Nobel laureate joins the autism cranks at AutismOne conference

If you're reading this from anywhere but Chicago, you just missed the Autism One conference, which ends today.  This conference, run by Jenny McCarthy and Generation Rescue, purports to tell parents "the truth" about autism.

The conference is a veritable festival of unproven claims, offering a powerful but false message of hope to parents who are desperately searching for new treatments for their children.  It's also a nexus for anti-vaccinationists, who run special seminars educating parents about how to get vaccine exemptions so that they can enroll their unvaccinated children in public schools.

A look at the presentations reveals that rather than presenting "the truth," one speaker after another is making unsupported, unscientific claims and then offering their own special therapy.  The one thing that most of these presentations have in common is that the speaker is making money from selling their so-called treatments.  For example, Anat Baniel offers her self-named "Anat Baniel method" and is promoting it through ads in the conference program.  Other speakers are offering special diets, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and in perhaps the most damaging treatment, Mark and David Geier's chemical castration therapy.  Mark Blaxill is there, still pushing the thoroughly disproven link between mercury and autism, and hawking his book on the topic.

The other major theme of the conference is conspiracies: how the government, big pharma, and the scientific establishment are all conspiring to hide "the truth" about autism, which the speaker will reveal to the audience. Coincidentally, many of the speakers also offer treatments, for a fee.

This year's speakers include Jenny McCarthy and Andrew Wakefield, as usual, but also a new entry: Luc Montagnier.

Jenny McCarthy has been a leader of the anti-vaccine movement for over a decade.  She's a former Playboy playmate and MTV host, with no medical qualifications whatsoever, who is convinced that vaccines caused her son's autism.  She's been spreading her anti-vaccine message very effectively, with particular help from Oprah Winfrey and Larry King, who gave her prime television exposure countless times.  Oprah even offered McCarthy her own show, until McCarthy ditched Oprah for NBC.

Andrew Wakefield, the thoroughly discredited doctor who falsified data in order to push his false hypothesis that autism is caused by the MMR vaccine - whose medical license was revoked in the UK, and whose famous 1998 paper on autism and vaccines was retracted after it was shown to be fraudulent - claims that his talk "offers solutions [that] will be ignored by those in power and the more dire of its predictions will result."  Too bad I missed that one.

It's no surprise that Jenny McCarthy and Andrew Wakefield, leaders of the anti-vaccine movement, are speaking at AutismOne.  Much more surprising is the presence of Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier, co-discoverer of the link between the HIV virus and AIDS.  What is he doing at this festival of pseudoscience?

Well, apparently Montagnier has gone off the deep end into pseudoscience himself.  He claims that his new group, Chronimed, has discovered in autistic children

"DNA sequences that emit, in certain conditions, electromagnetic waves.  The analysis by molecular biology techniques allows us to identify these electromagnetic waves as coming from … bacterial species."

What the heck?  In what seems to be a desperate effort to stay relevant, Montagnier is promoting wild theories with little scientific basis, and now he is taking advantage of vulnerable parents (see his appeal here) to push a therapy of long-term antibiotic treatment for autistic children.

This is truly a wacky theory.  Montagnier hasn't been able to publish this in a proper journal, for a very good reason: it's nonsense.   He claims that quantum field theory - an area of physics in which he has no qualifications - explains how electromagnetic waves emanating from DNA can explain not only autism, but also Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, Lyme disease, and rheumatoid arthritis.  Montagnier makes these claims and more in a self-published paper that he posted on arXiv.

This isn't Montagnier's first crazy idea: just a year ago, he claimed that DNA molecules can teleport between test tubes, also based on some kind of quantum hocus pocus.  This crackpot claim should have been ignored, and it would have been, if not for the fact that Montagnier is a Nobel laureate.  He's also endorsed homeopathy, another quack treatment.

This is a sad coda to a brilliant medical career.  Not only is Montagnier espousing junk science and tarnishing his own reputation, but he is lending credibility to the AutismOne conference, which is a festival of hucksters and snake-oil salesman, offering unproven, ineffective, and even harmful treatments to vulnerable children and their parents.

Autism is a complex, difficult disease.  Thousands of researchers are pouring their hearts and souls into understanding the disease and developing new treatments.  AutismOne does a terrible disservice to autistic children by siphoning away time, energy, and money that could instead go into real science.  We can only hope that it will fade away.

The Baltimore Sun dives into the anti-vaccination pool

In recent weeks, the Baltimore Sun, once an excellent newspaper, has dived headfirst into the pool of anti-vaccination pseudoscience. With two prominent opinion pieces, the Sun has given a platform to the anti-vaccine movement that they probably didn't expect, and that they certainly didn't deserve. The puzzle is, why? Who on the Sun's editorial board decided to offer their pages to the voices of fear and unreason?

