The Welsh measles conspiracy

If, as I do, you have strong feelings about the irresponsibility of the anti-vaxxer movement, and the mountain of science that they ignore in order to bolster their beliefs that vaccination is dangerous, I recommend not reading this post.  Just reading the background material for it means that I'm probably going to have to double up on my high blood pressure medication today.

Because now the anti-vaxxers are claiming that the measles epidemic in Wales this year, in which 700 people were sickened and one killed by a disease that is 100% preventable, was faked.

Yes, you read that right.  Heidi Stevenson, writing for Gaia Health, has a stomach-turning "exposé" that begins as follows:

The Great Measles Epidemic of Wales—the one that’s being used to stampede sheeple into vaccine clinics for the MMR jab—never happened. Seriously! It was faked. The actual data from the Welsh government on cases of measles proves it.

Here's her "proof:"

The fact is that, though 446 measles notifications were made between 1 January and 31 March of this year, those were merely reports. The reality is that only 26 cases were actually confirmed!

You may have noted that this faux measles epidemic started in November, and the figures for last year weren’t included. However, that doesn’t help make the case for an epidemic, or even come close to the claim that 83 people had to be hospitalized for measles. You see, the total number of confirmed measles cases in Wales for all of 2012 was 14. So, adding 14 for all of 2012 to 26 for the first three months of this year, we get a total of 40 confirmed cases of measles—less than half the falsely reported 83 hospitalizations!

 The actual reason for the discrepancy was picked up on almost immediately, with one of the first comments on the story reading as follows:

Note that only the minority of measles test samples are sent to Welsh labs.

So in conclusion it shouldn't be surprising if the lab confirmed figures are low at present because the majority of samples are sent to English labs for confirmation and are not included in the All Wales reports.

You're drawing conclusions based on at best incomplete data.

Stevenson went on the attack in the comments section, responding to the above commenter with, "But the reality is that this is not an epidemic and even if every reported case had proven to be genuine measles, it would not amount to an epidemic - nor has it amounted to anything that anyone needs to fear."  She responded to another person who objected to her stance with, "You're a shill.  Goodbye."  To another, who had mentioned herd immunity and that it was "thought that a 95% vaccination rate was enough to protect the population from epidemics in most cases," Stevenson snarled back:

What garbage! It's isn't known, it's merely "thought that". The belief in how high the rate of vaccination must be to stop a disease keeps changing - it keeps going up. The fact is that no one knows if there is even such a thing as herd immunity. It's an idea, not a fact. And that 95% figure is something that was pulled out of the air. It's meaningless - nothing but a coverup for the fact that the vaccines are nowhere near as effective as they'd have you believe.

Regarding learning math: The fact is that you've just spewed out figures that prove nothing in relation to this particular issue, and most assuredly do not demonstrate that you have any knowledge of the topic - just that you are able to spew out published figures.

You aren't actually providing any information that elucidates the topic at hand - the fact that the actual number of cases of measles is a small fraction of the reported number, though the reported number has been used to declare an epidemic and push for vaccination.

 Oh, yeah, and to further trivialize the Welsh epidemic, she threw in the following "photograph:"

Hmm, herd immunity is "meaningless?"  That would certainly come as a surprise to Dr. Paul E. M. Fine, whose 1993 paper on epidemiological modeling (available here) is considered the go-to source on how a sufficient pool of immunes in a population can prevent epidemics from taking hold.  Research by Thomas L. Schlenker et al. (available here) on measles in particular concluded that "Modest improvements in low levels of immunization coverage among 2-year-olds confer substantial protection against measles outbreaks. Coverage of 80% or less may be sufficient to prevent sustained measles outbreaks in an urban community."

And on a more emotional level, perhaps Ms. Stevenson would like to discuss the matter with Cecily Johnson, an Australian woman whose unvaccinated daughter Laine Bradley contracted subacute sclerosing panencephalitis as a complication of a measles infection, and lingered for five years, unable to speak, unable to feed, clothe, or wash herself, before dying at age twelve.

