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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsReligious fundamentalists try to prove fetal DNA in vaccines causes autism and fail
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2014/09/09/religious-fundamentalists-try-to-prove-fetal-dna-in-vaccines-causes-autism-and-fail/There are some myths, bits of misinformation, or lies about medicine that I like to refer to zombie quackery. The reasons are obvious. Like at the end of a horror movie, just when you think the myth is finally dead, its rotting hand rises out of the dirt to grab your leg and drag you down to be consumed. Of course, the big difference between zombies and these bits of zombie quackery is that in most stories a single shot to the brain will kill the zombie. The same is not true of zombie quackery. You can empty clip after clip of reason, science, and logic into the head of the zombie quackery at point blank range, and the best youll do is to drive it away for a while, only tor rise up again when you least expect it.
Of course, antivaccine pseudoscience, in my experience, is one area of quackery that is rich, if not the richest, in zombie quackery and zombie memes. The same old lies keep popping up again and again and again, like Whac-A-Mole. Sure, theyll sometimes go away for a while (or appear to go away for a while), but sooner or later the exact same misinformation, occasionally with minor alterations. Think the claim that the CDC conspired at Simpsonwood to hide that thimerosal in vaccines causes autism, a myth first popularized by antivaccine icon Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. back in 2005 whose rotting corpse recently been resurrected to shamble about like so many extras on The Walking Dead. One of the advantages of having been at this blogging thing for nearly a decade is that Ive come to recognized many of these zombie memes immediately on sight. Where other people think theyre new, I recognize them as something old, often something Ive written about before at least once, if not many times. The disadvantage, on the other hand, is a tendency to become jaded or bored with refuting the same nonsense over and over again. Sometimes I marvel that in December it will have been a decade since I started blogging and sixteen years since I started refuting online nonsense.
The latest zombie meme struggling to make a comeback is a particularly brain dead one, even by antivaccine zombie meme standards. It comes in the form of a press release on ChristianNewsWire for a new study (and I do use the term loosely, even though apparently it was published in a peer-reviewed journal) entitled New Study in Journal of Public Health and Epidemiology Correlates Autism Disorder Increase and Human Fetal DNA, Retroviral Agents in Vaccines. The first thing that you should notice about this press release is that it is on ChristianNewWire, whose news sources consist mainly ofyou guessed it!fundamentalist Christian and conservative Catholic organizations, with very few legitimate scientific organizations.
The next thing you should notice is who put out this press release: Katie Doan of the Sound Choice Pharmaceutical Institute. A quick click rapidly reveals that the SCPI believes vaccines cause autism and that its somehow related to fetal DNA in vaccines, complete with a list of aborted fetal product- This, you might recall, is part of another antivaccine zombie meme, namely the claim that vaccines are made using aborted fetal tissue. This comes from the simple fact that a human cell line originally derived from an aborted fetus decades ago is used to grow the viral stocks used to make some vaccines. This is such a non-issue that even the Catholic Church says its acceptable to use these vaccines because the risk to public health, if one chooses not to vaccinate, outweighs the legitimate concern about the origins of the vaccine and because parents have a moral obligation to protect the life and health of their children and those around them. That doesnt stop radical antiabortionists from trying to represent cells hundreds of cell divisions removed from the original fetus from which they were derived as somehow being fetal tissue or fetal parts, rather than what they are: A cell line.
Dumbasses.
NuclearDem
(16,184 posts)hobbit709
(41,694 posts)Trillo
(9,154 posts)morningfog
(18,115 posts)Autism research study finds treatment in infants removes symptoms
Autism treatment in the first year of life removes the disabling delay before most children are diagnosed, according to a pilot research study conducted at the UC Davis MIND Institute.
Infant Start in infants as young as 6 months old significantly reduces symptoms so that by age 3 most who received the therapy had neither autism nor delay.
The treatment was administered over a six-month period to 6- to 15-month-old infants who exhibited marked autism symptoms, such as decreased eye contact, social interest or engagement, and a lack of intentional communication.
The treatment was delivered the babys parents.
The study was authored by Sally J. Rogers and Sally Ozonoff , UC Davis professors of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. It is published online today in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
http://blog.sfgate.com/lshumaker/2014/09/08/autism-research-study-finds-treatment-in-infants-removes-symptoms/