Holford Watch: Patrick Holford, nutritionism and bad science

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…)

Mark Twain has been quoted (perhaps incorrectly) as saying that “A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” As shown on this blog and elsewhere, the Observer really messed up in its autism coverage. It ran a front page article by Denis Campbell - giving a very misleading account of some draft research, and completely messing up its figures in order to inaccurately argue that autism prevalence has risen to 1 in 58 UK children.

The Observer still hasn’t properly apologised for most of its errors, and at least one of the falsehoods that originated in that paper appears to have spread - not just across this world - but into the virtual world of Second Life. In their account of a piece on autism and Second Life, Channel 4 claims that “New research suggests as many as one in 58 children may have autism.” No, it doesn’t. Unless you either can’t do basic stats and don’t know how to interpret research, or you believe what the Observer says without bothering to fact-check it.

Oh well. I hope that Denis Campbell and his colleagues at the Observer feel very, very proud.

UPDATE: right, have now watched the offending segment more closely.  They mention the 1 in 58 figure in the video segment, too.  I’ve contacted Channel 4 to ask for a correction - will see if they fix their mistakes.

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…)

Now I’m annoyed with the Observer. I had a nice Holford Watch post mostly written - looking at some particularly odd claims for vitamin C - and was planning on spending the rest of the day relaxing with a newspaper. Then I saw the Observer’s truly dismal (2nd) attempt at an apology for their terrible MMR/Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) coverage. Now I can’t buy myself an Observer, and feel obliged to insert a break in your usual Patrick Holford coverage to write another post on the Observer.

Lots of the mistakes in the Observer’s latest ‘clarification’ have already been covered by Ben Goldacre and Mike Stanton. The Observer’s mistakes have also been extensively covered already: in the Guardian, the Times, the BMJ, a number of blogs, and in numerous e-mails and letters to the paper (I wrote to the Observer Readers’ Editor myself, to point out some of their mistakes).

The Observer coverage of this is so bad, though, that there’s always room to point out more errors. Incredibly - despite being told, repeatedly and very publicly - what they got wrong, the Observer continued to make more mistakes in their ‘clarification’ of the failures in their MMR/autism coverage. I will summarise some of these below: (more…)

A short break from your usual Patrick Holford coverage - courtesy of some more awful mainstream media MMR reporting. It was disappointing to see the Observer running such god-awful autism/MMR stories, but to see the BMJ pick up the Observer’s inaccurate figures (the claim that 1 in 58 children is on the autistic spectrum) is even more disturbing: this is a journal that should know how to do maths, and should know what a diagnosis is. I’ll deal with the BMJ claim first, and then move onto some jaw-droppingly awful MMR reporting in the Guardian. (more…)

This blog has been critical of Holford’s writing on MMR, autism and Wakefield. We were surprised that Holford made such a hash of summarising the evidence on this issue, and especially disturbed that he failed to note that Wakefield faced serious charges from the GMC - including the charge that he carried our unethical, unnecessary, painful and potentially harmful experiments on vulnerable children. Naturally, I expected that - even if Holford chose not to let his readers know about the serious charges Wakefield faced - the mainstream media would offer a more accurate summary of the issues. At least as far as the Observer is concerned, I was disappointed. My next post will look in more detail at the ethics of experimenting on children - if right-on papers like the Observer are totally incapable of doing a competent job of this, maybe blogs can offer slightly less dismal coverage - but first I think that the Observer deserves some attention.

Last week, the Observer ran a jaw-droppingly awful front page article on MMR. Luckily, though, they have a Readers’ Editor - Simon Pritchard - to correct this type of mistake. Well, kind-of. In fact, in a “short piece…riddled with self-exoneration“, Pritchard fails to correct most of the mistakes in the original article, and actually includes basic mistakes in his own column. Genius.

Pritchard ends his column by stating that “the central point, in my view, is that the leaked story of the apparent rise in the prevalence of autism was a perfectly legitimate and accurate story in its own right, which did not need the introduction of the MMR theory.” However, this was only a draft study and therefore was not reliable. Prof. Baron-Cohen (a prominent participant in the team behind the leaked study, described by the Times as “head of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University and one of the most authoritative figures in the field”) makes clear that the leaked draft was at a stage where it “is as accurate as jottings in a notebook”. More damningly, the alarmist 1/58 autism rate referred to by the Observer was, um, not a measure of autism diagnoses - but results of a pretty basic questionnaire, which showed that 1/58 research subjects were at risk of being on the autistic spectrum. Moreover, for Baron-Cohen we should interpret the current rise in autistic spectrum disorder diagnoses as “more to do with diagnostic practice” than a rise in autism rates. So the leaked study only showed an ‘apparent’ rise in autism rates for those who lack basic statistical and critical analysis skills. Perhaps the Observer should get a Science Readers’ Editor - so that it can properly correct its mistakes in future - or just find a Readers’ Editor with basic analytical skills. (more…)