Unscientific Anti-Vaccine Hysteria Could Cause A Measles Epidemic

Herd immunity arises when enough of the population has been vaccinated against a disease that individual cases cannot spread to enough people to cause an epidemic. We almost got there with measles near the end of the 20th century. Then Andrew Wakefield published a now-discredited study and the myth began that the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism.

from The Guardian:

The rate of MMR vaccination fell from 91% in 1997 – approaching the “herd immunity” levels that would virtually wipe out the disease – to 80% in 2003. They have recovered only slightly since then. The reason, almost certainly, is that parents were frightened by a possible MMR “link” to autism. This fear carried little credibility among medical professionals. But it received high, sometimes hysterical, media coverage.

[...]

The research that led to suggestions of an MMR “link” with autism came from Dr Andrew Wakefield and 11 colleagues at the Royal Free Hospital, London. It was later discredited. He and two others are now charged with serious professional misconduct before the General Medical Council.

This myth has received enough sensational press coverage that the suspicion that vaccines cause autism has entered common knowledge. Celebrities like Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey are furthering anti-vaccination propaganda. This could have serious repercussions on public health in America. Just when science was finally ridding us of a deadly disease, unscientific superstition came along to put us back in danger.

See Wikipedia for a summary of the “controversy” regarding autism and the MMR vaccine, and Science-Based Medicine for a discussion of vaccine side effects from an MD who specializes in Infectious Disease.

The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything: Dopamine

Read Montague, the director of the Human Neuroimaging Lab at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX, is trying to crack the code of how the brain makes decisions — the neurochemical foundation of free will.

The neurotransmitter dopamine‘s effect on creating the sensation of reward in the brain was discovered in the 50′s. Montague’s research is showing that the activity of dopamine neurons influences decision making in a more complex manner than previously thought. Dopamine isn’t just produced when something favorable happens. It’s also produced as soon as there’s an expectation that something favorable will happen.

What’s interesting about this system is that it’s all about expectation. Dopamine neurons constantly generate patterns based upon experience: If this, then that. The cacophony of reality is distilled into models of correlation. And if these predictions ever prove incorrect, then the neurons immediately readjust their expectations. The discrepancy is internalized; the anomaly is remembered. “The accuracy comes from the mismatch,” Montague says. “You learn how the world works by focusing on the prediction errors, on the events that you didn’t expect.” Our knowledge, in other words, emerges from our cellular mistakes. The brain learns how to be right by focusing on what it got wrong.

So the brain learns by avoiding prior mistakes and trying to supply itself with “fixes” of dopamine — kind of a brute force trial-and-error. Is that the meaning of life? Too much dopamine causes an organism to ignore its basic survival instincts even to its own death:

They inserted the needle right next to the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), a part of the brain dense with dopamine neurons and involved with the processing of pleasurable rewards, like food and sex.

Olds and Milner quickly discovered that too much pleasure can be fatal. After they ran a small current into the wire, so that the NAcc was continually excited, the scientists noticed that the rodents lost interest in everything else. They stopped eating and drinking. All courtship behavior ceased. The rats would just cower in the corner of their cage, transfixed by their bliss. Within days all of the animals had perished. They had died of thirst.

Maybe the ultimate goal is to do whatever it takes to keep as much dopamine flowing as possible while still keeping yourself fed, sheltered, and breeding for as long as possible. It’s elegantly simple. Working out the details of pursuing that goal is the interesting part.

[Seed Magazine]

DIY Knee Rehab

This post has been moved to the Move Aware blog.

Brains Can Hack Themselves

A woman who had absolutely no balance and could not stand without falling due to a loss of vestibular function fully regained it with the use of accelerometers that sent signals through the brain via electrodes attached to her tongue.

A man who had been blind since birth was able to distinguish people and objects and even perceive three-dimensional space by feeling a matrix of vibrating stimulators against his back.

Both of these feats were accomplished by Paul Bach-y-Rita, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They are demonstrations of neuroplasticity — the brain’s ability to reprogram itself — in this case substituting one sense for another.

Bach-y-Rita determined that skin and its touch receptors could substitute for a retina, because both the skin and the retina are two-dimensional sheets, covered with sensory receptors that allow a ‘picture’ to form on them.

It is one thing to find a new data port, or way of getting sensations to the brain, but another for the brain to decode these skin sensations and turn them into pictures. To do that, the brain has to learn something new. This adaptability implies that the brain is plastic, in the sense that it can reorganise its sensory perceptual system.

The entire article is really worth a read.

