Could coconut oil be an option for treating Alzheimer’s?

A new alternative treatment for Alzheimer’s doing the rounds seems to be based on a misunderstanding of the underlying science.
The title of this piece is a question posed by the ‘health correspondent’* in one of our local rags. It was inspired by a video doing the rounds on the internet of an American doctor who is using coconut oil to treat her husband’s Alzheimer’s. The doctor’s name is Mary Newport and she also has a book out: Alzheimer’s Disease: What If There Was a Cure? The Story of Ketones.
So what are ketones and could coconut oil be the new wonder cure for Alzheimer’s? Normally carbohydrates in the diet are converted into glucose which is then used by the body as fuel. However, when facing starvation, the body can burn fats in place of carbohydrates. The liver converts the fats into ketones which can be used in place of glucose. Where it gets interesting is that a particular high-fat diet is being used to successfully treat another brain disease – epilepsy. The ketogenic diet is a strictly controlled, high-fat, adequate protein, low-carbohydrate diet, which has been shown in numerous peer-reviewed scientific studies to be effective for controlling seizures in the group of children that don’t respond to medical treatment (so-called drug resistant epilepsy). Unfortunately studies have shown that it is less effective in adults.

So the ketogenic diet is more than just supplementing the diet with coconut oil. And it isn’t without side effects either, which can include weight loss, kidney stones, and constipation. While these are not insurmountable, the diet can be fatal for people with genetic disorders of fat metabolism. People like these will not be able to use the fats provided in the diet and if insufficient protein and carbohydrate are given, they will start breaking down their own protein stores for fuel, which can lead to coma and death.

So what about ketones and Alzheimer’s? Well it turns out that there are a number of studies looking at raising ketone levels in people with mild to moderate late onset Alzheimer’s. And it looks like they are doing it without the strict ketogenic diet. In a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, multicentre trial1, subjects were given a daily drink of a ketogenic compound called AC-1202 on top of their normal diets (and prescribed Alzheimer’s medication), and assessed for changes in cognitive performance.

But there was also a little twist to this story. One of the major risk factors for late onset Alzheimer’s is possession of one or more copies of the epsilon 4 variant of the apolipoprotein E gene (APOE4). The more copies of APOE4 you have, the higher your risk of developing the disease. So did AC-1202 improve cognitive performance? Yes, but only for people who didn’t carry any copies of APOE4. What this means is that your genes affect whether or not you respond to ketones. Interestingly, about 10 percent of subjects got a little better without any treatment too.

So what is AC-1202? It is NeoBee 895®, a common food ingredient made using glycerin from vegetable oil and fatty acids from, you guessed it… coconut oil! Although palm kernel oil is also often used. But before you race off to check your APOE4-type and stock up on coconut oil, let’s return to Mary Newport and her husband for a moment. Mary blogs2 about their life with Alzheimer’s, and despite being on coconut oil since 2008, all is not rosy. So if you started this article thinking that adding a little coconut oil to your diet would be the answer, I’m sorry to disappoint you. As Ben Goldacre would say, I think you’ll find it’s a little more complicated than that!

*A Vitamin and supplement peddler, so I am always a little sceptical of his claims !

  1. Henderson ST, Poirier J (2011). BMC Medical Genetics. 12:137.

  2. coconutketones.blogspot.co.nz

Just why is ‘pioneering’ cancer treatment so expensive?

A heartstring-tugging appeal in the NZ Herald doesn’t tell the full story.

Jesse Bessant is a little boy from Auckland with a very rare brain tumour. He has a ganglioglioma, a tumour that arises from ganglion cells in the central nervous system. As these tumours are very slow-growing, and with the location of his tumour (close to his brain stem) making surgery very risky, Jesse’s doctors have advised a ‘wait and see’ approach. However, the Bessant family have opted instead to try the Burzynski clinic in Houston, Texas, where Dr Stanislaw Burzynski offers his ‘pioneering’ antineoplastin treatment.

