WA Coroner & quack cancer cures

Spotted at Stop the AVN, reported in The Age.

THE West Australian Coroners Court will hold a major inquest next month into a series of deaths in mid-2005 when five people, including a 53-year-old Victorian woman, received dubious treatments for cancer allegedly at the direction of the notorious quack Hellfried Sartori.

It's difficult to understand the point of such an investigation since it seems, to date, that the government has done nothing about the inquest into the death of Penelope Dingle who tried to cure her cancer with homeopathy (sugar and/or water).

At the conclusion of the inquest, the coroner recommended federal and state health authorities review their legislation regarding complementary and alternative treatments. I'm not aware that anything at all has changed since.

All the inquests in the world won't stop people profiting from selling nonsense while it remains legal to do so.


In more-positive news, EoR points to the story of a young boy who survived cancer.

Sunrise on Vaccination

Whooping cough and vaccination were discussed on Channel 7's Sunsrise program this morning. I missed the main segment but caught a couple of email comments and David Koch's reply.

The second email that I heard read out was from a typical conspiracy theorist, anti vaccinationist, taking Koch to task for apparently being brainwashed by big pharmaceutical companies. Koch responded quite forcefully that we need 96% vaccination coverage to provide herd immunity (I now know this figure was provided by Dr Ginni Mansberg earlier). He went on to effectively ridicule what he called "airy-fairy parents" who don't want needles stuck in their kids.

Now, this is great - Channel 7 - Sunrise - were promoting science and medicine. But I'm confused. In the past (and no doubt very soon, again, in the future) I'm damned sure Koch has sat there while such things as "kitchen remedies" have been promoted. In fact, everything from psychics to reiki to acupuncture and naturopathy turn up regularly on the show and the promotional information, all too often supplied by practitioners, is lapped up by the Sunrise hosts.

Earlier this year they featured Deepak Chopra, who was billed as "the world leader in mind-body healing".

It seems to me Sunrise has to bear some of the responsibility for people believing there are genuine alternatives to real medicine and for those who extrapolate from this that there are also non-medical alternatives to vaccination.



There is now a video of this morning's segment online, featuring Sunrise doctor Ginni Mansberg. This is where Koch first raises the problem of those "airy-fairy parents" putting the rest of us at risk.

David, those "airy-fairy parents" are clearly such an important part of the Channel 7 viewer demographic that your bosses persistently feel the need to cater to them by supporting and promoting nonsense to the detriment of the rest of us. Even in this segment we see two examples of "let's not go there", once from Mansberg and once from Mel, when the issue of vaccination objectors is raised.

Why not go there? Why do the Sunrise team fear the truth?


UPDATE:

Dr Ginni responds to the "nutters" - she will "go there" after all...

Meryl Dorey, AVN & Big Pharma Fail!

Today, Meryl Dorey put out the following call on the Australian Vaccination network (AVN) blog...

Scarlet Fever was a dreaded killer of children (and adults) in the 1800s and the early part of the 1900s. In fact, it regularly killed more people than that disease we have all been taught to believe is such an indiscriminate killer of young and old – measles.

But Scarlet Fever has virtually disappeared. We don’t have scare campaigns telling us that we have to keep our children away from crowds because there is an epidemic of Scarlet Fever. We don’t have stories coming out in the media pointing the finger of blame at those who haven’t been vaccinated against Scarlet Fever and blaming them for the deaths of vaccinated children.

Perhaps that’s because we have never had a vaccine for Scarlet Fever. Never.

So, our learned adversaries who believe – against all of the available evidence, that vaccines have saved the world – how do you explain this decline in the mortality from Scarlet Fever without a Scarlet Fever vaccine? I’m waiting. Let’s hear it. C’mon – don’t be shy…

[article link]

I'm at a loss as to her point here. We are usually being asked, by the AVN, to believe that all vaccines are dangerous and ineffective and that the only reason we still have them is to make big pharmaceutical companies rich (or because our reptilian overlords want to gain total control of the population through lethal microchipping).

Ignoring the fact that a vaccine for Scarlet Fever was developed in 1924 then superseded by penicillin, what does not having a Scarlet Fever vaccine today actually prove? It seems to me that it demonstrates the strong possibility that the pharmaceutical industry might not actually be making dangerous and ineffective vaccines for problems that don't require them purely in the interests of maximising profits - otherwise we'd still be lining up for scary Scarlet Fever shots.

