The Wonderful Effects of the New Innoculation (thanks Wikipedia!)

At the risk of not sounding terribly polite, I’ve been researching (i.e., Googling) some of the stupidest questions being asked in our society: those of the antivax movement. Its not that it is stupid to question vaccinations, or for parents to ask sincere questions before having their children repeatedly jab. That’s common sense. No, the stupid comes in where we see antivaccine talking points repeated endlessly, unthinkingly by the antivaccine faithful. (And before you say it, “open minds” should go both ways.) You can’t help but find the same rhetoric being repeated endlessly on discussion boards, partisan websites and in interviews.

Anyway, I’m collecting some of my favorite Snappy Answers to Stupid Vaccine Questions here. While I am no expert, I’ll try to link to answers with good references. I’m also trying to avoid the vanilla PR answers you’ll get from health system websites.

Al Jaffee, by the way, is still alive, possibly in Guantanamo through either a tragic misunderstanding or an accurate Snappy Answer.

From A Photon in the Darkness comes Three Popular Anti-vaccine Myths Deconstructed. Spoilers: The myths are
1) “You claim that vaccines are 100% safe and effective!” Which technically is actually kind of a straw man of a straw man. A meta scarecrow, if you will. But only technically. As Photon explains, nobody of any real knowledge of the matter would claim that vaccines are either 100% safe or effective.
2) ”Vaccine-preventable diseases were in decline before the vaccines were introduced”
3) “The chickenpox vaccine causes shingles!”

From Losing in the Lucky Country comes a discussion on the mysterious phenomena of Vaccine Shedding, which follows in great part with myth #3 above. I’ve seen this sort of thing pop up in a number of discussion boards, where the real phenomena of viral shedding, a part of viral reproduction, has somehow been conflated with vaccines to create the myth of Vaccine Shedding.

The colloquial use of this nonsensical term seeks to convey that an individual who has been vaccinated can readily shed part of the vaccine and cause infection in the unvaccinated. Which by definition demands them to have shed not a vaccine but an infectious agent. Indeed a virus. Which by extension demands the vaccine to be a live virus vaccine. This then opens the door to viral shedding the vast complexities of vaccine induced immunity and viable modes of excretion – aka shedding. That won’t stop your garden variety anti-vaxxer claiming any vaccine can lead to infection of the unvaccinated via this ghastly “vaccine shedding”.

Its complex, and worth a read. To oversimplify, yes, live attenuated vaccines can pose a risk to immunocompromised people (and often infants and pregnant women) and a healthy child or adult cannot get sick from being near a vaccinated person.

I’ll try to keep updating this as whim takes me.

UPDATE 1: How Antivaxxers Debate

Here’s a nice primer on common antivaccine “Tropes and Tactics”, which is summarized and added-upon by Orac here for those who can’t access the article.

UPDATE 2: Brain Studies Demonstrate Autism at 6 Months

Interesting news for the antivaccine proponents who still cling to the myth that the MMR vaccine causes autism: you can detect patterns of autism in children as young as six months. Of course, MMR isn’t given to children younger than one year old, which leftbrainrightbrain blog suggests time travel may be the last refuge for the vaccine denialists. They also take a nifty look at the causation/correlation fallacy commonly necessarily employed by people who still insist vaccines cause autism.

Today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, Pete Diamandis announced an X-Prize for a tricorder-like device. The X-Prize Foundation is one of those organizations that make me proud of humanity.

Emily Willingham deftly dissects an awful attempt by a writer for The Atlantic at turning a cool scientific discovery into a “Frankenfoods” fear fest. Emily sums up the science in question — findings on how little bits of rice RNA can have an affect on our genes — in these passages :

A study from a Chinese group led by Chen-Yu Zhang of Nanking University and published in Cell Research, has uncovered the fascinating result that when people eat rice, they can absorb microRNAs (miRNAs)–tiny sequences of RNA–from the rice into the blood. These rice-originating miRNAs turn up in blood and tissues of people who eat rice and…here’s the kicker…one type of rice miRNA interacts with human proteins that are responsible for removing LDL (“bad” cholesterol) from the blood (!). It’s the first report of plant miRNAs ending up in people by way of diet and the finding that at least one of them alters an important process in the body.

{A bunch of cool stuff you should read cut out.}

Researchers have discovered myriad ways that miRNA influences human development and disease, and these discoveries open the way to using that information to cure disease. But all of the miRNAs investigated thus far in people have come from people themselves, either present for normal functions or overabundant and linked to disease. The flashy take-home from this latest rice study is, We can pick up these tiny regulators from what we eat…and they can interfere with the functions of proteins we make.