The catch? It’s going to cost the Bessants $375,000 to join one of Dr Burzynski’s clinical trials. The family’s fundraising appeal was covered by the NZ Herald in early March under the headline: “Hope for toddler with rare tumour”.

So what are antineoplastins and why is a clinical trial at the Burzynski clinic so expensive? Let’s start with those ‘pioneering’ antineoplastins. Might they be the next big thing in the treatment of cancer? I’m afraid to say that this is unlikely, as it turns out that Dr Burzynski has been trialling antineoplastins for over 35 years and has never produced strong evidence that his approach actually cures patients or increases their chances of long-term survival.

In fact the results of his trials don’t seem to have been published in the peer-reviewed medical literature and the American Cancer Society has gone so far as to recommend that people don’t spend their money on antineoplastin therapy. Dr Burzynski coined the phrase to describe a group of peptides that he identified first in human blood and then in urine and which he claimed to be “natural, non-toxic compounds that cure cancer”.

It turns out that the peptides can also be made by the body metabolising the drug sodium phenylbutyrate, which is how Dr Burzynski has been administering them for several decades now. Rather alarmingly, each 500 mg tablet of sodium phenylbutyrate contains approximately 62 mg sodium, meaning there is considerable risk of side effects including lethargy, weakness, irritability, seizures, coma and even death.

So if antineoplastins are just the by-product of sodium phenylbutyrate, why are Dr Burzynski’s clinical trials so expensive? After all, patients don’t usually have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to join a clinical trial. Sometimes they might even be reimbursed for taking part! It turns out that Dr Burzynski doesn’t just treat patients with his ‘antineoplastins’ anymore. Instead, he seems to be exploiting a very legitimate trend in real cancer therapy, often referred to as personalised medicine. Here patients are tested for particular disease markers which have been shown to respond to specific therapies. Orac, of the Respectful Insolence blog, has described Dr Burzynski’s “Personalized Gene Targeted Cancer Therapy” approach as “throwing everything but the kitchen sink” at the tumours. In fact, Dr Burzynski’s personalised therapy is part of a complaint against him by the Texas Medical Board, which is currently awaiting a hearing date. The complaint describes Dr Burzynski’s treatment of a patient with metastasised breast cancer, which included prescribing sodium phenylbutyrate with another four very expensive immunotherapy agents, none of which are approved for the treatment of breast cancer, and in combination with a chemotherapy agent.

In fact, it also transpires that Dr Burzynski owns the pharmacy that supplies the drugs he prescribes. His pharmacy is also accused of overcharging for drugs. A former patient, Lola Quinlan, has filed a lawsuit, claiming Dr Burzynski swindled her out of nearly $100,000 by using false and misleading tactics, including charging $500 per pill for drugs that could be bought elsewhere for a fraction of that price. And as well as the cost of drugs, there are his consultation fees, listed on one potential patient’s blog as:

  • Review of medical records prior to commencing treatment – $500
  • Initial consultation appointment – $1,000
  • “Genetic Tumor Markers” test – $4,000
  • Monthly treatment fee (with treatment suggested to last 4 to 12 months) – $4,500 – $6,000

All of which might explain why Dr Burzynski lives in a mansion with his initials in gold on the gates! But none of this was covered in the NZ Herald article. Don’t those being asked to donate deserve to know where their money is going? Instead, my emails to the journalist remain unanswered and Letter to the Editor unpublished. And the Bessant family continue to raise funds to send their child to be treated by a man who is accused by the Texas Medical Board of “unprofessional or dishonorable conduct that is likely to deceive or defraud the public or injure the public”. Pioneering? More like profiteering, if you ask me.

Seeing what you want to believe

Spoiler alert: Don’t read if you haven’t seen the film Contagion (which I highly recommend) but want to.

“Recently, I saw the new movie Contagion which is about the rapid spread of a virus and how it killed many people around the world while the health authorities refused to consider a potential (natural) cure and instead waited for the development of a vaccine.”

