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eric76
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15 Mar 2013, 2:02 pm

whirlingmind wrote:
eric76 wrote:
whirlingmind wrote:
I am open-minded to either option being the case, I just would like categorical evidence to be convinced. I am applying this not only to mercury, in all its forms, but all potential toxins that can affect neurology. I believe it can only be a good thing to make information available, so that people can look at all sides.


Do you have any links to dictionaries or other sources that define "categorical evidence"?


I think you'll find, it means proof.


As near as I can find, there is no such term.



eric76
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15 Mar 2013, 2:07 pm

whirlingmind wrote:
A little more light reading for anyone interested:


"Light reading" is correct. There is nothing there but a bunch of allegations with no references of any kind to the studies they purport to be reporting. No only that, it is from a group with a decidedly anti-vaccine agenda and cannot be trusted without backup from reasonably neutral researchers.



eric76
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15 Mar 2013, 2:30 pm

eric76 wrote:
whirlingmind wrote:
A little more light reading for anyone interested:


"Light reading" is correct. There is nothing there but a bunch of allegations with no references of any kind to the studies they purport to be reporting. No only that, it is from a group with a decidedly anti-vaccine agenda and cannot be trusted without backup from reasonably neutral researchers.


Okay. I did some searching and found some more information. From http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/monkey-business-in-autism-research/:

Quote:
Monkey business in autism research

...

But before I dive in, readers should understand that these three abstracts were poster presentations. In the biomedical field, poster presentations are the lowest form of “publication” of one’s data, with the highest being publication in a good quality, high impact, peer-reviewed journal. Indeed, several meetings that I go to fairly regularly accept nearly every abstract that is submitted as a poster. It is from this pool that reviewers decide which abstracts are good enough and/or interesting enough to be oral presentations. That’s not to say that many posters, especially at AACR (a meeting I attend almost every year), aren’t excellent. Many are very impressive, but that’s because, at least at the AACR meeting, the ratio of posters to presentations is quite high (which is why it would be foolish of me to disparage posters in general, given that I personally have presented several posters at various meetings, including AACR). Few abstracts make the cut to be oral presentations, though, relatively speaking. That being said, I do notice that the standards IMFAR appears to subject posters to do not seem to be anything resembling rigorous peer-review. Thus, given that these are only abstracts being submitted as posters, I consider them less seriously than I would an oral presentation and much less seriously than a research article in a good, high-impact peer-reviewed journal. More importantly, the publication of these abstracts as full papers in such a journal would also allow me to examine in detail the methodology, which is only sketchily described in these abstracts. So, even though they are not full scientific papers, discussing these posters is justified because clearly anti-vaccine activists are touting them as some sort of compelling evidence that Vaccines Are Evil Baby-Destroying Weapons of Mass Destruction.

So, on to the abstracts themselves! The first thing that became apparent when I read the abstracts is that they really all appear to describe aspects of one study, the results of which have been split into three different abstracts. In the science biz, this is known as divvying up one’s data into MPUs (minimal publishable units). It’s an unfortunately common practice, but not in and of itself necessarily an indicator of bad science. Because all too many granting agencies and tenure committees seem to be better bean counters than judges of quality and significance when examining a researcher’s publication record, lots of researchers do it. However, we as scientists do tend to look askance at the practice when it is done too blatantly, especially if duplicate or replicative data is included with the MPUs to pad them.

What next leaps to mind in looking at the abstracts themselves is that there are 13 monkeys in the “vaccine” group and only three in the control group. The authors do not explain or justify why there are such unequal numbers of subjects in the two groups or why they didn’t simply assign eight monkeys to each group. Doing so would have required the same number of animals. Similarly, there is no mention of how the monkeys were assigned to one group or the other (randomization, anyone?), whether the experimenters were blinded to experimental group and which shots were vaccine or placebo, whether the monkeys were weight- and age-matched, or any of a number of other controls that careful researchers routinely do when setting up animal experiments. Considering these factors, right off the bat from the small numbers (particularly with only three monkeys in the control group), I can fairly safely conclude that the study almost certainly doesn’t have the statistical power necessary to find convincing evidence of an effect of vaccination on any of the parameters measured. Let’s put it this way. I do experiments with mouse tumor models, and if I put such a large mismatch in terms of the number of controls relative to the experimental group, I would be highly unlikely to get any results I could have any confidence in.

On the other hand, maybe it’s a good thing that there weren’t more monkeys in the study, given the questionable ethics of subjecting infant monkeys to so many repeated procedures in the service of a dubious hypothesis. This concern does not even take into account the number of injections given to the monkeys as vaccines or placebos.


