Researchers Discover Antibody That Fights Multiple Flu Strains

In a major new discovery that could help prevent or treat influenza, researchers have identified an antibody that blocks the flu virus from entering its hosts’ cells and that can be used to cure already infected animals. The findings were reported in the most recent edition of the journal Nature.

Before a virus can make us sick, it must first adsorb (bind) to the surface of our cells and then get its DNA or RNA into our cells. Influenza A viruses use a protein on their surface called Hemagglutinin to attach to their hosts’ cells. Hemagglutinin is abbreviated “H” and the particular variety of Hemagglutinin forms part of the strain’s name (e.g., H1N1 or H5N1).  The “N” comes from an enzyme the virus produces called neuraminidase, which it uses to lyse (burst) its hosts’ cells in order to release newly formed virus particles.

The antibody discovered by lead author Ian Wilson (Scripps Research Institute) and colleagues at Scripps and Sea Lane Biotechnologies, binds to hemagglutinin thus preventing infection. This discovery may help in the development of more effective vaccines against the flu virus, which kills an average of 35,000 people per year in the U.S. alone. It could also help avert a deadly pandemic of avian influenza.

The research began by creating a library of antibodies from thousands of flu survivors from around the world by mining their bone marrow, which acts like a repository for all the antibodies they have ever made, the Bay Citizen reports. From this library, they were able to narrow their search to just the ones able to bind to influenza A. From this subset, they came upon the C05 antibody which protected cells growing in a Petri dish from influenza A infection. They also tried the experiment in vivo and found that C05 prevented mice from being infected. Furthermore, they discovered that mice already infected with a deadly strain of influenza were 100% cured when exposed to C05.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of this research is that C05 binds to hemagglutinin, which is highly conserved genetically and used by many different strains to infect their hosts. Consequently, C05 is effective against several different varieties of influenza, including H1, H2, H3 and H9 strains. If C05 proves effective in preventing or treating human infections, this could be a major breakthrough, as we currently have little or no natural immunity to H9 strains and there is at least one highly pathogenic avian influenza H9 strain that has already wreaked havoc on some poultry flocks. This deadly strain could acquire person to person transmissibility through gene exchange with other flu viruses, as several H1 and H3 strains have already done, thus becoming the next deadly pandemic strain.

Top 10 Censored Education Stories of the Decade (Again)

In honor of the one-year anniversary of Modern School, I am reposting some of my favorite articles from the past year. The following was also one of your favorites, as it has remained in the “Popular Posts” sidebar since soon after it was published. Nevertheless, I thought the article was important enough to put it up again for the benefit of those who may have missed it the first time around.

The Top 10 Censored Education Stories of the Decade

Rachel Norton posted the following list of top ed news stories of the decade. While I would agree that these were important education stories, they are all well known to most of the public. Yet each also has a hidden story behind it that has been ignored by the media. I’ve included Norton’s original list (in black). After each of her synopses I’ve added the hidden story behind it (in red).

10.  The rise of autism: In 2001, the incidence of autism was thought to be one case for every 160 people, which even then was much higher than in previous decades. Today, the accepted incidence is more like one case for every 100 people. Though the increased incidence is as much a public health issue as an educational one, I’ve included the phenomenon on this list because the increase in the number of children diagnosed with autism has had a profound impact on schools. From an educational perspective, autism is a perfect storm–children with autism have expensive needs, but respond well to intervention. No one really knows how much treatment is appropriate according to the framework set by special education laws.

While it is certainly shocking and significant to parents and educators that autism rates are going up, what has been virtually ignored by the media are the reasons for the increase. Autism rates increase dramatically among older parents. A ten-year increase in maternal age, for example, increases the risk of autism by 38%. Unlike Down syndrome, both older fathers and older mothers have a higher risk. Therefore, one likely reason for the increase in autism is the fact that many parents are waiting longer before having kids. 

Increasing rates of Autism are also due in part to how it is identified and diagnosed. Autism can now be detected and diagnosed much more accurately and sometimes earlier than in the past. Further, the definition of Autism Spectrum Disorder, which includes Asperger’s Syndrome, is broader and includes more patients than earlier definitions. 