So starts the Ponsonby News’1 resident health ‘correspondent’ (and online vitamin and supplement seller) John Appleton in his December column. Funnily enough, I also saw Contagion, Steven Soderbergh’s latest film, and have a rather different recollection of the movie. I’ll start by saying I loved it. As science-based movies go, it’s pretty accurate, which isn’t something that can usually be said of science in movies. Well, apart from the fact that the scientists don’t seem to balance their centrifuges. But I’m not going to bang on about that. For those who haven’t seen Contagion, it’s a kind of worst-case-scenario-type movie involving a highly infectious virus (which spreads with the aid of inanimate objects like glasses and door handles – known as fomites( with a massive mortality rate. The virus spreads from an animal to a person and then pretty much rampages across the world with the help of aeroplanes and other forms of transportation. It is absolutely terrifying, even more so because, in this modern world of globalisation and habitat encroachment and destruction, it really could happen this way.

The film’s science advisor was Dr W Ian Lipkin, Professor of Epidemiology and Director of the Centre for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. He based the fictional virus in Contagion on Nipah virus, first identified in 1999, when it caused an outbreak of neurological and respiratory disease on pig farms in Malaysia, resulting in over 250 human cases, including 105 human deaths, and the culling of one million pigs. Nipah is carried by some species of fruit bats and its transmission from bats to pigs is thought to be due to an increasing overlap between bat habitats and piggeries in peninsular Malaysia. Like the fictional virus in Contagion, Nipah causes fever and headache leading to coma, but in 14-16 days not four.

Anyway, that’s enough virology. Let’s look at Mr Appleton’s recollection of the “potential (natural( cure” that the health authorities were ignoring, busying themselves instead with trying to find a vaccine. What Mr Appleton is referring to is a subplot involving a blogger and internet conspiracy theorist called Alan Krumwiede, played by Jude Law. He uses his blog to push a homeopathic cure called forsythia, while making money from it. Sounds awfully familiar to me. Krumwiede is portrayed as a real believer, not a cynical charlatan, which also sounds awfully familiar. The film nicely portrays the power of the internet to spread misinformation, as Krumwiede posts footage of himself clearly suffering some viral infection, then taking forsythia and surviving. Turns out he just had the flu. But his championing of a ‘cure’ while the authorities race to find a vaccine leads to a quite chilling scene where people stampede in a pharmacy trying to get hold of forsythia. I thought the director was pretty blatant in his lampooning of the Krumwiede character. But it was obviously too subtle for a true believer. A classic case of confirmation bias, where we see what we want to believe in the ‘evidence’ presented.

But am I just as bad? Where Mr Appleton sees the health authorities ignoring the ‘natural’ brigade, I see the film as a champion for science. Here we have teams of scientists all doing their bit; some are trying to find the source of the infection, others are trying to grow the virus in the lab and develop a vaccine, and then we have the ones dealing with the infected laboratory monkeys trialling potential vaccines. One of the characters even does a ‘Barry Marshall’2, dosing herself with the top candidate vaccine and then visiting her dying father in hospital to expose herself to the virus.

While the lesson I take from the movie is how we really should be addressing the issue of habitat destruction if we want to avoid such a pandemic in the future, Mr. Appleton uses it as a chance to push the importance of taking high dose vitamin C to prevent and treat disease. To be fair, at least Vitamin C has an active ingredient, unlike forsythia. Naturally he brings up the case of Allan Smith, the farmer with swine flu, whose family fought to have him treated with high dose vitamin C. He survived. Accompanying Mr Appleton’s column is a full page advert for the book ‘Primal Panace’ by Thomas E Levy, which promises to reveal how “Vitamin C can be used to prevent and treat hundreds of infectious diseases (viral and bacterial(…”. If we do face a pandemic, is this what the people of Ponsonby are going to be stampeding to their pharmacies to buy? Oh I forgot, they can buy it from Mr Appleton’s website. Enough said.

  1. The Ponsonby News is a monthly 150 page glossy A4 advertising magazine distributed free to over 16,000 homes and businesses in Auckland.

