[quote]on edge wrote:
The remaining 154 cases were vaccine-associated paralytic polio (VAPP) caused by live oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV).
Not that I want to continue stirring the shit, but please note the last sentence.[/quote]
154 cases in 20 years = less than 8 cases per year in the US
The OPV carries about a one in 2.7 million chance of causing VAPP.
Considering that there were hundreds of thousands of cases of polio annually prior to vaccination, I’m still calling this one a win. By about six touchdowns.
If your argument is that we should no longer be vaccinating for polio because it’s eradicated, and the 1-in-3-million chance of disease is not worth it…we’re actually getting pretty close. There were still about 400 cases of polio worldwide last year. IF WE KEEP VACCINATING for a few more years we might completely eradicate it and be able to take polio vaccine out of the equation.
[quote]on edge wrote:
Activities Guy, regarding our study, is it your expert opinion that this study wouldn’t be any better if they used subjects all from a similar demographic so they don’t have to handicap the data to account for such a wide range in socio economic status? Would it not be better if they omitted kids on ADHD medications?[/quote]
He covered this before and so did I. Using kids with ADHD made the study MORE likely to find a relationship between thiomersal and adverse neurological events. In other words, it is to the anti-vaccine tribe’s advantage that they were in the study. They still found no relationship.
Re: the ADHD medications, if they had omitted kids on ADHD medications that would have weakened the study’s chances of finding a relationship between mercury and cognitive function (if one existed) because it would throw out the “strongest” cases. [/quote]
The problem with that is those kids were being actively treated for it with medication. Someone stated that the half life of the medications used for ADHD is pretty short and I will accept that but, that doesn’t mean there can’t be some carry over effect of discontinuing the medication “the night before”. Maybe the drugs are out of the kids system but that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be some kind of ingrained behavioral benefit that carries over into the next day. Or, some kind of withdrawal that would lead to more lethargy or more spastics.
It’s an unknown that could affect behavior & cognition. In a study looking for a relationship between early mercury exposure and later cognition and behavior outside factors that could affect behavior and cognition should be eliminated. Imo.
[quote]Davinci.v2 wrote:
I wrote a very nebulous statement; simply that more information is typically gathered over time and you like most people, immediately jump to conclusions and assume you know what I’m referring to. Based on your above response, it’s safe to say that you do not.
[/quote]
500 million people. Over 45 years.
How is it possible to gather more information? Do you need a sample size of one billion and a century of seeing its effects?
Regarding Bertrand Russell’s quote- I’ve thought on this for a while and decided that the issue with the concept behind the quote is simple- If you doubt everything and are always second-guessing your beliefs, then you can never do anything with conviction and will. If the concept is taken seriously, then it becomes impossible to actually do anything.
The solution I came up with- Have genuine, clearly defined and “easily” sourced, reasons for your opinions. Be willing to defend said opinion with conviction and strength. Also attempt with all your might to listen to everyone who challenges your opinion and analyze their rationales for challenging your opinion critically.[/quote]
On edge, I’ve really been thinking abou this, and the problem is that I can’t think of any more viable design. It’s playing Whack-A-Mole. Any other design choice creates MORE problems in trying to assess a mercury-cognition relationship.
Our ACTUAL design was:
allow kids on ADHD meds into study, but don’t let them take meds the night before
Other choices would have been
don’t allow kids on ADHD meds in, period
allow them but force longer discontinuation of meds
allow them and let them take their meds
Would have biased the sample by essentially removing the segment of kids with most serious behavioral problems. If you want to find a relationship between Exposure X and Outcome Y, you need a fairly representative range of the outcome.
Would not have been practical from parent standpoint. You’re gonna tell parents that their misbehaving kids have to go off ADHD medications for a month before the study? This would have biased the sample because parents of kids with ADHD probably would have found it impossible to adhere to and would have withdrawn from the study. Again, kneecapping your ability to find a relationship (if one exists) by removing those most prone to mercury exposure (if mercury causes ADHD) and with the worst behavioral and cognitive issues.
Would have been more likely to obscure a mercury-cognition relationship (if one existed) for reasons discussed already
Yeah, it’s not perfect, but any alternative design creates an even worse problem. I’d bet that in the design phase, they walked though the options that I’ve laid out here and realized that the best chance to detect a relationship, if one existed, was to allow those on meds into the study but prohibit their use the night before.
