New feature: Grand Conspiracy #1

I've been following the Autism Omnibus trial in Washington D.C. (if you have time, read some of the transcripts - they're fascinating - or for an excellent summary, head over to Autism Diva) over the last 2 weeks, and it got something stirring in my head. How many people would it take to pull off the grand conspiracy that the Mercury Militia and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are supposing?

First, an overview:

Over ten years ago now, Dr. Geier, an M.D. based out of Maryland, proposed the hypothesis that the preservative in vaccines caused autism. His hypothesis was based on two ideas. One, that many parents first noticed autism symptoms in their children shortly after their second year vaccinations. And two, that the preservative in vaccines (thimerosal) is a compound that contains mercury, and other mercury compounds are known neurotoxins. At the time, it was a shaky, but testable hypothesis.

Since then, numerous epidemiological and toxicological studies (summarized by the National Academies here) have failed to find any link between the preservative thimerosal and autism. In fact, thimerosal has been removed from most vaccines in Canada and the United Kingdom (and more recently in the U.S.) and none of those countries have seen a decrease in the level of autism, suggesting very strongly, that thimerosal does not cause autism.

Several groups and individuals (most notably Robert Kennedy Jr.) have suggested that a grand conspiracy exists that is duping the American public to prevent the truth being known (that is, that thimerosal causes autism).

So, for this to be true, who would have to be in on this grand conspiracy to dupe the American public?

-some employees of the FDA (at least a few hundred people)

-some employees at the CDC (at least a few hundred people)

-15 distinguished members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS)

-members of the labs of those 15 distinguished members of the NAS (at least 150 people total)

-the lawyers that work at the Health and Human Services Department (<100)

-the employees at the world's vaccine companies - an incomplete list being here (with employees in parentheses):

Sanofi-Aventis (96,000)
Chiron (5,000)
MedImmune (~10,000)
GlaxoSmithKline (100,000)
Emergent Biosolutions (?)
Wyeth (51,000)
Eli Lilly (44,000)

- the vast majority of academic autism researchers (~1000)*

- the vast majority of academic vaccine researchers (~10000)*

Giving a rough total of 300,000 people in on this conspiracy to poison the American people. Did I miss anyone?

* these numbers are a bit hand waving, as I get them by typing the word vaccine or autism into pubmed, and dividing the number of publications by 10

Friday beautiful science

Today's Friday Beautiful Science is a depiction of the tree of life, done as a sphere. Previously, I've discussed the limitations of depicting phylogeny on a standard tree, and suggested that doing it as a circle or a sphere would be more useful. Turns out I'm not the only one who thinks that. This is one particular 3-D visualization that I've taken from Tim Hughes at the University of Bergen (he has several others at his site). Yet other 2-dimensional visualizations can bee seen here.

63rd Skeptics' Circle.

The 63rd Skeptics' Circle is up at Relatively Science. Take a gander.

Colony Collapse Disorder - finally an academic publication

Given the time that has elapsed since the first mention of Colony Collapse Disorder in the popular press, it's nice to finally see some scientific publications trying to address this issue.

Last week, PLoS Biology, the free online scientific journal, published an Unsolved Mystery. Benjamin Oldroyd, a bee entomologist at the University of Sydney, writes about Colony Collapse Disorder:

On February 22, 2007, many Americans woke up to media reports that something was awry with their honey bees. A significant proportion of American beekeepers were complaining of unusually high rates of colony loss as their bees broke from their overwintering clusters. Loss of some colonies (say 10%) in early spring is normal and occurs every year. In 2007, however, losses were particularly heavy and widespread—beekeepers in 22 states (including Hawaii) reported the problem. Some beekeepers lost nearly all of their colonies. And the problem is not just in the United States. Many European beekeepers complain of the same problem. Moreover, beekeepers and researchers do not understand the specific causes of the losses.

He puts it in historical perspective:

Some winter losses are normal, and because the proportion of colonies dying varies enormously from year to year, it is difficult to say when a crisis is occurring and when losses are part of the normal continuum. What is clear is that about one year in ten, apiarists suffer unusually heavy colony losses. This has been going on for a long time. In Ireland, there was a “great mortality of bees” in 950, and again in 992 and 1443 [3]. One of the most famous events was in the spring of 1906, when most beekeepers on the Isle of Wight (United Kingdom) lost all of their colonies [4]. American beekeepers also suffer heavy losses periodically. In 1903, in the Cache valley of Utah, 2000 colonies were lost to a mysterious “disappearing disease” following a “hard winter and cold spring” [5]. More recently, there was an incident in 1995 in which Pennsylvania beekeepers lost 53% of colonies [6].

