Photo courtesy of Wildxplorer

This Week: A Phase 3 trial of a new malaria vaccine shows that it can halve the risk of disease. We explore whether that is significant development for controlling malaria in the future. The magnificent trees that line France’s ancient Canal du Midi are now dying. A story about waters wars in a different part of Australia. (Listen to Part I of Australia’s Water Wars in Podcast 135.)

Malaria Vaccine Trial Raises Hopes: The pharmaceutical company Glaxo SmithKline (GSK) published the results of a large scale field trial of a malaria vaccine. The results show that the vaccine can halve the risk of disease. Now, that may not seem like a big deal, (most other vaccines have an efficiency of 90% and above) but experts are hailing this as significant progress. It is also the first vaccine for a parasitic disease to be so effective. In this episode, we hear more about the vaccine from a GSK representative. Then, we get some perspective from infectious disease expert Bill Foege, who you heard in Podcast no. 125.
Read the study about the malaria vaccine trial here.
More about the vaccine on the BBC’s website.

The Dying Trees of France’s Canal du Midi:The banks along France’s Canal du Midi, are lined with trees so majestic that UNESCO called them “a work of art.” Sadly, those trees are dying. The World’s Gerry Hadden brings us this story.

Australia’s Water Wars Part II: Farmers in the great Australian Outback have never had much access to water. Now ranchers and environmentalists in the region have formed an unlikely alliance to avoid the water wars. The World’s Jason Margolis brings us this story.
Read more about Jason’s story here.

Why the Vaccine-Autism Link Remains Popular: Seth Mnookin’s new book is The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science and Fear tells the story of a powerful anti-vaccine campaign spurred by a fraudulent study published in 1998 in the medical journal, The Lancet.

The study, carried out by a British doctor, Andrew Wakefield claimed to have found a link between the Measles Mumps Rubella (MMR) vaccine and regressive autism. The findings were based on Wakefield’s study of 12 children. From the beginning, The Lancet distanced itself from the research by publishing a harsh critique alongside the study.

“We’ve known that it was bad science for a decade,” says Mnookin.

Scientists have tried but failed to replicate Wakefield’s findings. Last year The Lancet retracted the paper and  most recently the British Medical Journal, which carried out its own investigation into Wakefield’s work, called it outright “fraud.”  Amid the controversy, Wakefield lost his license to practice medicine in the UK.

But the anti-vaccine campaign spurred by Wakefield’s work has hardly lost ground. Thousands of parents in the U.S., the U.K., and other European countries continue to not immunize their children. The movement has had support from parents of autistic children and celebrities like Jenny McCarthy.

Faced with the daunting task of caring for a child with a poorly understood disease, vaccines have become an easy target for the fear and wrath of parents, according to Mnookin. Scientists do know that autism is a complex developmental disorder with a strong genetic basis. But they are only just starting to identify some of the risk factors that increase the likelihood of parents having an autistic child.

As for cures, there are none known and Mnookin acknowledges how incredibly frightening that is for parents . But the success of the anti-vaccination movement is starting to take a toll on public health. Diseases that were considered to be under control, like pertussis (whooping cough) and measles have made an unprecedented comeback in both the U.S. and parts of Europe.

Listen to our interview with journalist Seth Mnookin.  He was the guest in this Science Forum discussion. Mnookin’s new book is The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science and Fear. It tells the story of a powerful anti-vaccine campaign that was spurred by a fraudulent study published in 1998 in the medical journal, The Lancet.

The study was carried out by a British doctor, Andrew Wakefield. He claimed to have found a link between the Measles Mumps Rubella (MMR) vaccine and regressive autism. The findings were based on Wakefield’s study of 12 children. From the beginning, The Lancet distanced itself from the research by publishing a harsh critique alongside the study.
“We’ve known that it was bad science for a decade,” says Mnookin.

Scientists have tried but failed to replicate Wakefield’s findings. Last year The Lancet retracted the paper and  most recently the British Medical Journal, which carried out its own investigation into Wakefield’s work, called it outright “fraud.”  Amid the controversy, Wakefield lost his license to practice medicine in the UK.

But the anti-vaccine campaign spurred by Wakefield’s work has hardly lost ground. Thousands of parents in the U.S., the U.K., and other European countries continue to not immunize their children. The movement has had support from parents of autistic children and celebrities like Jenny McCarthy.