But maybe that's just me.

MORE:

Dorey also provides readers with a graph indicating that measles and scarlet fever both showed a dramatic drop in mortality in the late 1880s. I assume we are to conclude from this tight correlation that because one disease doesn't need a vaccine, neither does the other. It's an interesting correlation to be sure.

Ignoring the fact that Dorey has been told repeatedly that mortality is not best indicator of vaccine efficacy because diseases can also have disastrous, long-term, non-lethal effects (so incidence is a better measure) it's interesting to note that the 4-stroke internal combustion engine was being put into full production around the time these diseases showed their dramatic fall in mortality.

I can only conclude from this that cars are the reason why less people die from these diseases today.

God did it!

How strange is it that a god who can 'poof' an entire universe into existence, who can part seas, flood the globe and generally wreak havoc at the blink of his spiritual eye, has to resort to using mere mortals to dig a bunch of men out of a collapsed mine?

"There are actually 34 of us," 19-year-old Jimmy Sanchez wrote, "because God has never left us down here."

Amen, a watching world would agree.

But now the question has become, exactly whose God was down there with Jimmy Sanchez and the others?

Different churches are laying claim to inspiring divine intervention in the remarkable rescue, giving short shrift to the impressive technological achievement of the Chilean engineers (and a giant U.S.-made drill) in their efforts to get a leg up on the competition for souls in South America's newly diverse religious marketplace.

So sad that the fervently religious can have such little regard for their fellow humans.

Meryl Dorey, AVN & "what's that gurgling sound?"

That gurgling sound is the sound of the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN)* slowly going down the toilet!

I just spotted the news at Young Australian Skeptics and have followed up some news resources - the AVN is to lose its status as a charity. Anyone vaguely familiar with the anti-vaccine scare-mongering that forms the group's raison d'être would wonder how they were ever able to claim charity status in the first place.

From the Government Gazette announcement...

I, the Hon. KEVIN GREENE, M.P., the responsible Minister for the purposes of the Charitable Fundraising Act 1991, do hereby revoke the authority to fundraise issued to Australian Vaccination Network Inc on the following grounds as set out in section 31 (1) of that Act:

(a) fundraising appeals have not been conducted in good faith for charitable purposes.

(c) fundraising appeals have been improperly administered.

(f) it is in the public interest.

That cheering sound you hear is from thousands of sceptics across Australia who have worked tirelssly to bring the AVN's antics into public scrutiny.

The story is already getting wide publicity...

From Pro Bono News:

The NSW Office of Liquor Gaming and Racing (OLGR) has rescinded the charitable status of the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) after a two month investigation.

But the national, volunteer-run lobby and support group says the move is a political decision because its message of an individually informed health choice conflicts with the government's policy of pro-mass vaccination.

From The Herald Sun:

A CONTROVERSIAL NSW-based anti-vaccination group has been stripped of its charitable status after the state government found its appeals had not been conducted in good faith.

The Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) was ordered in July to publish a disclaimer on its website stating the group was anti-vaccination and its material shouldn't be read as medical advice.



From The Northern Star

AUSTRALIAN Vaccination Network media spokeswoman Meryl Dorey today said the Office of Liquor Gaming and Racing (OLGR) announced it would revoke the lobby group's authority to fundraise.

The press release from the Bangalow-based network said the OLGR, the body that oversees charities, had openely stated there was no evidence of fraud or ciminality in an audit of the group earlier this year.

The AVN have published more details in a media release that paints the decision as "political". Here's some of what the OLGR had to say...

The Organisation has failed to publish a disclaimer on its website as recommended by the Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC). This has resulted in an unacceptable risk of potential donors to the Organisation being misled when making a decision whether or not to make a donation, which has led to appeals not being conducted in good faith.

The Organisation's website is misleading in that it may lead people making donations to believe that they are donating to a cause which promotes vaccination whereas the Organisation adopts an anti-vaccination position. When requested by the HCCC to publish a disclaimer on its website the Organisation failed to do so.

The failure of the Organisation to comply with the HCCC recommendation resulted in the Commission publishing a Public Warning on 26 July 2010 advising that this failure "poses a risk to public health and safety". In this circumstance it is in the public interest to not permit the Organisation to conduct fund raising appeals under the Act.
 
It's pretty damned clear that the AVN have been their own worst enemy by refusing to comply with a request from the Health Complaints Commission earlier this year. It can't be easy to still pretend to be charitable while you're flashing a government health body the brown eye.

