Antivax lies now in I.T. articles.

I was reading an article at PC World about google’s new product “SideWiki“.  It’s basically a program which is an extension to google’s browser toolbar which allows you to put comments in to sidewiki but not in to the article’s comments feature.  This may come in handy for pages that don’t allow comments, but it’s not very good for those that do.  It also has its own intelligent ranking system which I guess we’ll have to see in action first.

The article was talking about the ranking system when up came this line:

It will be interesting to see how Sidewiki functions on controversial pages, such as those where a very vocal minority disagrees with the conventional view. Imagine the comments on pages saying that vaccinations don’t cause autism or that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii.

Excuse me?  Did I just read what I think I just read?  Did he just say almost every qualified and credited doctor and scientist, as well as the actual facts and figures, reality, is the vocal minority? Continue reading

What an beautiful day for science and medicine!

Love_Me_Protect_Me_Inject_MeToday has been a fantastic day.  One of those ones that go from good to brilliant to fantastic.  It started off with absolutely gorgeous weather outside, and just improved from there.

It started off with one piece of news I honestly didn’t think I would ever see.  New drug ‘hits melanoma’s Achilles heel’ read the headline.  A drug for tumors rather than chemotherapy?  Surely not.  But it’s true.  It is in the third stage of clinical testing stages at the moment, but it is doing extremely well, shrinking 70% of tumors which appear in over half of all melanoma cases.  Some are saying it could be on shelves in a couple of years.

This is very exciting news for Australians in particular as we are a very outdoors and beach centred culture, so melanoma rates are higher here than in most other parts of the world.  This drug once released (pray tell it does) will do wonders for this country. Continue reading