Bigger lesson here: sometimes the idea to limit a study population In an effort to reduce potential cofounders will actually make you less likely to find the relationship that you’re looking for.
I will try to pull up the paper next time I’m on my work computer and see if they mention doing a sensitvt analysis with kids on ADHD meds removed just to see what would happen.
Re: the ADHD medications, if they had omitted kids on ADHD medications that would have weakened the study’s chances of finding a relationship between mercury and cognitive function (if one existed) because it would throw out the “strongest” cases. [/quote]
The problem with that is those kids were being actively treated for it with medication. Someone stated that the half life of the medications used for ADHD is pretty short and I will accept that but, that doesn’t mean there can’t be some carry over effect of discontinuing the medication “the night before”. Maybe the drugs are out of the kids system but that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be some kind of ingrained behavioral benefit that carries over into the next day. Or, some kind of withdrawal that would lead to more lethargy or more spastics.
It’s an unknown that could affect behavior & cognition. In a study looking for a relationship between early mercury exposure and later cognition and behavior outside factors that could affect behavior and cognition should be eliminated. Imo.[/quote]
The reason they were in the study in the first place is that it made the study more likely to pick up events than if they had not been there. Anti vaccine people should be happy about that because it works against the vaccine.
Once again, they made the study more likely to pick up any relationship.
I mean, I’ve tried to give a detailed explanation above, but the simple explanation is just to imagine if they’d designed the study to exclude kids on ADHD meds.
I’m CERTAIN that such a design would have been shot down on the grounds that the study sample would be biased towards finding no relationship by omitting those most likely to have poor scores.
I also suspect, fairly or unfairly, that if they had excluded kids on ADHD meds, you’d be pointing to THAT as a flaw, too, using the above logic.
One other comment: on edge, you have obviously put a great deal of thought into this, not just clicked a few autism links, so I give you credit for that even if I disagree with your course of action.
I do have a question to pose as a follow up to your listing of the specific diseases and the general belief that your kids are low-risk because of where you live and what your kids do in their free time.
Do you ever plan to travel internationally?
Do you frequent any tourist attractions?
What if your kids decide to study abroad in college?
Because while they might be safe in your home with their stay at home mom, chances are that SOMEDAY they will leave the nest, right?
We spend a lot of time talking about he outbreaks among kids right now because “kids” have a lower vaccination rate than today’s adult population, but if anti-vaxers persist we will soon have an adult population with lower vax rates than the previous generation, and we’ll start seeing some of these diseases in adults, too.
I looked back a few pages and cannot determine the sample size from the ADHD study that is being discussed.
I am interested in the issue of what would be the results of excluding the ADHD kids.
My only question is how big was the sample size for the entire study and what number of kids had ADHD?
Although it is tempting to exclude all the noise in a study (and ADHD is noise in this case- so would all other as-yet-undiagnosed issues), you do need some error in your denominator, otherwise your stats lock up and you are stuck.
[quote]ActivitiesGuy wrote:
One other comment: on edge, you have obviously put a great deal of thought into this, not just clicked a few autism links, so I give you credit for that even if I disagree with your course of action.
I do have a question to pose as a follow up to your listing of the specific diseases and the general belief that your kids are low-risk because of where you live and what your kids do in their free time.
Do you ever plan to travel internationally?
Do you frequent any tourist attractions?
What if your kids decide to study abroad in college?
Because while they might be safe in your home with their stay at home mom, chances are that SOMEDAY they will leave the nest, right?
We spend a lot of time talking about he outbreaks among kids right now because “kids” have a lower vaccination rate than today’s adult population, but if anti-vaxers persist we will soon have an adult population with lower vax rates than the previous generation, and we’ll start seeing some of these diseases in adults, too.[/quote]
[quote]jnd wrote:
I looked back a few pages and cannot determine the sample size from the ADHD study that is being discussed.
I am interested in the issue of what would be the results of excluding the ADHD kids.
My only question is how big was the sample size for the entire study and what number of kids had ADHD?
