Bartholomew Cubbins on Autism: January 2006

BC on Autism Episode 3: Thimerosal in the Water Bottle (mov)

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or Google video:

A quick and dirty discussion of the following article:

Determination of methylmercury, ethylmercury, and inorganic mercury in mouse tissues, following administration of thimerosal, by species-specific isotope dilution GC-inductively coupled plasma-MS. Qvarnstrom J, Lambertsson L, Havarinasab S, Hultman P, Frech W. Analytical Chemistry, Department of Chemistry, Umea University, S-901 87 Umea, Sweden. johanna.qvarnstrom@chem.umu.se

For a smaller file size try the (http://blip.tv/file/11044/) 3GP file format (small viewing window) here.

Interverbal's blog has a great discussion about the significance of the recent California autism numbers.

He's following up on a post on Ginger's blog that tried to demonstrate a perceived drop in the increase of autism cases in the state and also attempted to correlate that the drop (given the corresponding time lag) with the reduction of thimerosal in the vaccines given to young children.

On Interverbal's blog you'll get dry data and conservative but accurate analysis. He skips the posturing and melodrama all too common in discussions of autism. So check it out.

Bottom line: the jury's still out about the roots of autism.

-BC

Bartholomew Cubbins on Autism Episode 2: Waly et al, Mol Psych 2004

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A rough discussion of Waly et al, Mol Psych 2004. Overall, the work is very interesting but the materials and methods description leaves a lot to be desired and the effect on PLM was marginal, often only 2-fold across several orders of magnitude of effector concentration. Further, many questions arise such as the form of the metals (counterion description?) and ensuring that the ionic strength and the pH remained constant across the effector titrations. What would be particularly interesting is comparing this assay (using maybe a mouse neuro line) with a side-by-side animal model experiment.

-BC

For a great rundown on logical fallacies, check out Interverbal's blog detailing fallacies 1-23. Go to his main splash page for many more.

I'd bet a paycheck that most of us have committed one or more these at some point in the recent past. I'm sure I have and so I'll be keeping this close as a reminder.

-BC