NSW Extends Free Pertussis Vaccine for New Mothers

About a month ago, Phil Plait wrote about the Victoria, Australia, Ministry of Health's decision to end a program that provides pertussis vaccine boosters for free to carers of newborns in an effort to protect infants from what can be, for them, a deadly disease. The reason cited was that the program did not "get the clinical result required". This move by the state of Victoria led Toni McCaffery, whose infant daughter, Dana, was killed by pertussis, to create a petition to the Premiers and Health Ministers of Australia to ask the states to continue to provide free pertussis vaccines to adults caring for newborns to help cocoon these infants until they are old enough to be vaccinated.

Well, the state of New South Wales has listened, to a degree.

Mark "Castrate 'Em" Geier's License Suspended - Part 6

[Edited to add: Not sure how I missed this, but when checking out Dr. Geier's listing on the Florida Department of Health's site, it looks like his certification with the American Board of Medical Genetics has been revoked, as well.]

There's been another development in the case of Dr. Mark Geier, the physician who came up with the Lupron Protocol as a purported treatment for autism. Lupron, for those who don't know about it, is a drug that is used in prostate cancer treatment, fertility treatment, to treat precocious puberty and, off-label, to chemically castrate sex offenders. It shuts down production of sex hormones (testosterone in men, estrogen in women). The reason the Geiers use this drug is because they believe that testosterone and mercury bind together, making it more difficult for the body to eliminate the mercury in, for example, thimerosal-containing vaccines. This belief comes from a single study examining testosterone and mercury in hot benzene, which, for those who might be unaware, is a condition never found in the human body. Prometheus wrote about this back in 2006. Never mind that there is no quality evidence showing that in children with autism there is any of this testosterone-mercury binding going on, nor that using lupron (followed by chelation) has any benefit at all.

At any rate, Dr. Geier's erroneously diagnosing children with precocious puberty so he would be able to prescribe lupron, among other ethical and professional lapses, led to his license to practice medicine in Maryland being suspended. This, in turn, resulted in the licensing boards in a number of other states suspending his licenses, too. Which brings us to today.

The 10 Pro-vaccine Commandments According to Anti-vaccinationists

Ahhh. Taking a few days away from it all to visit with family and friends is always good. Even better is when you get to do all that and return to find a wee bit o' the hilarious sitting in your inbox. Liz Ditz brought to my attention a relatively new group on Facebook: Provax Quacks. This group is described thusly:

Pointing out the duplicity and idiocy of the vaccine enthusiasts since 2012! Content irrelevant to the pages [sic] theme will be removed. [Edited to add: It looks like the ones running the group removed that second sentence sometime June 13, 2012 (curse my lack of foresight to get a screen grab), but looking at the comments on some of their wall posts, they have clearly been deleting comments, as predicted.]

Right off the bat, they conveniently let you know that any fact-based comments that contradict their ideological line will be censored. That saves me a lot of time. I won't waste any effort trying to comment on this new echo chamber of anti-vaccine inanity. I will, however, share with my readers a rather hilarious wall post put up by this group. If you had any doubts that the members of this group have little to no understanding of science or logic, what you are about to see will make it all perfectly, readily clear. In fact, I probably don't even need to offer my own commentary, but I just can't resist.

Without further ado, then, I present Vaccinology 10 Commandments, as seen by anti-vaccinationists:

New Report from HHS on Vaccine Storage

I heard something on the news this morning that I figured would get the anti-vaccine crowd into a fervor of excitement. It is something that they could spin to make it seem like vaccines really are dangerous or that they really don't protect people. Images leapt to mind of writers and commenters alike over at Age of Autism crying out, "See! We're not dumb for refusing vaccines!" Barbara Loe Fisher at the National Vaccine Information Center floated before my eyes, declaiming that vaccines are not safe. I could almost hear Mike Adams or Gary Null snidely claiming that this report proves (proves, I tell you!) that vaccines are ineffective. And so, I figured I should probably take a closer look into it before the wacky misinterpretations and outright lies began to flow.

What brought all this to mind? As reported by ABC news, some doctors may not be storing vaccines properly. The story is based on a new report from the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Inspector General (OIG), titled Vaccines for Children Program: Vulnerabilities in Vaccine Management (the PDF of the full report can be found here). Briefly, the OIG found that providers of vaccines made available through the CDC's Vaccines for Children Program (VFC) (a program that provides free vaccines to kids whose families might otherwise be unable to afford to get their child immunized) were frequently storing vaccines in inappropriate conditions, potentially reducing their potency and efficacy.

There are a couple ways that I could see this report being spun by opponents of vaccination. Let's take a look...

Mostly Good News from Vermont

Back in March, I wrote about how Vermont was moving toward improved public health by putting forth a bill that, if passed,would eliminate philosophical exemptions from school and daycare immunization requirements, while still leaving religious and medical exemptions intact. After a considerable amount of going back and forth, in committee, out of committee, to the House, back to the Senate and so on, Senate bill S.199 was signed into law on May 16, 2012.