The long and short of it is that the actual research shows what we've known for years.  Vaccination has an extremely low rate of complications, while the complications from what are now entirely preventable diseases -- measles, polio, diphtheria, typhoid -- are often debilitating and sometimes fatal.  No medical intervention is 100% safe, and if you scour the records you can find cases of bad side effects (mostly allergic reactions).  But if you weigh those against the millions of people who are now alive because of vaccines, the choice is obvious.

At least, it is to me.  It apparently isn't to Stevenson and others in the anti-vaxxer movement.  Maybe it's because any quantification of the lives saved by vaccines is always going to be a guess -- it's not like you can look at someone and say, "If you hadn't been vaccinated, you'd have died at age six of diphtheria."

But all you have to do is to look into historical records to gain that perspective.  One of my hobbies is genealogy, and being that my family is from the French part of southern Louisiana, I own several books of church and courthouse record abstracts from that region that I have used in researching my family history.  That was how I found out about the 1853 yellow fever epidemic that struck southeastern Louisiana, costing thousands of lives -- the records are there, the chronicles of individuals who were killed by that gruesome disease:

Boutary, Adela Marie, wife of Théophile Daunes, d. 10 Sept. 1853 at age 20 years during yellow fever epidemic (Thibodaux Church: vol. 1, death record #55)

Himel, Mélasie d. 17 Sept. 1853 at age 16 years during yellow fever epidemic (Thibodaux Church: vol. 1, death record #92)

Poché, Joseph d. 3 Oct. 1853 at age 19 years during yellow fever epidemic (Thibodaux Church: vol. 1, death record #151)

Any guesses as to why we don't even have yellow fever in the United States any more?  I'll leave you to figure that one out.

The Black Death, aliens, and the role of chaos in history

Yesterday's post, about the alien origins of humanity, generated a nice round of "you think that's a crazy belief, wait till you see this one!" from my readers.  The best contender in this game of Wingnut One-Upmanship came from another student, who found out that not only did aliens produce our species, they've been trying to kill us ever since.

I guess it's understandable, really.  Our stewardship of the globe hasn't exactly been praiseworthy.  It's no wonder that our superpowerful alien cousins, who still presumably live on our original homeworld (with its clement temperatures, 30-hour rotational period, and "no geomagnetic storms or glaciers"), would have some second thoughts about sending us here.  So it turns out that they've repeatedly tried to get rid of us.

This conclusion comes from a stellar piece of research entitled "Did Aliens Create the 'Black Death' and Other Diseases During the Middle Ages?  (And Are They Still Creating Diseases Today?)," which not only would win an award for the longest article title ever, but is yet another example of a piece of journalism that should say, in its entirety, "NO."  Unfortunately, the author doesn't take that route.  We're told that the 14th century plague has to be extraterrestrial in origin:

A great many people throughout Europe and other plague-stricken regions of the world were reporting that outbreaks of the plague were caused by foul-smelling “mists” and bright lights were reported far more frequently and in many more locations than were rodent infestations. The plague years were, in fact, a period of heavy UFO activity.

Well, I hate to be unimaginative, but the foul smells during the Middle Ages don't really require UFOs to explain them.  There was a fairly appalling lack of sanitation, particularly in the big cities.  Apparently just the amount of human waste lying around in heavily populated areas was enough to create a smell that would blow your hair back -- even 19th century London was a frightful-smelling place, according to Steven Johnson's wonderful book The Ghost Map (which chronicles the cholera epidemic of the 1850s, and how it led to the creation of an efficient city-wide sewer system).  And the fact that rodents weren't "reported frequently" is pretty certainly because of their ubiquity, not because they were absent.

But of course, it's not just the stinky mist and bright lights that are brought out as evidence:

A second phenomenon was sometimes reported: the appearance of frightening human-like figures dressed in black. Those figures were often seen on the outskirts of a town or village and their presence would signal the outbreak of an epidemic almost immediately. It appears that the “scythes” may have been long instruments designed to spray poison or germ-laden gas. Strange men dressed in black, “demons’ and other terrifying figures were observed in other European communities. The frightening creatures were often observed carrying long “brooms,” “scythes,” or “swords” that were used to “sweep” or “knock” on the doors of people’s homes. The inhabitants of those homes fell ill with plague afterwards. It is from these reports that people created the popular image of “Death” as a skeleton or demon carrying a scythe. In looking at this haunting image of death, we may, in fact, be staring into the face of the UFO.”

