Blue Collar Scientist

Well, it has taken almost three weeks, but I finally have some definitive news to post about Jeff, aka the Blue Collar Scientist. When we last checked in on things, it was thought that Jeff had caught some kind of nasty, persistent infection. This hypothesis has since been disproven, and now we know for sure what is going on.

The bad news is that Jeff has liver cancer. He’s got two tumors in the liver; one is small, one is quite large, almost 10cm in size.

The good news is that Jeff has no risk factors for cancer or liver disease; he’s never been a drinker, he’s hepatitis-free, doesn’t have HIV, etc. (In fact, the etiology of his condition remains unknown.) He’s healthy in every other way, with no cardiac, metabolic, or other diseases to complicate treatment. He’s very physically fit, although he’s gradually lost much of his stamina over the last several weeks. He’s had a full-body MRI and thoracic and abdominal CTs that establish he has no tumors outside the liver. All of this is good news for someone who has a disease that normally kills 90% of the people who are diagnosed with it within six months.

Another piece of good news - he’s being seen mid next week by the University of Washington Liver Center, one of the best liver clinics in the world, to receive treatment recommendations and come up with a plan.

Jeff’s still working on several projects - he’s got some political activism going on in Alaska, he’s still working on some curriculum materials for astronomy and physics education for some of his area school districts, and he’s still working on adapting a couple of his lectures into study guides. He’s been polishing his talk about how anyone can help make the science education crisis better.

What isn’t clear is whether he’s going to have the energy to blog very often - he certainly hasn’t during the last couple weeks of daily tests and doctors appointments. What are your thoughts on this - should we try to keep the blog going? Should we bring on a staff of regular contributors to keep fresh content between his occasional posts? Should this turn into an all-hepatic-cancer, all-the-time blog? Should it just be retired? Your feedback is needed.

BTW, you can feel free to e-mail or Skype Jeff (see the “BCS Esewhere” sidebar on the home page), and he’ll see your comments to the blog as well.

I recently made reference to The Flying Trilobite’s posting about asthma, in a post of my own on the same topic. Now local paleoartist Zach at When Pigs Fly Returns has put up a post on living with cystic fibrosis. It is worth checking out; I knew relatively little about it until reading his account.

I guess the next step is for the three of us to get together and storm the Bastille¹ (after we take a suitable break to us our medications) and release all the other pulmonary-function hard-luck cases from their societally-imposed bondage.

Or not….

1. Just two months to go! [↩]

Researchers at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere published a study yesterday in Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology¹ which establishes that asthma is associated with higher levels of suicidal thoughts with attempted suicides.

Doesn’t surprise me one bit.

The Flying Trilobite recently had a posting about asthma, a response to some google traffic that was coming his way, and over there I outed myself as an asthmatic from a very young age. When I was a kid, I had asthma severe enough to result in airway remodeling - in my case decidedly not good remodeling, though there is legitimate scientific debate whether remodeling in general is beneficial or deleterious - and today I walk around with significantly reduced lung capacity, compared to what I should have for my height and body weight, or whatever the norms are based on.

The reason that I’m not surprised to see asthma associated with suicidal thought and attempts is manyfold.

First, not being able to breathe properly is frightening and extremely painful, especially to the muscles that are used to breath - the shoulders, chest, and back in particular. Educated patients understand that few people die of asthma - but we are also taught that those that do often die of suffocation over a period of days or weeks of continuous and gradually worsening asphyxiation. We also understand that normal use of our life-saving medications can lead to refractory asthma - which is usually especially severe and frequently results in death; if you can walk out of the ICU, you consider yourself lucky.

Faced with an uncertain future, I know that I would feel a lot more comfortable about my existence if I knew that palliative care was available in the event that I faced a severe, probably terminal bout of asthma. But such palliative care is denied to asthma patients. We must tough it out, and that’s that. I can easily imagine that after a week or two of continuous symptoms, a perfectly rational asthmatic who cannot get any pain relief might be in the mood to take what the medical establishment would consider to be a few too many sleeping pills. I’ve never been down that road myself, but I’ve thought quite a bit about end of life care, knowing that if I don’t die of an accident or other sudden cause, I’m likely to die of asthma and its complications, and I’m unhappy in every way with what I know of how medicine treats the dying asthmatic.

