Posts Tagged ‘measles’
British Doctor Faked Data Linking Vaccines to Autism, and Aimed to Profit From It
Andrew Wakefield, who has been stripped of his medical license and whose study has since been retracted, explored business opportunities designed to capitalize on his fraudulent findings, according to the BMJ. The businesses were intended to earn huge sums of money in Britain and the U.S. — up to $40 million a year — by providing unique diagnostic services to test for the presence of measles in patients with Crohn’s disease.
Wakefield planned to develop his own supposedly safer vaccines after public fears were sufficiently stoked, according to the report, a two-part investigation by British investigative journalist Brian Deer. He outlines how Wakefield accepted fees from a lawyer who eventually filed (and lost) an autism-vaccine lawsuit.
The story also describes how the Royal Free Medical School in London supported Wakefield, who wrote an 11-page business plan while his first patient was still in the hospital.
The scheme was predicated on a link among vaccines, autism and bowel problems.
Wakefield’s 1998 paper in The Lancet claimed a link between autism and the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella, launching an international backlash against childhood vaccinations. But the research was discredited by follow-up studies, and none has ever established a link between vaccinations and autism. The Lancet in February 2010.
Last week, Deer also outlined in Wakefield’s data, including the nugget that his study included data from 12 children but he studied at least 13, including some who showed symptoms of autism before they were vaccinated.
Wakefield told CNN the allegations were false: “The findings that we have made have been replicated in five countries around the world,” he said.
Wakefield’s research has been widely discredited, but he is a hero to a small, vocal cadre of supporters who believe the medical establishment has been trying to silence him. Now that they know he’s been exposed as a huckster as well as a fraud, perhaps they will think twice.
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Inhalable Measles Vaccine Set to Debut in First Human Trials
Snort a dose of prevention for measles or other diseases
The inhalable vaccine bypasses the need for icky needles by mixing liquid carbon dioxide with weakened measles virus. That process creates microscopic bubbles and droplets which dry out and become an inhalable powder. Patients can then inhale their protection through a plastic nozzle similar to the neck of a plastic water bottle.
Making the breakthrough required researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder to develop a mixing device known as the Carbon Dioxide Assisted Nebulization with a Bubble Dryer, or CAN-BD. The device mixes two streams of fluid and then rapidly expands them to atmospheric pressure, before mixing in warm nitrogen to try the tiny bubbles and droplets.
"One of our primary goals of this project is to get rid of needles and syringes, because they frighten some people, they hurt, they can transmit diseases and there are issues with needle disposal," said Robert Sievers, a biochemist at CU Boulder. His innovation also represents a cost-effective method, at just 26 cents per dose, or about the cost of an injectable vaccine.
The no-needles approach has proved popular elsewhere. Australian scientists have developed a postage stamp-sized that can deliver a tiny but effective dose through the skin.
A first focus on measles makes sense, given that the inhalable vaccine goes directly to the lungs where measles typically attacks. But trypanophobes can also keep their fingers crossed for an inhalable treatment which delivers antibiotic particles for treating tuberculosis, or an inhalable treatment for the papilloma virus which causes cervical cancer.