Why science journalism matters
Britain is currently having a measles epidemic.
Measles has been a preventable illness for decades, but the vaccination rate dropped after the widely-publicized and bogus claims of a link to autism. The measles epidemic is especially severe in southwest Wales, in the circulation area of a paper that was especially anti-vaccination.
There are many examples where the media just reported uncertainty within the scientific community. This was not one of them.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
One issue that is hard about vaccination is that there is a free rider problem in heavilty vaccinated communities. If everyone else is vaccinated then there is little to no cost to opting out (as there is nobody to catch the disease from).
That being said, I get the flu vaccine annually (despite some risk that they will get that year’s mix incorrect) as I rather like the idea of fostering herd immunity and I occasionally teach in a building connected to a teaching hospital (not to mention that some students are medical residents).
As for autism, something interesting is going on with that disease but it is common to find false positives in the early epidemiologic investigations. It’s even more common if fraud helps the hypothesis along . . .
11 years ago
The flu vaccine is unusual because we aren’t even close to achieving herd immunity — I’ve seen an esitmate that the H1N1 flu infected over 20% of people. That means we’re still in the range where flu vaccination is individually beneficial — a friend of mine in Seattle, a healthy guy in his 30s, died of H1N1.
For measles and mumps, herd immunity is more important — we’d like to get vaccination to the level where the occasional person who can’t get vaccinated is still safe.
11 years ago
Fair enough, re: herd immunity. Perhaps I can replace with with the less rational “I would rather not be the vector that infects another person”.
Or the more rational “your H1N1 story makes me note that I am older than your friend and nobody has called me healthy” . . . .
Yikes!
11 years ago