Or I’m about to be, and my wife is getting a wee bit impatient, so I need to start packing, etc.  You know the drill.

Several weeks ago I argued that much of the the observed increase in autistic disorder over time can be explained by three phenomenon: (1) Diagnostic criteria have changed over some part of the period during which increases have been observed. The diagnostic criteria for autistic disorder were broadened over time. (2) The average age of […]

I’ve spent part of the last couple of days reading some of the arguments against the modern U.S. childhood vaccine schedule at places like the National Vaccine Information Center, SafeMinds, and in the medical investigative reporting of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. One of the statements you run across quite often is that today’s children — […]

Get a load of this. David Kirby has rewritten and re-posted his story from Friday (June 20). The new June 21st story is entitled, CDC: Vaccine Study Used Flawed Methods. It starts with the following:
(NOTE: My original post on this topic mischaracterized the 2003 CDC vaccine investigation as an “Ecological Study,” which it was not. […]

“Medical reporter” David Kirby has delivered a potentially explosive report to his unfortunate and misinformed minions at the Huffington Post, in which he shows a startling string of misunderstandings and complete lack of knowledge of basic epidemiologic design and methods. Furthermore, he writes that Dr. Julie Gerberding “admits to a startling string of errors in […]

In this week’s issue of Nature, there are three articles relevant to the above theme:
1. Sandra Titus of HHS’s Office of Research Integrity and two colleagues surveyed 2,212 researchers throughout the United States. Titus’s team found that almost 9% of the respondents in their survey, mainly biomedical scientists, had witnessed some form of scientific misconduct […]

On behalf of the Office of the Surgeon General and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), we would like to extend an invitation to join us for the Surgeon General’s Conference on the Prevention of Preterm Birth via webcast on June 16 and June 17, 2008.
Preterm birth remains […]

It may surprise you to learn that I’m relatively new to the blogosphere, both as a writer and as a reader. For example, when I started this blog in the middle of April, I had no idea there were so many science blogs. I was also naive enough to think that that any scientific question […]

A recent article by Deirdre Imus on The Huffington Post is long tirade against Alice Park’s Time magazine cover story, How Safe Are Vaccines? It’s been pointed out on other science blogs (and I wholeheartedly agree) that the the Time magazine article is one of the better pieces of medical journalism this year. I really […]

This title isn’t quite correct, but I couldn’t resist, since it sounds so catchy, evoking images of harmonica playing in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Rock Hill is located in beautiful York County, South Carolina, just off Route I-77, about 30 miles from Charlotte, North Carolina. From my nerdy scientist’s point of view, the people of […]