As with all things legal and political, there are positive aspects of the enacted law (PDF) as well as some negatives. The big negative, from my perspective, is that philosophical exemptions are still allowed in Vermont. But not all is doom and gloom. The various revisions the bill underwent added significantly to the school immunization laws, going beyond the simple issue of exemptions.

So, what all has changed?

Michigan Legislature Aims to Restrict Public Health

Now that Memorial Day has passed in the United States and I've had some time to get over last week's emotion-draining post, it seems like a good time to take a look at what lies ahead. What developments are in the works? Where is public health headed? We can expect the pertussis outbreaks in the U.S. to continue to spread, very likely including more pertussis deaths. We will likely see cases of measles imported from Europe. And we'll see public health officials work hard to prevent and contain outbreaks of disease.

Legislators, on the other hand, may need a bit of prodding.

In Michigan, it appears that the legislature is taking steps to make it harder for health care facilities to protect the health of their patients. A group of 11 republicans and 1 democrat have introduced legislation that aims to dictate to hospitals and other health facilities and agencies what they can and cannot do with regard to ensuring their staff are not a potential source of influenza infection.

In Memoriam - U.S. Pertussis Deaths Through May 2012

Catherina over at Just the Vax gave us all a reminder of the real impact of pertussis, or whooping cough. In that vein, this post is in tribute to those who have lost their lives to pertussis this year. My heart goes out to all of these families. Please go out and get your boosters and learn what to look for.

In Memoriam

Brady Alcaide
Age 2 months
Massachusetts

Name Unknown
Age 2 months
Arizona

Francesca Marie McNally
Age 3 months
Michigan

Ariel Renee Esther Salazar
Age 10 1/2 weeks
New Mexico

Kenadee Elizabeth Wilde
Age 9 weeks
Idaho

Name Unknown
Age 1 month
Texas

Name Unknown
Age 1 month
Wisconsin

It's Just a Cold

The other day I shared a little bit of insight into how my brain works at times. Subject associations lead from one thing to another, and before you know it, what began as a relatively mundane musing has taken on cosmic proportions. I certainly never thought that, waking up with the beginnings of a cold, I would end up writing about how a lack of gravity would affect medical care in space.

At any rate, the common cold has been bounding about my head (both as a topic and somewhat more literally). While I've been fortunate in that I've only really had to deal with a stuffy nose and only a minor cough, some of my coworkers have been less fortunate. Some manner of respiratory illness has been making the rounds, resulting in some of my workmates having been home for a day or two, both before I got my cold, and after. Talking to them, some actually brought up the subject of pertussis, or whooping cough. No one really knew much about it or what the symptoms were, but it's been in the news a bit lately, with a current epidemic in Washington state (1,484 cases reported as of May 12 [PDF], 2012, compared to 965 cases in all of 2011 and 608 for all of 2010), as well as smaller outbreaks in other states like Montana (142 cases), Idaho (31 cases, including 1 death), Iowa (150 cases), Wisconsin (~1,900 cases, including 1 death), Maine (55 cases [PDF]), Florida (112 cases [PDF]) and others.

Washington pertussis cases through May 12, 2012

I figured it might be a good idea, then, to pull some stuff together about the differences between a cold and whooping cough.

Cold Space

The other morning, I awoke with my nose deciding it didn't want to function properly and allow me to breathe through both nostrils. The harbinger of a cold, one nostril was stubbornly blocked with the various accumulations of the night. Lovely image, I know. Personally, I blame the exertion and physical stress (particularly the dunking in cold water and subsequent extreme chills) of the zombie run for this state of affairs. I mean, trudging through wet, muddy trails with hundreds of other people in relatively close proximity, dunking in icy water and waiting (soaked) for the better part of an hour in the breezy cool of a spring afternoon can't be all that good for you. Couple that with staying up late and waking early and voilà. A cold.

I actually have a point for relating this. You see, as I commuted to work and noticed my breathing passages start to open, I mused upon what a cold must be like in space. We take for granted that gravity helps our sinuses and nasal cavities drain. But in space, where there is no (or only a weak) gravitational field, would someone with a stuffy nose find absolutely no relief from natural drainage? How would the lack of gravity affect blowing one's nose? Would it be easier or harder?

As I pondered these questions, my mind began to drift toward bigger issues. I might be stepping on Phil Plait's area a bit, but I hope he won't mind. What about more serious medical care in space?

After the Zombie Apocalypse

This past weekend, I ran the Run for Your Lives zombie 5K obstacle course. The race served a couple purposes for me: 1) it was a good motivation to get back into running on a semi-regular basis and 2) it served as a good hook to raise money for vaccine research. Just to recap, I was raising money for the Vaccine & Immunotherapy Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. Specifically, they have two projects that caught my attention: creating an improved cholera vaccine and developing a laser-based vaccine adjuvant. My goal was to raise $3,000, and toward that end, I issued a challenge that if I hit $2,000 by race day, I'd double my personal donation. I'll come back to this later.

First, the race.