About Time, Too!

Not before time (in fact, long overdue) the BBC has an article which explains why statistics are so fucking misleading - particularly in the media and from government.

Michael Blastland's article, here is very good and has a step-by-step guide to demonstrating the simple maths behind the sort of everyday shite the people over at the Daily Fail wind the middle classes up with!

In other news, I'm quiet right now because I have a demanding day job and more demanding business partner who will spank my botty if she catches me blogging again... at least until I finish Faircycle.com ;-)

I'm also waiting for Jade Goody to pass over because the news is so full of her these days that there's very little worthy of a good piss take and I don't want to join the throngs of other bloggers saying how good/bad she is. It's a dichotomy, I know, but someone has to have it.

Daily Mail In Dramatic MMR U-Turn

The Mail's online edition carries news that, "There have been more than 1,000 measles cases so far this year – putting Britain at risk of a deadly epidemic, health officials say."

Well there's a fucking surprise! If you don't give vaccine to your children, there's a bloody good chance they'll become infected and statistically, if MMR uptake drops year-on-year as it did thanks to (among others) The Daily Mail's grossly inaccurate harping, the chances become ever greater.

Of course, this isn't really a U-Turn.

Seems like every time the "MMR Causes Autism" debate crops up, The Mail is there screeching at the middle classes.

Surely The Mail isn't that bad, is it?

Oh yes it is...

This is the "respectable" newspaper that for years carried the "Frankenstein Food Watch" with it's stock picture of a guy in some Hazmat suit and effectively fucked up GM food research for decades. This is the paper that let an idiot journalist write a massive piece about how "Darwin got it wrong". That would be Charles Darwin, father of the Theory of Evolution.

GM food has a bit of a scary label largely because the people that fiddle with genes work in white coats in sterile conditions, but there's no evidence at all that it's harmful: and worse than that, what precisely do you think GM does?

Let me tell you this much: it doesn't make living things by grafting dead things together like Victor Frankenstein did. It doesn't hang limp bits of barley from the top of dark castles in the middle of massive thunderstorms in the hope that a passing bolt of lightning will bring it back to life.

What it can do is increase the plant's resistance to disease; or its nutritional value. It can make a plant that can thrive in the harshest of conditions and still crop well.

It could help solve the world's hunger problem.

But the Daily Mail think GM is playing god - so fuck the starving children in Africa, we'll send them money instead which their corrupt government officials will use to line their own nests.

Way to go, Daily Mail.

Dail Mail Wows at Downs Increase: Wrong Again!

Research for the BBC, reports the Mail has resulted in: "An increasing number of women are choosing to bring a Down's syndrome child into the world rather than have an abortion. More babies are being born with the genetic condition than before screening was introduced 20 years ago, figures show. And research reveals that many parents believe the social stigma associated with Down's has been removed and the quality of life for these babies has improved."

But as my fellow blogger, Dr Ben Goldacre (that's a GP type doctor, not a quack) at badscience.net observes, the real factor is obscured but the simple application of a statistic.

Live Down's Syndrome births are up by about 4% so that means, according to the Mail, that more parents (mothers in particular are choosing to keep a child with this moderate genetic disorder). As usual no one bothers to check for other contributing factors and the anti-abortion (anti-choice) leaning Mail is delighted at this news.

And as usual, they are wrong.

The simple fact is because of the changes in modern life, women are choosing to have their children much later in life. In fact, in medicine, a woman is considered to be a geriatric mother if she becomes pregnant at over 30.

Holy crap!

This isn't as staggering as it sounds, we're all living a very long time compared with our recent ancestors largely due to modern medicine and better diet.

As abhorrent as it sounds to us in the modern West, what we rightly regard as children today, would have been parents at the ripe old age of perhaps 11 or 12 only a few thousand years ago. Mind you, they would also have likely been dead before they hit 35 too.

Nature didn't intend for the human animal to live as long as it does; so by choosing to fuck with the natural order, we're playing dice with our offspring. No one is sure what causes Downs syndrome, but what we do know is that the instance rises dramatically with maternal age; paternal age is also though to be a factor although less so.

For a woman usual age, the chance of conceiving a child with Down's is about 1-in-1600 but by 43, the chance of is about 1-in-40. Of those women (of all age groups) who do, about 9 from every 10 actually terminate the pregnancy.

Since more women are selfishly putting their careers first than ever before, there's been a dramatic upsurge in Down's conceptions - NOT a reduction in terminations.

The more you put in, the more you get out - it's so simple even I can understand it, which is probably why the fuckwits at the Mail won't hire me.

Will the Mail be publishing a correction? Fuck no!

Jenny McCarthy is pretty. Stupid

McCarthy is pretty and full of a sense of her own self-worth - and that's a problem.

Jenny believes in god (oh shit!) and she further believes that autism can be caused by the MMR vaccine (double-shit with ice-cream!) and further to that it can be cured (FUCK NO!)

But only if you make a pact with the almighty, according to Jen!

As a high-functioning Asperger's sufferer who didn't receive an MMR jab (because it wasn't invented then) I can honestly say I'm sick of "famous" people who try to lord it over the rest of us with ideas based on junk science that has been roundly shot down in flames: many, many times.

Yet still papers (read: "rags") like the UK's Daily Mail - one of the most pernicious spreaders of bullshit dressed up as serious journalism - still refuse to admit that Dr. Andrew Wakefield was a twat. His entirely flawed research (on the say-so of a few concerned patients) was motivated by greed and the whole thing is a crock.

Children die of measles every time there is an outbreak, yet more will go blind, deaf and suffer varying degrees of brain damage and mumps is fucking nasty - particularly in adult men; rubella causes serious defects in unborn children.

But Jenny "I Know Better Because I Is Famous" McCarthy won't be dissuaded.

I'm truly sorry to learn that her child is affected; but if he is truly affected by autism there isn't a proper doctor on the planet who can cure it. You can live with high-functioning Aspergers and milder forms of autism because it's a spectrum. It goes all the way from light grey where I exist through to the blackest depth of ... well, whatever it is that goes on inside the minds of those seriously affected. It's a very wide chasm between mild and serious autism; rather like stubbing your toe to having every bone in your body crushed.

Jenny won't accept that - even if some poor (educated) person tries to tell her she won't listen.

www.stopjenny.com

I just wish Andrew Wakefield would grow a pair and admit he fucked up. Maybe then this would show some signs of going away so we can get on with having normal(ish) lives and the parents/carers of sufferers wouldn't have to cling to an artificial hope.

But the damage is already done. Wakefield and those who follow him have blood on their hands; and the "wake" will continue to rattle on through generations as parents refuse a life-saving inoculation and their children suffer as a result.