As an aside, here's little style question for you: since, in the US, it's customary to put punctuation inside quotation marks, should we consider as an extension of the same principle that punctuation also belongs inside web links?
I'm torn. In the html it really looks like it should be that way, but I don't know how I feel about links that include commas, say. These are the things that keep me up at night.
As another aside, an earlier Bad Science post shows a picture of the author holding his book, and I found myself a little surprised that he looked the way he apparently does. I wondered why, since I wasn't aware of having any particular reason to expect Ben Goldacre to look any particular way, but eventually concluded that since he illustrates his blog with an image of Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's Monster, I must have sort of expected him to look like that. You know, grouchy and with knobs on his neck. It's funny how any image associated with a name will become a background idea of how that person actually looks.
I should note that Ben Goldacre does not, in fact, resemble Boris Karloff in any very striking way.
Anyway, I liked the excerpt, which talks about the way scientific information is played in the media and how that has a lot to do with what's seen as important. He uses the autism/vaccine scare as an example, and notes that vaccine scares tend to be localized.
If I may quote at length:
Before we begin, it’s worth taking a moment to look at vaccine scares around the world, because I’m always struck by how circumscribed these panics are. The MMR and autism scare, for example, is practically non-existent outside Britain. But throughout the 1990s France was in the grip of a scare that hepatitis B vaccine caused multiple sclerosis.
In the US, the major vaccine fear has been around the use of a preservative called thiomersal, although somehow this hasn’t caught on here, even though that same preservative was used in Britain. In the 1970s there was a widespread concern in the UK, driven again by a single doctor, that whooping-cough vaccine was causing neurological damage.
What the diversity of these anti-vaccination panics helps to illustrate is the way in which they reflect local political and social concerns more than a genuine appraisal of the risk data, because if the vaccine for hepatitis B, or MMR, is dangerous in one country, it should be equally dangerous everywhere; and if those concerns were genuinely grounded in the evidence, especially in an age of the rapid propagation of information, you would expect the concerns to be expressed by journalists everywhere. They’re not.
I think this is really interesting, since I'm of course familiar with the vaccine/autism questions here in the United States, but wasn't aware that in France there was a concern that a vaccine caused MS. Also, from the sounds of it, in the US the concern is with all vaccines, whereas in the UK, the fear is that the MMR vaccine specifically is the focus of alarm.
Just another reminder of the importance of evaluating information carefully and not assuming that whatever's on the front page is the full story or even a very important story.
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