Lastly, perhaps an equally important autism story this decade is the overwhelming and compelling evidence that there is NO link between vaccines and autism. Children’s vaccines are no longer allowed to contain any mercury and even those vaccines that still do contain mercury as a preservative (e.g., influenza vaccines) contain too little to cause a neurological effect. Further, while the number of autism diagnoses was going up over the past ten years, the amount of mercury in vaccines was declining. What has fueled the anti-vaccine hysteria is the fact that autism typically manifests in children between the ages of one and two years, precisely when they are getting many of their vaccines. Thus, coincidentally, many autism diagnoses happen right after a child has been vaccinated, creating the impression of cause and effect.

9.  Still waiting for technology to revolutionize education: At the beginning of the decade, most people would have predicted that schools would be using computers and technology in ways that enhanced student achievement and learning. Today, at the end of a decade that has seen an enormous expansion in the use of technology in everyday life, schools are still using computers in much the same way that they were at the start of the decade. More classrooms have computers; more schools have computer labs; but curriculum development has not kept pace with the interconnected, social nature of today’s Internet. Even as students text, access YouTube and update Facebook on their mobile phones, their classroom computers block access to most of those same services.  Teaching students to be smart consumers of sometimes unreliable Internet data and careful stewards of their personal information is of paramount importance for the next decade, but it’s not clear that schools are up to the task.

The hidden story here is that schools are spending bucket loads of their dwindling budgets on computers, software and other technology, while they fire teachers, librarians, nurses, custodians and secretaries and eliminate staff development days, and see a continuing achievement gap. Technology, like teacher quality, privatization, tenure and unions, is just another red herring that allows us to overlook the overwhelming cause of low student achievement: poverty. Bring families out of poverty and we’ll see dramatic improvements in student achievement, with or without fancy technology.

However, if we do want to see technology used in creative and clever ways to enhance learning, then teachers need to be provided more professional development opportunities to learn the technology, play with it and create innovative uses for it. This, sadly, is not happening, nor is it likely to happen with declining education budgets. One example of a creative use of technology is a series of experiments I designed for high school students to study the effects of drugs on nematodes using digital microscopy and software from the NIH to track their movements. It is a real world scientific experiment that not only teaches about the nervous system and cells, but has students collecting and analyzing their own original data. However, to develop this curriculum I spent three summers collaborating with scientists at UCSF and had to obtain all my own funding, without any support from my school, district or the state. 

8. Curriculum wars continue:  A bunch of Intelligent Design believers got elected to the Kansas State Board of Education, and suddenly we’re all debating Darwin again. Then Texas–one of the biggest textbook markets in the country, whose size gives it the power to shape curriculum choices far beyond its borders–decides that American History as traditionally taught is biased. So schoolchildren across the country will now learn, among other things, “about the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”  If anything, these skirmishes should remind us all to pay attention to the compositions of our state Boards of Education–they are powerful enough to create quite a kerfuffle if captured by extremists of any stripe.

The truth is that some of us never stopped debating Darwin. I have taught biology for fourteen years and I have had students challenge me on it every single year, even in liberal San Francisco. The fact is that only 16% of Americans believe in secular evolution, (the idea that humans evolved from other life forms without any divine intervention). It should be no surprise that some of the overwhelming majority of doubters would fight for their version of reality to be portrayed in school textbooks. Also, many of the backers of Intelligent Design, and other creationist schemes, have substantial financial backing to pay for political campaigns (including school boards) and advertisements. The Discovery Institute, for example, has an annual budget of $5 million, most of which is used to promote Intelligent Design schemes.

Like the adage that history is written by the victors, the textbook industry is controlled by the biggest, most powerful publishing houses, each of which has a stake in perpetuating the American Dream mythology and the conflation of capitalism and democracy. Therefore, textbooks, especially history books, will always downplay, manipulate and censor the history of unions and working people, extol the virtues of capitalism, and glorify the histories of the rich and powerful, regardless of who is on the school boards. 

