with these unfounded claims and agreed to pay $2 million.

Finally about 18 months earlier, Focus Education “agreed to stop making unsubstantiated claims that their computer game, Jungle Rangers, permanently improves children's focus, memory, attention, behavior, and school performance, including for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).”

In addition to the games and puzzles falsely claiming to make us smarter, more attentive and less forgetful, about 6 months ago “the FTC also settled charges against the marketers of Procera AVH, a dietary supplement claiming to have been clinically proven to improve memory, mood, and other cognitive functions.

These last four examples over the span of less than two years in only one category gives an idea of the size of the workload of the FTC as they try to police the deceptive claims of charlatans and hucksters, the snake oil salesmen preying on Americans looking for that magic cure, a cure for problems real or imagined, an easy way out.  Even some good companies may get carried away, trying to sell their products by promising cures when there is no evidence.   Perhaps they believe that what they are saying is true or that they have worded their ads cleverly enough to avoid legal problems.

In any case, these advertisers know a couple of things for sure.  Today there are so many reports of legitimate new drugs and advances in medicine that we are led to expect and be less skeptical of such claims.  They also know that any mention of Alzheimer’s, ADHD or autism will trigger an automatic, hopeful reaction.  So it’s up to us to be wary.  The FTC cannot protect us from every too-good-to-be-true ad that comes our way.  Discipline to do the work and not be sucked in by the promise of a miracle cure, along with a healthy skepticism that comes from critical thinking will push us to do a little research before accepting these claims at face value.  Such an approach can save significant time and money.

What's in a Relationship?

Correlation is a tricky subject.  It is the measure of the mathematical relationship between two measurements.  These could be any measurements, and it becomes tricky when someone tries to attribute a physical relationship to this mathematical relationship, that is, they try to tell you that because two things change at the same time (increase or decrease) that one causes the other.

A common example is carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere and climate.  Over many thousands of years, when there was more CO2 in the atmosphere, global temperature has been higher.  It’s not possible to deduce immediately from that the one causes the other.  Scientists must find the mechanism by which the change in one leads to a change in the other – the greenhouse effect of reflecting the earth’s heat back toward the ground, for example.  But correlation alone is not good enough.  It only provides a clue, a reason for further investigation.

Unfortunately, we read about correlation, these relationships, frequently but the reporters are not careful to clarify this important point.  A recent example comes from the University of Texas.  “Fathers who worked in engineering were two times as likely to have a child with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Those who worked in finance were four times more likely and those who worked in health care occupations were six times more likely to have a child on the autism spectrum.”  This is correlation, a mathematical relationship.  Have they looked for a mechanism to explain their results?  Is it an inheritance issue?  Is it the way the father treats his children?  Is there any real-life relationship at all?  The article says nothing about it. Should someone opt not to become a doctor for fear of increasing his children’s odds of being autistic?  Does one cause the other; do they have a common cause; or are the findings of the study based on an odd coincidence?

Stranger coincidences are really quite common.  This link shows a few examples from “a law student at Harvard who, in his spare time, put together a website that finds very, very high correlations between things that are absolutely not related, like margarine consumption and the divorce rate in Maine.”  My favorite is a 96.97% correlation between deaths by getting tangled in bed sheets and the revenue of ski facilities.  This is extremely close to perfect correlation of 100%, and much better than scientists that present studies for publications usually achieve.

Readers of any scientific or medical reports beware.  A correlation is only the beginning of an investigation, not a conclusion.

Is US Becoming a Third World Country?

Lack of science literacy, which I have commented on before, is more than knowing that gasoline explodes and should be handled with care.  Not understanding science and medicine leads to serious problems.  Children are dying.

When we look at news reports from less-developed countries about how superstition and religious zealots stand in the way of good medicine, we may feel a mixture of sadness and superiority, sadness because people, especially children are sick and dying for no good reason, superiority because Americans know better.  Reports from Nigeria tell us that gunmen “suspected of belonging to a radical Islamic sect shot and killed at least nine women who were taking part in a polio vaccination drive.”  The attack “signaled a new wave of anger targeting immunization drives in Nigeria, where clerics once claimed the vaccines were part of a Western plot to sterilize young girls.”  Elsewhere, polio vaccines find violent opposition because “some mullahs have preached against it, claiming falsely that the oral vaccine leaves Pakistani children sterile.” 

Americans would never act like that, or would they?  Fear of Autism from a long-ago-discredited report claiming a connection with MMR shots leads many parents in the US to oppose the vaccinations.  Recently this has led to a tripling of measles cases in the US, where the disease had been nearly wiped out, as it was brought in by travelers from overseas.  For the facts showing that the supposed MMR-Autism connection is untrue, see my April 19, 2013 comments.

Flu shots are wrongly associated with all kinds of bad side effects.  If that were true, it seems strange that doctors and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would recommend flu shots every year.  Conspiracy theorists will say that they are in league with the drug companies who make the vaccine, that they are willing to put the health of many people at risk just to make a profit.  Here is a link to a site addressing those concerns.  It dispels 25 of those myths that keep people away from the flu vaccines, decisions which contribute to the deaths of thousands.  The CDC lists influenza as the 9^th leading cause of death in 2011 with over 50,000 cases.

Similarly, parents refuse to get their preteens HPV shots.  On December 4 Katie Couric aired a show on this.  She admitted getting her daughters vaccinated, but for the sake of good television presented both sides of the issue.  Prior to airing, the show “teaser creates the false impression that the vaccine can kill, despite the fact that no evidence supports that conclusion. It also puts forth the idea that there is a controversy around the vaccine. There is certainly a vocal minority asserting that the vaccine is dangerous, and social conservatives who vilify the vaccine due to religious beliefs, but these are not real controversies.”  Such TV shows excuse their format as presenting both sides of a controversy.  On one side we have medical evidence, on the other side opinions of non-experts.  There are not two sides, only the truth.

Finally, some parents are denying newborns Vitamin K shots for fear of Leukemia.  Again they have been giving erroneous information, as this link makes clear.

When we see stories of children dying in third world countries due to lack of vaccinations based on false assumptions, misinformation, religious prejudices and ignorance, we have every right to feel sad – but superior?  I don’t think so.