Right.  Because we're not talking about a superstitious, credulous bunch of people here.  They can't possibly have made this up to explain a terrifying event that they didn't have the science to understand.

 Maybe it wasn't rats or aliens.  Maybe it was the "saaaalmon mooouuussse."

But then we find out that it wasn't all aliens who were impersonating Death; it was only the crazy homicidal aliens who were responsible:

This Awareness indicates that what in Medieval times were termed demons, and what many of the Christian faith considered to be demons, are in fact what entities refer today to as extraterrestrial aliens. The Greys from Zeta Reticuli today are not precisely the same invaders as those of the Medieval times. The Medieval aliens were both Reptoid and also of the Grey community that now is underground and known as the Deros. The Deros underground are demented forms of Zeta Greys, which have been here for many thousands of years, living underground to avoid sunlight and to avoid communication with humans except on those occasions where they seek to make contact for one reason or another.

Oh.  Okay.  Because that makes sense.

You know, I think that the problem here is that people are uncomfortable with the chaotic, random nature of much of life, especially the bad parts.  If something bad happens, the immediate impulse is to look for someone, or something, to blame.  This explains so much woo-woo thinking, doesn't it?  Without even trying hard, I found three examples that were linked on Reddit in the last two days -- an article on the website of the Institute for Natural Healing that attributes all cancer to eating meat, a claim that the government is covering up how dangerous vaccines are, and an allegation that WiFi in schools is causing headaches in children. 

Somehow, we just can't accept that people get sick, sometimes for no obvious reason.  It's not enough to celebrate the astonishing advances in medical science over the last hundred years, that have generated new records in the healthy human life span -- because, unfortunately, they haven't eliminated all disease and suffering.  The fact that we still get sick, we still grow old and die, must mean that there is some insidious plan behind it all.

It can't just be that we live in a world that's kind of a rough place, a world where bad things happen sometimes.  Not even in the case of the Black Death, where we (1) have identified the bacterium that causes it, (2) know the vector that transmitted it, (3) have evidence from medical records of the time that the symptoms are consistent with subsequent outbreaks, and even (4) have tissue samples (bones) that show evidence of Yersinia pestis infection.  No, that's not enough.  It has to be the evil demented aliens causing it all.

Anyhow, however understandable it is to want there to be some kind of overarching reason why stuff happens, rationality forces us to concede the role that chaos has in human history.  No extraterrestrial epidemics necessary.

And in case any of you were considering trying to one-up this story, I have to request, with all due respect: if you know of anything loonier than this claim, you probably shouldn't tell me about it.  I've done enough facepalms over this one to last me a while.

Letters from the home world

In choosing topics for this blog, I try not to have it simply devolve into taking random pot shots at crazies.  Loony ideas are a dime a dozen, and given the widespread access to computers that is now available, just about anyone who wants one can have a website.  Given these two facts, it's inevitable that wacky webpages have sprouted up like wildflowers on the fields of the internet.

When an alert student brought this one to my attention, however, I just couldn't help myself.  Entitled "Did Humans Come From Another Planet?", it represents one of the best examples I've ever seen of adding up a bunch of facts and obtaining the wrong answer.  The only ones who, in my experience, do this even better are the people who write for the Institute for Creation Research, and to be fair, they've had a lot longer to practice being completely batshit crazy, so it's only to be expected.

Anyhow, the contention of the "Did Humans Come From Another Planet?" people can be summed up by, "Yes.  Duh."  We are clearly aliens, and I'm not just talking about such dubiously human individuals as "Snooki."  All of us, the article claims, descend from an extraterrestrial race.  But how can we prove it?

Well, here's the argument, if I can dignify it with that term.

1)  Human babies are born completely unable to take care of themselves, and remain that way for a long time.  By comparison, other primate babies, despite similar gestation periods, develop much more rapidly.

2)  In a lower gravitational pull, humans could fall down without hurting themselves, "just like a cat or a dog."

3)  Humans have biological clocks, and in the absence of exposure to the external day/night cycle, they come unlocked from "real time" and become free-running.  So, clearly we came from a planet that had a different rotational period.