[The Telegraph via RichardDawkins.net]

Incompetent Yoga Teachers

This post has been moved to the Move Aware blog.

something’s broken

I’ve noticed for the second day now that my back aches. Not the kind of ache I might get after strength training or working on set construction — this is more of a flu-type ache, where it’s kind of sensitive to the touch. But I have no nausea or any of the more unpleasant flu symptoms. For a couple days I’ve had a little bit of a sore throat, a little bit lower in the throat than the spot just below the sinuses where I usually first start to feel cold symptoms coming on… but it gets no worse and I haven’t come down with anything. I don’t seem to get a whole lot of rest out of my sleep, which has been on a pretty normal schedule. I wouldn’t say I’m fatigued, but I definitely feel more tired (sleepy) than I’ve been accustomed in the past. This morning for the first half hour or so at my desk my stomach was not happy, but I chalk that up to riding my bike hard after eating breakfast this morning.

Tonight for the first time I noticed that when I move my eyes in their full range of motion in any direction the muscles hurt. That’s a new one — either the onset of a new symptom, or maybe I only just now noticed it. I’m hoping that’s just from staring at screens too much, which I have been doing a lot lately.

There are so many variables that it’s hard to trace back a definitive cause. This was the first week that I biked to work, except for Wednesday. I recently (a couple of weeks ago) started eating meat again. I had a lot of garbage to take out this week and my apartment had been pretty unkempt for a while toward the tail end of Into the Woods. It’s possible there’s been mold in the air. Longer term… it’s the summer so I’ve had the window air conditioner installed for a few months now, and it’s 8 years old and might have some nasty stuff in there from being stowed away in basements during the cold seasons. It was just a few months ago that my desk moved to a spot with my back to a large sunny window, so I could have more eye strain from that bright environment, although I think I do a pretty good job of getting rid of the glare. I haven’t been physically active for at least 4 months now. My attention to the quality of my diet has left a lot to be desired over the same period.

Some Googling gave me more questions than answers: Celiac (gluten sensitivity), hypothyroidism… for the conditions people were talking about, you need to have blood tests done. One thing I do know is that if this keeps up, I’m going to see a doctor.

that does it…

New rule.

From now on, every time I pick up the phone and order delivery food, I have to go to my cookbooks or online and find a new recipe to cook myself. That should be enough motivation to wean myself from an expensive habit and do myself some good at the same time.

There’s no such thing as “clean coal.”

The dumping of coal ash, also called “fly ash,” is unregulated by the EPA. The problem with calling reduced-emission coal burning “clean coal” is that the cleaner the air emitted by the coal power plant, the dirtier the ash becomes.

The ash contains toxic compounds such as arsenic, mercury, and aluminum which can cause cancer if they leach into ground water, and that’s exactly what seems to have happened in eastern Pennsylvania.

nasal irrigation

A few weeks ago in the midst of my allergic hell I decided to give nasal irrigation a try. I picked up the NeilMed Sinus Rinse kit — basically a squeeze bottle version of a neti pot — and went to town.

I soon discovered that blasting your sinuses with fluid causes some of it to attempt to escape via your ears and tear ducts. Easy does it.

The instructions recommend using only their special pre-mixed packets and distilled water to make the 8 oz. of solution that fits in the bottle. I found that tap water works just fine…at least in Madison it’s not so nasty that I wouldn’t drink a glass of it. In larger cities I suppose I’d stick with distilled, or at least filtered, water.

I also tried mixing my own solution today because I had run out of the packets provided with the kit. A quick Google survey concluded that the proper mix for an isotonic (same salinity as your sinuses) solution is 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon baking soda per 8 oz. of water. The table salt I have in my pantry happens to be non-iodized salt, which is safe(-ish?), but I wouldn’t recommend trying it with the common variety. It dissolved fine and felt no more uncomfortable than the packet-based solution, and mixing it myself will keep me from having to pay $13/month for the little packets and all the paper waste they create.

Does it work? My allergy symptoms have been better since I’ve been doing this regularly — twice daily when the pollen count was high — and the concept of flushing out the day’s (and night’s) irritants that still remain captive in the nasal cilia and mucus seems sound. It seems like the only way, other than staying fully hydrated, that I can actively keep my breathing as free as possible.

Fear is more powerful than reason.

This isn’t a surprising revelation, but there’s a biological reason for it. From Newsweek [via Schneier]:

The evolutionary primacy of the brain’s fear circuitry makes it more powerful than the brain’s reasoning faculties. The amygdala sprouts a profusion of connections to higher brain regions — neurons that carry one-way traffic from amygdala to neocortex. Few connections run from the cortex to the amygdala, however. That allows the amygdala to override the products of the logical, thoughtful cortex, but not vice versa. So although it is sometimes possible to think yourself out of fear (“I know that dark shape in the alley is just a trash can”), it takes great effort and persistence. Instead, fear tends to overrule reason, as the amygdala hobbles our logic and reasoning circuits. That makes fear “far, far more powerful than reason,” says neurobiologist Michael Fanselow of the University of California, Los Angeles. “It evolved as a mechanism to protect us from life-threatening situations, and from an evolutionary standpoint there’s nothing more important than that.”

Politicians and all religions that claim the existence of “hell” have been capitalizing on this for centuries, and the more we trust the fear-inducing rhetoric they’re feeding us, the less chance reason will have to prevail.