7.  After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans rebuilds its schools from scratch:  Prior to Katrina, New Orleans’ schools were considered to be among the worst in the nation–64 percent were deemed academically unacceptable by the state of Louisana, and the graduation rate was about 50 percent. The devastation and displacement of thousands of students in the wake of the disaster created an opportunity for reformers and policymakers, who quickly replaced schools that had been destroyed with a new network of charter schools. The district was rechristened the “Recovery School District,” and dollars flowed in, both from the Federal government and private sources. Recent college graduates, eager to make a difference, also came in droves to teach in the “new” New Orleans public schools.  Results? Initially, very promising–test scores posted by New Orleans have risen dramatically in the five years since the storm. A decade from now, will New Orleans be one of the nation’s highest-achieving school systems?  That kind of sustained improvement will depend on sustained effort and sustained investment. 

Arne Duncan said that Katrina was the best thing that could have happened to the New Orleans schools. What he meant was that disasters are fantastic ways to rally popular support for otherwise unpopular ideas, in this case, a massive scheme to convert the entire district to charter schools and destroy the unions. 71% of New Orleans children are now attending charter schools, the highest rate in the nation. All employees, including teachers and custodians, were fired and forced to reapply, and all union contracts were canceled. Many of the unionized teachers were replaced by Teach For America interns.

It would be tempting to attribute New Orleans’ improved test scores to these charter schools, but it would be inaccurate. First, large numbers of New Orleans residents still have not returned. Many of these were low income from  the Lower Ninth Ward, where only 3,600 residents have returned (out of the 19,000 who lived there prior to Katrina). Overall, New Orleans has become much more affluent. For example,  there are 66% fewer poor African American women living in New Orleans today than a decade ago. Rents have gone up by 39%. And, as we all know, it’s the class, not the school, that matters most in terms of academic achievement

6. Geoffrey Canada and his Harlem Children’s Zone inspire reform movement: Adopting the motto “whatever it takes,” the charismatic and energetic Canada set out to fight poverty and low academic achievement in a 97-square-block zone in Harlem. Private donations and accolades poured in, and Mr. Canada’s ambitious (and breathtakingly expensive) project was chronicled in a well-reviewed book (“Whatever It Takes,” written by journalist Paul Tough). The Zone’s two charter schools initially showed positive results, but more recent studies have illustrated just how hard it is to break the interconnected cycles of poverty and low achievement.  

First, it should be emphasized that two-thirds of Canada’s funding came from private donations, making his project a virtual private school and unsustainable or reproducible on a large scale. Second, despite his emphasis on hard work, Canada attributes his own academic success (despite growing up poor) to his avid reading. Ample studies show a strong correlation between reading, especially in early childhood, and later academic success. Yet low income families tend to read less to their young children and expose them to fewer new vocabulary words than middle class and wealthy families. This creates an achievement gap before kids have even started kindergarten that tends to increase as children get older, a problem that cannot be surmounted simply through hard work, accountability, or testing.

Canada, to his credit, acknowledges the strong impact that poverty has on academic achievement, and has sought to mitigate these effects with health care, adult classes for expecting parents, after school programs and other social supports. What he fails to realize or address (nor can he) is that the effects of poverty cannot be reversed through superficial means that occur only part-time (e.g., at school). The students and their families have spent much or all of their lives in poverty. Students continue to be poor when they go home. They start school with a disadvantage in terms of literacy and school readiness. Many lower income students have long histories academic failure and come to school with low self-efficacy. Poor kids are more likely to be born premature, with low birth weights, and to suffer malnutrition, lead poisoning or iron deficiency anemia, each of which can impair cognitive development or lead to learning disabilities. All of the best teaching and support services combined cannot overcome all of these problems for all low income students.

5. Landmark desegregation cases reshape student assignment policies:  In 2007, the Supreme Court decided two major school busing cases (Meredith vs. Jefferson County Board of Education and People Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District No.1 et. al), striking down any school assignment plan using race as a tie-breaker. The 5-4 decision said student assignment policies could be “race-conscious” but could not take an individual student’s race into account. Many school desegregation advocates fear that the Court’s decision will intensify rapidly resegregating schools and worsen educational inequities between low- and high-income communities.

The hidden stories here are that charter schools are speeding up the re-segregation process, despite these court rulings and that class matters even more than race. The argument for desegregation in Brown vs Board of Education was that separate was inherently unequal; therefore, stop segregating. However, even when schools were desegregated by race, they were still heavily segregated by class, with higher income schools having higher graduation rates and sending more kids to four year universities. Wealthier parents tend to live in wealthier neighborhoods, thus concentrating their wealth in a few schools. When their kids aren’t automatically assigned to the desired school, they are more likely than lower income parents to have the time, connections and understanding of the system to fight for their kids’ placement in their desired schools. When they can’t get into the desired public schools (or when there are no desired public schools) they have the wealth to send their kids to elite private schools.