4)  Humans don't have much body hair.  At least most of us don't, although I do recall once going swimming and seeing a guy who had so much back hair that he could have singlehandedly given rise to 80% of the Bigfoot sightings in the eastern United States.

5)  Geneticists have found that all of humanity descends from a common ancestor approximately 350,000 years ago; but the first modern humans didn't exist until 100,000 years ago.  So... and this is a direct quote, that I swear I am not making up: "In what part of the universe was he [Homo sapiens] wandering for the remaining 250 thousand years?"

Now, take all of this, and add:

1)  Some nonsense about Sirius B and the Dogon tribe, including a bizarre contention that the Sun and Sirius once formed a double-star system, because this "doesn't contradict the laws of celestial mechanics;"

2)  The tired old "we only use 3% of our brains" contention;

3)  Adam and Eve;

and 4) the ancient Egyptians.

Mix well, and bake for one hour at 350 degrees.

The result, of course, is a lovely hash that contends that we must come from a planet with a mild climate where we could run around naked all the time, not to mention a lower gravitational pull so we could just sort of bounce when we fall down, plenty of natural food to eat, and "no geomagnetic storms."  I'm not sure why the last one is important, but it did remind me of all of the "cosmic storms" that the folks in Lost in Space used to run into.  And they also came across lots of weird, quasi-human aliens, while they were out there wandering around.  So there you are.

In any case, that's today's example of adding 2 + 2 and getting 439.  All of this just goes to show that even if you have access to a lot of factual information, not to mention the internet, you still need to know how to put that factual information together in order to get the right answer.  For that, you need science, not just a bunch of nutty beliefs, assumptions, and guesses.  So, as usual, science FTW.

Which, of course, applies to a good many more situations than just this one, but as I've already given a nod to the Institute for Creation Research, I'll just end here.

The power of prayer vs. the power of litigation

Today we have a rather ironic story out of Brazil.

Cabaret owner Tarcilia Bezerra, in the city of Fortaleza, wanted to expand his business.  He had experienced great success with his liquor-and-dancing-girls enterprise, and thought it was time to make the place bigger.  So he applied for, and got, a building permit, and construction began.

The local church, however, didn't think that was such a hot idea.  All of that skin showing and alcohol flowing was just sinful; the idea that the godly folks of Fortaleza had to put up with Bezerra crowing about how well he was doing, and making the place bigger and better, was just naughty in god's sight.  So the pastor (who was unnamed in the story) encouraged his flock to pray that god would intervene and smite Bezerra and his unholy Temple of Tawdriness.  Prayer sessions were organized morning, noon, and night for weeks, as the construction went on.

And then, only a week before the grand reopening, lightning struck the cabaret, destroying most of the roof and almost all of the new construction.

The pastor was overjoyed, as were the members of his congregation.  The pastor spoke in a sermon the following Sunday about this demonstration of "the great power of prayer."  The church members bragged all over town that their petitions to god had been heard, and that the lightning had been sent by god himself to strike down the wicked cabaret.

So Bezerra sued the church.

His lawsuit read, in part, that the church and its members "were responsible for the end of my building and my business, using divine intervention, direct or indirect, as the actions or means."

The pastor, of course, was appalled, but was forced to respond to the lawsuit.  His response, predictably, was to deny "all responsibility or any connection with the end of the building."

Now, wait a minute: isn't this backwards?  The cabaret owner is the one who believes that praying works, and the church pastor doesn't?

The judge in the case, which has yet to be decided in court, evidently agrees.  In his opening statement, he said, "I do not know how I'm going to decide this case, but one thing is evident in the records. Here we have an owner of a cabaret who firmly believes in the power of prayer, and an entire church declaring that prayers are worthless."

It all, somehow, makes me wonder how much folks really believe what they're saying.  I remember, during the Cold War, Americans praying for the destruction of the Soviet Union.  How would they have reacted if Moscow had been struck by a giant meteorite, causing millions of deaths?  People pray for political candidates, and sometimes sports teams, to win.  What if it actually happened, as per biblical miracles, with the losing candidate (or sports team) being eaten by a lion, contracting leprosy, or being "swallowed up by the earth?"  Each Sunday, there are thousands of prayers given asking for Jesus' return.  What if he just showed up, and said, "You rang, here I am!  Okay, leave behind your comfy house and all of your stuff.  Give everything away to the poor, like I told you to.  What, weren't you listening?"

