Measles Rampant Again, Thanks to Anti-Vaccinationists

Measles is on the march once more, even though vaccination against the disease has cut the number of worldwide deaths from an estimated 2.6 million per year in the mid-20th century to 110,000 in 2017. But thanks to the anti-scientific, anti-vaccination movement and the ever expanding reach of social media, measles cases are now at a 20-year high in Europe and as many U.S. cases were reported in the first two months of 2019 as in the first six months of 2018.

Highly contagious, measles is not a malady to be taken lightly. One in 1,000 people who catch it die of the disease; most of the victims are children under five. Even those who survive are at high risk of falling prey to encephalitis, an often debilitating infection of the brain that can lead to seizures and mental retardation. Other serious complications of measles include blindness and pneumonia.

It’s not the first time that measles has reared its ugly head since the widespread introduction of the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine in 1963. Although laws mandating vaccination for schoolchildren were in place in all 50 U.S. states by 1980, sporadic outbreaks of the disease have continued to occur. Before the surge in 2018-19, a record number of 667 cases of measles from 23 outbreaks were reported in the U.S. in 2014. And major epidemics are currently raging in countries such as Ukraine and the Philippines.

The primary reason for all these outbreaks is that more and more parents are choosing not to vaccinate their children. The WHO (World Health Organization), for the first time, has listed vaccine hesitancy as one of the top 10 global threats of 2019.

While some parents oppose immunization on religious or philosophical grounds, by far the most objections come from those who insist that all vaccines cause disabling side effects or other diseases – even though the available scientific data doesn’t support such claims. As discussed in a previous post, there’s absolutely no scientific evidence for the once widely held belief that MMR vaccination results in autism, for example.

Anti-vaccinationists, when accused of exposing their children to unnecessary risk by refusing immunization because of unjustified fears about vaccine safety, rationalize their stance by appealing to herd immunity. Herd immunity is the mass protection from an infectious disease that results when enough members of the community become immune to the disease through vaccination, just as sheer numbers protect a herd of animals from predators. Once a sufficiently large number of people have been vaccinated, viruses and bacteria can no longer spread in that community.

For measles, herd immunity requires up to 94% of the populace to be immunized. That the threshold is lower than 100%, however, enables anti-vaccinationists to hide their children in the herd. By not vaccinating their offspring but choosing to live among the vaccinated, anti-vaxxers avoid the one in one million risk of their children experiencing serious side effects from the vaccine, while simultaneously not exposing them to infection – at least not in their own community.  

But hiding in the herd takes advantage of others and is morally indefensible. Certain vulnerable groups can’t be vaccinated at all, including those with weakened immune systems such as children undergoing chemotherapy for cancer or the elderly on immunosuppressive therapy for rheumatic diseases. If too many people choose not to vaccinate, the percentage vaccinated will fall below the threshold, herd immunity will break down and those whose protection depends on those around them being vaccinated will suffer.

Another contentious issue is exemptions from mandatory vaccination for religious or philosophical reasons. While some American parents regard the denial of schooling to unvaccinated children as an infringement of their constitutional rights, supreme courts in several U.S. states have ruled that the right to practice religion freely doesn’t include liberty to expose the community or a child to communicable disease. And ever since it was found in 2006 that the highest incidence of diseases such as whooping cough occurred in the states most generous in granting exemptions, more and more states have abolished nonmedical exemptions altogether.

But other countries are not so vigilant. In Madagascar, for instance, less than an estimated 60% of the population has been immunized against measles – because of which an epidemic there has caused more than 900 deaths in six months, according to the WHO. Although the WHO says that the reasons for the global rise in measles cases are complex, there’s no doubt that resistance to vaccination is a major factor. It’s not helped by the extensive dissemination of anti-vaccination misinformation by Russian propagandists.

Next: The Sugar Industry: Sugar Daddy to Manipulated Science?

Does Climate Change Threaten National Security?

The U.S. White House’s proposed Presidential Committee on Climate Security (PCCS) is under attack – by the mainstream media, Democrats in Congress and military retirees, among others. The committee’s intended purpose is to conduct a genuine scientific assessment of climate change.

But the assailants’ claim that the PCCS is a politically motivated attempt to overthrow science has it backwards. The Presidential Committee will undertake a scientifically motivated review of climate change science, in the hope of eliminating the subversive politics that have taken over the scientific debate.

It’s those opposed to the committee who are playing politics and abusing science. The whole political narrative about greenhouse gases and dangerous anthropogenic (human-caused) warming, including the misguided Paris Agreement that the U.S. has withdrawn from, depends on faulty computer climate models that failed to predict the recent slowdown in global warming, among other shortcomings. The actual empirical evidence for a substantial human contribution to global warming is flimsy.

And the supposed 97% consensus among climate scientists that global warming is largely man-made is a gross exaggeration, mindlessly repeated by politicians and the media.

The 97% number comes primarily from a study of approximately 12,000 abstracts of research papers on climate science over a 20-year period. What is rarely revealed is that nearly 8,000 of the abstracts expressed no opinion at all on human-caused warming. When that and a subsidiary survey are taken into account, the climate scientist consensus percentage falls to between 33% and 63% only. So much for an overwhelming majority! 

Blatant exaggeration like this for political purposes is all too common in climate science. An example that permeates current news articles and official reports on climate change is the hysteria over extreme weather. Almost every hurricane, major flood, drought, wildfire or heat wave is ascribed to global warming.

But careful examination of the actual scientific data shows that if there’s a trend in any of these events, it’s downward rather than upward. Even the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found little to no evidence that global warming increases the occurrence of many types of extreme weather.

