Deepak Chopra visited Vancouver, BC…and CFI was prepared with flyers and volunteers handing them out to people going to the talk. It’s an excellent example of how to effectively and informatively deal with pseudoscientific nonsense. Oh, and they actually had Chopra come out and talk with them, although it sounds like he didn’t say much of substance. But then, he never does.

One thing I’d like to see, though, is that they make copies of their flyers available on the web. Chopra isn’t going to vanish, and having more material that other groups can use when engaging wacky quantum woo artists would be useful.

It almost makes one feel sorry for Andrew Wakefield.

Retraction: Enterocolitis in Children With Developmental Disorders

A J Wakefield, A Anthony, S H Murch, M Thomson, S M Montgomery, S Davies, J J O’Leary, M Berelowitz and J A Walker-Smith

Am J Gastroenterol 2000; 95:2285-2295

On 28 January 2010, the UK General Medical Council’s Fitness to Practice Panel raised concerns about a paper published in the Lancet by Dr Wakefield et al. (1). The main issues were that the patient sample collected was likely to be biased and that the statement in the paper, that the study had local ethics committee approval, was false. There was also the possibility of a serious conflict of interest in the interpretation of the data. The Lancet has now retracted this paper (1). This paper in the American Journal of Gastroenterology (AJG) (2) also includes the 12 patients in the original Lancet article and therefore we retract this AJG paper from the public record.

I said “almost”. He’s still a despicable fraud who has caused the deaths of children.

We’re always hearing about these amazing profilers who work to describe the culprits, sight unseen, in serial killer cases. They get highlighted in books and movies and television, and the media just slurps it up with gullible glee. I’ve always found them unbelievable. The noise they’re making is pure cold-reading, and there’s nothing different between them and psychic detectives — it’s an embarrassment that our law enforcement agencies still use them, along with lie detector tests and handwriting analysis.

So I was glad to see this critical article from Malcolm Gladwell, written several years ago. He makes the same argument, that these analyses are pure bunkum. Among many examples, here’s one about one of the first profilers, James Brussel, who was touted as incredibly insightful for making so many predictions about a serial bomber in New York in the 1940s.

James Brussel didn’t really see the Mad Bomber in that pile of pictures and photostats, then. That was an illusion. As the literary scholar Donald Foster pointed out in his 2000 book “Author Unknown,” Brussel cleaned up his predictions for his memoirs. He actually told the police to look for the bomber in White Plains, sending the N.Y.P.D.’s bomb unit on a wild goose chase in Westchester County, sifting through local records. Brussel also told the police to look for a man with a facial scar, which Metesky didn’t have. He told them to look for a man with a night job, and Metesky had been largely unemployed since leaving Con Edison in 1931. He told them to look for someone between forty and fifty, and Metesky was over fifty. He told them to look for someone who was an “expert in civil or military ordnance” and the closest Metesky came to that was a brief stint in a machine shop. And Brussel, despite what he wrote in his memoir, never said that the Bomber would be a Slav. He actually told the police to look for a man “born and educated in Germany,” a prediction so far off the mark that the Mad Bomber himself was moved to object. At the height of the police investigation, when the New York Journal American offered to print any communications from the Mad Bomber, Metesky wrote in huffily to say that “the nearest to my being ‘Teutonic’ is that my father boarded a liner in Hamburg for passage to this country–about sixty-five years ago.”

The true hero of the case wasn’t Brussel; it was a woman named Alice Kelly, who had been assigned to go through Con Edison’s personnel files. In January, 1957, she ran across an employee complaint from the early nineteen-thirties: a generator wiper at the Hell Gate plant had been knocked down by a backdraft of hot gases. The worker said that he was injured. The company said that he wasn’t. And in the flood of angry letters from the ex-employee Kelly spotted a threat–to “take justice in my own hands”–that had appeared in one of the Mad Bomber’s letters. The name on the file was George Metesky.

Brussel did not really understand the mind of the Mad Bomber. He seems to have understood only that, if you make a great number of predictions, the ones that were wrong will soon be forgotten, and the ones that turn out to be true will make you famous. The Hedunit is not a triumph of forensic analysis. It’s a party trick.

I also cannot abide Sherlock Holmes, in either book or movie form, because it is such hokum. I’m always growling to myself, “Wait, you cannot derive a simple linear chain of inferred causality from a single observation of a phenomenon with many different possible causes and variables! Holmes, you fraud!”, and then I end up throwing the book away or turning the television off. Even the latest film version with Robert Downey Jr., which was entertaining because they turned Holmes into a brawling thug, was infuriating whenever Holmes would get into a fight and calmly calculate exactly what was going to happen in the next 10 seconds. Yeah, right.