The researchers sum up what I’ve just said in this way:

“Researchers have speculated that the relationship between asthma and suicidal behaviors is possibly because of ensuing mood and anxiety that results from disability and discomfort associated with asthma, which can be a lifelong disease,” they note. “Individuals might have frequent thoughts of death with increasing severity solely because they have a potentially life-threatening illness.”

To which my response is, no shit.

Technically, my evidence is anecdotal and personal; this hypothesis should be tested properly. But it rings true and I don’t consider it a high-risk experiment.

Second, much of my society does not accept asthma as a legitimate condition. Through the 1950’s, asthma was considered a psychosomatic condition - a disease that was entirely in the sufferer’s head. Until the mid 1960’s, treatment for asthma was dispensed by psychiatrists and psychologists in this manner²:

At that time, psychoanalytic theories described the aetiology of asthma as psychological, with treatment often primarily involving psychoanalysis and other ‘talking cures’. As the asthmatic wheeze was interpreted as the child’s suppressed cry for his or her mother, psychoanalysts viewed the treatment of depression as especially important for individuals with asthma.

Cry for my mother, my ass.

Asthma is now proven to be a real disease. In fact, it is an immune disease, a consequence of a too-active immune system. Remember this the next time a quack medical cure purveyor tries to sell you something that “boosts the immune system” - I have a boosted immune system, and trust me, you don’t want one. Asthma is an immune response in the bronchial airways, leading to constriction of those airways, excess mucous production, and is topped off with inflammation. All three of these leave less room for air to enter and exit the lungs.

Despite the objectively measurable physiologic symptoms, and despite the ability to induce asthma in anyone using a Methacholine challenge or similar test, the condition was considered until recently³ to be all in the patient’s head. Although the medical establishment changed its mind and recognized the condition as a real disease - and kudos to the medical establishment for responding to evidence, I’m not trying to say they were negligent in any way - the rest of our society has been slow to follow in the time since.

Despite medical evidence that prompt use of a rescue inhaler is necessary to save the lives of asthmatics, despite federal laws that protect the rights of asthmatics, and despite state laws mandating that schools allow asthmatic children to carry inhalers, there are still people who are too short-sighted to notice, or care, about asthmatics.

This school used to have an outright ban on medication, until I and others pointed out the illegality of the situation to an asthma activist organization. In response to massive pressure, the school changed the policy, and now if you fill out a form, the school says you can, they guess, have your medicine, if it is absolutely necessary that, you know, the student continue to live, or something. See also here,

Here is a school (pdf) that illegally requires the inhaler to be kept in the nurses office, and explicitly calls the use of the inhaler a “privilege” - at this school, the right to continue living is suddenly no longer a right. They also give broad, draconian powers to teachers who think the inhaler isn’t needed to deny its use to students. Here’s a hint for you - school teachers are not qualified to make medical assessments of respiratory function. This kind of thing is pretty widespread - one survey found that about a third of asthmatic kids had their inhalers taken away from them by school officials.

What happens when such practices are put into place? Students die. It has happened a number of times, but I’ll only link to the story of Catrina Lewis Michele Gaudin. Catrina died while school officials prevented her accessing her inhaler and spent a half hour trying to telephone her mother, before finally calling 911 to pick up the body. The life-saving murderous advice they gave to Catrina before she died was to go outside and get some fresh air. Her inhaler was locked in the school nurse’s office the whole time - they just wouldn’t let her use it.

Leaving the schools behind, there are still numerous examples of the asthmatic prejudice in the wider society that I’m sure any asthmatic could invoke. One of my favorites involves any time I was having an attack as a kid, and was told - and this happened often - to “just breathe” by some knowedgeable dumb-ass adult. I think I heard this from my gym teachers, parents of my childhood friends, extended relatives, and other well meaning, but very ignorant, people in my community.