  2. The Australian medic who won a Nobel Prize in 2005 for his role in the discovery of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease; he famously drank a culture of H. pylori, developing gastritis a few days later.

I declare the following conflict of interest (which is more than John Appleton ever does…): I am a publicly funded research scientist working in the field of microbiology. I am a strong proponent of vaccination. And before you ask, I’m not in the pay of Big Pharma.

Pseudoscience for profit

Proponents of alternative therapies often throw around charges of vested interest when challenged. But often their own interests don’t bear scrutiny.

As this is the first of what I hope will be a regular column in the NZ Skeptic, I thought I would take the opportunity to tell you all a little bit about who I am and what has motivated me to write this column (besides David twisting my arm…). I am a research scientist with two obsessions: bioluminescence (the production of light by living organisms – think glow worms and fireflies), and nasty microbes. I feel immensely privileged to have made a career out of combining these two passions: in a nutshell, I make bacteria glow in the dark for a living.

After many years working in the UK, I was awarded a fellowship from the Health Research Council of New Zealand and relocated to the University of Auckland. Shortly after arriving in Auckland I joined Skeptics in the Pub and a fellow skeptic lent me a copy of Trick or Treatment. This fantastic book, written by Dr Simon Singh and Prof Edzard Ernst, reviews the evidence for the effectiveness of complementary and alternative medicine. I’m sure I don’t need to tell this audience that despite very little evidence for their success, these treatments are widely used.

In the final chapter, Singh and Ernst list some reasons why this might be. Surprisingly, scientists are on their list. Singh and Ernst argue that alternative health practitioners are highly vocal and many of their claims go unchallenged. They believe scientists have a responsibility to make their voices heard too. I found Singh and Ernst’s call to arms inspirational and took up blogging and writing letters to the editor as a result.

A very rich source of ire comes from a free monthly 150-page glossy A4 advertising magazine called the Ponsonby News, distributed to over 16,000 homes and businesses in Auckland. The Ponsonby News has a couple of ‘health correspondents’: John Appleton, who has a website selling vitamin and other supplements, and ‘Dr’ Ajit, an Ayurvedic practitioner with a couple of spas in Auckland. For those unfamiliar with Ayurvedic ‘medicine’, it is a system of traditional medicine that originated in India. Mr Ajit’s column is usually pretty funny, like urging people with hay fever not to eat stodgy food in winter for fear it will clog them up.

But John Appleton’s column usually worries me. A couple of months ago, he was inspired by an article he read in the Listener assessing the risks and benefits of hormone replacement therapy, which advised readers to avoid the internet and talk to their doctors instead. Unsurprisingly, Mr Appleton was somewhat horrified by this suggestion having “found the internet to be a fabulous resource” for researching topics like hormone replacement therapy.

Indeed, what he went on to write about was ‘bio-identical’ hormones which he implied are a safe and effective alternative to hormone replacement therapy. I wrote a letter to the editor to point out that the benefits of ‘bio-identical’ hormones were at best overhyped and at worst pseudoscientific nonsense1, which prompted a reply both through his column and in person. In it, I was accused of being part of the medical establishment, locked away in my ivory tower, only interested in “science for profit”, unlike those in the complementary and alternative medicine field, who he believes are doing “science for people”. He has since sent me an envelope full of reading material to show me just how bad evidence-based medicine is.

It was really interesting to read the propaganda material which has shaped Mr Appleton’s views on evidence-based medicine and the medical establishment. Needless to say, they are all non-peer reviewed articles posted on natural health websites.

I found one article in particular quite fascinating, as it trumpeted Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced gastroenterologist who insists there is a link between autism and the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccination. As a microbiologist, I am very familiar with Wakefield’s work, which is just plain old bad science (see NZ Skeptic 100). But Wakefield continues to be held up as a shining example of how a good doctor trying to do the best for his patients has been vilified by the medical establishment. If this kind of material is what Mr Appleton is using as his evidence base then I’m definitely alarmed!