Oh, I'm sure that there are some people who would be thrilled if this happened.  The members of the Westboro Baptist Church, for example.  But I'll bet that most ordinary churchgoing folks would freak out so badly that they might never freak back in.

I suppose the take-home message, here, is "be careful what you pray for, because due to random chance, it might actually happen, and then you'll have to admit that you honestly didn't think anyone was listening."

Sleepless in upstate New York

Any regular reader of Skeptophilia who pays attention to the timestamp on my posts knows that I'm a bit of an insomniac.

I have suffered from chronic insomnia since I was a teenager.  It started with bizarre, vivid dreams, which often would wake me up (sometimes because I'd thrashed around so much I'd fallen out of bed).  Once awakened in the wee hours, it takes me long enough to fall back to sleep that I frequently just give up and get up.  Most of the conventional sleep aids haven't helped; the mild ones (like valerian and melatonin) are ineffective, and the stronger ones worry me because of their capacity to become addictive.  So mostly, I've just put up with it, living and working on a chronic sleep deficit, and trying to catch time to take catnaps whenever I can.

So, naturally, I was pretty intrigued when I ran across an article called "Life Without Sleep," by Jessa Gamble.  Her piece begins with a bit of a history of sleep deprivation, and includes the efforts by the military to come up with a way to combat fatigue in soldiers (most of which, by the way, were either ineffective in the long term or had dreadful side effects).  But my attention really perked up when she started talking about two potential therapies for chronic insomnia -- transcranial direct-current stimulation (TCDS) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) -- which work not by getting you to sleep, but by reducing the amount of sleep you need.

TCDS and TMS both work on the same principle; using an external energy source to trigger neuronal firing in the brain.  Both of these treatment modalities are, pretty much, what they sound like.  TCDS involves placing electrodes on the scalp, and introducing a electric current into the brain; TMS places the head in a powerful magnetic field.  Both of them have been used, with results that I'd file in the "interesting" column, to treat depression, anxiety disorders, and schizophrenia.  Both have no known long-term side effects, although TMS apparently has a low risk of causing seizure or fainting.  (For me, the main risk of TCDS is that I would spend the entire time worrying that I was participating in a reenactment of the climax of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.)

According to Gamble, both of these treatments show great promise in helping with insomnia.  About TCDS, she says:

After a half-hour session of the real treatment, subjects are energised, focused and keenly awake. They learn visual search skills at double the speed, and their subsequent sleep — as long as it does not fall directly after the stimulation session — is more consolidated, with briefer waking periods and longer deep-sleep sessions.

TMS apparently has shown similar results:

Using a slightly different technique — transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which directly causes neurons to fire — neuroscientists at Duke University have been able to induce slow-wave oscillations, the once-per-second ripples of brain activity that we see in deep sleep. Targeting a central region at the top of the scalp, slow-frequency pulses reach the neural area where slow-wave sleep is generated, after which it propagates to the rest of the brain...  TMS devices might be able to launch us straight into deep sleep at the flip of a switch. Full control of our sleep cycles could maximise time spent in slow-wave sleep and REM, ensuring full physical and mental benefits while cutting sleep time in half. Your four hours of sleep could feel like someone else’s eight. Imagine being able to read an extra book every week — the time adds up quickly.

What I'm imagining, at the moment, is not feeling chronically exhausted, and not having to worry about falling asleep at the wheel during my ten-minute drive home from work (a fear I deal with on more days than I'd like to admit).  I imagine not constantly wondering when I'm going to have time to take a nap so I can actually be wide awake after eight o'clock at night.

It's a happy picture.

Of course, the worrywart side of me wonders what the long-term effects of this might be.  We still understand very little about why animals need sleep, and less still about why they dream.  Messing about with a physiological system we don't fully comprehend seems rather foolhardy.  On the other hand, the tests that have been done so far support the contention that TCDS and TMS are relatively safe, are non-invasive, and show great promise in dealing with chronic insomnia, a condition which according to the National Sleep Foundation plagues 10-15% of adults.