Often terms such as “disappearing disease” or “spring dwindling” are used to describe the syndrome in which large numbers of colonies die in spring due to a lack of adult bees [7,8,9]. However in 2007, some beekeepers experienced 80–100% losses. This is certainly the extreme end of a continuum, so perhaps there is indeed some new factor in play.

So this has been going on for some time.

He covers several possible causes, but zeroes in on two:

We have seen that a large number of factors can produce CCD-like symptoms. We have also seen that CCD is not new: CCD-like symptoms have been known to beekeepers for more than a hundred years but are sufficiently infrequent that when symptoms are severe, beekeepers become concerned that there is something new afflicting their bees.

Clearly CCD is a multifactorial syndrome. Some researchers have suggested that the bees are suffering immunosuppression. Certainly, expression of immune genes in insects is costly [56–58], and if bees are stressed by other causes, they may be less able to mount an effective immune response to pathogens [see Box 1]. This idea is now eminently testable, because the honey bee genome has been sequenced [59], and this provides researchers with new tools to tackle problems like CCD. A microarray of honey bee immune genes and genes from their pathogens is available [60], and this could be used to determine if the known immune genes are underexpressed in colonies suffering from CCD.

I suggest that another possible cause of CCD might simply be inadequate incubation of the brood. Thus any factor—infections, chronic exposure to insecticides, inadequate nutrition, migration in adult population, and inadequate regulation of brood temperature might cause CCD-like symptoms.

My hypothesis could be easily tested by removing brood from several colonies and incubating some of it at optimal temperature and some at suboptimal temperature. The brood would then be used to constitute new colonies in which some colonies comprise workers raised at low temperature and some comprise workers raised at optimal temperature. I predict that the colonies comprising workers reared at suboptimal temperature will show signs of CCD. Moreover, I would not be surprised if they showed higher levels of stress-related viral infections. These effects could act synergistically—more virus leads to shorter-lived, less efficient workers, that in turn leads to suboptimal temperature regulation, and more short-lived bees.

And he provides tests for his hypothesis. Brilliant!

Tangled Bank #82

Tangled Bank, a biology blog carnival, is up at Greg Laden. Go have a gander.

Edit: I particularly enjoyed the post Botox is Bonkers over at Microbiology Bytes.

Genetic engineering meets vaccinology: or how to get the attention of all kinds of protesters

ERV wrote yesterday about a cool, new genetically-modified food that has the potential to act as a vaccine against cholera. The basic idea is that they are expressing a gene from cholera in rice. When you eat the rice, you are exposed to the fragment of a protein from cholera and will make antibodies to it. That way when you are exposed to cholera in the future, you will be immune to it. What are the advantages of this approach? From ERV:

So really this rice is going to be ground up and put into pill form, which is fantastic on so many levels!

1. Dont need a needle. Ive said over and over and OVER (are you listening, HIV-Circumcision 'researchers'??) its really damn hard to make sure your needles/equipment is appropriately sterilized in the third world. I dont care how many seminars youve had on how to sterilize needles. It doesnt always get done. Plus, I dont think youll hear any kids complaining about a lack of needles ;)

2. Can be kept at room temperature. No refrigeration. Aint gonna always have that in the third world either. Sure you might have a fridge, but it might not have power. And they tested batches that were left at room temp for 1.5 years-- Still worked. AWESOME!

3. Introducing the antigen through the intestinal mucosa. These folks found that introducing the cholera antigen orally works great because cholera normally infects through your digestive tract! Convinces lots of sentinel immune cells to hang out in your intestine and wait for another cholera bug to float by!

I thought I would write about another super cool approach to vaccines of the 21st century, and this one is a little closer to home as my wife and I both work on things that are indirectly related to this. (Though I confess, I'm a little worried that this post will attract the anti-vaccination mob along with the anti-genetic-engineering crowd).