First, on June 16, the Sun printed an Opinion article by Mark Geier, where he argued that his unfounded theories about the causes of autism make it okay for him to chemically castrate young boys. (I know this sounds shocking, but it's all too true.) I wrote about Geier two years ago: he and his son David administer what they called the "Lupron protocol" to autistic boys. They charge $5000-$6000 per month for their treatment, which is based on their belief that autism is caused by an excess of testosterone. Lupron, the drug they give to children, is a testosterone-suppressing drug that is the chemical equivalent of castration. It is a harsh treatment used to treat advanced prostate cancer. There is no evidence that it helps autistic boys. When the Chicago Tribune interviewed Simon Baron-Cohen, a professor and director of the Autism Research Center at Cambridge University, here was his reaction:

"The idea of using it [Lupron] with vulnerable children with autism, who do not have a life-threatening disease and pose no danger to anyone, without a careful trial to determine the unwanted side effects or indeed any benefits, fills me with horror."

Finally, after Geier had spent many years of selling his quack treatment to vulnerable families, the state of Maryland suspected his medical license suspected in April. Now, for reasons I cannot fathom, the Baltimore Sun has given him a huge billboard to ask for his license back so he can resume his discredited Lupron protocol.

(Geier also claims that mercury in vaccines causes the rise in testosterone levels that he claims to treat. He ignores the overwhelming evidence, re-affirmed again last year, that there is no link between mercury-containing vaccines and autism.)

This wasn't enough bad science for the Sun, which just a few weeks later published another Opinion piece, this one by anti-vaccine activist Margaret Dunkle. In her article, Dunkle claims that the vaccine schedule includes too many doses, and she further claims that these are harmful to children. This "too many, too soon" argumen is a constant refrain of the anti-vax movement (particularly Jenny McCarthy), despite the lack of science to support it. The evidence on her side: a new study published by Gayle Delong, claiming that autism rates and vaccination rates are linked. Who is Gayle Delong? It turns out she is an economist, not a scientist, and she's a board member of SafeMinds, a well-known anti-vaccination group. Delong's study has already been thoroughly debunked by Neuroskeptic, Sullivan, Liz Ditz, and others, who pointed out its deeply flawed statistics and other problems. Dunkle, though, was happy to jump on this junk science and ignore the real science.

The real science tells just the opposite tale. For example, a thorough review published in Pediatrics in 2002 showed that infants today are exposed to fewer antigens than they were 40 years ago, due to better vaccine formulations. It also found that vaccines "prevent the weakening of the immune system." Countless other articles have shown the efficacy of vaccines; the Immunize for Good site is a good source for a realistic picture of the risks versus the benefits.

Is the Baltimore Sun responsible for the anti-vaccination stories appearing on its Opinion pages? I can imagine their response: "we're just presenting both sides," they might argue. Debates are just fine when political opinions are concerned, but you don't get to argue about facts. Scientific facts are not debated from "both sides" - for example, we don't waste time arguing that diseases are caused by "miasmas" as was once believed. And when the subject is vaccines, presenting the anti-science, anti-vaccine argument has real, and harmful, consequences.

The science is clear: vaccines have been the single greatest boon to public health in the history of mankind. Vaccines have saved millions of lives, and allowed parents to live without the fear that their children will sicken and die. Here are some facts: pre-vaccination, whooping cough caused 9000 deaths per year in the U.S. Post-vaccine, this has dropped to 20 deaths per year. Pre-vaccination, there were 350,000 polio cases worldwide in 1988. In 2009, there were just 1,604, and there's a chance we can eliminate polio entirely. Back in 1921, diptheria caused 206,000 cases in the U.S. alone. In 2001, there were just 2 cases.

If we stop vaccinating, these diseases will return. And make no mistake about it: if measles, whooping cough, polio, and other vaccine-preventable diseases return, children will die. I'm sure that the editors of the Baltimore Sun don't want this to happen. But through their ignorance of the science around vaccines, they have allowed their newspaper to become a voice for a dangerously misinformed group of activists whose main goal is to stop vaccines.

How to correct the damage? Well, the Sun could publish multiple articles on their Opinion pages explaining how many lives vaccines have saved. They could help to re-educate parents about how valuable these medicines are, so they will demand them for their children, rather than refusing them as some parents now do. I have only a faint hope that the Sun's editors will take such action, but I'm calling for it anyway. They owe it to the public.