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Does anybody drink raw milk?
- Thread starter Nicolas Mestre
- Start date
originally posted by Scott Kraft:
I grew up drinking only raw milk between the ages of 8 and 18. Judge the ill effects for yourself.
No comment.
Have statisticians explained changes in the incidence of autism or evaluated the effect of modifications to the vaccination schedule, especially since the 1990s? As I say, I stopped reading the literature about five years ago, but up to that point they had not. The best statistics I saw came out of California, which recorded only full-blown cases and did not include kids with PDD and other, more inclusive classifications. Those numbers showed a dramatic increase, way beyond what you would expect from a genetic disease. Then, a couple of years ago, CA changed the classifications they used, so it's impossible to tell what effect if any the gradual removal of thimerisol had. Mercury didn't come out of vaccines all at once, and it takes a few years for kids to be diagnosed. The CA statistics strike me as solid evidence that there is some kind of environmental trigger, but what that trigger is remains a mystery.
None of this is to say that people shouldn't get their kids vaccinated; they should. Doing away with vaccines makes no more sense than doing away with antibiotics. But opposing hysterical parents to all-knowing, all-powerful scientists only gets it half right. Calling people assholes is satisfying but doesn't amount to much of an answer. There is a striking difference in the response of the medical community to adverse reactions to the Sabin polio vaccine in the early 1960s and what we're seeing now with presentations like this.
None of this is to say that people shouldn't get their kids vaccinated; they should. Doing away with vaccines makes no more sense than doing away with antibiotics. But opposing hysterical parents to all-knowing, all-powerful scientists only gets it half right. Calling people assholes is satisfying but doesn't amount to much of an answer. There is a striking difference in the response of the medical community to adverse reactions to the Sabin polio vaccine in the early 1960s and what we're seeing now with presentations like this.
Ian Fitzsimmons
Ian Fitzsimmons
Calling people 'assholes' usually means you've lost the argument.
I'll offer State of Immunity
I've never understood the antigen overload argument very well, and perhaps you can explain it to me, Cliff. It seems to me that kids are constantly being exposed to a bunch of new protein antigens, and that vaccines are a rather tiny proportion of these.
Consider a typical infection with a mundane respiratory virus. The virus replicates like crazy and expresses a couple of dozen proteins at high levels. In fact, it presents them in ways that are more stimulating to the immune system than most modern vaccines--CpG sequences, LPS, and other PAMPs are whacking Toll-like receptors in dendritic cells, there is a big rush of inflammatory cytokines, fever, the works. So you really get a response to those proteins, T-cells, B-cells, all of it. The kid gets a respiratory or GI infection every other week, or so it seems.
These exposures seem much more significant than an IM injection, some with just purified proteins, and it happens all the time to every kid.
Consider a typical infection with a mundane respiratory virus. The virus replicates like crazy and expresses a couple of dozen proteins at high levels. In fact, it presents them in ways that are more stimulating to the immune system than most modern vaccines--CpG sequences, LPS, and other PAMPs are whacking Toll-like receptors in dendritic cells, there is a big rush of inflammatory cytokines, fever, the works. So you really get a response to those proteins, T-cells, B-cells, all of it. The kid gets a respiratory or GI infection every other week, or so it seems.
These exposures seem much more significant than an IM injection, some with just purified proteins, and it happens all the time to every kid.
Oswaldo Costa
Oswaldo Costa
Was that English?
The profitability of vaccines is highly variable. With the vaccine court in place and higher prices, new vaccines make money. Old legacy vaccines are very difficult to manufacture, actually practically all vaccines are tough to make, and the prices of the old ones generate margins that are worse than for most things pharma sells.
I have raised money for vaccine discovery and development companies, and I would tell you that in many cases it is uphill. There is a perception in many parts of pharma and finance that the vaccine business is one you don't want to touch--you give the product to healthy people, so the safety barrier to license is very high, the FDA is perceived as being an irreducible risk.
The politics around vaccines are also a drag.
So there are actually a bunch of companies and funders that want nothing to do with them.
I have raised money for vaccine discovery and development companies, and I would tell you that in many cases it is uphill. There is a perception in many parts of pharma and finance that the vaccine business is one you don't want to touch--you give the product to healthy people, so the safety barrier to license is very high, the FDA is perceived as being an irreducible risk.
The politics around vaccines are also a drag.
So there are actually a bunch of companies and funders that want nothing to do with them.
Sure.originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
Was that English?
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
Calling people 'assholes' usually means you've lost the argument.
Unless you're a monkey, in which case it's just business as usual.
Mark Lipton
Sharon Bowman
Sharon Bowman
+1
Heh heh heh, that's ambiguous, given thatoh, f***, it should be +3, what with the twins.
Heh heh heh, that's ambiguous, given thatoh, f***, it should be +3, what with the twins.
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
Calling people 'assholes' usually means you've lost the argument.
In this case it was drunken post.