I am left contemplating Mr Appleton’s concept of “science for profit” versus “science for people”. I have never thought of myself as doing science for profit. True, I make a decent living being a scientist but it is nothing like the money I imagine some of those involved in alternative medicine make. It is worrying that the alternative health field has successfully propagated the belief that it is purely motivated by improving people’s health and wellbeing, completely glossing over the fact that it is an extremely lucrative industry.

Indeed, one of the pieces of evidence that Mr Appleton used to back up the claims he made about ‘bio-identical’ hormones was a review paper written by a medical doctor called Kent Holtorf and published in an obscure peer-reviewed journal. Interestingly, Dr Holtorf declared no conflicts of interest despite the fact that he is founder of the Holtorf Medical Group which has offered ‘bio-identical’ hormone therapy for over 10 years. Science for people? More like ‘pseudoscience for profit’, if you ask me.

1‘Bio-identical’ was a phrase coined to describe plant-derived molecules believed to be identical to human hormones. No evidence has ever been presented to verify this. Many of the conventional treatments include similar plant-derived molecules. The difference is that the conventional therapies have been studied over many years so doctors know what the side effects and risks associated with them are. There is no evidence that ‘bio-identical’ hormones are safer or more effective; it is likely they have the same side effects and risks. As for it being pseudoscience, ‘bio-identical’ hormone treatment often involves blood or saliva testing to determine which hormones are deficient and hence tailoring treatment to the individual. While this sounds like a good idea, there is no scientific basis or indeed evidence that such a strategy is useful or relevant. In fact, hormone levels in the blood and saliva vary from day to day and are unlikely to reflect the actual biological activity in specific tissues.

The (bad) science behind the MMR hoax

The world-wide panic over the MMR vaccine was sparked by the actions of one doctor who breached several standards of scientific practice. This article is based on a presentation to the 2010 NZ Skeptics conference.

Every few years, the World Health Organisation (WHO) publishes a series of ‘death tables’, a summary of how many people died in a given year and the causes of death. The tables make interesting reading. The figures published for 2004 show that a third of all deaths worldwide were due to infectious diseases, a staggering 15.1 million people1. Of these, four million may have been prevented by vaccination.

As a microbiologist, I am staggered by the growing anti-vaccination movement. Vaccination has to be the success story of ‘modern’ medicine. Just look at the benefits: vaccination can provide lifelong protection, does not rely on correct diagnosis or treatment being available and can avoid some forms of auto-immune disease that can be triggered by infection. As the saying goes, prevention is better than a cure. While it is true that vaccines are not 100 percent risk-free, the benefits to both the vaccinated individual and the wider community (through ‘herd immunity’) far outweigh the risks.

What is fascinating about vaccination ‘hysteria’ is that different countries have different scares, even though they are using the same vaccines. One such scare, which has resulted in a resurgence of measles in a number of countries, relates to the MMR vaccine. This is a freeze-dried preparation of three living but disabled viruses: measles, mumps and rubella. In the 1990s, a British doctor by the name of Andrew Wakefield claimed there was a link between MMR vaccination and autism. He claimed to have discovered a new syndrome, which he called autistic colitis, in which autistic children were found to have a particular kind of gut disease.

He also claimed to have found that the appearance of symptoms of autism coincided with MMR vaccination, and children with autistic colitis had measles virus in their guts. His findings were based on a study of 12 children with developmental and intestinal problems, published in the Lancet medical journal in 19982. Nine of the children were diagnosed with autism. The children were believed to have been developing normally and then suddenly regressed, and parents were asked to recall how close to the time of MMR vaccination the symptoms appeared.

The study suffers from a number of crucial flaws, not least the lack of blinding or control groups, or potential for parents to incorrectly recall the appearance of symptoms. It also turned out that Andrew Wakefield had numerous conflicts of interest: he was receiving money from lawyers looking to build a case against a vaccine manufacturer, had submitted a patent on an alternative measles vaccine, breached ethics compliances and even paid children at a birthday party for donating blood.

