Hilary's Desk

Perhaps this Australian documentary should have been labelled...

Totally missing the point. Or .. A bunch of Lies.  Take your pick.

The Australian 60 Minutes journalist who had the responsibility for doing the research for this programme, is professionally incompetent.

You will not understand this blog unless you take the time to download all the full text medical articles, tables, graphs etc in this blog, and study for yourself what a 60 minutes journalist refused to look at.  Or .... chose not to.

The increase in pertussis has nothing to do with the unvaccinated at all.  It's all happening because doctors in Australia have finally woken up to the fact that pertussis can happen in vaccinated people and are testing for it.

The reason all the old studies over-estimated pertussis vaccine efficacy was, as Cherry said in a 1998 medical article, that doctors believe that vaccinated people never got pertussis, so they never diagnosed it.  SIMPLE.  Pertussis after a vaccine was coincidence and something else.   According to Dempsey 2009, that situation still exists in USA today. 

As to the Australian whole cell whooping cough vaccine, it was implemented solely on the basis of trust, because as CDI admitted in 1994, there were NEVER any efficacy tests done on it, and there were no "serological correlates" or tests to prove immunity, for them to use as a basis of discussion anyway. 

Wonder what the Australian public would have said back then, if some doc had said, "We don't know if this works, because we don't know how to test for immunity to pertussis, but we assume this bright idea is a good one."

The Australian CDI went one further in 1997, and admitted that they ALSO... didn't collect data on the vaccination status of whooping cough cases either.  Read Full Blog

Further to the superb piece in today's Otago Daily Times paper written by Otago Medical Schools Professor of Medical Ethics (and neurologist) Professor Grant Gillett, calling into question the ostrich attitudes of medical practitioners, Read Full Blog

 Professor Hemila quite rightly asks sciblogs why they blethered on about mice and cancer instead of actually DOING a literature review on vitamin C and Pneumonia....  Did Sciblogs...  actually put their brains into gear?  Professor Hemila's Finnish website is the BEST place on internet to find early and more recent published medical information on Vitamin C.  I'd like to think that Sciblogs might learn something from this airhead episode, but seriously, ...  I very much doubt it.  Here is Professor Hemila's post, for anyone interested: Read Full Blog

In the wake of the TV3 documentary "Living Proof",  thoughout New Zealand, families who have members in ICU with H1N1, are being told that their near-death family members cannot be given intravenous vitamin C because it would cause renal failure. The medical literature does not support this statement. Many times we hear about vitamin C and kidney stones, but where did that "information" come from? According to Professor Hemila of Finland, it is an "urban legend". Quite why the medical profession feel it so necessary to create urban legends, is another matter altogether. Professor Hemila details the literature on this on his a page on his website called "Safety of Vitamin C: Urban Legends" (page pdf'd):  Read Full Blog

It never ceases to amaze me, when people who put themselves out as scientists, display woeful researching skills, and appear not to hear what is said on programmes they criticise. Peter Griffin at Sciblogs had this to say about the 60 Minutes documentary “Living Proof”. Amongst his various ramblings, he misses the fact that experts were asked to comment.. but refused. He also asked heaps of redundant questions:   Read Full Blog

Are doctor prepared to their patients to die, rather than take note of either Allan Smith, or the known medical literature? Hence, this open letter to New Zealand Herald. Read Full Blog