Today, I’m active in athletics, despite having a significantly reduced lung capacity. Specifically, I like to ride bikes, and I have a high performance, tricked-out, all-carbon road bike with some nice components that weighs approximate 6/10^ths of an ounce that I like to ride as fast as I can. I ride in groups with some pretty fit riders, most of them about half my age. I can keep up, except when we hit the longer hills. Then my lungs just don’t allow it. I arrange ahead of time with my riding companions, telling them they can wait for me at the top, or they can just keep going and we need not finish together - it doesn’t matter to me. The few that wait? Well, when I get there, I’ve heard “just breath” a few too many times.

If we could breath, folks, we would.

Another is the admonishment that I’ve heard numerous times to just relax, and not sit up so straight during an attack. Got news for you - if I lay down during an attack, it gets way worse. If I recline on my couch, perhaps with some grapes and a couple of Roman slaves waving some white feather fans over me, the best that can be said is that I will have died in style. A kind of anachronistic, perverse style, but you see the point. Ignorant advice that I should just relax isn’t really needed here: Asthma isn’t a result of being high-strung. Being high-strung is a result of having to deal with idiots while I’m having an asthma attack.

The bottom line is that our culture views asthma in different ways; some see it as a medical condition and nothing more, and that’s fine. Others see it as a sign of personal weakness and a character flaw, and that’s not fine. That’s the heritage of the old establishment view of asthma as psychosomatic, requiring treatment with Freudian psychotherapy in order to make a better-adjusted person with fewer mental hang-ups.

Now, if you spent your life explaining to close friends and activity companions about certain of your limitations, in a responsible way so that they could make informed choices and not panic when confronted by these limitations - OR if you spent your life not disclosing these things and forcing others to deal in ignorance with what they considered to be unexpected and unexplained behavior on your part - and you had about half the people respond from the perspective of the “personal weakness” meme, would you consider suicide? How about some of your friends? I have no problem believing that this kind of social challenge would lead at least some people to suicidal thoughts and attempts.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not piling on the researchers here. It is about time that someone took a look at the mental health attributes of asthma, now that 1 in 4 kids are getting it, and these researchers are doing a good thing. I reserve my ire solely for the irresponsible behavior and prejudices of people confronted by asthma. Fortunately, it is getting rarer as I age. Unfortunately, not as fast as I’d like, and until things get straightened out in the culture, an asthma-suicide link is going to have the ring of the obvious to me.

1. Clarke DE, Goodwin RD, Messias E, Eaton WW. Asthma and suicidal ideation with and without suicide attempts among adults in the United States: What is the role of cigarette smoking and mental disorders? Ann Allergy Asthma Immunol 2008;100:439-446. [↩]
2. Asthma and depression: a pragmatic review of the literature and recommendations for future research Clin Pract Epidemol Ment Health. 2005; 1: 18. Published online 2005 September 27. doi: 10.1186/1745-0179-1-18. PMCID: PMC1253523 Copyright © 2005 Opolski and Wilson; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1253523 [↩]
3. Within my lifetime. [↩]

It is almost too tempting to avoid making a Jenny McCarthy joke here, so I’m going to avoid it by the skin of my teeth. I’ll just point you to this bit of news.

In another sign pointing to an inherited component to autism, a study released on Monday found that having a schizophrenic parent or a mother with psychiatric problems roughly doubled a child’s risk of being autistic.

“Our research shows that mothers and fathers diagnosed with schizophrenia were about twice as likely to have a child diagnosed with autism,” said Julie Daniels of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who worked on the study.

“We also saw higher rates of depression and personality disorders among mothers, but not fathers,” she said in a statement.

This study has a pretty big n - 1,227 children with autism, compared with families of 31,000 children without autism.

The result is not new; previous studies have supported the conclusions. This study appears in Pediatrics.

No one knows what causes autism, but researchers think it is likely that several genes and possibly environmental factors contribute.

Blackwell Publishing has kicked out a press release with a slightly unfortunate hed:

Cholera Study Provides Exciting New Way Of Looking At Infectious Disease

Now, the study that this press release reports is kind of exciting. (And yes, you can read it for free.) Basically, the investigators are looking at Vibrio cholerae, the pathogen that causes cholera, a disease characterized by massive diarrhea and very rapid death if untreated.