The journalist Brian Deer was instrumental in bringing all of these conflicts to the public’s attention and has maintained a website (briandeer.com/mmr-lancet.htm) summarising his investigations into Wakefield and the MMR debacle. Recently, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) commissioned Deer to write a series of articles summarising his findings3-5. In 2010, Andrew Wakefield was found guilty of misconduct and struck off the medical register in the UK and the Lancet finally retracted his paper.

In an editorial accompanying one of Deer’s articles, the BMJ’s editors asked:

“What of Wakefield’s other publications? In light of this new information their veracity must be questioned. Past experience tells us that research misconduct is rarely isolated behaviour.”

What of his other work? Indeed, the Lancet paper was just the first in a series of papers by Wakefield attempting to link autism with measles. One of the things he showed was that measles virus could be detected in the guts of autistic children using a technique called the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). PCR is a fantastic technique used to amplify very small amounts of target genetic material to generate over a billion copies. In a nutshell this means PCR can take something that is undetectable and make it detectable. However, one of the downsides of such a sensitive technique is that it is very easy to contaminate, so proper controls are really important. For those who want to know how PCR works, there are some very nice videos online (youtube/eEcy9k_KsDI).
One of the crucial things needed to carry out PCR is a set of very specific ‘primers’ which recognise the region of genetic material that you want to amplify (Fig 1). You need primers to each end of the region of interest and then PCR amplifies the bit between the primers. So if the primers match the wrong region, you will end up with a large amount of the wrong thing, a classic case of garbage in, garbage out. So the important things to remember are:

  1. The primers need to be specific so that they only amplify what you are targeting and nothing else.
  2. You have to be very, very careful not to contaminate the reaction.

To make sure the primers are specific and nothing has been contaminated, it is crucial to include a number of controls alongside the samples being tested:

  1. A negative control which has water in place of any target genetic material which will tell you whether you have had a contamination problem or not.
  2. A negative control which has control genetic material that does not contain any of the target sequence which will tell you if your primers are specific enough.
  3. A positive control which has genetic material that does contain the target sequence which will tell you if your reaction has worked.

So, you have your samples and your controls, the PCR machine has done its dash and you are left with a little tube filled with billions of copies of the target sequence (or none if the sample was negative…). This can then be visualised by gel electrophoresis and you are left with something like the picture in Fig 2.
Lane 1 contains a size standard, lane 2 is the negative control containing no genetic material, lane 3 is the negative control containing no target sequence (the very faint band is just the background genetic material), lane 4 is the positive control containing the target sequence and lanes 5 and 6 are our unknown samples (which in this case are all positive). It is important to say here that very rarely would you see an actual gel published in a paper. Most results are just described as the number of positive or negative samples. This is important as it leaves the reader assuming the correct controls were done. But it doesn’t end with gel electrophoresis. To make absolutely certain, the amplified genetic material can be sequenced to confirm it is the correct thing. And if the claims you are making are wide-reaching and/or controversial then sequencing is exactly what should be done.

Andrew Wakefield hypothesised that exposure to the measles virus in the MMR vaccine was a factor in the emergence of his so-called ‘autistic colitis’ and that genetic material from the measles virus would be found in patients with the disease but not healthy controls. He supervised PhD student Nick Chadwick to investigate. The first paper they published (in January 1998) was in the Journal of Virological Methods, reporting a “rapid, sensitive and robust procedure” for amplifying measles RNA6. In August 1998 they published a second paper describing the use of the procedure to look for measles virus in samples from patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD)7. They state:

“These results show that either measles virus RNA was not present in the samples, or was present below the sensitivity limits known to have been achieved”.

