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.

Let me set the record straight first: I’m a huge NPR fan.  I think I first got hooked around 9/11, and I’ve been an avid listener ever since.  Of the six preset stations on the car radio, the other five combined don’t get half as much playtime as NPR, which in my neck of the woods is 90.9 WBUR.  I enjoy the high-quality reporting, the engaging interviews, and even the fun weekend shows like Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.  I enjoy the whole affair so much that a couple years ago, I felt bad being a freeloader and started making yearly contributions.  And beyond simple enjoyment, I also find myself learning a lot from listening.  It’s become a significant and trusted source of information for me.

You can imagine my consternation, then, when a couple weeks ago my morning commute with WBUR was interrupted by an ad for a company providing ”detoxifying” services with “ionic energy fields”, oxygen supplementation, and nutrient supplementation.  I won’t give the name here for fear of upping the company’s notoriety somehow.  It was a rude, jarring, pseudoscientific intrusion into what was typically a very informative drive.  How could WBUR advertise this crap?  I knew they needed sponsors, as any public radio station does, but surely this was bending too low.

I almost blogged about my dismay that day, but work soon had me running around enough to forget that morning’s insult.  My wedding and honeymoon came and went shortly thereafter, and I returned to my happy NPR listening habits, past injuries forgotten.

Until today.

I’m driving up Route 2 towards Concord, enjoying ”Only a Game”.  The usual WBUR sponsor bit comes on, but this time instead of Landry and Arcari or the MFA, the nice female radio voice spits out the name of a school of homeopathy!  Let me say that again - homeopathy.  You have got to be kidding me.  What’s next - sponsorship from a Boston psychics organization?  Noni juice manufacturers?  WBUR already broadcasts Science Friday.  Maybe they should add Woo Wednesday to attract more sponsors.

So I’m calling out WBUR on this one, and I hope others do, as well.  And remember, WBUR, it’s only because I love you.  I know public radio money is not exactly overflowing, but there have to be some standards on who it’s ok to take money from.  Those who make their living duping their customers with potentially harmful pseudoscience should not be given the opportunity to spread their message on stations such as WBUR, stations that exist to educate and provide information.

With all of today’s talk about ricin found in Las Vegas, I have to tell a little story. I remember first learning about ricin way back in Prof. Krieger’s 7.20 class (Human Physiology) in college. The class distinguished itself from most other biology-major fare by being immediately and directly applicable to real life. The mention of ricin, however, was especially memorable to me because it was mentioned in the setting of the Bulgarian umbrella murder. It wasn’t a particularly positive use of biology, but I was pretty impressed. Espionage! Assassination! Secret spy gadgets! All made possible with science. If I remember correctly, one single molecule of ricin was capable of killing a human cell. That’ll make you pay attention.

Today marks the 199th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, a man who came to mean much in his day and even more so now. Whether you dine with fellow evolutionists at a “Phylum Feast” complete with “primordial soup,” or you just ponder for a moment how much of modern science has been shaped by the theory of evolution, I hope you are able at some point to stop and appreciate this one man’s work.  I’ll admit to still be slogging through Origin of Species, but I’m undoubtedly a fan for life.  Happy Birthday, Chuck.

Read more at http://www.darwinday.org/

Just got back from Turks and Caicos a couple days ago (more on that later). While I was down there, I had the opportunity to read this little tidbit in Wired by Thomas Hayden:

Morality, spirituality, the meaning of life — science doesn’t handle those issues well at all. But that’s cool. We have art and religion for that stuff. Science also assumes predictable cause and effect in a world that’s a chaotic, bubbling stew of randomness. But that’s OK, too. Our approximations are usually good enough. No, the real reason science sucks is that it makes us look bad. It makes us bit players in the Big Story of the universe, and it exposes some key limitations of the human brain.

Look at it this way: Before science, we humans had dominion over Earth, the center of the universe. Now we’re just a bunch of hairless apes on a wet rock orbiting a minor star in a marginal galaxy.

Even worse, those same cortexes that invented science can’t really embrace it. Science describes the world with numbers (ratio of circumference to diameter: pi) and abstractions (particles! waves! particles!). But our intractable brains evolved on a diet of campfire tales. Fantastical explanations (angry gods hurling lightning bolts) and rare events with dramatic outcomes (saber-toothed tiger attacks) make more of an impact on us than statistical norms. Evolution gave us brains that crave certainty, with irrational fears of crashing in an airplane and a built-in weakness for just-so stories about intelligent design. Meanwhile, the true wonders revealed by the scientific method — species that change into new species over time, continents that float around the planet, a quantum-mechanical world where nothing is for sure — are worse than counterintuitive. To a depressingly large number of us, they’re downright threatening.

In other words, thanks to evolution, half of all Americans don’t believe in evolution. That’s the universe for you: impersonal, uncaring, and ironic.

I liked this little snippet a lot - the content as well as the sentiment. Science doesn’t suck - far from it. But unfortunately, far too many of us fail to appreciate science because our brains aren’t quite wired that way. Ironically, science has taught us enough to know why science sucks for so many, but that just highlights the enormity of the struggle of enlightening the masses. Great.

Link to the original article is here. (If you read the comments there, be sure to ignore the first commenter, who has no idea what he’s talking about.)