[BITList] Fwd: [From: Mike Feltham] It's not what the papers say, it's what they don't

[Michael Feltham]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "guardian.co.uk" <noreply at guardian.co.uk>
Date: 6 December 2008 17:26:05 GMT
To: mj.feltham at madasafish.com
Subject: [From: Mike Feltham] It's not what the papers say, it's what  
they don't

Mike Feltham spotted this on the guardian.co.uk site and thought you  
should see it.

To see this story with its related links on the guardian.co.uk site,  
go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/06/bad-science-mmr-vaccine

It's not what the papers say, it's what they don't
Ben Goldacre
Saturday December 6 2008
The Guardian


Writing this column really scares me because I wonder whether  
everything else in the media is as shamelessly, venally,  
manipulatively, one-sidedly, selectively reported on as the things I  
know about. But this week the reality editing was truly without  
comparison.

On Tuesday the Telegraph, the Independent, the Mirror, the Express,  
the Mail, and the Metro all reported that a coroner was hearing the  
case of a toddler who died after receiving the MMR vaccine, which the  
parents blamed for their loss. Toddler 'died after MMR jab' (Metro),  
'Healthy' baby died after MMR jab (Independent), you know the  
headlines by now.

On Thursday the coroner announced his verdict: the vaccine played no  
part in this child's death. So far, of the papers above, only the  
Telegraph has had the decency to cover the outcome. The Independent,  
the Mirror, the Express, the Mail, and the Metro have all decided that  
their readers are better off not knowing. Tick, tock.

Does it stop there? No. Amateur physicians have long enjoyed  
speculating that MMR and other vaccinations are somehow "harmful to  
the immune system" and responsible for the rise in conditions such as  
asthma and hay fever. Doubtless they must have been waiting some time  
for evidence to appear.

This month a significant paper was published by Hviid and Melbye in  
the December 1 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology. They  
examined 871,234 children in a Danish birth cohort, comparing asthma  
in those who had MMR against those who didn't. MMR-vaccinated children  
were massively and significantly less often hospitalised with an  
asthma diagnosis, and used fewer courses of anti-asthma medication  
than unvaccinated children. This "protective" effect of the MMR  
vaccine was more pronounced for hospitalisations with severe asthma  
diagnoses.

Those results aren't just incompatible with an increased risk of  
asthma following MMR vaccination, they actually support the hypothesis  
that MMR vaccination is associated with a reduced risk of asthma in  
young children. Tick, tock.

And most astonishing of all is the tale of "the Uhlmann paper", or the  
"O'Leary paper". This came out in 2002 and claimed to have found  
evidence of vaccine measles virus in tissue samples from children with  
autism and bowel problems, to massive media acclaim.

As I've said previously, two similar papers, by Afzal et al and  
D'Souza et al, in 2006 found negative results on almost the same  
question, and were unanimously ignored by the media (even though  
D'Souza actively went out of his way to show how O'Leary et al got  
false positives).

Stephen Bustin is professor of molecular science at Barts and the  
London. He examined the O'Leary lab for the court case against MMR, as  
an expert witness for the drug company defendants. The case collapsed,  
and he was unable to discuss his findings. Then he was called to give  
evidence in the American "autism omnibus" case against the vaccine.  
The anti-vaccine movement did their best to prevent this. They knew  
what he had found: it appears to be incontrovertible evidence that the  
lab was detecting false positives.

Now Bustin has finally been able to write about what he found in  
O'Leary's lab. He published this month. Nobody who covered the  
original O'Leary paper has written about it. Not a soul will.

Measles cases are rising. Middle class parents are not to blame, even  
if they do lack rhetorical panache when you try to have a discussion  
with them about it.

They have been systematically and vigorously misled by the media, the  
people with access to all the information, who still choose,  
collectively, between themselves, so robustly that it might almost be  
a conspiracy, to give you only half the facts.

Today, I have merely given you some small part of the other half, and  
next week I will move on: but know that nobody else has.

? Please send your bad science to ben at badscience.net

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