She then goes into The Atlantic author’s illogical leap attempt to turn into a cautionary tale of genetically-modified food. I understand (via her Twitter handle) that she’s updating the piece. I look forward to following the tale.

Oh, where were we? History, yes! NEJM is 200 years old and they’re celebrating with a cool site and timeline.

Science Fiction magazines (like all genre literary magazines) are suffering what are probably unsustainable drops in readership, which makes it curious to see that MIT’s consumer-friendly Technology Review has just announced its own Skiffypub: TRSF. I know you can find Analog and Asimov’s in “e” versions, but I’m shocked neither has an Android or IOS app. Its not like they cater to savvy geeks or anything.

While waiting for a photographer to set up this morning, I read a nifty PLoS ONE paper on parasitic wasps from some Czech researchers that might add a few good parasite examples to your cocktail party conversation bank. The chief example, of course, is the larva of the wasps themselves, who force their spider hosts to build the sort of snuggly web-den that they would normally do as they are preparing for winter. The researchers gather that the larva get the same advantage from the winter webs as the spiders do, namely protection from weather and predators. Then, presumably, the larva eat their hosts from within. Eh, don’t feel too bad. Unless you are a big fan of spiders, Neottiura bimaculata and Theridion varians are not the sort I’d hesitate to squish. But maybe that’s just me.

Interestingly, both spiders make different kinds of winterized webs, where N. bimaculata creates a dense wad of webbing while T. varians builds a cupola-like structure. So, despite the fact that the hosts are two distinct species who build two distinctly different types of webs, the wasp larva effects them in more or less the same way, presumably by tinkering with the same winterizing mechanism (yay evolution!).

The paper’s intro also provides a few good examples, which I’ll just paste here for reference:

Many parasites and parasitoids have evolved remarkable strategies to manipulate the behavior of their hosts in order to promote their own survival and reproduction [1], [2]. The behavioral manipulations described include altered phototaxis, changes in locomotion, and the alteration of foraging and defensive behaviors [2]–[19]. The most fascinating manipulations are those that lead to unnatural host behaviors. The parasitic trematode, Dicrocoelium dendriticum Rudolphi, forces its intermediate ant-host to move up onto blades of grass during the night and early morning. This action increases the ingestion of infected ants by grazing sheep, the final host [3]. Mermithid nematodes induce their terrestrial arthropod hosts to commit suicide by jumping into water, after which the hairworms desert the host to spend their adult stage in their natural habitat [8].

Behavioral manipulations often result in the induction of innate behaviors. Acanthocephalan, Polymorphus paradoxus (Connell & Corner), evokes evasive behavior in the amphipod intermediate host, Gammarus lacustris Sars, which is then eaten by ducks [4]. The braconid parasitoid, Glyptapanteles spp., makes their caterpillar host behave as a bodyguard of the parasitoid pupae [15]. The caterpillar stands bent over the parasitoid pupae and violently lashes out at approaching predators, resulting in reduced predation of parasitoid pupae.

Evidence for benefits of the host manipulations for the parasitoid has been gained from several host-parasitoid systems [9]–[12]. But there might be also costs involved. This has been rarely studied. Maure et al. [13] investigated bodyguarding of the braconid pupae, Dinocampus coccinellae (Schrank), by ladybird Coleomegilla maculate Timberlake. Laboratory experiments revealed that duration of bodyguarding suppressed predation by lacewings but also decreased the parasitoid fecundity.

You can find the entire article here, for free, because PLoS ONE is awesome like that.

We have a good new tent, a Coleman instant tent, in fact, but no tent on earth, I’m sure, could have withstood the rains we experienced that night. It rained hard. Then harder. Then harder still. Then harder yet. Eventually, the water began seeping in through the seams.

I may post more later, but now–for reference–some useful links for next time:

1. My knot tying skills aren’t what they should be…this I know. I quit Boy Scouts just as we were getting heavily into the knot thing. Hopefully, I can pick up a few pointers here at iwillknot.com.

2. While it is nice to see the stars, I think a rain fly (despite what Coleman says) could be useful. I had planned to put a tarp up above the tent, but the site we ended up on didn’t have many trees. I think I need to put together a kit like this tarp and home-built pole collection from this camping how-to site. I like the use of galvanized spikes as stakes, perhaps with washers to grip the rope better. I may just fork out the cash for tarp poles instead of making my own, though.

3. We had great fun at the Swatara State Park’s fossil pit, and collected some wee fossil shells and what I am hoping is part of a trilobite. Its all late Ordovician-era, about 450 million years ago–more than old enough to blow our minds. I might investigate other local PA fossil-hunting locales. If so, these groups might help, but many of the links are outdated. Apparently, there are some outcroppings in Deer Lake, PA that might be worth visiting with the kids. It could also be a nice stop on the way to the Yeungling brewery tour.

