Glad to see you hosting. Bring us stories!!! I'm ready.

We have a dedicated Science group which gets all the cool stories. But I'll try to scavenge for some more obscure ones!

Might fall under the psudoscience category? Fakes and quacks? Fakery and Quackery? Where would one look?

I'm open to suggestions!

Make mine chocolate, pls.

Will that do?

Mr. Dixie would be in heaven over that!

but it's good to have you minding the store just in case another electric universe or vitamin freak wanders in.

And that he didn't wrap up loose ends like his host position in a group that only had the one!

I thought about sending him a PM, but wasn't sure if he was just taking some time off.

I am most interested in medical quackery, and especially the campaigns against vaccinations and other forms of modern medicine; the wilder fringes of pseudoscientific 'philosophy' (think Intellectual Impostors); and most of all, in the links between anti-science and the political Right.

One that you are probably uniquely suited to answer, at least among DU Sk(c)eptics!

Was there much of an anti-vax movement in the UK before Wakefield came along? Do you know if he originally had connections to the US anti-vax loons?

And there were always individuals who were anti-vaccination.

But I think it got a lot worse with Wakefield. There had been some worries about the safety of the pertussis vaccination in the early 80s, which led to a reduction in uptake as well as to some changes to improve the safety of the vaccination; but I don't think the same degree of paranoia was involved.

I think with the Wakefield/MMR episode several things converged:

(1) The government really had tried to deceive us about the safety of beef at the beginning of the BSE scandal; so that people were ripe for any suggestion that the government were concealing medical dangers. The converse of crying wolf, I suppose.

(2) The Daily Mail and other elements of the right-wing press took up the scaremongering in a big way.

(3) The great reduction in infectious diseases led to a generation of parents who had grown up without fear of, or much exposure to these diseases, and who did not therefore always have earlier generations' awareness of the dangers of these diseases.

As regards links between Wakefield and the American anti-vaccine movement - no, not initially at all. In fact, the main vaccination critics in the UK and USA focused on different issues: here it was the MMR itself; in America it was mercury added to vaccines. Eventually, there was increased collaboration between the two; and of course Wakefield eventually saved his career by moving to America - apologies for THAT export!

And since you live to serve .....humans, it reminds me of that chap who wrote (not too long ago) a book which claimed to show there had never been any cannibalism.

Ridiculous, of course. Just goes to show skepticism can go too far.