It was long thought that humans were the source of cholera, but in the last several years there’s been quite a bit of evidence that it actually lives in aquatic environments. This study explores how cholera interacts with chitin, the polysaccharide that makes up the exoskeletons of insects and crustaceans. The findings of the researchers, in brief, show that cholera’s interactions with chitin explains a lot about how cholera lives, expands its range, and infects humans.

This is of course a good thing - knowing about this will lead to strategies that will save lives and greatly reduce suffering. And it is also good that the investigators are excited by their work. I’d hate for the evolutionary¹ and molecular biologists who work on human disease to be, you know, apathetic, or worse, bored about what they do.

But that hed…. I just can’t get past the idea that we should be careful about saying we are excited about infectious disease, for the same reason that when a client telescope crashes in a novel way, I avoid calling the event “awesome” or “cool” in front of the client - even though it is pretty cool what you can learn about these complex systems from their failure modes.

But the headline doesn’t really matter - the release is good, the science appears sound, and the utility of the findings is unquestionable. This time, I’ll take what I can get.

1. And guess what - this study did depend upon evolutionary theory and methods to come to its conclusions. Yet another example of the way that evolution helps us all. [↩]

Pull on the shoes of a 16 year old girl for just a moment, and walk with me:

You’ve been struggling with anorexia since you were 10. You’ve been in and out of hospitals, but you don’t have health insurance and you can’t afford to check yourself into a private treatment facility. You know your life is in danger, and you need to find help as soon as possible.

One day, someone tells you about a residential treatment program that has worked wonders for its graduates. This program, with treatment facilities all over the world, has taken girls suffering from eating disorders, mental health issues like depression and bipolar disorder, and pregnant teens, and transformed them, around six months later, into healthy, shiny and happy young women.

And the program is absolutely free.

Sound good?

When you visit the website of the organisation that runs the program, you realise they are a ‘Christian counselling’ group. Ok, no problem, you can handle the Jesus references and nightly prayer meetings won’t hurt you. You used to go to church when you were younger, anyway. Free access to medical professionals and healthy meals will be worth it.

So you start the application process at the Mercy Ministries website.

After being put on a long waiting list, you are finally admitted to one of Mercy’s residential treatment facilities. That’s when things get really bad.

Instead of medical treatment, you are told your eating disorder is caused by demons (not the metaphorical sort, you understand), and the prescribed antidote is prayer, speaking in tongues and the laying on of hands. An exorcism by any other name…

This story is not particular to any one person, but stories similar to it have been surfacing in the Australian media in the last few months. This media coverage has thrust Mercy Ministries into public discourse and debate in Australia, and two weeks ago, Mercy was referred to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission for alleged breaches of the Trade Practices Act.

But it seems Mercy Ministries is continuing to operate in the US without much fallout from this. A quick online search shows that the controversy has not quite made its way across the Pacific Ocean.

The BCS asked me to write this post, geared towards a US audience, as an elaboration of a post on my blog about Mercy Ministries in Australia.

It is possible that the allegation of mistreatment made against Mercy Ministries in Australia is an isolated case, caused by a ‘bad seed’ at one treatment facility, but it is more probable that the common ideology of Mercy’s facilities around the world is to blame. If nothing else, this post serves as a cautionary tale against taking the word of a secretive religious organisation at face value.

Mercy Ministries was established as a public charity (which it still is) by Nancy Alcorn in 1983 in Louisiana, and has since spread to Australia, New Zealand, and the UK (don’t worry, Canada, it’s coming soon to a British Columbia near you). From their website, Mercy Ministries aims to:

…provide opportunities for young women to experience God’s unconditional love, forgiveness, and life-transforming power.

How does it do this? Once again, the US website speaks:

Our free of charge program serves a diverse population of young women from various socio-economic backgrounds, aged 13-28. Many of the girls, who come to Mercy for help, are facing a combination of debilitating circumstances and have been in various treatment facilities with unsuccessful long-term results. We are committed to providing the young women we serve with the most excellent program services that allow them to recognize their self-worth and prepare them to reach their full potential. Our non-conventional approach to healing allows young women to permanently stop destructive cycles and prepares them to take hope out into their communities.

