vaccine

The RV144 HIV Vaccine trial results are out! Onwards and upwards chaps...

Wed, 10/21/2009 - 18:18

Yesterday saw the release of the paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine containing the hotly awaited data concerning the HIV vaccine trial that took place in Thailand. There was already some discussion of the initial results, which were reported in September and discussed by Colin and Martin. As has already been discussed, there is a very cautious consensus due to the statistical analysis of the trial only *just* falling on the side of significant.

Halvorsen on the Today Programme

Fri, 10/02/2009 - 17:18

Having been given space by the Daily Mail to write a column on vaccination two days ago, Dr Richard Halvorsen has today been given air-time by Radio 4. The programme is available here on iPlayer and an unverified transcript is available here.

Christian Voice, the HPV Vaccine and Freedom of Speech

Sat, 04/18/2009 - 21:56

[bpsdb] I intended to publish this two months ago and didn't get around to it, but given the recent kerfuffle about the Daily Mail's stance on HPV, I thought I'd drag it out of the archives. It's about fundamentalist "group" Christian Voice, the HPV vaccine, and freedom of speech, and it touches so many of the recurring crank themes out there. The story starts with an innocent, inoffensive little advert in the New Statesman, and includes probably the funniest ever smackdown by the Advertising Standards Agency.

Guest Post: Reflections on the Realities of Measles

Fri, 04/17/2009 - 10:49

[bpsdb] Please give a warm welcome to guest blogger "DeeTee", a British doctor with experience working in Africa.

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We are used to hearing from antivaccine lobbyists that diseases like measles are trivial conditions, notable only because they used to give kids the chance of a few days bunking off school. Sure, most of us old enough to have been children in the prevaccine era will probably think "what is the fuss all about?" But memory plays us false, and the reality can be quite different.

MMR: The Roles of Education and the Media in Vaccine Uptake

Fri, 07/25/2008 - 01:48

The controversy over MMR that Andrew Wakefield managed to trigger in the U.K. with his botched Lancet study, has given researchers the opportunity to study the dynamics of a public health scare. Their report, "Anatomy of a Health Scare: Education, Income and the MMR Controversy in the UK" studies the relationship between the media, certain family attributes, and uptake of the MMR vaccine [1]. Their findings call into question conventional wisdom regarding the positive role of parent education in vaccine uptake.

You Say Organic Potato, I Say Poisonous Lump of Neurotoxins

Sun, 03/30/2008 - 02:10

Browsing a thread on the JABS forum recently I came across a man pointing to some research indicating that thimerosal, a vaccine ingredient, may be a genotoxin. I'm not going to get into the whole antivaccine nonsense here because others have done a far better job (in doing so prompting the very weird thread I was looking at). But I was reminded what potatoes can teach us about faulty logic.