Davblog

In which someone you've never heard of writes about things you have no interest in

Posts Tagged ‘goldacre’

The “Controversy” That Won’t Die

The controversy over the MMR vaccine should be dead. I mean, really, no-one who reads around the subject can be in any doubt that Wakefield’s study was flawed and he massively overstated his findings. However the British press got hold of the story and now refuses to let go.

A good example is Jeni Barnett’s recent piece on the London radio station LBC. In it she promotes the same tired old nonsense (dangerous old nonsense) about MMR being linked to autism. Ben Goldacre picked up on this and posted about it on his Bad Science blog. His article included the audio from the programme. His readers had some fun dissecting the piece.

Yesterday Ben was contacted by LBC’s lawyers asking him to remove the audio from his site. He has done so, but has also put out a call for a lawyer who could help him fight the case. Ben has removed the audio (but it’s currently available on WikiLeaks).

It’s appalling that the media are still repeating this discredited nonsense. But it’s worse that they are attempting to cover their tracks and prevent people from seeing just how misinformed they are. It’s also instructive to read Jeni Barnett’s two blog posts [both since removed] where she sounds, to me, very much like a creationist arguing that we should “teach the controversy”. If you’re feeling particularly brave you could also read the comments from her listeners and despair at the number of them who still seem to believe Wakefield’s nonsense and see any attempt to refute his ideas as the medical profession trying to stifle legitimate debate.

MMR is safe. Wakefield was wrong. The only people who don’t realise that is people who insist on getting their information about science from people who are not scientists.

The Media on MMR

This makes me very angry.

Yesterday the NHS Information Centre released data showing that take-up of the MMR vaccination was lower than it should be. The national level has stalled at 85%, whereas it really needs to be at 95% in order to achieve “herd immunity” – an unflattering term which simply means that immunity is at a level where it’s impossible for the infection to take hold in the community. A decade ago, this figure stood at 92% and was rising.

This is terrible news and many media outlets have commented on it. Here, for example, are the BBC. the Mail and the Express. All of these stories contain a similar explanation for the drop. Here is the Express:

Confidence in the mumps, measles and rubella vaccine fell after
researchers published a 1998 paper in The Lancet medical journal
suggesting a link between MMR and autism.

Uptake of the jab dropped to around 80% after some parents refused to let their children have the vaccine.

This explanation is, of course, being more than a little economical with the truth. It’s true that in 1998 the Lancet published a paper that claimed to link MMR with autism. But papers in the Lancet don’t generally lead to such a hysterical reaction in the general population. This one wouldn’t have done so either if the media hadn’t picked up the story and built it up in such a disgraceful manner.

The point of publishing a paper in an academic journal like the Lancet is for other qualified academics to examine the methods and the results of a study and to draw their own conclusions as to the quality of the research and the reliability of the findings. And in this case, the methods were extremely questionable and the findings were completely untrustworthy.

But that didn’t matter. Andrew Wakefield, who lead the study which the paper was reporting on, held a press conference calling for the suspension of the MMR vaccination and it was this which was reported in the press rather than other doctors’ doubts about the reliability of his research.

Very quickly the MMR/autism link worked its way into the public consciousness and everyone “knew” that responsible parents didn’t give their their children the MMR vaccination. Hence the massive fall in immunisation and a couple of quite scary epidemics of measles in the last few years.

All of which makes it a bit galling to read yesterday’s stories in the press. The same media outlets which drummed up the hysteria in the first place are now reporting on the drop in immunisation. Here’s the BBC:

The study has since been discredited, but confidence has been slow to return in the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.

That’s accurate, I suppose, but it hardly makes it clear that the study was discredited almost immediately but that media outlets took years to listen and to drop their anti-MMR campaigns.

The problem seems to be that many of the original news stories were written by journalists who didn’t know anything about how science works. Just because some doctor stands up and says that something is true, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is true. The study needs to be examined closely before pronouncements like this can be made. Andrew Wakefield should not have held that press conference and he’s currently being investigated by the General Medical Council for many mistakes he made in the course of this study.

If you’re interested in finding out more about this story and just how badly people were mislead by the media, I strongly recommend Ben Goldacre‘s recent book Bad Science. The final chapter covers the whole sorry tale in some detail. The rest of the book is well worth reading too.

The moral of the story is: don’t trust science stories that aren’t written by people who understand science.

Nadine Dorries is Confused Again

You have to feel sorry for the electorate in Mid Bedfordshire. When they elected Nadine Dorries in 2005, I’m sure they couldn’t have know what a huge mistake they had made.

You might recall how she accused Ben Goldacre of publishing parliamentary secrets. When Goldacre pointed out that the facts he had published were in the public domain, she ignored him. When people tried to point out the errors on her web site (which she calls a blog even though it’s nothing like one) she responded by removing the ability to comment.

It’s therefore nice to be able to report that Ben has caught her out again. This time she is propagating a well-known urban legend which has been doing the rounds for almost ten years. The story goes like this. in 1999 Dr Joseph Bruner carried out an operation on a 21-week-old foetus. During the operation a photo was taken which shows the hand of the foetus apparently holding to the surgeon’s finger. Anti-abortion campaigners like to use this image to show that carrying out abortions at this age is wrong.

