Yet another antivax paper RETRACTED :D

Today I planned to write about the autonomous metro system but this was such a bombshell of the news I simply couldn't resist to comment.

Especially because it arrives from my own region of the world. More precisely, from neighbouring Croatia.

Plitvice, thank you 500px for this free photo

Just a Small Intro:

For more than 20 years there was not a single case of death in Serbia, caused by Measles and it was the product of the well-organized society. The education was the top notch, overall understanding of the world (among youth, not WWII generations) was good. In the pre-internet age, there were plenty of good magazines. And than... The war, breakup and the whole region spiralled into the Age of Stupidity.

Our music became stupid. Our elites became corrupted and we run to the safety of our homes during the Solar Eclipse?! Yes, in 1999, people were hiding. From the solar eclipse?!

After fostering stupidity for a couple of decades more, we got 15 deaths as the consequence of the growing anti-vax movement. Just to put it into the perspective, it would mean 700 deaths in the USA, in about 6-month period.

And even crazier, in the region of Dubrovnik, the percentage of vaccinated children is about 55%?!
In the Dubrovnik, the city of Renaissance science. The city of Rudjer Boskovic and the city that invented the quarantine, some 650 years ago!?

The word "quarantine" originates from the Venetian dialect form of the Italian quaranta giorni, meaning 'forty days'. This is due to the 40-day isolation of ships and people before entering the city-state of Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik, Croatia). This was practiced as a measure of disease prevention related to the Black Death. Between 1348 and 1359

What's going on with this world!!!

Retracted Stupidity:

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Sometimes I'm wondering how some completely incompetent persons can still be in science?
If you don't know how to handle a gun and you shoot unintentionally at your colleagues on daily basis - you can not be a policeman.

If you want to read this garbage (that's now retracted), follow the link

Ok I admit, the Title is cool:

Subcutaneous injections of aluminum at vaccine adjuvant levels activate innate immune genes in mouse brain that are homologous with biomarkers of autism

I'll skip my common style of citing and answering, to keep it shorter and more concise:

Also, some experts have already debunked it in a so refined way that it's difficult to say antything else 1

• mice are not humans. Humans and mice don't accumulate the Al, in the same way,
• the dosage of Alhydrogel was incredibly high, several folds higher than the dosage in children
• Now take at look at the actual results, Figure 1, Page 44

And this is the answer from the real expert:

There is also the problem that they used old literature to select their gene targets when much more recent research has been done. By happenstance, they did measure some of these same genes in their study. However, their results do not match has has been measured in children that have been diagnosed with autism. For example, RANTES was shown to be decreased in children with autism. In Shaw’s work there was no statistical difference in RANTES expression between mice given the aluminum treatment and those receiving saline. Likewise, MIP1alpha was shown to be decreased in developmentally delayed children but was shown to be increased in the aluminum treated mice. This was also the case for ILIb which was found to be elevated in children with moderate autism yet there was no statistical difference between the mice receiving the aluminum treatment and those receiving saline. In fact IL-4 was the only gene to follow an expression pattern similar to what was found in children with severe autism (elevated in both cases). source

• the next thing is very popular: use the wrong technique and present it as it's the right technique. Instead of using the real-time RT-PCR, they used semi-quantitative RT-PCR

The greatest advantage of all however, is that real-time PCR data can be used to perform truly quantitative
analysis of gene expression. In comparison, old fashioned PCR was only ever semi-quantitative at best. source

This is just a 3-page brochure, but it's very good

The most absurd point is the munching with the gels. In Photoshop, with some clear artefacts caused by image compression.
Click here to see it.

• And my favourite part for the end: bad statistics

For some unreasonable reason, the pinnacle of statistics in the majority of papers published in biology is the t-Test. T-test itself is not bad, but... It works with the data that follow Gaussian distribution. If the data show some other distribution - you are using the wrong test. Also, in order to have any distribution, the size of the sample should be large enough. And if you combine non-Gaussian distribution of data with the small size of the sample - it will be very, very wrong.

In conclusion:

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Science wins again!

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They used the wrong animals. Filled them with the incredibly high amount of aluminium. They analysed the expression of the genes using the wrong technique. Then they used very poor Photoshop to alter the results and finally, after all those flaws, they used the wrong statistics.

There is something rotten in the state of Denmark

Why do we still have this XIX century principle of publishing that is very prone to the influence of inglorious and dishonest people - I don't know.

References:

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• The retracted waste of time, link
• The absolute domination and debunking, link
• Softer version, napisano na Hrvatskom, link