I'd volunteer to give it a try, even given the iffy status of the risks.

But right now, I think I'd better wrap this up, because the coffee's done brewing, and given how little sleep I got last night,  I could sure use a cup or two.  Or five.

Breaking news: scientists once again don't discover Atlantis

Geology buffs probably heard about the announcement last week of the discovery off the coast of Brazil of a large slab of granite.  It's a geological anomaly; granite doesn't form in the deep ocean.  It's associated with silica-rich magma that cooled slowly, underground.  Granite forms the most abundant "basement rock" of continents, and most of it is very, very old.  This piece seems to have been left behind as Africa and South America split when the Atlantic Ocean opened 160 million years ago, and was completely covered with water ten million years ago.

So far, a story that would be of interest only to those intrigued by oddities of plate tectonics.  So, of course, the media can't report it that way.  Let's see... block of rock off the coast of South America, once above water, now not...

I know!  Let's report that the scientists have discovered Atlantis!

Don't believe me?  Check out how HuffPost's Meredith Bennett-Smith trashed this story, opening with the following highly scientific paragraph:

Nearly 2,600 years after Greek philosopher Plato wrote about the fabled metropolis of Atlantis, vanished forever beneath the sea, a Japanese-manned submersible has discovered rock structures that may be evidence of a continent that similarly disappeared beneath the Atlantic Ocean many, many years ago.

Yes, Ms. Bennett-Smith, 2,600 years and ten million years are both many, many years.  How very astute of you.  But let me clarify something for you: this is not Atlantis.  I know this for sure, because Atlantis was fictional.

RT went even further, heading their article with the following image:

Two of the scientists, Shinichi Kawakami and Roberto Ventura Santos, put fuel on the fire by referring to the block of rock as "Atlantis" when they spoke to reporters.  Santos evidently felt some trepidation about this (which he should have), and added, "We speak of Atlantis more in terms of symbolism.  Obviously, we don’t expect to find a lost city in the middle of the Atlantic."

Really, Dr. Santos?  Then don't refer to the damn thing as Atlantis.

So, of course, now all of the woo-woos are having multiple orgasms over this "scientific proof" that Atlantis existed, as advertised, complete with cities and people and everything else described in Plato.  By this morning, we have ha-ha-we-told-you-so articles appearing in The Truthseeker,  The Controversial Files, Before It's News, The Hollow Earth Insider, and Godlike Productions, not to mention hundreds of theoretically more reliable news sources.  Although a handful of them mentioned Santos' wishy-washy disclaimer, most of them burbled on and on about Plato and the fabled island of the philosopher-kings, because that's clearly more valid than the actual science.

Let's get this straight.  Ten million years ago, when the last bit of this continent went beneath the Atlantic Ocean, our nearest ancestors were chimp-like anthropoid apes somewhere in Africa.  The earliest Australopithecenes didn't evolve until about four million years ago, and considering their brainpower, I'm doubtful that even they were "philosopher-kings."  And by that time, this block of continental granite had already been sunk for six million years.

This isn't Atlantis.  Atlantis never existed.  It's a folk tale, a myth, a legend with no basis whatsoever in fact.

Of course, I don't expect this to convince anyone who wasn't already convinced.  Especially because they have pictures.

Okay, I'll stop now, because my forehead hurts from all of the headdesks I did while researching this post.  I've got to chill out a little, because if I keep digging into this stuff I'll run across someone who claims that they found Shangri-La in Nepal and the remains of Minas Tirith in Bulgaria, and at that point I'll just take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it.

A shot in the arm

The website of the World Health Organization states it this way: "Immunization is one of the most successful and cost-effective health interventions and prevents between 2 and 3 million deaths every year."  UNICEF places the lives saved at closer to 9 million, and states that "vaccines have brought seven major human diseases under some degree of control - smallpox, diphtheria, tetanus, yellow fever, whooping cough, polio, and measles."

The members of my family understand the impact vaccination has had all too well.  My grandfather's only full sister, and his eldest half-sister, died five days apart of measles at the ages of 22 and 17; and my mother had polio as a child, stunting the growth in one leg and leaving her with a permanent limp.  (Still, my mom was one of the lucky ones; less fortunate polio survivors ended up partially paralyzed and spent the rest of their lives in an iron lung.)