If you had a Babel fish in your ear, this is what you would hear: Mercy recruits desperate and vulnerable young women, to indoctrinate them with a very specific brand of religious belief. ‘Conventional’ doctors, psychologists and dietitians are superfluous, as girls can only be healed if they become good enough Christians. All girls are descended from that hussy, Eve, and so are inherently gullible and/or evil. Their minds and bodies must therefore be strictly regulated.

Once a girl enters a Mercy Ministries treatment facility, she is effectively cut off from the rest of the world. Instead of teaching girls how to relate to other people living in the real world, Mercy teaches them the most important thing they need to do is to relate to the big invisible guy in the sky. Girls are allowed to send and receive mail (according to the application form, all mail must be opened in front of Mercy staff), and can make 15-minute phone calls to family only on weekends. Girls are not allowed to work. In Australia, girls are not allowed to continue with their secondary or tertiary education while attending the program. In the US, tertiary education is discouraged, and if a girl is still in high school, she can do a correspondence course with her current school or enroll in an online program designed for private schools.Mercy Ministries states:

The Director of Education works with the girls to keep up with the curriculum they are currently studying at school.

…with inappropriate bits like critical thinking skills taken out, no doubt.

But of course, education of that sort is not their priority. The Mercy day begins at 7am and ends at 10:30 pm. During the day, only 1.5 hours is dedicated to school. They have 2.5 hours of prayer/bible study, not including counselling sessions, which go for 3 hours (so essentially, its 5.5 hours of structured religious indoctrination). The rest of the time is spent on meals, chores and a bit of free time. There is no mention of time set aside for regular medical appointments.

Which brings me to the heart of the allegations made against Mercy Ministries in Australia. The girls who spoke out about their experiences said that they very rarely met with qualified medical professionals. Most of their counselling was conducted by bible college students, or counsellors trained in an in-house program by Mercy Ministries. Instead of visiting psychiatrists, girls were told that their problems were caused by demons, which would only disappear if girls worshipped in the proper way. They would be prayed over by Mercy staff, who spoke in tongues and laid hands on the girls. Relapses were a sign that they weren’t praying hard enough.

Girls in the Mercy Ministries program do not have access to their own doctors. Any general practitioners, dietitians and psychologists, when and if consulted, are hand-picked by Mercy. Contrary to any pesky progressive notions of privacy, the girls’ consultations with doctors are supervised by Mercy staff.

The girls do not have access to televisions or radios, and they are only allowed access to ‘Christian’ books and music. On the plus side, they can bring with them as many translations of the Bible as they wish, within the 5 book limit.

Removing people from destructive influences and habits is the basis for most treatment programs, but in the case of Mercy Ministries, the girls not only have to submit behaviourally, to rules and attitudes about drugs and eating and exercise, but are also expected to submit intellectually and emotionally. There is no room for questioning, and little recourse to outside medical assistance, because Mercy claims to operate according to god’s infallible word. As long as a girl questions or resists Mercy’s methods, she will never be healed because she has not accepted god.

On the subject of god, Mercy Ministries says it is:

…an independent organization that is not affiliated with any single church, organization or denomination.

WRONG. Mercy Ministries and its methods are entrenched in the Pentecostal tradition, with all the trappings: belief in the inerrancy of the Bible, in ‘Baptism in the Holy Spirit’ (outwardly manifested through happy-clapping and speaking in tongues), and in divine healing. The Australian arm of Mercy Ministries is closely allied with and financially supported by Hillsong, an Assemblies of God church in Sydney.

In keeping with its Pentecostal leanings, Mercy Ministries is strictly anti-abortion. Mercy’s website tells girls with unplanned pregnancies that:

The Mercy Ministries staff is dedicated to helping each expectant birth mother reach the best decision for herself and her child.

Very liberal of them, eh? But then, the knockout punch, from the program application form:

Mercy Ministries firmly believes in allowing you to make the choice between adoption and parenting. We believe that while you are here God will give you direction for your life and that of your unborn child.

The word coercion springs to mind. The silence on abortion as a choice is deafening. If you are doubtful of my conclusion, watch this Mercy Ministries promotional video.