4. Charter movement reaches a peak:   Though the first charter schools opened in the early 1990s, the charter school movement matured in the last decade, with the number of charter schools doubling since 2000 (there are now about 5,000 charter schools open nationwide). Initially, charters were seen as laboratories for promising practices, but they have since been hailed by some reformers as high-quality alternatives to traditional public schools (in New Orleans, discussed in #7 above, two-thirds of the Recovery School District’s schools have been reopened as charters). Others, notably education scholar Diane Ravitch, who wrote the 2010 book ”The Death and Life of the American School System,” the charter debate is really a distraction from a serious conversation about how to fix our educational system, which is and will continue to be dominated by traditional public schools.  Finally, early claims about the stellar academic progress of students in charter schools (as compared to their counterparts in traditional schools), may have been overblown. Several studies released in 2009 and 2010 found that charters, on average, perform no better than traditional public schools.

There are several hidden stories here. First, the charter movement, which initially found its support among Christian fundamentalists who wanted “family values” schools, has become a multi-billion dollar industry dominated by large private education corporations, like Green Dot, Wall Street investors and billionaire cheerleaders like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton Foundation. It should be emphasized that this is the primary impetus for the proliferation of charter schools and all the bogus claims about their potential. Over the past decade, the number of for-profit Education Management Organizations (EMOs) running charter schools has gone up seven-fold. Non-profit charter schools often subcontract out management of their schools to for-profit EMOs.

A second underreported story is that not only do charter schools perform no better than traditional public schools, and often much worse, but they also tend to be far more segregated and have a tendency to push out students who they think may lower their test scores, like special education students. For example, nearly 80% of Latino and 70% of black charter school students are in schools that are over 90% minority, nearly double the rate in traditional public schools. In 2007, public school enrollment was 47% white, 22% black, 21% Hispanic and 3% Asian. Private, religious school enrollment was 73% white, 9% black, 12% Hispanic, 3% Asian, while private, secular school enrollment was: 69% white, 11% black, 9% Hispanic, and 6% Asian. Poor students make up 40% of public schools, but only 17% of private religious and 10% of private secular schools.

3. Mayoral control is tempting, but not a magic bullet:  The trend toward big-city mayors assuming control of their city’s school system actually began in the 1990s, when  mayors in Boston and then Chicago took over their city’s schools. New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg took over his city’s schools in 2002, followed a few years later by Adrian Fenty in Washington, D.C. In 2006, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was prevented by a judge’s ruling from assuming more power over the Los Angeles Unified School District. Assuming control of failing school districts is tempting for Mayors, who think that controlling school board and Superintendent appointments is a great way to ensure accountability and stability in school leadership. But does mayoral control actually improve schools? Researchers say there is no compelling evidence of a connection between rising achievement and mayoral control.

The hidden story here is that mayoral control is simply a way to eliminate oversight, accountability and democracy. It takes away the power of parents, teachers and community members and focuses it into the hands of a benign (or not so benign) dictator who, more likely than not, uses that power to hand over public schools to private ed profiteers and charter schools. It allows billionaire mayors like New York’s Bloomberg to install inexperienced rich cronies as schools chief (e.g., Cathie Black, Joel Klein) or Daley to install the equally inexperienced and wealthy Duncan in Chicago. 

2. Race to the Top: With the creation of the $4.3 billion Race to the Top competition, President Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan dramatically increased the Federal role in education. Is that a good thing? The four options for states to use to turn around failing schools are not supported by any particular research, and the huge jackpot being dangled by the U.S. Department of Education won’t necessarily go where it’s needed the most — instead, it will go to the states that best parrot Washington’s new party line.

The hidden story here is that Race to the Top (RTTT) is just another way to transfer taxpayer dollars into the hands of corporate education profiteers. 

