MMR & autism - hogwash

Living in the UK in the late 90s (as I did) it was hard to avoid the MMR scandal. I won't go into the details here. This link will tell you what you need to know and concentrates on the part played by the press in the whole palaver. Suffice to say, they did not cover themselves in glory and undoubtedly influenced a large number of parents not to use the triple jab thereby endangering the children of those parents who immunised their kids but for some reason the jab didn't work.

Now that the dust is settling, that the GMC verdict is in and that the Lancet paper retracted, some reflection is appropriate.

Despite the Bad Science link above suggesting that the autism / MMR link is a UK phenomenon, in my young student cohort one person put their hand up in a tutorial to remark on the link when MMR was mentioned. So, the damage has spread globally.

The other entity that comes out of this mess poorly is the magazine Private Eye. Although it is typical for the magazine to take an automatically contrarian view, their lack of understanding of the data disproving the autism link went on for far too long. Even today, there seems to be a reluctance to accept that they were duped by the lobbyists on this one. I sent them a letter post GMC to see if they'd publicise the safety of MMR as thoroughly as they did the imagined dangers, but normally when the letter is accepted you get a "I've passed this on to the editor"... nothing this time. And there's nothing on their website at the moment when you search for 'MMR'.

Oh God, and I forgot about their special report in 2002. 2002! Geez. The BMJ produced an interesting review here.

The problem comes down to the media's lack of understanding of science. Being largely art grads, this is not surprising. Other skills, such as understanding how the biases of sources can bias a piece of work, you would have thought to have been in an experienced journo's tool kit... but in this case the author of the Private Eye report, Heather Mills, even goes so far as to thank these sources on the back cover of the report..!

Following this debacle, a demonstration of little self-awareness of one's limitations amongst the fourth estate is warranted.

Odd goings on in the Guardian

Rather than write the whole thing out again, here's what I posted on the Bad Science forum:

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First post. Sorry if I appear pedantic but the Guardian's grasp of basic science facts irritates me in the face of their positioning in the market as being the clever clever paper.

Thing is, the Guardian's health correspondent has had a confusing weekend struggling with what E. coli is. Bug, virus or bacteria.

He plumped for virus in the first iteration of the article on which he was the sole author. I posted a link on my blog which now connects to a different article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/sep/1 ... urrey-farm

This now has two authors, one of whom is, bizarrely, an economics writer. The avoids all mention of viruses or bugs, just "E coli". Confusingly, the article history indicates only a single revision 27 minutes after the first posting which I think is strange given that I had time to read the original article, work myself up into a whirlwind of pedantry, draft my blog bit with a photo (finding one always takes five minutes or so) so it looks like I lucked into a small window there.

Thing is, I think that this was the original piece which has also been edited:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/sep/1 ... urrey-farm

From a different author (Ben Quinn rather than David Batty) but the timing fits with when my blog was updated: http://methuselahmedstudent.blogspot.com/ and it has the requisite "vomiting bug" reference missing from the new piece.

So: either the bylines have been switched, or there has been some unreferenced changes, or I'm a huge idiot missing something (which is always possible). Perhaps I should have archived the original page but I"m not that anal (I didn't even italicise E. coli above, I'm sure you've noticed).

Cheers

Meths
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Science literacy in the media

The Guardian, the paper of the British undergraduate (and me when I lived there), likes consider itself somewhat a cut above other newspapers. It provides a platform to the excellent Bad Science columnist Ben Goldacre (although his recent article on drug patents left a bit to be desired) which is to be applauded.

However, despite all this it still seems to favour the art graduate stepping sideways school of training health correspondents and because of this makes regular, irritating (to me) mistakes in the most basic facts of science stories. There was an article which conflated influence vaccines with therapeutics quite recently etc etc.

Here's a classic. As I clicked on the link, I knew what I would find:

- Story about an E. coli outbreak.
- Covered by David Batty, "Health Correspondent"
- He thinks it's a virus. He's clearly not sure, so starts off with the classic "bug" gambit at the start of the article to avoid committing.
- He even quotes a bacteriologist.

How long does it take to search Wikipedia? I suppose if you don't know what you don't know, you don't know you need to search.

Maybe I could be the Guardian's Australian chess correspondent. After all, I know shag all about that.

A journalist's perspective

Here's grim.

The splash page of the SMH had a nice picture of Marlene Dietrich with the accompanying uplifting by-line letting us know that intersex patients can now be "fixed" by their doctors, which is nice:

"

When the answer to girl or boy is: 'I don't know'

They've been called hermaphrodites and intersex children - but doctors can often fix them. "

Looks like the front page has been changed.

Oh, no: it's back now.

The article itself was unimpressive and looked like an excuse to show glamorous photos with nice titillating hermaphrodite plays on words. Mmm... sexual healing. No sign of the athlete in question, nota bene. Guess she looked a bit, erm, "mannish" for the tone of the article. Nothing as off-putting as an unglamorous intersex person.

Thing is, there's no mention of "fixing" intersex children in the article. Nor should there be, given that many of the generation of intersex children who were surgically "fixed" are a bit (a lot) upset about not being given much choice in the matter what with them being infants at the time. The Intersex Society of North America may not speak for all those born somewhere along the sex continuum, but they represent a large body and have very definite and reasonable opinions on this matter which you would have thought would be taken into account before putting a nice big picture with link on your front page.

Particularly given that the article originated in the right on, intellectual as Guardian newspaper in the UK. Despite being the paper of the discerning, earnest under- and post-grad, it still took their Health Editor, who seems to have been in the job for long enough to pick up a bit of science by osmosis at the least, several goes to get the number of human chromosomes right.

But at least they didn't go for the glam angle, unlike the high brow SMH.