Mercy Ministries has also been criticised for being anti-gay. It is common knowledge that Pentecostals don’t approve of homosexuality, so for Mercy to be anti-gay is not a huge leap. An article in the Sydney Morning Herald revealed that girls are shown videos like this one, from American ‘ex-gay’ speaker Sy Rogers.

The Mercy Ministries application form contains this gem:

Have you ever been a victim of rape or incest? How old were you?

Have you ever been the victim of sexual abuse, physical abuse or ritual abuse?

Have you ever been involved in prostitution?

Have you ever been involved in same sex relationships/lesbianism?

Have you ever tried to commit suicide? When?

Did they think they could slip it in, and we wouldn’t notice? I never realised being a lesbian was an –ism. And to group it with rape, incest, sexual and physical abuse, and prostitution gives you an idea of how homosexual girls or girls confused about their sexuality are dealt with in the Mercy program.

Mercy Ministries is paranoid about homosexuality. Those speaking about the Australian program mentioned ‘separation contracts’ between girls who had developed close friendships in the facility, and not being allowed to show physical affection of any kind towards each other. On a more amusing note, the application form also contains this:

Have you ever witnessed or been involved in the following occult activities?
…
Tarot Cards
Psychic Consultations
Levitation
Voodoo
Chanting
Ouija Boards
Witchcraft
Channeling
Reading
White Magic
Transcendental Meditation
Witches Coven
Dungeons and Dragons
Programming (color, number, location, etc.)
Putting Curses on Others

Reading through the application form, questions like those above, combined with questions about whether the applicant has committed her life to god make it pretty clear where Mercy Ministries’ allegiance lies. So why would a non-Christian (or non-Pentecostal) girl enter Mercy’s programs? One reason is the lack of publicly-funded resources and treatment centres for young women with these issues. Another reason is that the Mercy Ministries program is free. They keep telling us it’s free. It’s FREE!

Or is it?

From the Mercy Ministries website:

Mercy Ministries provides food and shelter, but we are not responsible for medical expenses or prescriptions. It is the responsibility of parents or guardians of minors, or their sponsoring agency to cover these expenses. Adult aged applicants should provide for their own medical needs.

Mercy Ministries only provides food, shelter and religious indoctrination for free. Everything else has to be paid for by the girl or her health insurer, sponsor or parents. It’s not free. It’s certainly not value-free.

Not all the girls who go through Mercy’s programs are complaining. In Australia, Mercy’s supporters are coming out of the woodwork to counteract the negative allegations against the program. Mercy Ministries claims a 90% success rate. There is no information about who conducted the ‘independent survey’ that yielded this result, nor are there any statistics to back up this success rate – only a few anecdotes.

At best, Mercy Ministries is misleading the public by claiming their program is not affiliated with any particular church or denomination, and by advertising their program as completely free. If their website, with its squeaky-clean models and liberal-sounding emotive language, is enough to lull skeptical old me into almost believing they’re not so bad, how much easier to lure in a young girl in need of help?

At worst, Mercy’s methods are dangerous. They deny medical treatment and counselling to vulnerable girls, and instead, teach that mental illness, eating disorders and homosexuality are the work of the devil and can be cured through prayer. Girls already confused now feel guilty because they are not good enough Christians to be cured; or they rebel and are expelled for being untreatable. Many of the girls who are speaking out against Mercy Ministries say they relapsed after leaving the program, and had to find other treatment facilities to counteract the effects of Mercy’s methods.

Mercy Ministries is currently being investigated by the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission, and I’ll be watching closely to see how that develops. I wonder if it will be too much longer before similar complaints about Mercy Ministries to emerge in the American media?

Further reading:

• See the Mercy Ministries application form for yourself, after filling out a few details.
• The Mercy Ministries Australia website.
• Sean the Blogonaut’s X-Mercy Stories: written by ex-Mercy Ministries women.
• Mercy Survivors - a website for ex-Mercy women from around the world.

There’s been quite a bit in the last few days on the science blogosphere condemning Clinton and Obama for ‘buying in’ to claims that vaccination causes autism. I thought it might be useful to go back to primary sources and see what was actually said.

