The vaccine wars

A Broken Trust: Lessons from the Vaccine–Autism Wars

Until the summer of 2005, Sharon Kaufman had never paid much attention to the shifting theories blaming vaccines for a surge in reported cases of autism. Kaufman, a medical anthropologist at the University of California, San Francisco, knew that the leading health institutions in the United States had reviewed the body of evidence, and that they found no reason to think vaccines had anything to...

The New Wars Debate:

The statin wars.

1 The Lancet. The statin wars: why AstraZeneca must retreat. Lancet 2003; 362: 1341. 2 Uretsky BG, Thygesen K, Armstrong PW, et al. Acute coronary findings at autopsy in heart failure patients with sudden death: results from the assessment of treatment with lisinopril and survival (ATLAS) trial. Circulation 2000; 102: 611–16. 3 Krum H, McMurray JJV. Statins and chronic heart failure: do we need...

The chemical wars.

The culture of economic growth and rapid innovation has led the chemical industry to contaminate tens of thousands of locales with hazardous chemicals that are poorly understood. As a result, the chemical industry finds itself at war with citizens who are troubled by the widespread dissemination of industrial poisons and alarmed by the power and unaccountability of the corporations themselves. ...

The drug wars.

W e get terribly excited about the issue of drugs in sport. The fear of anabolic agents or stimulants producing superhuman performance has dominated Olympic and professional team sports for many years. It seems however that doping has been present virtually since competitive sports began, with apocryphal stories of various potions being used in ancient times just as pharmacological agents are u...