Live-vector vaccines are what a lot of folks are hoping will be the vaccines of the future. How do they work? Over the last 30 years, we've learned an awful lot about how several different bacterial pathogens work. Pathogens like Salmonella and Listeria actually enter your cells and express their genes inside you (these are not viruses, mind you, but bacteria that go intracellular). We also know an awful lot about how to stop pathogenesis at certain steps. There are all kinds of mutants that are able to go intracellular, but are blocked at later stages of pathogenesis, so are unable to spread, or unable to express certain toxins, or otherwise unable to complete the disease process.

How does this help us build vaccines? These mutants that are blocked at later stages of pathogenesis actually elicit an immune response from the host. That is, when your body sees foreign bacteria in their cells, you are able to mount a potent immune response to it, so the second time you see Salmonella or Listeria, you are able to fight it off (though given that Salmonella has so many different varieties, it is quite difficult to vaccinate against all of them). It also allows you to mount both an antibody response and a cell-mediated response (these are two different immune responses that I will write about later). The long and the short of it is that most vaccines only elicit an antibody response, which doesn't protect well against pathogens that climb inside your cells to evade the antibodies.

Well, these days it is rather trivial to genetically engineer Salmonella. And Listeria is also able to be genetically engineered. So it's easy to put genes from another pathogen into them. (And before you cry, "What?! You're building a superbug?!! - it takes hundreds of genes working in concert to create a pathogen. One or two genes does not a pathogen make). One example of a live vector vaccine is here. Folks at the Center for Vaccine Development put part of the tetanus toxin into Salmonella. They then gave the Salmonella to mice, and found that the mice made antibodies to tetanus that have been previously shown to be able to protect them from infection.

So, big fat hairy deal. They've built a vaccine for an infection that there is already a potent vaccine available. Well, this is a potent demonstration that this technology is viable. There are a bunch of labs working to build vaccines against disease in a similar manner (including for diseases that don't currently have available vaccines).

What are the advantages of this approach? It's similar to the rice vaccine above:

1. You can get both cell-mediated and antibody immune responses, whereas most subunit vaccines that are available only give an antibody response. In non-science language: your immune system responds in a way that's more likely to prevent disease.

2. No needles! (You can just drink this).

3. Easier shipment and administering of the vaccine. And shipping to remote locations (think parts of Africa & Asia) is much simpler. That, and you don't need to have anyone who is highly trained giving the vaccine. Merely an eyedropper and a bottle to drop it into a glass of water will do.

4. Cheap. Growing Salmonella is easy. And building genetically modified Salmonella is infinitely easier than genetically modified plants or animals.

5. Generalizable. It is easy to imagine building multiple different vaccines in this manner, and then administering them simultaneously (either as a single organism, or a cocktail of several different bugs).

But what is the downside? The upfront costs will be high. New vaccines are expensive as the manpower to make them is highly skilled, and the number of tests that they have to undergo to demonstrate safety is high.

The other major downside is the PR side. The public at large is so woefully uneducated about basic science issues, and even conventional vaccines have been controversial in the public arena. I can only imagine the anti-vaccination folks now:

Genetically modified pathogens! *gasp* You're playing God!

Yep, every time you save a kid from a disease you're playing God. Some people think that's okay. I think that the time is right to start telling people about these vaccines so that when they do start to become commercially available that there isn't a visceral, knee-jerk reaction against them. When I tell people about what I do, they say, "You genetically engineer bacteria? Why would you want to do that?". If they're calm enough to sit down for a few minutes and talk to me about it, they often ultimately agree that it is a good idea.

Disturbing searches

I've been a little quiet lately. Here's something that got me interested in posting: What are the sickest searches that people have done to find your blog? Let me clarify. These are searches that people did in Google that gave them a link for me (and on the ones I checked, I showed up in the first or second page). I've listed them below, including links so that you can see the context that those words came up in my blog (that said, a couple of them came up on keyword search pages combining multiple posts).

Well, I confess there aren't that many sick searches being done for my blog (should I be disappointed?). But the few disturbing ones that I did have were extremely disturbing:

"want to hurt your baby"

broken baby bones conspiracy

homeopathic remedy for autism son that likes mother's butt


Happily there are also some funny ones. Try:

can i own a howitzer??

alcohol consumption before getting the hpv shot

moon colony conspiracy

global infertility conspiracy (actually, add conspiracy to anything, I get a lot of hits that way)

ld50 of water

factories allow bugs in food

what does you worries about genetically food <-- this one just makes me laugh because of the grammar


hat tip: Pharyngula



Update: There's a funny post written to Google searchers here. Check it out.