Somewhere in a remote but picturesque location in southern Germany, there’s a special castle called Schloss Dagstuhl. Every week, the castle fills up with a smallish group of Exceptionally Privileged Computer Scientists, who can only go there Because They Have Been Invited. Every week hosts a different field; In my case this was the Scientific Visualization seminar, one of the oldest participating groups. Everything has been setup just so to guarantee a perfect computer sciencey week for all guests. Because I’ve already been boring too many people with this story in person, I thought it prudent to write it up. Let’s hope it’s not a first (and second!) rule of Fight Club situation, in which case posting frequency over here might drop quite drastically.
Schloss Dagstuhl, picture courtesy of Wikipedia.
To begin with, the meals are exquisite, three times a day, every day. As we all know, the path to a computer scientist’s heart is through buying them new gadgets, but feeding them well is a great backup plan. Another very nice touch is the fact that seating is deliberately randomised, meaning that your introvert self is forced to sit at the table with a different group of guests during each lunch and dinner, in turn meaning that even if you try otherwise, you will probably get to have a good conversation with every one of the fifty attendees.
In the case of our seminar, the working day consists of presentations in blocks of three or four, followed by a longer block of discussion on all the preceding presentations, panel style. Attendees were all asked not just to give a standard scientific presentation, but to discuss open problems and future challenges in their respective sub-fields. I (and many others, judging by the aggregated post-meeting feedback) really enjoyed this format. The presentations made one think, and the discussion blocks were long enough to really get into the details. You can check out abstracts and slides on the seminar website.
After a full day of quite intensive discussion, there were breakout sessions during which four subgroups started working on the various chapters of a new Springer book that should appear sometime early in next year. The book will deal with multi-field, uncertainty, biomedical and scalable visualization, and it has the makings of being a keeper.
The other extremely important magic bit about this castle is the abundance of real coffee machines (ones that grind coffee beans for every cup), snack corners and, uhm, beer fridges. You can’t really go anywhere, as you’re in the middle of nowhere, so after dinner the conversations tend to continue till late in the night, conversant stamina enhanced by said coffee and beer facilities. Evil science plans were made, good old-fashioned deep conversations were had and the early next morning consequences were flatly ignored. I haven’t laughed quite so much in a long time, but that part of the programme prefers, and has the right, to remain completely silent.
If you ever get the invitation, don’t hesitate for a second to accept: You shall return an exhausted but terribly happy computer nerd.
You must vaccinate
Image courtesy of dbtechno.com.
I was mistakenly under the impression that, at least in my social circles, the whole vaccination issue had been put completely to rest, but based on the number of serious questions that I’ve been asked recently, this unfortunately does not seem to be the case.
For those of you who don’t have time, I’ll cut to the chase immediately:
Yes, you simply must vaccinate your children. This is the best and safest choice, for both your child and your fellow humans.
No, there is no link between vaccination and autism. No, spreading out the (MMR) vaccinations is not safer, it is in fact more dangerous. Also, the “vaccine overload” hypothesis is flawed.
For those of you with a bit more time or those of you who are not willing to take me on my word, I’ll go into some more detail on each of the points mentioned above. Most of what I write here is based on articles in the Wikipedia. I’ve deliberately done this, because these articles are accessible and readable to everyone, and they do link to the original scientific articles that they are based on. Feel free to jump to any section. Also, each section ends with a short summary of its contents to make it easier for you to skip.
Recent history
This section is based on the Wikipedia article on the MMR vaccine controversy.
In 1998, Andre Wakefield and co-authors published a paper in the Lancet where, based on 12 case reports, they speculated on a possible link between the MMR vaccination and autism, and also speculated that it might be better to space out the vaccinations. Of course the press and media picked this up and went completely wild, causing a health scare in the UK. It is important to note that both of these claims were highly speculative.
It later turned out that Wakefield had received 55000 (fifty-five thousand) UK pounds from Legal Aid Board solicitors who were gathering evidence to use in a case against vaccine manufacturers, and that a number of parents of the children taking part in Wakefield’s study were directly involved in the law-suit. Wakefield did not mention any of this at the time of publication. Ten of his 12 co-authors have since completely retracted their interpretation of the paper.
In short, the author of the paper that started most of the modern vaccination-autism scare was completely corrupt, and his corruption directly affected this specific research.
He did manage to cause such a scare in the UK, that measles (one of the diseases that MMR vaccinates against) is for the first time in decades at almost epidemic levels. Since then, there have been cases of measles killing children, something which would most probably not have happened had the vaccination compliance not been at an all-time low. Isn’t that absolutely crazy when one considers that measles was all but eradicated?
In the years between 1998 and the present, there have been numerous extremely well-designed and large studies, none of which have been able to find any kind of link between vaccination and autism.
To summarise this section: The research that the vaccination scare is based on, was deeply flawed and based on corruption, not science.
Spreading out of vaccines
This section is based on the Wikipedia article on the general Vaccine Controversy.
In some cases, parents opt for spreading out the vaccinations, because they mistakenly think that this is safer than not doing so. The flawed idea that administering all these vaccines together could be dangerous is called the “vaccine overload hypothesis”. It is flawed for the reasons:
Importantly, if you spread out vaccines, you increase the time during which your child is susceptible to the diseases that are being vaccinated again, thus greatly increasing the health risk to your child and all other children it comes into contact with. You are a bad parent if you do this.
To summarise this section: Administering the vaccinations together does not damage your child’s immune system. Spreading out vaccines is dangerous for both your child and all children it comes into contact with.
Celebrities campaigning against vaccination
Recently, a number of celebrities, most prominent of which Jenny McCarthy and her partner Jim Carrey, supported by Oprah, have been campaigning against vaccination. You have to remember that these are actors and entertainers, with almost ZERO medical or scientific background or training. McCarthy dropped out of nursing school to become a Playboy Bunny: There’s nothing wrong with that, but you really cannot base important medical decisions, concerning the health and survival of your child (!!), on the opinions of an erstwhile nude model!
To summarise: Think carefully about the scientific and medical backgrounds of actors telling you how to care for the health and well-being of your child, even more so when it concerns life and death issues such as vaccination.
The logical conclusion
To the best of our scientific knowledge, vaccinations as they are administered today are safe and do not cause autism. In spite of this, research continues day and night to make sure of this observation.
On the other hand, if you don’t vaccinate, the risk of your child getting ill and dying is significantly higher. If a large enough number of you don’t vaccinate, we lose our herd immunity and then there is a very real risk that many more of our children will get ill and die due to your inaction. Do you seriously want to take this very real risk with your and my children’s lives?
Post scriptum
I hope that this has helped. If there are any issues that are not clear, or missing, or you are not convinced, please let me know so that we can discuss and so that I can improve this article.
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Posted in Commentary, education, life, meta, science
Tagged denialists, evidence-based, health, medicine, science, vaccination