Before we do that, a quick note about the issue (just skip all this and scroll down to the first quotation if you already know the history). The autism-vaccine “link” was dreamed up - or at least heavily promoted - by lawyers who want to make money at the expense of what they see as a rich pharmaceutical industry ripe for the taking¹. The plaintiff bar’s original focus was not on autism; it was on other sorts of vaccine injuries, some real, some make-believe.

Their litigation in the 1980’s essentially ended vaccine production in the United States; as a response to this critical threat to health, the government has had to take various steps to insure that vaccines are still made here, and are available to people who need them. One of those steps is the creation of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, put into place in 1988. It was originally a response to litigation over the pertussis vaccine, in which lawyers introduced evidence, leading to huge payouts, that was later found to be false. Under current law, the plaintiff’s bar goes after the VICP when they think that something might possibly have gone wrong with a vaccine. Although the program is paid for by a small surcharge on vaccines, the court is government-backed, and it hasn’t always remained within its budget; so in essence, every plaintiff’s award or frivolous suit through this court costs the taxpayer a bit of money. It is still, of course, better than not having any vaccines.

The vaccine-autism link doesn’t appear to have become popular until the late ’90’s, and originally the proponents of the link claimed that thimerosal, a vaccine preservative, was the cause of autism. Thimerosal was removed from vaccines given to children starting in 1999², and if this hypothesis were right, a reduction in autism should have been noted in the following years - but it hasn’t. Rather than admit that they don’t know anything about medicine, proponents of the thimerosal hypothesis have moved on to become full-blown anti-vaccination campaigners. Among the claims they’ve advanced is that vaccination is part of a vast government conspiracy to keep people in their place.

That is where we are today. Given the political muscle behind the vaccine conspiracy theorists, mainly in the form of the plaintiff’s bar - who currently have billions of dollars of autism-related claims against vaccine makers in the VICP court - and the predatory medical and quack-medical practitioners following a buck, the issue is now, apparently, one for the presidential campaign.

So here’s what the candidates actually said (with links back to sources):

Barak Obama:

We’ve seen just a skyrocketing autism rate. Some people are suspicious that it’s connected to the vaccines. This person included. The science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it.

Note that where Obama says “this person included,” he gestured to someone in the audience - he apparently doesn’t mean “myself included.” That doesn’t excuse the fact, of course, that the science is very conclusive that there is no autism-vaccine link.

John McCain:

It’s indisputable that (autism) is on the rise amongst children, the question is what’s causing it. And we go back and forth and there’s strong evidence that indicates that it’s got to do with a preservative in vaccines.

Strong evidence? John McCain basically accepts the conspiracy theory hook, line, and sinker.

Hilary Clinton:

Do you think vaccines should be investigated as a possible cause of autism?

I am committed to make investments to find the causes of autism, including possible environmental causes like vaccines. I have long been a supporter of increased research to determine the links between environmental factors and diseases, and I believe we should increase the NIH’s ability to engage in this type of research. My administration will be committed to improving research to support fact-based solutions, and I will ensure that the NIH has the staff and funding to fully explore all possible causes of autism.

What will you do to protect Americans, especially young children and pregnant women, from exposure to mercury through vaccines?

I will ensure that all vaccines are as safe as possible for our children by working to ensure that Thimerosal and mercury are removed from vaccines. I plan to fully invest in our research agencies so they can protect our children’s health, and so they can find the causes and cures for conditions such as autism.

There’s some more material there from Clinton, including something that I’d consider to be classical political weasel words.

Remember, folks, we live in the real world. Resources are limited. Every dollar we decide to spend researching this issue is a dollar we can’t spend some other, better way. What the candidates are talking about is the need to research an issue that has already been researched to death, with six or seven major - and expensive - studies already completed, and with thimerosal already removed from vaccines making a repetition of much of this effort pointless in the extreme.

1. Sometimes they are, and sometimes they deserve to be taken. But not over vaccines. [↩]
2. The only vaccines today that contain thimerosal are for influenza and tetanus, although if you get bitten by a snake, some antivenins contain thimerosal [↩]