In interests of brevity, I'll skip some of the discussion of the problems with the "research".

Quote:
Overall, judging from the abstracts so helpfully provided by AoA, I am, alas, underwhelmed. These three studies appear to be nothing more than Hornig v.2.0, except this time with monkeys. I suppose it’s possible, albeit unlikely, that the science in the actual study will turn out to be better than what is represented in the abstracts. For that, we will have to wait for the actual papers to be published–if they ever are published, which is by no means certain, given what I can glean of the quality (or, more correctly, the lack thereof) of the science presented in these abstracts. ...

Finally (and I saved this for absolutely last because I wanted to address the substance of the abstracts first without being accused of basing my criticism primarily on ad hominem attacks), who did this experiment? One name stands out: Andrew Wakefield. Yes, it’s the same Andrew Wakefield whose incompetent science (particularly in the area of dealing with RNA and doing PCR!) done with huge conflicts of interest led to a scare that caused MMR vaccination rates to plummet in the U.K. ten years ago. In addition, a blogger named Kev informs us a bit about some of the other authors:

Quote:
The primary author seems to be Laura Hewiston of Pittsburgh University. She is registered on that page as a DAN! Doctor. She (I think its the same person) also appears here (see 953) and here.

Also listed as an author according to AoA is one AJ Wakefield. Enough said about that!

Lastly, is Steve Walker who did a poster presentation at an IMFAR in the past (can’t recall which one) which also appeared to offer support for the MMR hypothesis. Oddly, that poster presentation never made it into any kind of peer reviewed journal.


Also oddly enough, Hewiston appears to have a background in primate research and has presented multiple times at the meeting of the American Society of Primatologists, an observation that makes me wonder how she got roped into these studies. Apparently she has an autistic son, and that may be coloring her decisions. Unfortunately, Dr. Hewitson wouldn’t be the first researcher whose personal brush with autism led her down the path of questionable science. It appears that such may be the case with her.

Indeed, having learned that she has an autistic son, I really, truly wanted to give Dr. Hewitson the benefit of the doubt as I read these abstracts, assuming that perhaps her love of her son was affecting her scientific judgment and that she might not know what she was getting into when she collaborated with Andrew Wakefield. Sadly, I then discovered what seems to be a very serious and apparently undisclosed conflict of interest, as a commenter has informed me. Not only is Dr. Hewitson married to Dan Hollenbeck, a regular contributor to the Age of Autism website (which would not in and of itself be a major conflict of interest), but she and her husband are listed as litigants in the Autism Omnibus proceedings (see #437):

Quote:
437. Laura Hewiston and Dan Hollenbeck on behalf of Joshua Hollenbeck, Dallas, Texas, Court of Federal Claims Number 03-1166V


If this conflict of interest was undisclosed, it is in violation of the policies of INSAR about presentations at IMFAR and conflicts of interest:

Quote:
INSAR requires authors to disclose their sources of contributed support (commercial, public, or private foundation grants, and off-label use of drugs, if any). INSAR also requires authors to signify whether there may be a real or perceived conflict of interest. Any potential for financial gain that may be derived from reported work may constitute a potential conflict of interest.


Note that the instructions say “any” potential financial gain and “…real or perceived conflict of interest”! I’d say that being a plaintiff in a massive legal action being heard before the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program that alleges that vaccine injury, specifically some combination of mercury and other factors (I’m never quite clear which) caused autism in the litigants’ children qualifies as a rather major conflict of interest, wouldn’t you? This conflict of interest is not listed on the AoA posting of the abstracts, which means either that AoA left it out when republishing the abstracts or Dr. Hewitson did not report them to INSAR when submitting or finalizing the abstracts. The first possibility would not surprise me, as AoA is a font of misinformation in service of antivaccination ideology; the second possibility saddens me, because, if true, it would indicate that an apparently once talented researcher has taken a major step down the road to academic and professional ruin. I really hate to see that.

But it goes beyond even that. Kev has also figured out that not only is Dr. Hewitson married to Dan Hollenbeck, but that Dan Hollenbeck works for Dr. Wakefield at Thoughtful House as Director of Information Technology and that his website FightingAutism.org is also part of Thoughtful House. Kev sums things up quite well:

Quote:
So, here we are with three poster presentations from a woman who has an autistic son, affiliated with DAN!, is married to the Thoughtful House IT guy (who also happens to be on the Board of Directors of SafeMinds) and these afore-mentioned poster presentations are also co-authored by Andrew Wakefield. I wonder just how impartial this science can be?


Did they ever actually publish this study? If so, where?