Faced with the daunting task of caring for a child with a poorly understood disease, vaccines have become an easy target for the fear and wrath of parents, according to Mnookin. Scientists do know that autism is a complex developmental disorder with a strong genetic basis. But they are only just starting to identify some of the risk factors that increase the likelihood of parents having an autistic child.

As for cures, there are none known and Mnookin acknowledges how incredibly frightening that is for parents. But the success of the anti-vaccination movement is starting to take a toll on public health. Diseases that were considered to be under control, like pertussis (whooping cough) and measles have made an unprecedented comeback in both the U.S. and parts of Europe.

• Are you struggling with the decision over whether or not to vaccinate your children?
• How do you get the best scientific information to help you decide what to do?
• Is it too late to stop diseases like pertussis, measles and mumps from taking their toll?

Join our conversation with Mnookin. It’s just to the right. He’s taking your questions until January 31st.

Additional Resources:

• For a longer version of our interview with Mnookin, download the latest episode of The World Science podcast.
• Seth Mnookin’s Blog.
• A review of The Panic Virus in the Columbia Journalism Review.
• Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative.
• Three-part series in British Medical Journal on the fraud behind the original study in The Lancet: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
• CDC pages on recent outbreaks of measles and whooping cough.

This week: Geologists say they expected the earthquake in Haiti. Some European countries have overstocked the H1N1 vaccine and are trying to unload excess doses. Engineers and archaeologists are collaborating to expand Rome’s metro system. Elsa is back from vacation and her favorites stories include one about ancient Egyptian eyeliners. Finally, a listener tells us about his favorite music for doing science.

Haiti’s Seismic History: Haiti has had more than its share of natural disasters. Every year the country is hit by violent tropical storms, not earthquakes.  But geologists say that this week’s earthquake should not have come as a surprise. I spoke to a couple of geologists to find out why. Its a story I did for the radio show earlier this week.
Report by: Rhitu Chatterjee.
Live updates about Haiti from the BBC.
The quake could have been worse, says one scientist.

Flu Vaccine Overstock: After last year’s rush to stock up on the vaccine against the H1N1 flu, some European countries are now trying to unload millions of doses. Countries such as Spain, Germany, The Netherlands, and France have found themselves with huge stockpiles because far fewer citizens than expected sought out the vaccine. Governments are hoping to cancel orders or sell the excess vaccines to developing nations.
Report by: The World’s Gerry Hadden.

Elsa’s Favorite Science Stories:

• Lead in Ancient Egyptian Eyeliner: Ancient Egyptians might have been unaware of lead poisoning. But they might have known of some health benefits of lead that we are unaware of. That’s the conclusion of a new study that analyzed the novel lead salts found in the famous black eyeliners of ancient Egyptians sampled from a collection at France’s Louvre Museum.
  The study.
  The Egyptian Antiquities collection at the Louvre.
• Inflatable Female Cane Toads: Australian scientists have found that female cane toads are a fairly empowered lot. A female toad picks a male with the best call. But she wards off the smaller, unworthy suitors by inflating herself and causing them to loosen their grip on her. (Or if she prefers a smaller guy, she can make that happen too.)
  The study.
  BBC coverage.
  More about cane toads.
• Cricket Pollinators: A researcher working on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean has found the first evidence of a cricket pollinating flowers. Crickets are omnivorous and normally don’t use nectar as a food source. The researchers think that the raspy cricket on Reunion might have developed a taste for orchid nectar and become an important pollinator because of a scarcity of other insects on the island.
  The study.
  Watch the video of the raspy cricket caught in the act of pollinating an orchid.
  

Rome’s New Metro Line: Expanding Rome’s metro system is not an easy task. In a city with a rich history, building a metro line could mean endangering the city’s historical sites. That’s why engineers and archaeologists are collaborating to build Rome’s third metro line.
Report by: The BBC’s Duncan Kennedy.
See a BBC video of the new construction.

Music in Science: Biologist D J Braiser tells us which songs best describe his experience of doing science.

This week: Perceptions of the swine flu vaccine differ across the Atlantic. Japanese doctors discover a mother who passed cancer to her daughter in the womb. Dyslexia turns out to be more complex in Chinese-speaking people. Monkeys visit the “uncanny valley.” Scientists find the first known omnivorous spider. And our ancestor Ardi is now on Facebook.