[Update: Previously I called the photo an "internet hoax". I think that's inaccurate. I'm not saying that the photo is faked. I'm just saying that it doesn't show what the anti-abortionists say that it shows.]

There are (at least) two problems with this. Firstly, Dr Bruner is clear that the foetus was fully anaesthetised throughout the operation. There’s no way that the foetus could have moved in the way that some people claim. Secondly, even if the foetus did move in the way described, that is no measure of the long-term viability of the foetus.

Anyway, that’s a debate that I don’t really want to go into now. The point is that the photo has been around for years and that there has been enough debate on it to at least throw severe doubt on the interpretation that the anti-abortionists (and Dorries is a loud member of that group) like to place on it. It has just taken me ten minutes with Google to work that out. Surely it’s not too much to ask that our elected representatives put in a bit of effort to verify things they publish as fact.

Let’s also remember that Dorries is very keen to mention the fact that she used to work as a nurse. So you might think that she has the medical knowledge to realise that what she is posting as fact is (at the very least) rather suspect. I know that we can’t expect MPs to be experts on every subject that they have to deal with. But this is an area where Dorries claims some level of expertise.

I don’t know if anyone in Mid Beds reads this blog. But if anyone from the constituency comes across this entry and is considering voting for Dorries in the next general election then I urge you to reconsider. The constituents of Mid Beds deserve better than this.

Update: Dorries has responded to some of the criticism in post that is laughably called “the hand of truth”. I suppose we have to give her some credit for responding. Usually she just ignores her critics completely. But her response does absolutely nothing to either address the issues or enhance her reputation as a medical expert. Firstly, she asks why the surgeon would bother to anaesthetise a foetus – apparently forgetting that the mother and the foetus share the same blood, so it’s hard to anaesthetise the mother without effecting the child. Secondly, she seems to think that the foetus must have made the incision in the uterus wall that we see in the photo as it’s jagged and no surgeon would be so untidy. I didn’t realise that a foetus had the strength to break through the mother’s skin. If that’s the case then surely it’s surprising that so many of them get carried to full term.

She also implies that the surgeon might lying about what happened because he’s in fear of the “vociferous, and unfortunately violent” pro-choice campaigners in the US. I don’t know about you, but I can’t ever remember reading about violent pro-choice campaigners. From what I’ve seen, it’s the anti-abortion campaigners that you need to worried about crossing.

But it’s how she closes which annoys me the most. She says:

Finally, don’t listen to me, don’t listen to the pro-abortionists. Trust your own eyes, believe what you see.

And she ensures that you don’t listen to the other side of the argument by failing to actually link to any of the criticism (you can find a lot of it by googling for “dorries hand of hope“). To me, that indicates that she isn’t interested in a fair debate on the subject. She just wants to lie to the electorate and push her biased view of the world.

Don’t believe what you see. Question everything you see and everything you’re told. Research the subject and see what the experts say. And decide who you’d rather believe – the surgeon who was carrying out the operation or a stupid MP who is obviously pushing an agenda.

Nadine Dorries’ “Blog”

Nadine Dorries is the MP for Mid Bedfordshire. On her web site she has something that she calls a blog, although it only really resembles one superficially. Up until a couple of days ago, the biggest problem with it was that it didn’t allow linking to a particular entry, you could only link to a page containing all of the entries on a particular day. A couple of days ago things changed and the site became even less blog-like.

You’ll have seen the recent news about the Commons science and technology committee’s report on the abortion law. Dorries was one of two members of that committee (the other was Bob Spinks) who didn’t agree with the report’s findings and issued their own “minority report“.

In that report they say this:

We were greatly concerned to read in the Guardian on 27 October an article clearly aimed at undermining the credibility of Professor John Wyatt, which contained detailed information about Wyatt’s evidence, which was passed by him to the committee after his oral evidence session, and which could only have been passed on to the journalist concerned by a member of the Select Committee. There should be an enquiry about how this information got into the public domain and as to whether such a personal attack represents a serious breach of parliamentary procedure..

The author of the article in question was Ben Goldacre of the Bad Science web site. In a blog posting, Goldacre points out that the information that Dorries and Spinks are so concerned about him having access to is all in the public domain.

Readers of Goldacre’s blog tried valiantly to post comments to Dorries’ blog explaining her error, but none of these comments were published. Eventually Dorries posted another entry on her blog explaining that she would no longer be publishing any comments on blog. She claims that it’s because she doesn’t have time to moderate the comments before posting them. A cynic may well think that it’s because she doesn’t want to run the risk of people pointing out her errors.

And this is, of course, where Dorries’ web site loses all right to be called a blog. Too many politicians are deliberately misunderstanding the point of blogging. A blog is a great way to build up an interaction with your audience (in the case of an MP, your constituents) but too often these days we see blogs just being used as a monologue rather than a conversation. Even when sites allow comments, too many people prefer to remove (or not publish in the first place) comments that show them in a bad light or try to hold them accountable for their mistakes.

Of course, people should be free to publish or not publish whatever they want on their web sites. but if you’re not prepared to have a decent conversation with your readers, then don’t call it a blog. It’s just a marketing tool.

More on this from several other blogs. And Tim has set up an alternative place for people to comment on Dorries’ output.