Holford Watch: Patrick Holford, nutritionism and bad science

In yesterday’s Telegraph, Damian Thompson asks whether we’re seeing “The last rites for alternative medicine?” For Thomson

CAM’s [Complementary and Alternative Medicine's] real problem…is shortage of proof. The information technology brilliantly exploited by unorthodox therapies is now being harnessed to spread the inconvenient truth that most of them don’t work. Sceptics in the blogosphere have assembled a global daisy-chain of links exposing the falsehoods of alternative practitioners.

Interestingly, Thompson believes that media nutritionists such as Prof Patrick Holford of Teesside University (and - in particular - Holford’s unjustified support for Wakefield’s bad science) have played an important role in CAM’s problems (more…)

In mid-March, Prof Patrick Holford of Teesside University chose to greet the start of Wakefield’s GMC hearing with a magnificent torrent of canards about MMR and autism. He sent out an e-mail to his mailing list, titled ‘The Truth about Vaccine Damage’. However, Holford appears to have an unusual concept of ‘truth’. He manages to confuse correlation and causation, imply some kind of dark conspiracy, misrepresent legal information, and argue from false authority. Managing all this in a single e-mail is somewhat impressive. I’m going to go over a few of Holford’s canards here. (more…)

A long time ago, MythBusters tested a scenario that recreated the classic vandalised police car scene from American Graffiti (it involved a chain being passed round the rear axle and being attached to a post). Adam Savage was brought to book by the camera crew for misremembering his predictions of the probability of the axle being ripped out of the car. When Savage was confronted with the video evidence of his errors and his revised estimates of the probability, he famously riposted: “I reject your reality and substitute my own”.

Professor Patrick Holford seems to be pursuing a similar line of defence (JKN as previous version on Holford site has disappeared). (more…)

In a 17/3/08 e-mail to his mailing list, Prof Patrick Holford of Teesside University discusses Wakefield’s work and the possible role of the gut in autism.

Wakefield’s hypothesis can be summarised as follows:
[A] subset of children…develop[e] a particular form of developmental regression following previously normal development, in combination with a novel form of inflammatory bowel disease…Exposure [to the MMR vaccine] leads to long-term infection with measles virus within key sites, including the intestine, where it is associated with lymphoid hyperplasia and acute and chronic mucosal inflammation.

It sounds like a plausible hypothesis, but it’s wrong. One would expect a professor carrying out research in this field to know this - but we will recap the evidence, in case Prof Holford might have missed some of it. This idea of a ‘novel form of inflammatory bowel disease’ is - as a scientist writing on Left Brain Right Brain argues - an example of how one can manufacture a disease (which then creates a market for treatments) (more…)

Professor Patrick Holford of Teesside University is a staunch supporter of Dr Andrew Wakefield and in 2007 set out his case as to why others should likewise support Wakefield. Holford has updated his website to explore the issue: Patrick Holford’s Concerns About the MMR Vaccine.

Patrick Holford claims to have remarkable insight into the causation of autism and how to “bring them back” when children are on the autistic spectrum. He suggests that there is hard evidence that links MMR and autism. (more…)

Professor Patrick Holford of Teesside University and Head of Science and Education at Biocare frequently upbraids professionals and researchers for what he perceives as their lack of up-to-date research.

Yet, it was with an extraordinary sense of deja woo that we learned about Patrick Holford’s Concerns About the MMR Vaccine. (more…)

Observer editor Roger Alton will step down at the end of 2007. It appears that the terrible MMR/autism coverage from the Observer - and their failure to issue a proper retraction or apology - played a role in this. Much more than the ‘mainstream media’, bloggers have been pushing this issue and refusing to let it go quietly away. Le Carnard Noir (the previous host of the Skeptic’s Circle) has even put up a counter marking the number of “weeks without [the Observer offering] a correction of apology about MMR and Autism.