Swine Flu Vaccine: A vaccine against the H1N1 swine flu virus is now available and is starting to reach people around the world. But while U.S. officials are recommending the vaccine for large segments of the population – including all children from 6 months to 24 years of age — many European medical professionals are less ready to recommend the vaccine. We explore cultural differences in how people in the U.S. and Europe perceive the risks and benefits of swine flu vaccination.
Guest: Jay Butler, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Report: By The World’s Gerry Hadden in Barcelona.
Guest: Robert Dingwall, University of Nottingham, UK.
Links:
Information on H1N1 flu from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
More on H1N1 vaccine from the World Health Organization.

Cancer Transferred from Mother to Daughter: The tragic case of a 28-year-old woman in Japan may help scientists better understand the biology of cancer and the workings of the fetal immune system. The woman had cancer, and that cancer was transferred to her baby in the womb. Scientists say it is the first conclusive case of cancer being passed from pregnant mother to child.
Guest: Anthony Ford, Institute of Cancer Research, UK.
Links:
The study.
BBC coverage.
Transcript of this interview.

Elsa’s Favorite Science Stories:

• Chinese Dyslexia: Dyslexia in Chinese-speaking people appears to be more complex than dyslexia in English speakers. In addition to having phonological problems — trouble associating sounds with print — Chinese-speaking dyslexics have additional trouble processing visual information.
  The study.
• Monkeys’ Uncanny Valley: People generally enjoy seeing robots and animated figures that look somewhat human, but when artificial beings resemble humans too closely, people are repelled by the depictions. The dip in people’s responses to such robots or images is called an “uncanny valley.” Scientists have now found that monkeys also have an uncanny valley.
  The study.
  Image: Some of the synthetic monkeys that seem to give real monkeys the creeps. (Credit: Shawn Steckenfinger.)
  
• Vegetarian Spider: Scientists have stumbled upon a spider with rare food habits. Of the 40,000 known spider species, Bagheera kiplingi appears to be the only one that eats a mostly vegetarian diet. The spider lives on acacia bushes in Central America. It eats the same food as its neighbors, which are aggressive stinging ants.
  The study.
  More about jumping spiders.
  Video: Watch a spider outmaneuver — and out-wait — ants in order to harvest her favorite plant parts. (She finally gets to eat after 22 seconds. Filmed by Christopher Meehan.)
  

Ardi on Facebook: It has been just two weeks since Ardi, our 4.4 million-year-old ancestor, made headlines worldwide. She now has a Facebook page. You can find and friend her here.
Ardi doesn’t approve of this song, but you could still take a listen.
Find out more about Ardi on The World Science Podcast number 34.

Download MP3

I’ve been doing this podcast for a long time now (four and half years, give or take an episode), and it never fails. The best, most original parts of the show are always suggested by you, the listeners. So, hats off to long-time WTP fan Gabor Kovacs, who not only sends along great story ideas from time to time, but also hosts Electrical Language, his own indie music podcast. Gabor sent me an email earlier this week, and told me to look into Embrace, a low-cost incubator made from phase change materials. The idea, as you can see, is to create a kind of sleeping bag for a low-birth-weight or premature baby. The bag is designed to hold a constant, warm temperature for four hour stretches. This can greatly improve the chances for the baby’s survival. Twenty million low-birth-weight babies are born each year, mostly in rural areas in the developing world that don’t have access to high-end incubators. Hence, the hope that the Embrace could help. We catch up with Linus Liang, one of the co-founders of the non-profit. Listen in to find out how the technology works, and how the field testing is going in India.

Our other big story this week also overlaps the boundaries of tech, science and public health. Researchers in Thailand have reported an AIDS vaccine trial which seems to show, for the first time ever, the prevention of infection. The results are modest, but it is spurring hope for a more effective vaccine to combat HIV/AIDS. I would be remiss if I didn’t include news like this in the podcast, in my humble opinion.

Then, on to worms…Scottish worms to be precise. Scientists are, wait for it, doing a worm census in Scotland. Why? Well, it turns out that those little earth engineers just might be able to tell us the effects of climate change on our environment. We speak with one of the Roy Neilson, one of the scientists involved in The Great Scottish Worm Count.

And we end with a cell phone symphony in Mumbai that was “conducted” by German soundartist Hans Koch and “performed” by, well, the audience. We couldn’t make this stuff up if we tried, could we?

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