In California, for example, the state had to adopt the national content standards known as Common Core Standards, in order to be in the running for RTTT funds. This will cost $1.6 billion in new textbooks (a windfall to the ed publishing industry), yet the RTTT grant for California (had they succeeded) was only worth $700 million. RTTT also requires states to ease restrictions and quotas on new charter schools, which makes it easier for private, for-profit charter schools and EMOs to gain access to public education funds.

1. No Child Left Behind: I don’t think you can underestimate the impact this law had on schools over the past decade. NCLB was one of President George W. Bush’s signature policy achievements, but it was also backed by powerful Democrats in Congress, including the late Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Rep. George Miller of California. The law drastically expanded the use of standardized tests and set up the unachievable goal of making all students proficient by 2014. Schools that failed to meet growth targets (Adequate Yearly Progress or AYP) for all students and specific subgroups (like members of minority groups and students with disabilities) were subject to sanctions, which became more severe each passing year. The one good thing the law accomplished was to focus attention on the achievement gap, and put schools on notice that they should pay attention to the achievement of all students. But the law’s sanctions and targets were unnecessarily punitive and unrealistic, and led to a narrower focus on basic skills rather than critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity.

NCLB (re-christened as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, its original name) has been up for reauthorization since last year, but little progress has been made (the Obama Administration says reauthorization will be a top priority for 2011).  Until that reauthorization happens, all of NCLB technically remains in effect, though it’s unclear whether its most toxic provisions will actually be enforced.

There are two big under-reported stories here. First, NCLB was designed so that its goals could never be attained. Virtually every school in California is expected to be failing by 2014, the year all students are supposed to be proficient under NCLB. The reason is that if any subgroup of students (e.g., special education, immigrant, ESL, low income, etc.) at a school fails to improve sufficiently, the entire school is deemed a failure under NCLB. 

The second story is that NCLB, like RTTT, is big business and has the potential to become even bigger, especially if schools continue to fail. The tests bring in big bucks for the test publishers, while the pressure for schools to improve increases spending on new curricula, professional development and restructuring plans. Many of the curriculum suppliers had close ties with President Bush and some even helped to write NCLB. Barnett Alexander “Sandy” Kress, for example, was a lobbyist for McGraw-Hill and a key architect of NCLB. Harold McGraw, Jr., of McGraw-Hill, sat on the board of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy, while his son, Harold McGraw III, was a member of the George W. Bush transition team. Kress also represented Ignite! Learning, a company headed by Neil Bush, and K12 Inc., owned by Bill Bennett, Reagan’s Education Secretary. 

While there are certainly huge profits to be made by selling tests, textbooks and curriculum, there may be even greater potential profits ahead for charter school companies and EMOs. After four years of failure, schools must replace all their teachers, implement new curricula, appoint outside experts, or convert to a charter school. With states like California expecting nearly 100% failure by 2014, this could open up a backdoor route for the complete privatization of the k12 education system.

Hoax Alert: Autism and Vaccine Link Based on Fraud

In honor of the 1-year anniversary of Modern School, I am reposting some of my favorite articles from the previous year. This one follows a common theme in Modern School: debunking popular myths and misconceptions, particularly around health and science. (I also really liked the old school public health posters from Wikipedia)

 

Anti-Vaxxers—You’ve Been Duped!

From Wiki Common

The decade long effort to link vaccinations with autism was based on fraudulent research by British physician, Andrew Wakefield, who has since been completely discredited and banned from practicing medicine. His research, first published in The Lancet, in 1998, connected the MMR vaccine to autism and stomach ailments, setting off a worldwide hysteria that led to a dramatic drop in immunization rates in the U.S. and U.K., and a rise in Measles and other preventable diseases, including some deaths. Numerous studies followed that proved that there was no link between vaccines and autism. (See the reports from the CDC and the National Institute of Medicine).

It is shocking that a world-wide panic could be triggered by a single research paper, and even more so when one considers the serious flaws in this paper, such as the fact that it was based on the statistically insignificant sample size of 12 patients or that its findings have never been replicated. However, this was not just a case of negligent or sloppy research, but a deliberate hoax, perpetrated with the collaboration of anti-vaccination activists for the purpose of financial gain.  Wakefield, himself, was paid more than 400,000 pounds (about $750,000) by lawyers to help them win their lawsuit against Aventis Pasteur, SmithKlineBeecham, and Merck, on behalf of parents of autistic children. His work for the lawyers began two years before his Lancet publication, thus creating a significant conflict of interest that biased his research.