Although it is tempting to exclude all the noise in a study (and ADHD is noise in this case- so would all other as-yet-undiagnosed issues), you do need some error in your denominator, otherwise your stats lock up and you are stuck.
jnd[/quote]
I don’t have the numbers for the ADHD crowd in front of me on my phone, but the study was not an ADHD study it was a study looking at mercury in vaccines and adverse neurological events. The study had 1,047 people.
Britain did a study with 100,000. And I believe Germany had one with 12,000. Different designs of course, but theyre not the studies under conversation.
[quote]jnd wrote:
I looked back a few pages and cannot determine the sample size from the ADHD study that is being discussed.
I am interested in the issue of what would be the results of excluding the ADHD kids.
My only question is how big was the sample size for the entire study and what number of kids had ADHD?
Although it is tempting to exclude all the noise in a study (and ADHD is noise in this case- so would all other as-yet-undiagnosed issues), you do need some error in your denominator, otherwise your stats lock up and you are stuck.
jnd[/quote]
I don’t have the numbers for the ADHD crowd in front of me on my phone, but the study was not an ADHD study it was a study looking at mercury in vaccines and adverse neurological events. The study had 1,047 people.
Britain did a study with 100,000. And I believe Germany had one with 12,000. Different designs of course, but theyre not the studies under conversation.[/quote]
Thanks for the info.
If there were 1000+ kids in the study, then it is highly unlikely that the the ADHD issue had any real influence on the outcome of the study (unless there was an ungodly # of ADHD kids- which I doubt).
In any event, with an N that size the amount of measurement error add by the ADHD would be super-small.
Ok…what was it you were trying to say? We know this already. This is a 16 year old study, this is information we already know. I posted a number of pages back about aluminum accumulating in bone and lungs. I didn’t mention the brain but it happens there too, and all the accumulation is unavoidable because aluminum is in food, water, and air. And antiacids, and anti-diarrheal meds. And its unavoidable for 100% of the human race.
If you have a comment I’d rather you say it instead of linking to a study with no comment underneath the linm.
[quote]jnd wrote:
I looked back a few pages and cannot determine the sample size from the ADHD study that is being discussed.
I am interested in the issue of what would be the results of excluding the ADHD kids.
My only question is how big was the sample size for the entire study and what number of kids had ADHD?
Although it is tempting to exclude all the noise in a study (and ADHD is noise in this case- so would all other as-yet-undiagnosed issues), you do need some error in your denominator, otherwise your stats lock up and you are stuck.
jnd[/quote]
I don’t have the numbers for the ADHD crowd in front of me on my phone, but the study was not an ADHD study it was a study looking at mercury in vaccines and adverse neurological events. The study had 1,047 people.
Britain did a study with 100,000. And I believe Germany had one with 12,000. Different designs of course, but theyre not the studies under conversation.[/quote]
Thanks for the info.
If there were 1000+ kids in the study, then it is highly unlikely that the the ADHD issue had any real influence on the outcome of the study (unless there was an ungodly # of ADHD kids- which I doubt).
In any event, with an N that size the amount of measurement error add by the ADHD would be super-small.
jnd
[/quote]
Appreciate your input. It may not have been clear from the course of conversation but that was what me and ActivitiesGuy were trying to get at, as well as responding to the criticism that they shouldn’t have been included in the first place (it’s both a better study design and an additional safety factor to include them and measure them without meds in their system). It increases the sensitivity of the study, even though a very small increase and at the cost of introducing noise and the possibility of false positives.
I don’t know how to explain it any better. EDIT: not to you
Ok…what was it you were trying to say? We know this already. This is a 16 year old study, this is information we already know. I posted a number of pages back about aluminum accumulating in bone and lungs. I didn’t mention the brain but it happens there too, and all the accumulation is unavoidable because aluminum is in food, water, and air. And antiacids, and anti-diarrheal meds. And its unavoidable for 100% of the human race.
If you have a comment I’d rather you say it instead of linking to a study with no comment underneath the linm.[/quote]
I won’t assume what Davinci is thinking, although he seems to like this approach of tossing out one piece of information and trying to get a rise out of you rather than actually taking a position himself. I mean, whatever.
