We have identified a chronic enterocolitis in children that may be related to neuropsychiatric dysfunction. In most cases, onset of symptoms was after measles, mumps, and rubella immunisation. Further investigations are needed to examine this syndrome and its possible relation to this vaccine.

Many of us in the scientific community recognized the "study" as junk when it appeared in 1998. Even before we learned of then-unknown ethical failings by its lead author, we knew the study was based on a tiny population of only twelve children. More, it relied on a novel methodology that assumed some bizarre, previously unheard of, association between children's autism and their manifestation of intestinal problems.

When criticism of the paper intensified in the days after publication, Lancet editor-in-chief Dr. Richard Horton defended his decision to publish what he acknowledged as an inferior study by claiming it would generate debate on the autism/vaccine issue. Even when ten of the original thirteen authors withdrew their names from the article, Horton still refused to withdraw the study.

Nor did he take such action when multiple studies subsequently appeared showing no link between vaccines and autism. Nor even in 2004—when it was revealed that the lead author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, had been paid, in part, by lawyers for parents seeking to sue vaccine makers, claiming adverse health consequences.

This retraction by The Lancet came far too late. It's very easy to scare people; it's very hard to unscare them. Horton has made no effort whatsoever to apologize or take editorial responsibility for this egregious error. He should step forward and say, "I regret the needless suffering and death for which I am partly responsible."

[The Iraq Body Count and the Iraq Family Health Survey] indicate that the 2006 study by Burnham et al. considerably overestimated the number of violent deaths. For instance, to reach the 925 violent deaths per day reported by Burnham et al. for June 2005 through June 2006, as many as 87% of violent deaths would have been missed in the IFHS and more than 90% in the Iraq Body Count. This level of under-reporting is highly improbable, given the internal and external consistency of the data and the much larger sample size and quality-control measures taken in the implementation of the IFHS.

• "Health benefits" of switching agriculture methods and livestock production seem to be based on the absurd notion that over-nutrition is a significant problem in much of the world.



• Similarly, health is again invoked as a reason to switch to low-carbon forms of energy production, as if the world is already sufficiently electrified. The benefits of bringing electrical power to the third world are absent from the discussion.



• Likewise, healthy activities—this time in the form of walking and cycling—will somehow make up for inferior transportation systems.