Ed’s corner of the web

I can get a little moody and punchy when I’m short on sleep, so my reaction was not particularly favorable a few mornings ago when I opened up the AMA Morning News in my inbox and read the first headline:”Study indicates MMR vaccine may not be linked to autism.”  I think I nearly had a stroke.  I may have yelled, “Gee – you think?” out loud to the empty room, but I can’t fully recall.

For background, AMA Morning News is a daily digest of medically relevant news that’s compiled and sent out by the people at the American Medical Association.  The idea is to keep the busy doc apprised of what’s going on in the world of medicine and medical science.

The article attached to this particular headline referenced a newly-published study on PLoS ONE (the online journal for the Public Library of Science) that shot down the contention, made 10 years ago in a much-derided study by Dr. Andrew Wakefield, that measles virus – obtained through MMR immunization – persisted in the guts of kids with autism and possibly was involved in autism’s pathogenesis.  What followed from Dr. Wakefield’s study was heightened vaccine fear-mongering and strengthening of antivaccination movements in the the US and UK, the unfortunate results of which can been seen now in the recently reported outbreaks of measles in the UK and the US (without – it should be noted – any change in the incidence of autism).

In the last few years, the idea of a link between vaccination and autism has been thoroughly debunked by several large, rigorous scientific studies.  Unfortunately, the public has been a little slow to catch up with the data (which is actually one of my big gripes with the American Academy of Pediatrics), and a lot of unwarranted, even counterproductive, fears regarding vaccines still remain.  This headline, instead of reflecting the consensus state of the medical scientific community (minus a few whackjobs), played more to those unfounded fears of vaccines.  The likelihood of vaccines being linked to autism is vanishingly small, well beyond what any reasonable person would require for convincing.  But a headline that says “MMR vaccine may not be linked to autism” gives a very different impression.  To someone who has been fighting against those fears and misinformation for years, it was not a welcome sight – and especially upsetting coming from the AMA.

So I wrote a letter.

To Whom It May Concern,

I was greatly dismayed when I opened up my inbox this morning to see this headline in today’s edition of AMA Morning Rounds: “Study indicates MMR vaccine may not be linked to autism.”  I’m not sure how this headline made it past your editors, but the implication it gives is that there is still significant doubt as to whether MMR is linked to autism, when in fact there is none.  This lack of association has been established and reestablished by study after stronger study, and for the AMA – of all organizations – to imply that there is still doubt is a reflection of either base ignorance or refusal to accept the data.  I’m not sure which is worse.  A more appropriate headline would have been, “Study reaffirms lack of link between MMR vaccine and autism,” which is a much better reflection of the article’s actual contents.  If the AMA is going to continue to be a trusted source of news and information for doctors as well as patients, it needs to work harder to avoid the irresponsible, obfuscating language that I read today.

Sincerely,
Edward Chung, MD

In my irate, sleep-deprived state, I wrote a complaint letter to the feedback email address at AMA Morning News.  I didn’t really expect to get a response; I just felt better having aired my opinion.  And a little part of me thought that maybe somewhere, somehow, someone would read it and realize that what they had pulled was not cool.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when a couple days later I got this:

Dr. Chung,

Thanks for writing. You’re right…that headline could most certainly have been written better. In fact, you already wrote what would have been a more appropriate headline for that news item. I’ll discuss this with the editors at U.S. News Custom Briefings, which the AMA partners with to produce Morning Rounds, in hopes of not repeating this in future issues.

Thanks again for writing, and thank you so much for your membership with the AMA.

Sincerely,

(name redacted)
Manager, member communications
American Medical Association

Not bad!  It wasn’t defensive, back-pedaling, or falsely apologetic (ie. “We’re sorry if you were offended by what we wrote.”).  It was, “Our bad, you’re right, we’ll fix it.”  Kudos to member communications at the AMA.  Now they’ve gotta be careful.  If I continue to get positive feedback for airing my opinion, I just might have to do it more.

A tip of my hat goes out to David Campbell, a biology teacher at Ridgeview High School in Orange Park, FL.  The NYT recently published an article detailing his difficulties in teaching evolution to his Biology I class.  I thank my Dad for pointing the article out to me.  The battle of evolution versus creationism (or Intelligent Design or whatever else they’re trying to disguise it as these days) has been particularly heated in the past several years, and public schools and their school boards have been the front lines in this debate.  The fact that there’s a battle at all is somewhat of a sad indictment of the status of science education in this country, but that’s a topic for a whole other series of posts.  Beyond all the posturing and rhetoric in the blogosphere is this single human trying his darndest to make a difference in an steeply uphill struggle.  It’s easy to sit at the keyboard and say, science teachers should do such and such, evolution should absolutely be taught in the classroom, etc.  But the details of how to do that in a real school with real kids is a much more complex issue.  Here is a dude who is actually there, walking the walk, pursuing not only the noble goal of teaching science, but also promoting the concepts of evolution.  In Florida.  Hard core, man.  Keep fighting the good fight, sir.