I wasn't calling anyone an asshole, per se, but the idea of not vaccinating is "assholic".
originally posted by Cliff:
Have statisticians explained changes in the incidence of autism or evaluated the effect of modifications to the vaccination schedule, especially since the 1990s? As I say, I stopped reading the literature about five years ago, but up to that point they had not. The best statistics I saw came out of California, which recorded only full-blown cases and did not include kids with PDD and other, more inclusive classifications. Those numbers showed a dramatic increase, way beyond what you would expect from a genetic disease. Then, a couple of years ago, CA changed the classifications they used, so it's impossible to tell what effect if any the gradual removal of thimerisol had. Mercury didn't come out of vaccines all at once, and it takes a few years for kids to be diagnosed. The CA statistics strike me as solid evidence that there is some kind of environmental trigger, but what that trigger is remains a mystery.
Well, statisticians don't really ever figure out anything, we just answer questions for scientists.
From everyone I have talked to about the subject the consensus seems to be that there is no one cause, which shouldn't surprise anyone since it is a syndrome. Better evaluation and diagnosis, pollution, and later average age of parents were the things I heard most often.
None of this is to say that people shouldn't get their kids vaccinated; they should. Doing away with vaccines makes no more sense than doing away with antibiotics. But opposing hysterical parents to all-knowing, all-powerful scientists only gets it half right. Calling people assholes is satisfying but doesn't amount to much of an answer. There is a striking difference in the response of the medical community to adverse reactions to the Sabin polio vaccine in the early 1960s and what we're seeing now with presentations like this.
Point taken. To me, refusing to vaccinate your child borders on criminal negligence and is a conscious stick in the eye to your fellow citizens.
originally posted by SFJoe:
I've never understood the antigen overload argument very well, and perhaps you can explain it to me, Cliff. It seems to me that kids are constantly being exposed to a bunch of new protein antigens, and that vaccines are a rather tiny proportion of these.
Consider a typical infection with a mundane respiratory virus. The virus replicates like crazy and expresses a couple of dozen proteins at high levels. In fact, it presents them in ways that are more stimulating to the immune system than most modern vaccines--CpG sequences, LPS, and other PAMPs are whacking Toll-like receptors in dendritic cells, there is a big rush of inflammatory cytokines, fever, the works. So you really get a response to those proteins, T-cells, B-cells, all of it. The kid gets a respiratory or GI infection every other week, or so it seems.
These exposures seem much more significant than an IM injection, some with just purified proteins, and it happens all the time to every kid.
The antigen overload argument makes intuitive sense to people who aren't familiar with the science. That's the tough thing here. It is just impossible for laypeople to understand a lot of these things and they create narratives based on what they do understand. I don't really understand immunology all that well (as you know) and I have a PhD and work around it every day. How is someone without a lot of training or someone like you around to explain it to them patiently supposed to understand it?
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
Was that English?
No it's immunology.
Alphabet soup and acronyms without rhyme or reason. When I was taking the med student immunology cycle, I almost laughed out loud sometimes.
originally posted by VLM:
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
Was that English?
No it's immunology.
Alphabet soup and acronyms without rhyme or reason. When I was taking the med student immunology cycle, I almost laughed out loud sometimes.
Oh, and statistics is without jargon, I presume? No non-intuitive abbreviations like SPSS, BMDP, etc. bandied about in your literature? Lucky dogs!
Mark Lipton
originally posted by MLipton:
originally posted by VLM:
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
Was that English?
No it's immunology.
Alphabet soup and acronyms without rhyme or reason. When I was taking the med student immunology cycle, I almost laughed out loud sometimes.
Oh, and statistics is without jargon, I presume? No non-intuitive abbreviations like SPSS, BMDP, etc. bandied about in your literature? Lucky dogs!
Mark Lipton
Those are the names of software.
If you can explain how just the ILs came about in immunology you'd get some sort of journalistic prize.
We're not even in the same universe. Statistics is not disjunctive at all. It all fits together systematically which is why us Asperger types are drawn to it like moths to flame.
The most compelling accounts I've heard have suggested an interaction between thimerisol, aluminum, adjuvants, and the vaccine material in a small minority of genetically susceptible kids. Children who are immunologically compromised may respond in an atypical way to vaccinations. It's not just parents and cranks who entertain this possibility. Frontline could easily have found, e.g.:
[V]accine experts tend to look at the population as a whole, not at individual patients. And population studies are not granular enough to detect individual metabolic, genetic, or immunological variation that might make some children under certain circumstances susceptible to neurological complications after vaccination. . . . The debate roils oneven about research. The Institute of Medicine in its last report on vaccines and autism in 2004 said that more research on the vaccine question is counterproductive: Finding a susceptibility to this risk in some infants would call into question the universal vaccination strategy that is a bedrock of immunization programs and could lead to widespread rejection of vaccines. The IOM concluded that efforts to find a link between vaccines and autism 'must be balanced against the broader benefit of the current vaccine program for all children.' " -- Dr. Bernardine Healy, former director of the American Red Cross and the US National Institutes of Health.
Here she is on CBS
Or, this statement from an autism research center at UC Davis.