Another over-hyped assertion about climate change is that the polar bear population at the North Pole is shrinking because of diminishing sea ice in the Arctic, and that the bears are facing extinction. Yet, despite numerous articles in the media and photos of apparently starving bears, current evidence shows that the polar bear population has actually been steady for the whole period that the ice has been decreasing and may even be growing, according to the native Inuit.

All these exaggerations falsely bolster the case for taking immediate action to combat climate change, supposedly by pulling back on fossil fuel use. But the mandate of the PCCS is to cut through the hype and assess just what the science actually says.  

A specific PCCS goal is to examine whether climate change impacts U.S. national security, a connection that the defense and national security agencies have strongly endorsed.

A recent letter of protest to the President from a group of former military and civilian national security professionals expresses their deep concern about “second-guessing the scientific sources used to assess the threat … posed by climate change.” The PCCS will re-evaluate the criteria employed by the national agencies to link national security to climate change.

The protest letter also claims that less than 0.2% of peer-reviewed climate science papers dispute that climate change is driven by humans. This is nonsense. In solar science alone during the first half of 2017, the number of peer-reviewed papers affirming a strong link between the sun and our climate, independent of human activity, represented approximately 4% of all climate science papers during that time – and there are many other fields of study apart from the sun.

Let’s hope that formation of the new committee will not be thwarted and that it will uncover other truths about climate science.

(This post was published previously on March 7, on The Post & Email blog.)

Next: Measles Rampant Again, Thanks to Anti-Vaccinationists

Nature vs Nurture: Does Epigenetics Challenge Evolution?

A new wrinkle in the traditional nature vs nurture debate – whether our behavior and personalities are influenced more by genetics or by our upbringing and environment – is the science of epigenetics. Epigenetics describes the mechanisms for switching individual genes on or off in the genome, which is an organism’s complete set of genetic instructions.

A controversial question is whether epigenetic changes can be inherited. According to Darwin’s 19th-century theory, evolution is governed entirely by heritable variation of what we now know as genes, a variation that usually results from mutation; any biological changes to the whole organism during its lifetime caused by environmental factors can’t be inherited. But recent evidence from studies on rodents suggests that epigenetic alterations can indeed be passed on to subsequent generations. If true, this implies that our genes record a memory of our lifestyle or behavior today that will form part of the genetic makeup of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

So was Darwin wrong? Is epigenetics an attack on science? At first blush, epigenetics is reminiscent of Lamarckism – the pre-Darwinian notion that acquired characteristics are heritable, promulgated by French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Lamarck’s most famous example was the giraffe, whose long neck was thought at the time to have come from generations of its ancestors stretching to reach foliage in high trees, with longer and longer necks then being inherited.

Darwin himself, when his proposal of natural selection as the evolutionary driving force was initially rejected, embraced Lamarckism as a possible alternative to natural selection. But the Lamarckian view was later discredited, as more and more evidence for natural selection accumulated, especially from molecular biology.

Nonetheless, the wheel appears to have turned back to Lamarck’s idea over the last 20 years. Several epidemiological studies have established an apparent link between 20th-century starvation and the current prevalence of obesity in the children and grandchildren of malnourished mothers. The most widely studied event is the Dutch Hunger Winter, the name given to a 6-month winter blockade of part of the Netherlands by the Germans toward the end of World War II. Survivors, who included Hollywood actress Audrey Hepburn, resorted to eating grass and tulip bulbs to stay alive.

The studies found that mothers who suffered malnutrition during early pregnancy gave birth to children who were more prone to obesity and schizophrenia than children of well-fed mothers. More unexpectedly, the same effects showed up in the grandchildren of the women who were malnour­ished during the first three months of their pregnancy. Similarly, an increased incidence of Type II diabetes has been discovered in adults whose pregnant mothers experienced starvation during the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33 and the Great Chinese Famine of 1958-61.  

All this data points to the transmission from generation to generation of biological effects caused by an individual’s own experiences. Further evidence for such epigenetic, Lamarckian-like changes comes from laboratory studies of agouti mice, so called because they carry the agouti gene that not only makes the rodents fat and yellow, but also renders them susceptible to cancer and diabetes. By simply altering a pregnant mother’s diet, researchers found they could effectively silence the agouti gene and produce offspring that were slender and brown, and no longer prone to cancer or diabetes

The modified mouse diet was rich in methyl donors, small molecules that attach themselves to the DNA string in the genome and switch off the troublesome gene, and are found in foods such as onions and beets. In addition to its DNA, any genome in fact contains an array of chemical markers and switches that constitute the instructions for the estimated 21,000 protein-coding genes in the genome. That is, the array is able to turn the expression of particular genes on or off.

However, the epigenome, as this array is called, can’t alter the genes themselves. A soldier who loses a limb in battle, for example, will not bear children with shortened arms or legs. And, while there’s limited evidence that epigenetic changes in humans can be transmitted between generations, such as the starvation studies described above, the possibility isn’t yet fully established and further research is needed.

One line of thought, for which an increasing amount of evidence exists in animals and plants, is that epigenetic change doesn’t come from experience or use – as in the case of Lamarck’s giraffe – but actually results from Darwinian natural selection. The idea is that in order to cope with an environmental threat or need, natural selection may choose the variation in the species that has an epigenome favoring the attachment to its DNA of a specific type of molecule such as a methyl donor, capable of expressing or silencing certain genes. In other words, epigenetic changes can exploit existing heritable genetic variation, and so are passed on.

Is this explanation correct or, as creationists would like to think, did Darwin’s theory of evolution get it wrong? Time will tell.