Meryl Dorey concludes her opening statement with a request for potential donors to hurry up and donate before the revocation takes effect (why these things aren't instant is beyond a simpleton like me). But she's been desperately pleading for funds for months, supposedly to fight a legal campaign against the HCCC decision and it seems to have mostly fallen on deaf ears. I imagine anyone who gives a toss has already donated - to an organisation that has now had its charity status revoked.

I wonder if there are legal avenues for donors to recoup their money on the basis they were misled as to the group's true nature?

This is going to spread through the blogosphere faster than I could hope to keep up with (I almost used an infection metaphor there but this is serious folks - children have died) so use Google blog search to follow along.

MORE:

Peter Bowditch reported the AVN to the OLGR in May last year.


*For newcomers, the AVN is an anti-vaccination lobby group that uses scare tactics to convince people, especially new parents, that vaccination is a lethal tool of evil governments and pharmaceutical companies. They use every means at their disposal to get this "message" across but among their favourites are spreading fear about supposed toxins and the gross misuse and outright abuse of statistics, some of which have to be mangled beyond recognition in order to even appear to support the anti-vaccination agenda. Logical fallacies that are not welcome in most sensible conversations or debates find a welcoming home at any AVN-run website.


NOTE: I'm not a doctor or scientist. You really don't need to be to see through the nonsense that passes as information from groups like the AVN.

Meryl Dorey, AVN & Science

*UPDATE* I recommend that readers take a look at the comments following this article for important clarifications


Someone on the Australian Vaccination Network's (AVN) Facebook page posted a link to an Adelaide Now story about a hospital doctor contracting whooping cough.

In short, a doctor at a Women's and Children's hospital tested positive for whooping cough and the hospital has taken action to identify anyone who was potentially infected by him. The story does not mention any confirmed infections among the 59 people identified as having had contact during the infectious period, but says 25 were given precautionary antibiotics. The article finishes with a call for children to be fully vaccinated.

The doctor's vaccination status was not mentioned but is the cause of some speculation at AVN Central. An AVN administrator, posting only as Australian Vaccination Network, wrote:

What was the doctor's vaccination status? How long since his last shot and if it was fairly recent, what does this say about the effectiveness of vaccination? While the unvaccinated are being blamed for the outbreak that's been going on in Oz for the last few years (despite our record-high levels of vaccination), cases like this where a health professional has contracted and possibly passed on pertussis are far from rare.

Given that we don't know the doctor's vaccination history, the comment seems somewhat pointless. This doctor might be one of those who the AVN regularly tell us about - doctors opposed to vaccination. Even if we assume the doctor was vaccinated, anyone who knows anything about vaccination knows that it isn't claimed to be 100% effective. So the doctor could be fully up to date with his or her vaccinations, and still become infected. That, in itself, isn't even news.

The next response on the Facebook thread was from Meryl Dorey, also posting as Australian Vaccination Network but at least including an unfortunate MD at the end of her comment (she isn't a doctor - of any kind. She's not even a scientist. For the record, neither am I). Here's a screenshot of her comment...

Her opening remark was what caught my attention...

The other question is - was this mutation something natural or did the vaccination actually CAUSE it?

Now, I'm no biologist - I didn't even do biology in high school (I did chemistry and physics instead) but I really don't think she has even a layperson's concept of what mutation is.

As always, I'm open to corrections but, for what it's worth, here's my layman's summary of mutation.

Organisms are never quite identical. Minor differences in DNA occur across a species. Sometimes these changes are bad for the organism and those individuals die or fail to reproduce. Sometimes the changes seem to do nothing, bad or good, for the organism but if the organism survives and reproduces, those changes can be passed on. Few changes would be likely to automatically deliver an immediate, significant benefit to an individual or species.

However, some of those seemingly insignificant changes might become beneficial for the organism if its circumstances change. In a season where grass is in short supply, those animals in a group that have longer necks might benefit by reaching leaves in trees. Shorter individuals might die that season and the "longer-neck mutation" is now part of the species. It has mutated but it didn't intentionally grow a longer neck to survive, the mutation wasn't "caused", as such. It survived because some individuals were different enough to exploit a differing situation that  others couldn't. It's evolution in a nutshell.