A pediatrics resident wrote an excellent op-ed on vaccination in the LA Times. LA has seen its first outbreak of measles in four years there, and it’s something to worry about.

A study published in the April issue of Pediatrics examined a 2008 measles outbreak in San Diego. The index case was a 7-year-old unvaccinated child who was exposed to the virus while abroad. This case resulted in 839 exposed persons, 11 actual cases (all in unvaccinated children) and the hospitalization of an infant too young to be vaccinated. In total, the outbreak cost the public more than $175,000, which would have covered the costs of measles vaccinations for almost 180,000 children.

You skip out on giving your kids a cheap, easy, routine shot, and this is what you can do: harm hundreds. Measles is also the kind of disease people can die of, too, so there’s an even greater risk than making a lot of people miserable.

But this next bit was the most compelling part of the story. How can smart people be so stupid?

And yet, many parents continue not to vaccinate their children. I see such children frequently. Last fall, when I entered an examination room, a 5-year-old patient loudly yelled “Get out!” Her mother apologized, then explained. “Sorry, she’s never gotten S-H-O-T-S before.”

Confused, I looked down at the chart to confirm that the patient was in for H1N1 and seasonal flu vaccines. Seeing that she was, I seized the opportunity to offer her catch-up vaccines as well, but her mother declined. She explained matter-of-factly that it was because the flu was “going around” whereas the other vaccine-preventable diseases, she said, were no longer a threat.

She went on to tell me that she was a lawyer who had grown up in a country where measles is still endemic. Since moving to the U.S., she had never known anyone to suffer from measles, but she did know several children who had autism. So, while she understood that vaccinations had not been definitively shown to cause autism, she felt that, here in America, the risk of autism was a bigger threat than that of vaccine-preventable diseases.

No longer a threat? That’s awfully short-sighted. This clever lawyer moved to this country from a place where the disease was endemic…does she think there is a super-duper barrier around America now so no more people and diseases can move here from her native country? And there is no risk of autism from vaccinations that has ever been demonstrated.

I suppose I could make a few jokes about selfish lawyers here, but since there are lawyers reading the blog, I’ll wait until they leave the room. Ask me later, kids. Or invent your own!

That’ll send a chill down Antipodean spines. They’ve got creationists just like us (please stop sending them here, we’re full up), and they’ve also got crazy anti-vaxers promoting dangerous public health practices in public libraries. Fortunately, they also have skeptics opposing the people who want to make babies vulnerable to disease — maybe we should put a positive, friendly spin on it and call the anti-vaxers pro infant mortality — and they’re busy gearing up with information to combat ignorance.

If you’re living near Perth, it might be a good idea to make some contacts, and maybe show up at the dead baby promotional event at the library in June to protest.

P.S. We’re full up on anti-vaxers, too. Australia sent us Ken Ham, I think it would be only fair to respond by sending Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy to the southern hemisphere.

There was an anti-vaccination rally yesterday in Chicago — boring and silly! What’s more interesting is that Women Thinking Free (a fabulous new organization) had a counter-demonstration. You can read an account or two or three of the event from the rational perspective; it sounds like the anti-vaxers are also anti-science. The rally and anti-rally also made the news, and that’s actually a good account, which plainly states that there is no evidence of a link between autism and vaccination, that Wakefield’s study was flawed, and that Wakefield has had his license to practice medicine revoked.

I’m troubled by one thing. The theme of the literature the smart people were handing out was “Hug me — I’m vaccinated”, and they’ve got a photo of Wakefield hugging one of the skeptics, which is safe, because they’ve had their shots. But has Wakefield? Has anybody asked him if he’s up to date on his vaccinations?

They might have infected him with skepticism, you know. Or he might have been swarming with kook cooties.

I’d mentioned before that the Royal Ontario Museum was sponsoring a talk by that pseudoscientific goober, Deepak Chopra — perhaps Ken Ham had been unavailable — and as you might guess, quite a few people are dumbfounded that a respected museum was bringing in a quack. You can help protest: Larry Moran has a letter to the Director of the ROM, and you can add a signature to it.

I’ve been to the ROM, and it’s excellent — there is no pandering to quacks there. I have to wonder who made this awful decision…and I wouldn’t be surprised if it weren’t some non-scientist in marketing.