The M.M.R. vaccine doesn’t cause autism, and the evidence is overwhelming that it doesn’t,” Dr. Ellen Wright Clayton, the chairwoman of the panel, assembled by the Institute of Medicine, said in an interview, referring to a combination vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella that has long been a focus of concern from some parents’ groups.

The panel did conclude, however, that there are risks to getting the chickenpox vaccine that can arise years after vaccination. People who have had the vaccine can develop pneumonia, meningitis or hepatitis years later if the virus used in the vaccine reawakens because an unrelated health problem, like cancer, has compromised their immune systems.

These same problems are far more likely in patients who are infected naturally at some point in their lives with chickenpox, since varicella zoster, the virus that causes chickenpox, can live dormant in nerve cells for decades. Shingles, a painful eruption of skin blisters that usually affects the aged, is generally caused by this Lazarus-like ability of varicella zoster.

Again, if you oppose vaccination, you are killing children.

Just as building the interstate highway system in the United States a half-century ago made modern commerce more feasible on a national scale, China’s ambitious rail rollout is helping to integrate the economy of this sprawling, populous nation. In China’s case, it is doing so on a much faster construction timetable and at significantly higher travel speeds than anything envisioned by the United States in the 1950s.

Work crews of as many as 100,000 people per line have built about half of the 16,000-kilometer, or 10,000-mile, network in just six years, in many cases ahead of schedule, including the Beijing-to-Shanghai line, which was originally planned to open next year. The entire system is still on course to be completed by 2020.

Former vice president and environmental advocate Al Gore sharply criticized President Obama’s “failed” approach to global warming Wednesday.

Gore was supportive of Obama’s action in the first six months of his administration, but the former Democratic presidential nominee said the administration has not made the case for action among the American people.

“President Obama has thus far failed to use the bully pulpit to make the case for bold action on climate change,” Gore wrote in a “Rolling Stone” article published online. “After successfully passing his green stimulus package, he did nothing to defend it when Congress decimated its funding.”

“Without presidential leadership that focuses intensely on making the public aware of the reality we face, nothing will change,” Gore added.

Astronomers think they’ve nailed down the source of a mysterious blast of gamma rays that reached Earth in late March and continues, at reduced levels, even today. The culprit looks like a black hole, 3.8 billion light-years away, that swallowed and ripped apart a wandering star.

On March 28, NASA’s Swift satellite first noted the outburst of invisible radiation, a gamma ray burst, one of the most powerful explosions in the universe. Such blasts, thought to result from the explosion of massive stars, are regularly detected and usually die away within minutes. But this one continues today, and in its first two days, the intensity of the outburst measured in some wavelengths not visible to the naked eye as bright as a hundred billion suns, scientists report in Thursday’s edition of the journal Science. That makes it one of the most intense cosmic explosions ever witnessed by astronomers.

This is the part where Bruce Willis and/or Will Smith arranges a crack team of experts to prepare for the impending alien invasion.

Vaccination rates among California’s kindergartners are below U.S. goals for 2020, according to a new federal report released Thursday.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that 95% of kindergartners should be vaccinated for nine diseases. But in California, only about 93% of kindergartners are inoculated for the ailments: polio; diphtheria; tetanus; pertussis, also known as whooping cough; measles; mumps; and rubella.

But more California kindergartners were inoculated for Hepatitis B and varicella, also known as chickenpox. For those diseases, more than 96% were inoculated.

Thanks to TVs Matt who gave me the heads up on this

Unfortunately, in TV news at least, the role of mainstream media propagandist for the anti-vaccine movement has been taken on with gusto by a CBS News correspondent named Sharyl Attkisson, and, oops, she did it again just this Thursday with an article entitled Vaccines and autism: a new scientific review, in which she pimps a truly horrible “review” of the evidence base regarding whether vaccines cause or predispose to autism.

Vaccines don’t cause autism. Every scientific study worth anything has disproven this. It’s not a real connection. Publishing this type of untrue data scares parents, and eventually leads to dead children.

STOP.

State health officials have confirmed six cases of juvenile measles this month in Hennepin County and caution more could be on the way in areas where parents have been reluctant to vaccinate their kids.

The Minnesota Department of Health confirmed the fifth and sixth cases on Friday. Three of the kids are from the Somali community, where some parents have been afraid to immunize their children over fears of the vaccine’s safety.

Health officials are racing to ease those fears and persuade parents to get their kids vaccinated.

These are diseases we beat with science, and now thanks to ignorance they’re back.

Sad to see, yet, proud of what we as a nation can accomplish.

The shuttle Discovery braved the hellish fire of re-entry for the last time Wednesday and glided back to Earth to close out the space plane’s 39th and final voyage, an emotion-charged milestone marking the beginning of the end for America’s shuttle program.

Dropping through a partly cloudy sky, the commander, Steven W. Lindsey, and Col. Eric A. Boe of the Air Force guided Discovery through a sweeping left overhead turn, lined up on Runway 15 and floated to a picture-perfect touchdown at 11:57 a.m. Eastern time to wrap up an extended 13-day space station assembly mission.

As it coasted to a stop under a brilliant noon sun, Discovery’s odometer stood at some 5,750 orbits covering nearly 150 million miles during 39 flights spanning a full year in space — a record unrivaled in the history of manned rockets.

