Coxsackievirus

Enterovirus infection may be strongly linked to type 1 diabetes

Researchers have been searching for decades for the cause(s) of type 1 diabetes, and some recent evidence might point to an enterovirus. If this research holds up over time, we might be able to develop a vaccine for the enterovirus that could prevent type 1 diabetes.

This is very interesting data that might unlock one of the great puzzles of type 1 diabetes. The etiology of type 1 diabetes has eluded researchers for years, and this new data, which links it to an enterovirus, is game-changing.

This article will tell you all about diabetes and the new research.

Vaccines cause diabetes – another myth refuted and debunked

If you cruise around the internet, engaging with the anti-vaccine religion (not recommended), you will pick up on their standard tropes, lies, and other anti-science commentaries, like the claim that vaccines cause diabetes. Of course, once one digs into the scientific facts, you find little supporting evidence.

A lot of the vaccine deniers believe that vaccines cause a lot of everything and several claims that vaccines cause Type 1 diabetes (or here), based on little evidence. As far as I can tell, this myth is based on the “research” from J. Barthelow Classen, M.D., who has pushed the idea that vaccines cause type 1 diabetes, through some magical process that has never been supported by other independent evidence.

In another example of the anti-vaccine zealot’s cherry-picking evidence to support their a priori conclusions, they ignore the utter lack of plausibility supporting any link between vaccines and Type 1 diabetes. At best, Classen has cherry-picked statistics to support his predetermined conclusions, “comparing apples to oranges with health data from different countries, and misrepresenting studies to back his claim.”

Moreover, Classen seems to come to his beliefs based on population-wide correlations that rely on post hoc fallacies, rather than actually showing causality between vaccines and diabetes. It’s like finding that a 5% increase in consumption of Big Macs is correlated with a full moon. Those two things may happen at the same time, but it would take a laughable stretch of real science to make a cause for causality.

Enterovirus 68 – don’t blame vaccines or pesticides

A while ago, I reported on an outbreak of a mysterious viral disease that exhibited polio-like symptoms. At the time, around 23 children and young adults were afflicted with the disease. Some of them tested positive for enterovirus 68 (known as EV-68 or EV-D68), a member of a genus of viruses that includes over 66 different species that can infect humans. None of these children tested positive for the polio virus.

Polio is a crippling and potentially deadly infectious disease caused by the poliovirus, a human enterovirus, that spreads from person to person invading the brain and spinal cord and causing paralysis. Because polio has no cure, the polio vaccine is the best way to protect yourself and the only way to stop the disease from spreading.

The United States last experienced a polio epidemic in the 1950s, prior to the introduction of the polio vaccine 60 years ago. Today, polio has been eradicated from most of the planet, as the number of worldwide polio cases has fallen from an estimated 350,000 in 1988 to fewer than 223 in 2012—a decline of more than 99% in reported cases.

Predictably, the anti-vaccine community has decided to use this extremely rare virus to make specious claims about vaccines, pesticides, and who knows what else. Typical of these tropes, we pro-science types completely debunk it, thinking it’s dead and done. But like the metaphorical zombie, it arises again to eat the brains of anti-vaccine activists. So, here I go again.