One thing worth adding here is that basic science studies (such as this one) accumulating toxins in animals range from proof-of-concept (this happens through this pathway) to actual toxicity studies, and sometimes they are designed to give an ENORMOUS dose of the toxin to an animal like a mouse. Which is fine, but all it “proves” is that an enormous dose of said toxin would have bad effects. We then use this information to inform us how said toxin would be safe for humans, usually several orders of magnitude LESS than the toxic dose in animals to be safe.
These studies are often misinterpreted or misreported as ALUMINUM IN VACCINES TOXIC FOR CHILDREN. That interpretation COMPLETELY missed the point of the study.
The whole “scary sounding ingredients” thing, insinuating that aluminum and mercury are toxic…well, yeah. Everything is toxic at high enough levels. Hell, an IV delivery of too much WATER can kill you. Table salt is composed of two highly volatile chemicals. Animal studies like this showing that aluminum can reach the brain are designed to help us understand these processes and how much of a toxin we can take, not to prove that it cannot be used, period.
[quote]ActivitiesGuy wrote:
I mean, I’ve tried to give a detailed explanation above, but the simple explanation is just to imagine if they’d designed the study to exclude kids on ADHD meds.
I’m CERTAIN that such a design would have been shot down on the grounds that the study sample would be biased towards finding no relationship by omitting those most likely to have poor scores.
I also suspect, fairly or unfairly, that if they had excluded kids on ADHD meds, you’d be pointing to THAT as a flaw, too, using the above logic. [/quote]
Absolutely not. Remember, I wasn’t objecting to ADHD kids I was objecting to MEDICATED kids. Medicated with psychotropic drugs.
[quote]ActivitiesGuy wrote:
One other comment: on edge, you have obviously put a great deal of thought into this, not just clicked a few autism links, so I give you credit for that even if I disagree with your course of action.
I do have a question to pose as a follow up to your listing of the specific diseases and the general belief that your kids are low-risk because of where you live and what your kids do in their free time.
Do you ever plan to travel internationally?
Do you frequent any tourist attractions?
What if your kids decide to study abroad in college?
Because while they might be safe in your home with their stay at home mom, chances are that SOMEDAY they will leave the nest, right?
We spend a lot of time talking about he outbreaks among kids right now because “kids” have a lower vaccination rate than today’s adult population, but if anti-vaxers persist we will soon have an adult population with lower vax rates than the previous generation, and we’ll start seeing some of these diseases in adults, too.[/quote]
We’ve never left the country. We do take two trips a year. I fly, the wife & kids drive. Haha That’s not due to germ fear or anything. It’s because it’s expensive to fly 5 and I can’t miss that much work by doing a long road trip just to get to our destination.
One of our trips is to Southern California and we go to Laguna Beach every single day. The other trip is deep into the heart of Mormon country where we hike every day. We’re not afraid to go to ammusment parks or anything. We just like the outdoor activities. We used to go to a lot of kid places around town but by the time we had #3 those excursions were too much of a pain in the ass. We do get a lot less colds since we stopped that.
The stories we hear occasionally of college kids and meningitis are scary as fuck and I’d consider vaccines going into college. My oldest boy is 13 now and I know who he is and the course he’s on very well. He’s such a homebody I suspect he will live at home and go to JC until he’s 20. If he chooses to leave home and go off to college at 18 you will hear my jaw hit the floor. It won’t surprise me if he goes thru life and never gets drunk. I won’t worry about this stuff too much for him but he will be be old enough to make such choices by that time.
Ok…what was it you were trying to say? We know this already. This is a 16 year old study, this is information we already know. I posted a number of pages back about aluminum accumulating in bone and lungs. I didn’t mention the brain but it happens there too, and all the accumulation is unavoidable because aluminum is in food, water, and air. And antiacids, and anti-diarrheal meds. And its unavoidable for 100% of the human race.
If you have a comment I’d rather you say it instead of linking to a study with no comment underneath the linm.[/quote]
Aragorn, you posted a graph showing a marked increase in total body aluminum due to vaccines. Those marked increases would be 3 or 4 times higher for just blood serum levels. After all, we (or at least me) are less concerned over aluminum accumulated in bones. I’m concerned about blood serum levels feeding the brain.
Dietary sources of aluminum are poorly absorbed but obviously account for gradual accumulation in total body load. The graph you posted shows jumps in the load due to vaccines.