From Wiki Commons

Of the 12 children Wakefield claimed had contracted regressive autism from vaccines, only 1 actually had this severe form of autism and 3 didn’t have any form of autism whatsoever. Many of the children had autism symptoms prior to being vaccinated. However, when the children’s symptoms didn’t fit his hypothesis, he simply changed the data.  Furthermore, the children did not come from a random sample, as he had claimed. Most of his subjects were the children of litigants seeking compensation from vaccine companies.

Committing Science For Fun and Profit

Wakefield was not just making a lot of money working for lawyers. He also had developed his own alternative measles vaccine which he claimed was safer than the MMR vaccine. However, in order to make any money from his vaccine, he needed to discredit the MMR vaccine, thus providing another conflict of interest and incentive to alter his data.

Why Were So Many Suckered?

In the Wake of Wakefield: Risk-perception and Vaccines, David Ropeik points out several interesting tendencies in how humans perceive risks which may contribute to parents’ willingness to believe the vaccine-autism link or to decide not to have their children vaccinated.

From Wiki Commons Human-made risks seem scarier than natural ones (vaccines are human-made)   Risks with small benefits seem like bad risks to take (vaccine protect us from diseases that are relatively rare, so the benefits of vaccination seem minimal) Risks imposed on us feel more threatening than those we choose voluntarily There is increased fear when we don’t trust those in charge (as in the medical industry, and as a result of the numerous pharmaceutical recalls—Vioxx, DES, thalidomide, Phen-Fen, etc) Risks to kids evoke much more fear than similar risks to adults.

The Pot Calling the Kettle Dumb—Bachmann, Paul Try to Out-Stupid Perry

As reported earlier this week on Modern School, right wing Christian fundamentalist Rick Perry, supported rampant teen sex in the state of Texas by mandating Guardsil (HPV) vaccinations for teen girls, in opposition to the rhetoric and philosophy of his ilk. Not surprisingly, it turns out that nearly $30,000 was donated to his gubernatorial campaign by drug giant Merck, manufacturer of Guardasil.

Regardless of his motivations, the policy would certainly save lives. Guardasil protects against human papillomavirus, which can cause cervical cancer, a disease that currently has a fatality rate higher than 30% (see Discover Magazine Blogs “Bad Astronomy”).

Despite the benefits in terms of public health, Perry’s GOP presidential nemesis Michele Bachmann used the Guardasil flap as an opportunity to rip him a new orifice to stick his head into (and in the process, wedged her head more deeply into her own orifice). During the recent GOP debate she said that Gardasil "can have very dangerous side effects." She also said that a woman came up to her claiming that her daughter became mentally retarded because of a Guardasil vaccination.

Such high profile criticism of a vaccine will certainly provide strong inspiration to the anti-vax movement, which thrives on pseudoscience, superstition, and unsupported claims. The problem is that there is no evidence whatsoever that the vaccine can cause mental retardation, while other side effects and dangers are relatively minor (see Michele Bachmann needles Perry on vaccinations from Discover Magazine blogs).

Not only has there never been a single confirmed case of Guardasil-induced mental retardation, but a bioethicist has offered Bachmann $10,000 if she can provide some evidence for her claim.

What is most appalling and dangerous is that such a claim could be made by a presidential candidate and left unchallenged by the media. Bachmann’s source was an unnamed woman who may or may not exist, while there was no vetting or confirmation by any doctors or scientists. As far as anyone knows, the claim could have been fabricated by Bachmann or her handlers. However, even if the woman does exist and did make the claim, that does not make it true and Bachmann should not have publicized the claim until she had solid evidence from medical or scientific professionals. By doing so, she fanned the flames of anti-vaccination hysteria and the general anti-science tendency that has been growing in this country.

The anti-vaccination movement is based almost entirely on fear, while fear itself depends more on the perception of a threat than the actuality of a threat. It is like crying “fire” in a crowded theater: people will likely react first to the cry, and not stop and consider whether there is any truth to the claim.