Vaccination, however, has been increasingly under attack, with spurious claims linking vaccines to everything from autism to allergies.  This, despite the fact that repeated controlled studies have found vaccines to be safe and effective, and despite the "studies" linking vaccines to negative health effects having been roundly discredited.

Even with all of this, there's still a scare campaign going on that "Big Pharma" is secretly trying to kill you every time you get a shot.  Just last year, we saw Stephanie Messenger's book Melanie's Marvelous Measles published, and it's still available on Amazon despite 147 (out of 200) one-star reviews:

In it, we get to read about little Melanie, who is just delighted to get measles so she can "heal naturally."  The book, Messenger says, "was written to educate children on the benefits of having measles and how you can heal from them naturally and successfully."  Even worse is The Mother magazine, which in its March/April issue had an article that stated that "Measles will only develop in a body that is low on vitamin A," and suggests eating more carrots as a preventative.  We are also told that "people don't die of measles -- they die of medical mismanagement of the fever."

Too bad my Aunt Anne and Aunt Emelie didn't know about all this, isn't it?

Unfortunately, though, the anti-vaxxer nonsense has caught on, based in equal parts on fear, a poor understanding of science, a sneaking sense of suspicion about the ethics of medical/pharmaceutical corporations, and a large dose of the naturalistic fallacy.  Most recently, the whole issue has hit Canada, where just yesterday the British Columbia Medical Journal released, in its May issue, an article stating that Health Canada has just granted license to "homeopathic vaccines" called "nosodes" -- and yes, they are the usual homeopathy bullshit, made from substances diluted past Avogadro's limit, which are therefore pure water.  Nevertheless, Health Canada saw fit to give their stamp of approval to "nosodes" for influenza, measles, pertussis, and polio, despite its stated mission to "(test) products for safety and efficacy before allowing them to enter the market."

So now, we don't just have people avoiding vaccines, we have them taking fake vaccines.

And we're beginning to see the effects of this foolishness.  Wales is still recovering from a measles outbreak that sickened 700 people last month, resulting in at least one death.  Two days ago, the BBC ran a story that states that "Levels of vaccination have been too low in some countries, particularly in rich western European nations...  Experts said it was not too late to hit the target, but 'extraordinary' effort was needed."  The WHO and other medical oversight groups are concerned that in many places, we have dropped below the levels needed for herd immunity, the number of immune individuals needed in a population to prevent the disease from catching hold.  Once that happens, epidemiologists warn, an epidemic is almost certain to occur.

It's hard to combat all of this.  Prominent voices like Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy have spent enormous amounts of time, energy, and money sowing suspicion and drawing false correlations, and once you've activated the fear module in people's minds it's almost impossible to repair the damage.  Doctors are said to be hand-in-glove with corporate interests; skeptics like me are seen as shills or dupes.  If the government itself forces its citizens' choices -- compulsory vaccination programs for school attendance, for example -- it is claimed to be infringing on rights.  When epidemics occur, as in Wales this year, it causes a brief flurry of activity, but once the survivors recover, most people forget about it.  The fear remains that the anti-vaxxers are right -- perhaps the epidemic would have occurred anyway, even if everyone had been vaccinated, and then maybe there would have been all of these cases of autism to contend with.

Here, have a carrot.

I wish I had a good suggestion regarding what to do about all of this.  While I'm all for personal freedom, I really wish governments would step in and say, "Look, I'm sorry you have fallen for pseudoscientific superstition.  That's unfortunate for you.  Roll up your sleeve, please."  If this happened in enough places, maybe we could eradicate measles and polio, the way we eradicated smallpox in 1980.  While getting rid of diseases like the flu, which affect other mammals as well as humans, is unlikely, we could certainly get further along in stopping or slowing down epidemics.

Think of the human suffering this would eliminate, and the lives it would save.

Maybe it's time to apply some science and rationality, here, and not succumb to fear tactics, fallacious thinking, specious claims, and the "research" of outright frauds.  Wouldn't that be marvelous?