UPDATE: For far, far future reference: small camping trailers. I particularly like the small Casita and Scamp trailers, with fold-down bunks to sleep four.

Will I be able to post a picture of Benny? Lets see after the jump…

Why? Because research often sounds funny. Really. Why else would Palin attack fruit fly research? For the ignorant, it sounds pretty damn frivolous. For the rest of us, its pretty embarrassing to watch.

Now I’m not saying that there’s not waste in government, or even waste in research funding. There probably is. In fact, I’m willing to go as far as say–without any evidence at hand one way or the other–that there probably is waste in federal research funding. Someone, somewhere at the National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health, is funding a research program that they know, in their heart of hearts, will not advance the human body of knowledge one iota. Shocking, I know.

If only Coburn was actually pursuing something like that. No, he’s doing what Proxmire and others did before him, searching through the reams of research grant summaries produced by places like NSF to pick ones that sound silly or frivolous. Its easy enough to do, but will just as likely backfire on you. Again, ask Palin.

You can also ask Mark Sanford. Before Mark was a governor and a famed Appalachian explorer, he was a Republican Congresscritter of the Revolution of ’94 sort. In 1998, he played the same Golden Fleece game, searching the abstract databases of the National Science Foundation (which had become freely online) for funny-sounding award summaries.

To be honest, I did the same thing. I interned in the NSF’s Office of Legislative and Public Affairs (OLPA, which I always liked to say as Opa! They learned quickly to keep me away from the dishes.) As a pioneer in open-access government-type stuff, NSF put all their approved grant information online, which was pretty keen in the 90s. As an intern, I was not encumbered by a particular PR “beat” and was given free reign to cover whatever I found interesting, as long as the professional public information officers didn’t mind. I scanned through the award listings and came up with cool stuff like “supermassive” black holes and “doppler on wheels.”

Sanford did the same thing and came up with a remarkable rant on federal funding for ATM research. He wanted to slice almost $200 million from the budget, citing waste on ATM research and other silly things. Only he (or his staffer) didn’t bother to read beyond the headline, if they did, they would have realized that the award abstract referred to Asynchronous Transfer Mode, the switching technique that made your lightning fast dorm room ISDN connection so much faster than your parent’s Compuserve account. Cue the sad trombone. (Side note: Sadtrombone.com is apparently defunct so I’ll do it myself: Wah wah wah waaaaah.)

In fairness to Republicans, it was Sanford’s Michigan colleague Vern Ehlers who pointed out Sanford’s error, quashing the budget hack. (Check out this little note in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.)

Even more recently, Rep. Adrian Smith of Nebraska, tried to play the Golden Fleece game. Last year, Rep. Smith called for folks to search through NSF’s award database to find other funny-sounding stuff like:

$750,000 to develop computer models to analyze the on-field contributions of soccer players and $1.2 million to model the sound of objects breaking for use by the video game industry. Help us identify grants that are wasteful or that you don’t think are a good use of taxpayer dollars.

Of course, both projects were taken drastically out of context. the soccer study was really a look at smart-swarming, that is how teams can come together to collaborate on complex problems. The “sound of objects breaking” was created for the study of how to recreate realistic noises in a virtual environment, say for search-and-rescue or the military, perhaps? Again, its a bit of irony. The NSF attempts to be responsible with our money, showing us precisely where the dollars are going, only for some political hack to come along, take the work out of context, and use it to further his own political agenda.

Oh, bother.

NSF, which only spends about 5 percent of its budget on administrative costs*, is getting nailed by political hacks for a) openly posting its award information (which is probably mandated by now) and b) funding scientists who often use imprecise or “clever” language in their award application titles and abstracts.

So, Coburn, you want to cut waste? Fine, but realize that federal funding for research is the backbone of our economy. Every new technical advance, therapeutic drug, surgical technique, material and technology we’ve seen in the last 50 years owes its very existence to agencies like the NSF and NIH. Every step forward we’ve made in medicine, technology and industry began in some academic laboratory with government dollars. Research funding is every bit a part of our infrastructure as our roads and bridges (which could also use a little bit of money now that I think of it).

Maybe you could take a little fiscal pride in that Tom, my friend, and a little less happy-dancing over the amount of farm subsidies your rake in for Oklahoma each year.

The fact is, NSF and NIH subject grant applications to peer review. That is, the agencies gather teams of scientists to review the grant applications made by other scientists. The NSF was started that way nearly 60 years ago as a way of making a science of science funding, whereas scientific projects would otherwise be funded through political largesse and budgetary earmarks. In other words, its the opposite of pork.