When the government said Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks or that he had weapons of mass destruction, this was sufficient to terrify the American public and convince them to support an unprovoked war and the curtailing of their rights and freedoms at home, despite the fact that neither claim was true and the evidence against both claims was readily available to those willing to look a little more deeply.

When Andrew Wakeman claimed he had evidence that vaccines caused autism, parents were quick to believe him and to deny vaccinations to their children, placing their own children and everyone else at increased risk for measles, pertussis, and other serious and preventable diseases. Yet when Wakeman was completely discredited, his paper retracted, and his license to practice medicine revoked for fraud and misconduct related to his anti-vaccination work, the damage had already been done. Despite the fact that it has been repeatedly demonstrated that vaccines do not cause autism and that there have been no documented and verified cases of vaccines causing autism, the seeds of fear had been so deeply planted that large numbers of people are still convinced that vaccines do in fact cause autism.

GOP contender Ron Paul has also jumped into the fracas. A political action committee supporting his candidacy produced a video calling Gardasil "a STD vaccine," a clever manipulation that implies that the drug allows wild, disease-free sexual activity. This, of course, is exactly the kind of anti-sex, anti-health and anti-teen spin that religious conservatives have been putting on the drug all along.

In actuality, Guardasil is a drug that protects against one deadly but preventable disease. It does not protect against any other STDS or against pregnancy, so it is not even close to a free-ticket to free love. Vaccinating teenagers against this disease does not promote or encourage unprotected or premarital sex any more than sex education programs or access to condoms do. There are still plenty of reasons for children to avoid or delay sexual activity and there are plenty of children will continue to have unprotected sexual encounters despite access to condoms, birth control and Guardasil.

What this debate is really about is America’s Puritanical attitudes toward sex and its hypocritical attitudes toward teenagers (plus some political grandstanding). In reality, teenage pregnancy and STD rates have been steadily declining for the past decade, while STD and unplanned pregnancy rates for their parents’ and grandparents’ generations have been climbing.

California’s Whooping Cough Epidemic (And New School Vaccination Requirement)

There have already been 733 reported cases of whooping cough (Pertussis) in California this year, with 78 cases just in Contra Costa County, according to the Bay Citizen. In 2010, the county had 205 cases for the entire year, while there were over 8,000 cases throughout California, the most since 1947. Last year, 10 infants died of the disease in California.

Pertussis is a serious respiratory infection that is treatable with antibiotics and preventable with vaccines. While it can be deadly for babies, it can still cause healthy older children and adults to miss weeks of school or work and even require hospitalization. There has been an upsurge of infections in California among some unvaccinated immigrants and especially among unvaccinated middle class native born children whose parents ostensibly have bought into the anti-vaccine hysteria.

A new state law now requires students in grades 7 through 12 to show proof of vaccination for Pertussis before they go to school, including a recent booster. (The dtap vaccine given to toddlers does not give life-long protection against whooping cough, as do the vaccines for mumps and measles). State Superintendent Tom Torlakson recently produced a video message to inform parents of the new law and the dangers of Pertussis.

HPV Uncut: Get Vaccinated and Wear a Coat

As you probably know by now if you read my blog with any consistency, I was a professional scientist first, before becoming a science teacher, and that I like to stay up to date on the latest scientific news and discoveries, not only for professional growth and development, but also for my own amusement and. And, like my students, I am particularly drawn to science that is creepy, disgusting, prurient and weird. So it should be no surprise that the following article by Michelle Clement (Scientific American online blogs) caught my attention: What's the deal with male circumcision and female cervical cancer?

Circumcision Tools at the Jewish Museum, NY (Image by istolethetv)

As one would hope, the article was written with a great deal of humor: “Recently, while I was getting drinks at a pub with about a dozen or so other biologists, I was involved in a very animated discussion about circumcision -- because that's what biologists argue about when they're drinking, apparently. ‘They do it to increase stamina. It desensitizes the penis,’ said a microbiologist. (There's some evidence to the contrary on the bit about stamina, actually.)”