“And Houston, Discovery, for the final time, wheels stopped,” Mr. Lindsey radioed flight controllers in Houston.

NASA: Still the best.

More than 21,000 people got whooping cough last year, many of them children and teens. That’s the highest number since 2005 and among the worst years in more than half a century, U.S. health officials said Wednesday.

They are puzzled by the sharp rise in cases. The vaccine against whooping cough is highly effective in children, and vaccination rates for kids are good.

When you don’t vaccinate your children you are not only abusing your own children, but the other children around them.

VACCINATE YOUR CHILDREN.

(tip via)

“If an adult caregiver or parent decides not to vaccinate their children, we feel that they’re taking an unnecessary risk, so we wanted to take a strong stand and say this is so important to us that it’s a deal breaker for us,” Dr. Dyer says matter-of-factly.

Dyer published his vaccine manifesto in the journal ‘Pediatrics’.  He says, “I think more physicians need to be more aggressive about vaccinating kids.  If you’re not willing to vaccinate your kids, if you’re not willing to trust us and trust our judgment and education then we have a philosophical difference here.”

I don’t think public schools should admit any child who hasn’t been vaccinated (with exceptions for kids who may have some sort of provable allergy or related sickness that prevents vaccination), but this is another area of defense.

Parents who refuse to vaccinate their children are endangering our society via their actions.

A universal flu vaccine has been successfully tested on humans with the disease for the first time, it was reported Monday.

The U.K.’s Guardian newspaper said that unlike existing vaccines, this one, which was tested by scientists at Britain’s Oxford University, does not need to be changed every year to match the latest strain of the virus.

Gupta: There has been a lot of scrutiny of vaccines recently — specifically childhood vaccines. There has been a lot of news about is there a connection with autism, for example. What do you make of all that? Dr. [Andrew] Wakefield wrote a paper about this [in The Lancet in 1998] saying he thought there was a connection. And there were lower vaccination rates over a period of time as a result in Britain, then the United States. What are your thoughts?

Gates: Well, Dr. Wakefield has been shown to have used absolutely fraudulent data. He had a financial interest in some lawsuits, he created a fake paper, the journal allowed it to run. All the other studies were done, showed no connection whatsoever again and again and again. So it’s an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids. Because the mothers who heard that lie, many of them didn’t have their kids take either pertussis or measles vaccine, and their children are dead today. And so the people who go and engage in those anti-vaccine efforts — you know, they, they kill children. It’s a very sad thing, because these vaccines are important.

(via)

For a little 8 year old kid who was obsessed with space exploration this was a kick to the gut of epic proportions.

Credit to President Reagan for his great speech at the time:

Rest in peace, Ellison S. Onizuka, Sharon Christa McAuliffe, Greg Jarvis, Judy Resnik, Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, and Ron McNair.

If only these people showed some interest in how Andrew Wakefield sought to enrich himself via dead children, and how he’s been aided by people like Jenny McCarthy in this mission.

The BMJ report says that Wakefield met medical school managers to discuss a joint business even while the first child to be fully investigated in his research was still in the hospital; and how just days after publication of his Lancet article, he brought business associates to his place of work at the Royal Free Medical School in London to continue negotiations.

Drawing on investigations and information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Deer says Wakefield and his associates used financial forecasts that predicted they could make up to £28 million (about $43.7 million) a year from the diagnostic kits alone.

There is no connection between vaccines and autism. No connection at all. There have been tons of studies on this, in multiple countries. There is no link. All avoiding vaccination does is help to spread disease and death among the most vulnerable – children.

This is what Jenny McCarthy is advocating, and what Huffington Post enables by giving her a platform to spread this dangerous non-science. McCarthy uses the same crap language of the global warming denial movement and the phony intelligent design scam – acting as if there’s some “debate” to be had. It’s Glenn Beck style “just asking questions,” with the added effect of killing children.

All the parties in this – Jenny McCarthy, the anti-vaccination movement, and The Huffington Post – should be ashamed of what they’re doing (the same goes for Oprah Winfrey who is set to give McCarthy a larger platform).

> The Facts In The Case Of Dr. Andrew Wakefield

A now-retracted British study that linked autism to childhood vaccines was an “elaborate fraud” that has done long-lasting damage to public health, a leading medical publication reported Wednesday.

An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study’s author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study — and that there was “no doubt” Wakefield was responsible.

“It’s one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors,” Fiona Godlee, BMJ’s editor-in-chief, told CNN. “But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data.”

Britain stripped Wakefield of his medical license in May. “Meanwhile, the damage to public health continues, fueled by unbalanced media reporting and an ineffective response from government, researchers, journals and the medical profession,” BMJ states in an editorial accompanying the work.

In other words?

VACCINATE YOUR CHILDREN!!!

This post brought to you by my dog C.K. who turns 11 this week and says “DUH.”
Link

The intelligence of “a man’s best friend” has evolved at a greater rate than the less social cat over millions of years, scientists at Oxford University have claimed.

It was often thought that the feline pet was smarter than its canine counterpart because it needed less attention but researchers have discovered that cat’s brains are smaller because they are less social.