February 23rd, 2011 → 9:26 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Earlier today, I got an email from Randy Dotinga, who writes regularly for Voice of San Diego, an online watchdog news site. One of the site’s regular features is called “Fact Check,” and Randy was factchecking something I said on Anderson Cooper 360 on January 5:
In 2010 alone, 10 infants died of whooping cough in California, which is astounding that that is happening today. There are children that have died of Hib, diseases that I have always assumed were definitely in the past in this country. There was a measles epidemic several years ago in California, in San Diego, that cost $10 million to contain, and resulted in a quarantine of dozens of children. That meant that those parents then had to find some way to take care of those kids, either not go to work or pay for day care. So, even when you have a case like with that measles epidemic, where it’s true that children didn’t die, you had one infant that was hospitalized for a serious amount of time, and dozens of families that had to pay an enormous amount of money because of this.
Post Categories: Blog post
January 6th, 2011 → 11:42 am @ Seth Mnookin
Yesterday, the news broke that the British Medical Journal was running a series of stories that labeled Andrew Wakefield’s infamous 1998 Lancet study that posited a link between the MMR vaccine and autism an “elaborate fraud.” Dr. Fiona Godlee, the BMJ‘s editor-in-chief, compared the MMR scare to the Piltdown man hoax, in which a series of fossilized remains found near East Sussex, England were claimed to be a previously unrecognized early ancestor of humankind. (I’m hoping that has more resonance in the UK than it does in the US, because when I first read that I had absolutely no recollection of the whole Piltdown mess.)
As someone who has spent two years doing nothing but looking into various vaccine scares, I found the way these latest revelations, which were based on reporting by Brian Deer, were packaged to be problematic. (more…)
Post Categories: Blog post
