A week on the road: California & Colorado recap

March 12th, 2011 → 9:09 pm @

I’ve been traveling a lot over the past week, which has translated into lots of activity in the real world and very little in the virtual one. Instead of a bunch of mini-posts, I’m going to do a couple of catch-all updates; this one has links to news about some of the events I did on the road, and over here you can see some recent interviews and articles about The Panic Virus. (more…)

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Dept. of corrections: The phantom $10 million measles outbreak

February 23rd, 2011 → 9:26 pm @

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.

(more…)

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Causation & correlation: What declining special ed rates don’t (necessarily) say about autism diagnoses

February 4th, 2011 → 6:05 pm @

Earlier today, California Watch, a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting, posted a short piece on rising rates of autism and declining rates of students with “learning disabilities”: (more…)

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