They then went on to look at the children reported in the, now retracted, Lancet paper (that is, the ones with ‘autistic colitis’). Wakefield never published these results but Nick Chadwick did write up his PhD thesis in 1998. Brian Deer has put the relevant information from the thesis on his website (briandeer.com/wakefield/nick-chadwick.htm). Nick Chadwick concludes: “None of the samples tested positive for measles, mumps or rubella RNA, although viral RNA was successfully amplified in positive control samples”. Despite this negative result from 1998, Wakefield then appears as senior author alongside a team of Japanese researchers in a paper published in April 2000 in the journal Digestive Diseases and Sciences8 where they report the detection of measles virus:

“One of eight patients with Crohn disease, one of three patients with ulcerative colitis, and three of nine children with autism, were positive. Controls were all negative. The sequences obtained from the patients with Crohn’s disease shared the characteristics with wild-strain virus. The sequences obtained from the patients with ulcerative colitis and children with autism were consistent with being vaccine strains.”

In 2002 Wakefield then published another, bigger study of children suffering ‘autistic colitis’ with a team from Ireland9. They reported:

“Seventy five of 91 patients with a histologically confirmed diagnosis of ileal lymphonodular hyperplasia and enterocolitis were positive for measles virus in their intestinal tissue compared with five of 70 control patients.”

Yasmin D’Souza and colleagues at McGill University in Canada published a very nice study in 2007 in which they compared the primers used by both the Japanese and Irish groups with their own primers for the measles virus on a range of IBD and control intestinal biopsy samples10. Any positive samples were verified by sequencing.

And the results? The primers used by Wakefield and colleagues weren’t specific for measles virus. In fact, the amplified fragments were found to be of mammalian origin. What this means is that human samples should all be positive. Unsurprisingly, when D’Souza tried using genuine measles specific primers they “failed to demonstrate the presence of MV [measles virus] nucleic acids in intestinal biopsy samples from either patients with IBD or controls”. They also failed to find any measles virus in samples taken from over 50 autistic children11. This does suggest that Andrew Wakefield’s research conduct does not stop with the Lancet study.

There is now a huge body of evidence indicating that there is no link between vaccination and autism. Despite this, Andrew Wakefield is held up by many as a hero, fighting a corrupt system with the ‘evil’ pharmaceutical industry at its centre. Wakefield has recently published a book entitled Callous Disregard: Autism and Vaccines – The Truth Behind a Tragedy. One reviewer wrote:

“Dr. Wakefield sets the record straight. It was not he who showed callous disregard towards vulnerable, sick children with autism. It was the British medical establishment, the General Medical Council, the media and the pharmaceutical industry that threw the children under the bus to protect the vaccine program. This is a book for everyone who cares about our future”.

Who needs evidence, hey?

References

  1. WHO website. www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/en/
  2. Wakefield AJ, Murch SH, Anthony A, et al. (1998). Lancet 351(9103): 637-41. RETRACTED.
  3. Deer B (2011). BMJ. 342:c5347. doi: 10.1136/bmj.c5347.
  4. Deer B (2011). BMJ. 342:c5258. doi: 10.1136/bmj.c5258.
  5. Deer B (2011). Secrets of the MMR scare. The Lancet’s two days to bury bad news. BMJ. 342:c7001. doi: 10.1136/bmj.c7001.
  6. Chadwick N, Bruce I, Davies M, van Gemen B, Schukkink R, Khan K, Pounder R, Wakefield AJ (1998). Virol Methods. 70(1):59-70.
  7. Chadwick N, Bruce IJ, Schepelmann S, Pounder RE, Wakefield AJ (1998). J Med Virol. 55(4):305-11.
  8. 8. Kawashima H, Mori T, Kashiwagi Y, Takekuma K, Hoshika A, Wakefield A (2000). Dig Dis Sci. 45(4):723-9.
  9. 9. Uhlmann V, Martin CM, Sheils O, Pilkington L, Silva I, Killalea A, Murch SB, Walker-Smith J, Thomson M, Wakefield AJ, O’Leary JJ (2002). Mol Pathol. 55(2):84-90.
  10. D’Souza Y, Dionne S, Seidman EG, Bitton A, Ward BJ (2007). Gut 56(6): 886-888.
  11. D’Souza Y, Eric Fombonne E, Ward BJ (2006). Pediatrics 118(4): 1664-1675.