Tabitha Southey: “On swine-flu conspiracy theories.”

This remix of two famous scientists has been making the rounds. I quite like it.

I’d forgotten about this until I began re-reading Great American Science Writing of 2007. Beside’s Mark Chapman’s excursion to the U.S. court case Kitzmiller v. Dover, it has an article about Bill Choisser’s discovery of face blindness. It’s a neurological condition that keeps people from recognizing faces. They will literally pass their own mothers on the street (as Bill once did) without recognizing them. It can lead to scarily funny moments, such as a fellow trying to start up a conversation with an attractive woman—who turns out to be his ex-girlfriend. People with face-blindness go to extraordinary lengths to live socially—to remember, and greet, people they know or meet.

The condition was known before, but in isolated cases of brain damage. The Internet, with its usenet groups and, later, Yahoo Groups, enabled the congenitally face-blind to find each other, realize how profoundly different they were from others, and break through some of their isolation. They provide subjects for research. The condition is now called prosopagnosia, from the Greek prosopos, face, and agnosia, not knowing. The odd thing is that they can learn to recognize houses or cars, the same way anyone else does. They try to learn faces that way But the talent of recognizing faces is so inborn and so sensitive that there’s really no way to recreate it by trying.

Bill’s book, Face Blind!, is online and free.

I wonder if people who “never forget a face” have an unusually large “Face Processing Area” in the visual cortex?

Over at Aetiology, Jan Helldén mentioned a study:

“I would like to point everyone who believes that there is a connection between autism and vaccination to a Danish study that includes almost one tenth of the population. It was published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2002 (KM Madsen, et al.: A Population-Based Study of Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccination and Autism, NEMJ Vol. 347:1477-1482, No. 19). The abstract says it all.”

ABSTRACT

Background:
It has been suggested that vaccination against measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) is a cause of autism.

Methods:
We conducted a retrospective cohort study of all children born in Denmark from January 1991 through December 1998. The cohort was selected on the basis of data from the Danish Civil Registration System, which assigns a unique identification number to every live-born infant and new resident in Denmark. MMR-vaccination status was obtained from the Danish National Board of Health. Information on the children’s autism status was obtained from the Danish Psychiatric Central Register, which contains information on all diagnoses received by patients in psychiatric hospitals and outpatient clinics in Denmark. We obtained information on potential confounders from the Danish Medical Birth Registry, the National Hospital Registry, and Statistics Denmark.

Results:
Of the 537,303 children in the cohort (representing 2,129,864 person-years), 440,655 (82.0 percent) had received the MMR vaccine. We identified 316 children with a diagnosis of autistic disorder and 422 with a diagnosis of other autistic-spectrum disorders. After adjustment for potential confounders, the relative risk of autistic disorder in the group of vaccinated children, as compared with the unvaccinated group, was 0.92 (95 percent confidence interval, 0.68 to 1.24), and the relative risk of another autistic-spectrum disorder was 0.83 (95 percent confidence interval, 0.65 to 1.07). There was no association between the age at the time of vaccination, the time since vaccination, or the date of vaccination and the development of autistic disorder.

Conclusions:
This study provides strong evidence against the hypothesis that MMR vaccination causes autism.

If I read this correctly, a vaccinated child has a 17% lower chance of getting an autism-spectrum disorder and an 8% lower chance of developing autism than one that is not vaccinated. In other words, vaccination seems to protect against autism. Interesting!

Thanks for the reference!

I didn’t realize how old the expression, “I’ll be hornswoggled” was until the discovery of this fossil: it has three eyes on the ends of its horns so that it can ogle from a vantage point. Luckily for both etymologists and entomologists, it was preserved in amber.

Unicorn fly, or Hornswoggler, in amber