Money is scarce–only about 1 in 10 grants are ever given funding–so the pressure is on to fund high-impact, low-risk work. (If anything, there is a good argument to be made for funding high-risk work, but that’s not what I’m ranting about today.) Grants that get funding rarely get funded on the first go-around, and a lot of work goes into making sure the money is spent wisely. Note: I can’t think of anywhere else in the Federal government where people work so hard to make sure that taxpayer money is spent well. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Further reading:

* Best proof I can find is here, a report from 4 years ago. I admit, its a little outdated, but I’ve got work to do…

I think this is better than some vague resolution, here is a set of accomplishable goals for the winter break:

UPDATE: Hit or miss all around

Bathroom:
Caulk the tub and fixtures
Tighten the faucet
Touch up the scratchmarks on the #$*@*@ IKEA sink.

UPDATE: didn’t really get to it, but I will caulk and tighten this weekend, I swear. My, that sounds dirty.

Bedroom:
Exorcise the closet and dressers of lingering ghosts of years past
Maybe go to #$*@*@ IKEA to get a little bookcase.

UPDATE: Success! I exorcised the HELL out of that closet. Goodwill dump of epic proportions.

Living room/dining room/ kids’ bedroom:

Find a “Storage Solution” for the kids’ crappe

UPDATE: Partial success! Some more storage bins, and a purge of unused baby toys, seemed to have made a difference.

Office:
Purge cables
Scan kids’ artwork, photos, etc.
Get a #$*@*@ IKEA rug to replace my wife’s coffee-stained horror of an office rug.
Make the pilfered laptop kid-friendly, i.e., find some free XP software for the kiddies, and (dare I say it) lose the Bondi Blue iMac.

UPDATE: Well, we cleaned the office.

Attic:
Purge, Purge, Purge. They’ll need to make an after-school special about me to warn kids off…

UPDATE: Qualified success! Another trip to Goodwill.

Kitchen:

Scrub those cabinets and that #$*@*@ floor…maybe look into a new floor…to be done by someone else.

UPDATE: Everything cleaned, but that never lasts…

“I’m a complete rationalist,” said Jesse Lebovics, manager of the Olympia and submarine Becuna for the Independence Seaport Museum. “I can explain most of it.

“But [the ship] certainly has a colorful enough history that I think if something were to be around, it makes sense it would be around the Olympia,” Lebovics said.

Sure, Jesse, nice “but” there. I’d think a few ghosts would be mighty convenient for you though.

I don’t necessarily blame the folks who run the Olympia for pitching this story. After all, we’ve seen Eastern State Penitentiary go from moldering historical curiosity to one of the most popular “haunted” places in America by embracing the ghost tourist industry. (By day a historic gem, by night a history-making cash cow.) And the Independence Seaport Museum is still reeling from the scandal left behind by its former president, who ran the place as his own personal cash/political favor machine.

Apparently, the ISM has already pimped out the ship to the ghost TV reality show industry, a necessary first step, I’m sure, before they partner with a ghost tour outfit. That is, if they can put it together in time. According to previous reports, they’re looking to sell it for $20 million or they’ve threatened to sink it off the coast of Cape May. My thinking is that it will join the SS United States and become another ghost ship of Philadelphia.

Um, not in the haunted sense, but the abandoned, looming over Ikea sense…although the Olympia doesn’t necessarily loom over anything.

You want to save the Olympia? Save the waterfront. May my father, a highway engineer since the 60′s, forgive me, but let’s get rid of I-95. The idea is so mad it might work.

UPDATE:

I can’t link it directly, but check out picture number four in the gallery. The caption says it all: “In recordings, Harry Burkhardt says, he has heard voices, including one that told him: ‘Save the ship!’”

Harry, are you certain Jesse wasn’t whispering in your ear?

Also, if I ever do that podcast thing I wanted to do, I’m using a song from this album as its theme. Probably Sambarama (track 4 below).

I think it could just use a good cleaning, so I’d imagine this site will be useful (thanks to its author). I called a local repair shop, one of three I found listings for in the Philadelphia area — and the only one who picked up a phone, and their typewriter repair guy only works occasionally throughout the year and charges just to look at machines. The way I see it, any chance that I significantly screw up the restoration is mitigated by the steep repair costs. If he’s going to charge me an arm and a leg to fix it, I might as well see to it that it is good and broke first.

I’ve been looking with much envy at some of the classic letterheads of yore, such as Tesla’s or Steve McQueen‘s, and I think it might be fun to come up with my own. If the spirit moves me, I think I might also persuade myself to type out a few notes from time to time. Like most folks nowadays, my handwriting is atrocious, and physical representations of correspondence are rare and beautiful things nowadays.

Of course, this restoration may never happen while the kids are still in underfoot and, by the time they’re done, mechanotelepathy will have made all other forms of communication obsolete.