We're not talking about the majority of kids by any stretch, but we don't know what the markers are. I've seen suggestive research on certain genetic markers, but nothing remotely conclusive. I'm not sure how to compare the stress on a developing infant's immune system from a common cold to a series of vaccines with adjuvants and other vaccine components that are injected in rapid succession. The whole point of adjuvants is to intensify the immune response, no? What are the concentrations of biological agents injected in vaccination? Does that not matter? I'm asking honestly. I tend to share Joe's skepticism about the antigen overload argument, too. Perhaps there is an different trigger altogether. Still, it seems to me that scientists ought to at least entertain the possibility that vaccines play some role, given that the US requires twice as many vaccinations for kids under five than the average for the developed world. To my knowledge, the potential synergistic effect of grouping vaccinations together has never been studied; the CDC in particular has tried to shut down debate and keep people from asking questions on the basis of deeply flawed science -- admittedly, published by well-credentialed scientists in prestigious venues.
Madsen's ubiquitous 2003 study that purported to show that autism rates continued to rise after thimerisol was removed -- that was the one Frontline presented as proof positive that mercury is not involved at all, case closed -- admits that the way they collected data changed a critical juncture in the study. Just as they show rates going up, in 1995, Madsen's team added outpatient clinics to their count of autism cases. That's where almost 95 percent of Danish kids got diagnosed. Those cases were left out before 1995:
"The increase in the incidence of autism
from 1990 on may be attributable to more attention
being drawn to the syndrome of autism and to a
change in the diagnostic criteria from the ICD-8 to
the ICD-10 in 1994. Also, outpatient activities were
included in the Danish Psychiatric Central Research
Register in 1995 and because many patients with
autism in former years have been treated as outpatients
this may exaggerate the incidence rates, simply
because a number of patients attending the child
psychiatric treatment system before 1995 were recorded
for the first time, and thereby counted as new
cases in the incidence rates." -- Madsen et al., "Thimerosal and the occurrence of autism: negative ecological evidence from Danish population-based data," Pediatrics (Sept. 2003)
Maybe I'm too cynical, but this work was paid for largely by Denmarks largest vaccine manufacturer, Statens Serum Institute. Although the article does not disclose it, I gather it was initiated by the CDC.
[V]accine experts tend to look at the population as a whole, not at individual patients. And population studies are not granular enough to detect individual metabolic, genetic, or immunological variation that might make some children under certain circumstances susceptible to neurological complications after vaccination. . . . The debate roils oneven about research. The Institute of Medicine in its last report on vaccines and autism in 2004 said that more research on the vaccine question is counterproductive: Finding a susceptibility to this risk in some infants would call into question the universal vaccination strategy that is a bedrock of immunization programs and could lead to widespread rejection of vaccines. The IOM concluded that efforts to find a link between vaccines and autism 'must be balanced against the broader benefit of the current vaccine program for all children.' " -- Dr. Bernardine Healy, former director of the American Red Cross and the US National Institutes of Health.
Here she is on CBS
Or, this statement from an autism research center at UC Davis.
We're not talking about the majority of kids by any stretch, but we don't know what the markers are. I've seen suggestive research on certain genetic markers, but nothing remotely conclusive. I'm not sure how to compare the stress on a developing infant's immune system from a common cold to a series of vaccines with adjuvants and other vaccine components that are injected in rapid succession. The whole point of adjuvants is to intensify the immune response, no? What are the concentrations of biological agents injected in vaccination? Does that not matter? I'm asking honestly. I tend to share Joe's skepticism about the antigen overload argument, too. Perhaps there is an different trigger altogether. Still, it seems to me that scientists ought to at least entertain the possibility that vaccines play some role, given that the US requires twice as many vaccinations for kids under five than the average for the developed world. To my knowledge, the potential synergistic effect of grouping vaccinations together has never been studied; the CDC in particular has tried to shut down debate and keep people from asking questions on the basis of deeply flawed science -- admittedly, published by well-credentialed scientists in prestigious venues.
Madsen's ubiquitous 2003 study that purported to show that autism rates continued to rise after thimerisol was removed -- that was the one Frontline presented as proof positive that mercury is not involved at all, case closed -- admits that the way they collected data changed a critical juncture in the study. Just as they show rates going up, in 1995, Madsen's team added outpatient clinics to their count of autism cases. That's where almost 95 percent of Danish kids got diagnosed. Those cases were left out before 1995:
"The increase in the incidence of autism
from 1990 on may be attributable to more attention
being drawn to the syndrome of autism and to a
change in the diagnostic criteria from the ICD-8 to
the ICD-10 in 1994. Also, outpatient activities were
included in the Danish Psychiatric Central Research
Register in 1995 and because many patients with
autism in former years have been treated as outpatients
this may exaggerate the incidence rates, simply
because a number of patients attending the child
psychiatric treatment system before 1995 were recorded
for the first time, and thereby counted as new
cases in the incidence rates." -- Madsen et al., "Thimerosal and the occurrence of autism: negative ecological evidence from Danish population-based data," Pediatrics (Sept. 2003)
Maybe I'm too cynical, but this work was paid for largely by Denmarks largest vaccine manufacturer, Statens Serum Institute. Although the article does not disclose it, I gather it was initiated by the CDC.