Monthly Archives: May 2010

Two stories that I ran across on Monday were connected in a way that I thought worth penning a few words.

The first was that Andrew Wakefield, the doctor who stoked the fears of parents for a decade by claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, was removed from the medical register and declared a doctor non grata. UK’s General Medical Council concluded the longest investigation in its history into allegations that Wakefield had lied, acted unethically and failed to acknowledge financial conflict of interest in his study. He published a paper in the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, in 1998, declaring that the outcome of his study on 12 children with inflammatory bowel disease indicated a link between the triple vaccine, MMR, and both inflammatory bowel disease and autism.

His study caused a drop in parents giving their children the MMR vaccine causing a noticeable rise in the number of measles cases. In 2006, a boy died of measles in the UK, the first death caused by measles in 14 years in the country. After declaring measles banishsed from the UK in 1994, it was declared to be endemic in 2008, a outcome caused largely by the MMR scare.

The second story was the uptake in the number of skeptics on global warming and climate change in the UK specifically and in Europe in general. A poll conducted by the BBC in February showed that only 26% of Britons thought that climate change was serious and caused by humans, roughly about half of who thought so from 2009. According to a poll by the reputed German magazine, Der Spiegel, now only 42% of Germans consider global warming a serious threat compared to 62% four years earlier.

The connection between these two stories is the central role played by the media. In the case of the Wakefield scandal, a study of 12 children is hardly conclusive of anything in science. But the media drummed up the story, especially after Tony Blair and his wife refused to reveal whether their child had been vaccinated with the MMR. Ben Goldacre, of the brilliant Bad Science blog, provides a fascinating and detailed story of the unfolding of this media mishap and places the blame for the anti-vaccination scare squarely on the shoulders of the media. He writes:

“Emotive anecdotes from distressed parents were pitted against old men in corduroy with no media training. The Royal College of General Practitioners press office not only failed to speak clearly on the evidence, it also managed to dig up anti-MMR GPs for journalists who rang in asking for quotes. Newspapers and celebrities began to use the vaccine as an opportunity to attack the government and the health service, and of course it was the perfect story, with a charismatic maverick fighting against the system, a Galileo-like figure. There were elements of risk, of awful personal tragedy, and of course, the question of blame: whose fault was autism?”

Regarding the role played by the Blairs in this mess, he writes (December 2001 was when the Blairs refused to answer the MMR question):

“2002 was in fact the peak of the media coverage, by a very long margin. In 1998 there were only 122 articles on MMR. In 2002 there were 1,257 (from here). MMR was the biggest science story that year, the most likely science topic to be written about in opinion or editorial pieces, it produced the longest stories of any science subject, and was also by far the most likely to generate letters to the press, so people were clearly engaging with the issue. MMR was the biggest and most heavily covered science story for years.

It was also covered extremely badly, and largely by amateurs. Less than a third of broadsheet reports in 2002 referred to the overwhelming evidence that MMR is safe, and only 11% mentioned that it is regarded as safe in the 90 other countries in which it is used.”

Switching stories, here is what the NYT has to say about the chief reason why Britons and many others are more skeptical of climate change:

“Here in Britain, the change has been driven by the news media’s intensive coverage of a series of climate science  controversies unearthed and highlighted by skeptics since November. These include the unauthorized release of e-mail messages from prominent British climate scientists at the University of East Anglia that skeptics cited as evidence that researchers were overstating the evidence for global warming and the discovery of errors in a United Nations climate report.

Two independent reviews later found no evidence that the East Anglia researchers had actively distorted climate data, but heavy press coverage had already left an impression that the scientists had schemed to repress data. Then there was the unusually cold winter in Northern Europe and the United States, which may have reinforced a perception that the Earth was not warming. (Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a United States agency, show that globally, this winter was the fifth warmest in history.)”

The stories that the media chooses to drum up are as much a reflection of the culture they live in as they are of the money chain. Climate skeptics are largely fueled by corporations and individual preferences to a US-style consumption-driven lifestyle. Ben Goldacre says that vaccine scares are fairly common in different parts of the world. But, each region has its version of the scare. For example, the French believed in the 1990s that the Hepatitis B vaccine causes multiple sclerosis, a fear unmanifested elsewhere. Similarly, the MMR scare was much more pronounced in the UK than in most other parts of the world.

But underlying all this is all a lack of understanding about science. Science is about a way of thinking, of approaching the world. It is a method, not an accumulation of facts. But most people consider science to be a body of knowledge rather than the method, using a more round-about, two word “scientific method” phrase to the more common and simpler to use single word, science. In the Guardian article reporting the Wakefield disbar, I found this quote illuminating:

“Adam Finn, professor of paediatrics at University of Bristol medical school, said society tended to admire those who stick to their opinions. But in science, “the real heroes are those who acknowledge the supremacy of evidence and retain an open mind and those who admit, with good grace, when they are wrong..”

A single report, in and of itself, doesn’t prove much except provoke a scratching of the chin. But, we clamor for certainty and if bad science or bad reporting of bad science can provide that illusion of certainty, we’ll take it.

These issues and stories are not merely of an academic interest. As a father, I often ponder about what qualities I’d like Maya to develop from the start. The consequences of climate change will affect her and her progeny. How can we all, as parents, better shape the world we live in, better bequeath it to our children and theirs ? Is it by getting them into the rat race faster and better equipped than their peers or by doing something else ? Is it by subscribing them to a litany of activities in the name of talent and progeny or by teaching them the benefits of slowing down and rumination ? How can we teach them that if we don’t take the time to slow down, disengage from the bustle and hurry world that we’ve created for ourselves ?

P.S: Bad Science is an excellent blog for those looking to dissect and get behind the bad reporting and bad science. Skeptical Science is an excellent resource for those willing to consider the evidence for climate change. For those wishing a more detailed breakdown of Wakefield’s crimes, I found this article very helpful.