This reminded me of the two things I miss most about being a scientist (in contrast to being a science teacher): having the time and energy to go pubs in the first place and having the time, energy, interest and knowledge to casually talk science with peers. The one or two times I have found myself in a pub with colleagues, the conversation was dominated by complaining about work, which is not surprising since our spouses and partners are sick of hearing about it, while the public in general thinks we have it way too easy. When we do discuss science at work, it is almost always in the context of how to best teach it and never just a casual discussion of the merits of a particular new study or discovery. Fortunately for me my wife is a scientist. So when she gets tired of hearing me complain about my job (and vice versa) we can geek out together and talk about circumcision, autism, anti-vaccine hysteria, coprophagia and other important topics.

Let us return to the merits of male circumcision. Clement, in a fit of drunken lucidity, decided it was best to not rely on the unsubstantiated claims of her male peers, and decided to research the subject more thoroughly. She reviewed a 2002 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that found that circumcision correlated with a decreased risk of penile HPV infection. Similar results were found by a 2009 study in African men. HPV, of course, can cause cervical cancer. The curious thing is that there was no significant correlation between circumcision and cervical cancer except if the uncircumcised partners were also likely to engage in risky sexual behavior.

This research tells us several important things. First, parents should relax and not immediately go have junior’s dingus snipped just to protect his future sexual partners. Rather, it would be safer, cheaper and less cruel to simply encourage safer sexual activity and get him vaccinated against HPV. It also reminds us that correlation is not the same as causation. HPV can cause cervical cancer, whereas circumcision correlates with a decreased risk of HPV. However, increasing the risk of HPV is not the same as causing HPV. In other words, an uncircumcised man may have an increased risk of HPV, especially if he engages in risky sexual behavior, but that doesn’t mean he has or will have HPV.

That being said, Clement also found a more recent paper published this year in The Lancet which looked at African men and their partners. This research found that after controlling for lifestyle variables, monogamous women partnered with circumcised men had significantly lower rates of HPV infection. The authors of this study concluded that circumcision should not be ruled out as a method of reducing HPV infection. However, because they only looked at monogamous women, these results cannot be extrapolated to women with multiple sexual partners. Also, if the men were non-monogamous, they would have a higher risk of contracting HPV regardless of the status of their foreskins. Lastly, this study showed an increase risk in HPV transmission, not cervical cancer.

Even if circumcision does reduce the risk of contracting and spreading HPV, it is certainly not as effective as condoms and vaccines, and therefore should only be considered as a supplement to the promotion of safer sex practices (and not a solution on its own) and only in populations where vaccines and condoms are routinely rejected. Considering that there is now an effective HPV vaccine, (and that there are so many other STDs that can be reduced through safer sex practices) it seems absurd to even consider circumcision as a prophylactic.

Of course, all this talk about circumcision reminds me of the old one about the moyel who, after a long and productive career of circumcising young Jewish boys, had acquired quite a collection of old foreskins. So he took his collection to the village leather worker and asked if he could make him something nice.

"Sure," said the leather worker. "Come back in a week."

So a week later the moyel returns and the leather worker hands him a wallet. Needless to say, the moyel is crestfallen. "This is it, this tiny little wallet? After 40 years of toil and saving, and all I get is this little thing?"

"Ah, but if you rub it," said the leather worker, "it will become a suitcase."

Autism Linked to College-Educated Parents

A recent posting by Josh Clark (Discovery News), NEWS: Autism Clusters Tied to College-Educated Parents, describes a recent epidemiological study by the University of California, Davis, that found clusters of autism in regions of Southern California with high concentrations of highly educated parents.

The study by Dr. Karla Van Meter, published in the journal Autism Research, examined the birth records for 2.4 million California births between 1996 and 2000, 10,000 of whom were later diagnosed with autism. Van Meter and colleagues found a difference in the rate of autism in areas of highly educated parents to be almost double that of nearby areas with lower levels of parental education. They also found that the prevalence of autism increased with the amount of education.

There is still considerable debate about the causes of autism. While, there is no logical mechanism for the education of parents to directly cause the disorder, other studies have shown a correlation between the age of parents and the incidence of autism. Highly educated parents tend to delay child rearing, partially in order to finish school and partly to give themselves time to establish themselves in the competitive and demanding careers for which they are training. Therefore, one possible explanation for Van Meter’s observations is that high degrees of education correlate with delayed child rearing and that it is actually the advanced age of the parents that is the causative factor.

Ironically, college-educated middle class California families are among those most likely to skip vaccinations out of the irrational (and refuted) fear that vaccines cause autism.