With bacteria, like that which causes whooping cough, all that needs to happen is for the organism to change just enough to not be recognised by an immune system that has already been exposed to the original organism.

But mutation is a numbers game. It's occurring all the time in all organisms but remember, not all mutations are beneficial. Some of the mutations might make the "new" bacteria different to the old bacteria but it might also be less virulent - more easily defeated. Such mutations pose little threat to us.

Think of beneficial mutation a little like choosing winning Lotto numbers. To really improve your chances of winning Lotto, you need to try a hell of a lot of number combinations - and you still might not win.

Beneficial mutation is best served by the ability to constantly reproduce as each new generation can have different "combinations". Then we need enough individuals to carry just the right combination - and that requires still more opportunities to reproduce. Since infected people will usually either beat the infection (possibly with long-term side effects), receive antibiotics or die, the organism needs to keep finding new hosts in order to keep playing the "mutation lottery"

A large population of unvaccinated (or never-infected) people offers the best opportunity for the bacterium to evolve a mutant combination that allows it to by-pass a pertussis-ready immune system.

I am at an absolute loss to even contemplate how a vaccine for whooping cough could actually CAUSE such a mutation. It's not like the bacteria are weighing up the situation and choosing which parts of their DNA need to be changed in order to survive - they are just lucky enough to sometimes develop a difference that makes them look different to a pre-primed immune system. Such mutations would occur even if vaccination had never been invented.

Further down the AVN Facebook page is a question about whether live virus vaccinations are contagious.

I was just wondering - Which vaccines are live culture? When a child is being vaccinated, does the doctor tell them to stay away from other people especially babies & children for a few days, because of the risk of that child spreading the live culture that they were just vaccinated against.

The obvious short answer to this, to a layman like me, would be "no" since vaccination would be completely pointless if it posed exactly the same threat as the natural disease it is designed to contain. But this is an AVN page so you can bet that isn't the answer that's given.

The first reply is just bizarre so I'm just going to leave it well alone.

The second reply comes from Meryl Dorey, self-described leading expert on vaccination.

Hi Fiona - Live virus vaccines include the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella), Chicken Pox (Varicella) if we license the Shingles vaccine in Australia, that will also be a live virus, some of our licensed flu vaccines are live though they are... not used often here, the oral polio vaccine which is also not used often in Australia is live, rabies is live which is only used for bat handlers here in Oz and I think I'm forgetting one but it's too early in the morning...does anyone out there know if I have?

I haven't checked all the facts of Dorey's reply but I do note a significant omission which could have put the questioner's mind at ease. The live viruses used in vaccines like MMR are "attenuated".  From wikipedia (my bolding)...

An attenuated vaccine is a vaccine created by reducing the virulence of a pathogen, but still keeping it viable (or "live").[1]  Attenuation takes a living agent and alters it so that it becomes harmless or less virulent. These vaccines contrast to those produced by "killing" the virus (inactivated vaccine).

It seems to me, and I remind you I'm neither a doctor nor a scientist, that even if the vaccinated child were contagious, then any subsequent infection would be mild. Again, I'm ready to stand corrected if I'm wrong (*UPDATE* I recommend that readers take a look at the comments following this article for important clarifications). Even so, Dorey's answer seems sadly lacking in important details that one might expect to find from a group that claims to offer parents information that will help them make vaccination decisions.

But why are AVN members concerned by infections - either from doctors or vaccinated kids? After all, Meryl Dorey is on record as saying whooping cough isn't lethal and that it's little more than a bad cough that is easily treated with sugar and/or water (okay, she called it "homeopathy" but that sounds far too "sciencey" for something which actually is just sugar or water). Anti-vaxxers often argue that our immune systems are strengthened by contracting infections, so surely they should welcome infectious doctors, vaccinated-pox parties and biological mutation.

Fun with the Cuttlefish

If you love poetry (or verse), atheism and scepticism then you no doubt already follow the Digital Cuttlefish (DC). If not, you definitely should.

In a recent post, DC has invited entries to a growing piece of verse about what the Devil would do.

DC opened with...

If I were the devil, the first thing I’d do
(I’d be subtle, and not too apparent)
Is create holy writings that all disagree
And announce that each one is inerrant.

...and there are follow-up verses from DC and other contributors.

I've added...


If I were the devil, the next thing I'd do
(along with the things I have stated)
is to make lots of people and tell them "be good",
then condemn them for flaws I'd created.

We'll see if it makes the grade.