Happy 2009!
We’re leaving tonight on the red-eye to go back from the Bay Area to New Jersey so, in the interest of being able to spend more time in the California sunshine with my guys and my parents, and since it is, indeed, 2009, a few more highlights from 2008.
August means one thing in my household—-two weeks at the beach, at the Jersey Shore. Not surprisingly, it was still impossible to avoid talk about vaccines. A new clinical trial of the GFCF diet was announced. While people have strong disagreements about the “right” of parents to vaccinate or not, …read more

In light of this discussion, consider statement from Bad Astronomy (a blog for Discover Magazine):
…….antivaxxers are potentially the Number One health hazard in America
????!????!!!?!?????!
Or maybe Bad Astronomy’s statement could just be punctuated with a plain old, definitive, period.

At last, some sensible words about vaccines, courtesy of actress Amanda Peet on yesterday’s Good Morning America:
“It seems that the media is often giving celebrities and actors more authority on this issue than they are giving the experts. I know it’s a paradox, but that’s part of why I wanted to become a spokesperson, to say to people, ‘Please don’t listen to me. Don’t listen to actors. Go to the experts.’”“My main message to parents is that they should not be taking medical advice from me or any other celebrity. They should look to their pediatrician, the AAP and other …read more

Much happened over the past two weeks but I want most of all to think about Evan Kamida, who passed away on July 24, just a few days shy of his eighth birthday. Please keep his mother Vicki Forman and Evan’s family in your thoughts and prayers—-and to honor his memory, here’s a small and lovely thing to do: Please take a photo of flowers at a swingset and post it to this Flickr pool. Shannon Des Roches Rosa and Jennifer Graf Gronenberg have posted more information.
Thinking of Evan.

Not a Team Player in the Office?—-Not Necessarily
The difficulties that …read more

Amanda Peet says a sorta sorry. While writing “”I believe in my heart that my use of the word ‘parasites’ was mean and divisive’” in a letter on the Cookie magazine website, she also says:
“[T]here is no association between autism and vaccines. How many more studies do we need to conduct on vaccines, before we start re-channeling our efforts and money towards research on autism?”
Of course, just saying “[t]here is no association between autism and vaccines” is enough to draw a lot of ire, depending on who you talk to.

About autism, that is, this blog having the “a-word” in its title. Frequently discussion here veers off into this topic. The power of association being what it is, the more “the v-word” is mentioned, the more the belief/feeling/notion that there’s a link between said word and autism gets etched into the public’s mind. This association occurs (and is strengthened by source amnesia) no matter how much scientific evidence (and there has been more recently, concurrent with more evidence that autism is genetic) arises that disputes a link.
The good thing about the very large amount of attention attributed to this …read more

About a year and a half ago, two reporters debated about thimerosal, vaccines and autism. This was back in January of 2007; the reporters were David Kirby and Arthur Allen.
In the past two months, two actresses—Amanda Peet and Jenny McCarthy have made statements to various media sources about vaccines and what they do and what they don’t. Peet has (no surprise here) aroused quite a bit of scorn, anger, fury, from proponents of the hypothesis that vaccines or something in vaccines can be linked to autism.
So there you have it. Journalists and actresses weigh in on a scientific question that …read more

Amanda “soon to appear in PSA’s for Every Child by Two” Peet vs. Jenny “Green Our Vaccines” McCarthy?
If the subject is vaccines.
Conversations with Paul Offit, M.D., who is chief of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a frequent target of the ire of pro-vaccine safety/anti-vaccine-ists, led actress Peet to be “’shocked at the amount of misinformation floating around, particularly in Hollywood.’” Apparently on the trailer of her soon-to-be-in-theaters film, X-Files 2, Peet says “I am not the most popular girl at the FBI, right now” —- I suspect she’s not going to be “the most popular” in …read more