How useful would it be as a public health practice to put up signs in public places that people who are not vaccinated should avoid them? For their own safety and for the safety of people who have compromised immune systems.

I am mostly thinking about hospitals because there are people there that are immunocompromised, but also places like sports stadiums, concerts, supermarkets, malls, airports, mass transit and any other place that many people congregate. In the past, didn’t they close theaters during epidemics?

I don’t know how feasible it would be to calculate the degree of risk that the congregating of certain groups would have, depending on the degree of immunization in the community. Then when the “risk” reaches a certain level gatherings of certain types could be discouraged.

For example something like the superbowl is the ideal place to spread something pretty contageous. The people who run the superbowl would do virtually anything to prevent it from being canceled, including making a vaccination record a condition of entry.

From that post: “I hear that someone told him [Hugh Heffner] that GR [Generation Rescue] was against girls and boys getting the Gardasil vaccine to prevent them from getting genital herpes and cancer, but Hugh’s hearing went a few years ago and he thought that Jenny McCarthy was hosting a benefit to pay for Gardasil for preschoolers. A natural mistake. But embarassing for Hef and the Gardasil Girls (TM), not to mention for GR.”

Just for amusement value. (Sorry if this isn’t a terribly erudite contribution… maybe I really should start reading those papers instead of procrastinating…)

I do read the blog, (though more often Orac’s paraphrases of your work - lazy, I know) but hadn’t read all the autism prevalence ones.

The letter Simon Baron-Cohen wrote to the British newspaper the Observer was after they published an utterly dire story talking about the “rising tide of autism” almost exactly a year ago (coinciding, not in the least coincidentally, with the start of the medical licensing misconduct hearing against Dr Andrew Wakefield). The story generated an enormous (largely blog-based) backlash in the UK; Ben Goldacre did several scathing stories on it which can be found here if you are interested (scroll down to find them).

I am a physiologist by trade so I tend to avoid blogging the MMR / vaccine / autism story as there are others much better qualified (like yourself). Though occasionally my annoyance with the credulous media coverage gets the better of me (and here).

One epidemiology-related issue I have written about is the “increased cancer risk from chlorinated water” idea that some of the water-woo people like to riff on. I did my take on this here, mostly dealing with the way risk is “framed”, though it sort of alludes to the epidemiology here and there.

Anyway, keep up the good work. There seems to be so much misuse of epidemiology at the “mock-scientific” end of woo that it is good to know you are out there shooting down their nonsense. It also helps no end as a blogger to know, when someone sticks up an idiotic claim, that you can say “well here’s a real epidemiologist explaining in detail exactly why that idea / letter / paper was a crock”.