We can’t know exactly why Alton stepped down - and other factors were definitely involved - but it is nice to think that we may have played a part. Alton ran a frontpage story he should have known was incorrect, then refused to offer an adequate apology - it has been 16 weeks now. (more…)

I’m pleased to say that - after I complained several times - the Observer has now corrected one of the many glaring errors in its MMR coverage: last Sunday, it ran this correction

In our interview with Dr Andrew Wakefield (News, 8 July) we referred to a US court case brought by 4,800 families claiming that their children had been made seriously ill by routine vaccinations. The article pointed out that the case centred on the use of the preservative thimerosal, which contains 50 per cent mercury. We said: ‘Crucially, it has never been an element of the MMR vaccine here’, which could suggest that it formed an element in US MMR. We are happy to clarify that it does not. (more…)

On July 5, the Observer published two terrible MMR stories that Kevin Leitch summarised nicely: The Observer “had decided to play the role of media dumbass. Obviously the mail and Private Eye are having an off day.”  The Observer have not properly apologised for these stories, or retracted them: Mike Stanton summarises much of the blog and media coverage on this.

I’ve been in touch with Stephen Pritchard - Readers’ Editor of The Observer - about two errors in particular.  As I noted last week, The Observer states that:

Critics point out that the US [Autism Omnibus] court case is not about the MMR vaccine itself but centres on the use of a preservative called thimerosal, which contains 50 per cent mercury and until a few years ago was added to routine vaccinations given to children in the US under one. Crucially, it has never been an element of the MMR vaccine here.

This statement is simply wrong.  MMR never contained thimerosal, anywhere, ever: it’s a live vaccine, so adding such a preservative would render it ineffective. Also, the Autism Omnibus has discussed MMR at length.

Stephen Pritchard did, eventually, get back in touch with me.  However, his response was somewhat strange and totally unsatisfactory. (more…)

I used to think that the Observer was a proper, accurate paper - that when you saw an article in it, you could assume that it was well-researched, probably accurate and, if a mistake was made, the Observer would correct it. Maybe I was naive before: at any rate, the Observer has very effectively disabused me of this belief. Apologies in advance for any typos etc. in the below: I’m sufficiently annoyed about this that I’m struggling not to break into any Stott-style swearing, so the bile might come out in an occasional spelling or grammatical mistake instead.

On 8/7/07 the Observer ran two awful articles on autism and MMR - and got things wrong in many, many ways. The problems with the Observer’s 8/7/07 article on autism rates and MMR, and Wakefield interview, have been dealt with at length - here and elsewhere - and I won’t go over all of these points again here: the Observer got things wrong in so many ways that it frankly becomes tedious to keep listing them again. They have also made a real hash of their two - woefully inadequate - responses to well-justified criticisms of the article: criticisms that were in many case far better-researched, more nuanced, and closer to what good journalism should be than Denis Campbell’s attempts at being a health/science journalist in the original Observer articles. The Observer have now removed one of the two offending articles from their website (although this appears to be for legal reasons, rather than a retraction due to the article being mostly wrong on most things it covered).

In this week’s Observer there is not (so far as I can tell from their website) any mention of their previous coverage of MMR and autism. After previously trying to cover up their horribly embarrassing failures with a bodged clarification, it looks like the Observer may now be hoping that if they don’t mention the elephant that is in the room - and currently stamping all over their reputation for quality journalism - the elephant will go away. However, that is not going to happen.

What I’m going to focus on here is the Wakefield/Campbell interview still on the Observer website - and two embarrassingly basic errors in the interview, which still remain uncorrected. In the interview, the writer (Denis Campbell, I presume) states that:

Critics point out that the US [Autism Omnibus] court case is not about the MMR vaccine itself but centres on the use of a preservative called thimerosal, which contains 50 per cent mercury and until a few years ago was added to routine vaccinations given to children in the US under one. Crucially, it has never been an element of the MMR vaccine here.

The Observer is simply wrong to imply that MMR contained thimerosal, anywhere, ever: this is a live vaccine, so adding such a preservative would render MMR ineffective. Moreover, the Autism Omnibus has discussed MMR at length: for example, Chadwick’s testimony to the court offers a devastatingly effective critique of Wakefield’s science. (more…)