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I have donated gallons of plasma since I learned that my blood type is AB+, and that my blood type is harmful to the vast majority of people.  I strongly encourage people to donate blood and plasma if they are physically able to do so.  Years ago, when I decided to be a blood donor, my local blood donation center tested my blood, and told me that I should donate plasma instead of blood.

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Last month I reported on the pain being felt by alternative medicine practitioners in the UK as a result of the activism of Nightingale Collaboration. Part of that effort was streamlined via a piece of software created by Simon Perry called Fishbarrel. This tool modifies Google's free Chrome web browser to provide simple ways to highlight dubious claims, comment on them, and automatically gather them into a properly formatted government complaint. I blogged about Fishbarrel back when it was released.

Initially Fishbarrel only supported agencies in the UK, and Simon has gradually added support for other countries. I'm pleased to relay the news that the Fishbarrel software can now be used by skeptics in the United States to file complaints with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  Go to Simon's blog post on Fishbarrel to download the updated software and view the tutorial video.

 

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One of the most famous UFO abductions allegedly took place November 5, 1975. The abductee was a logger named Travis Walton.  Skeptic History icon

He wrote a book called The Walton Experience that was adapted into the movie Fire in the Sky.

Among many who investigated this case was CSI Founding Fellow Philip J. Klass, who was born Nov. 8, 1919. He was skeptical, as you might expect.

When an independent witness to the Travis Walton abduction came forward in 1993, Walton’s supporters were suspicious and accused Klass of putting the witness forward in a Project Alpha style hoax. Klass denied the charge.

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Ever since starting my blog nearly seven (!) years ago, I've concentrated mainly on skepticism in medicine, in particular examining various implausible medical claims that proliferate on the Internet and in our media like so much kudzu choking out science and reason. I've done this at my original blog and over the last four years as the managing editor at Science-Based Medicine, where I work with Steve Novella and a crew of skeptical medical bloggers to discuss the science behind highly implausible medical claims, such as homeopathy. The reasons I do this are two-fold. First, it's what I'm interested in. Second, it was at the time an "underserved" blogging niche that allowed me to align my skeptical interests with a niche that allowed me to establish myself as a blogger early on. Ultimately, I became interested in the anti-vaccine movement and somehow found myself becoming one of the "go-to" bloggers for all things vaccine and anti-vaccine, which further solidified my niche. That's not to say that I didn't write about general skeptical topics. In fact, I used to do that a lot more often back in those days, when I'd cover topics such as creationism, Holocaust denial, 9/11 "Truth," and the like. (I still can't resist a good bit of pareidolia.) It's just that I don't seem to do that as much these days.

When I saw the following news report, I was disturbed enough to abandon my current "comfort zone" a bit. It also made me think of a post on the recent JREF blog by Sharon Hill pointing out the pernicious effect of the proliferation of "ghost hunting" shows on television. In this case, what bothered me is how these shows affect young people who are just learning science and who should be learning critical thinking skills. Unfortunately, although there is a contingent of the audience of these shows who watch them just for the entertainment value and openly scoff at credulous view of the paranormal promoted by them, a lot of the audience of these shows believe they're real, just as many viewers of The Dr. Oz Show believe that he usually gives good medical advice, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary.

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Normally, I'm all over stories like this, but somehow I'm a bit late to the party, having been scooped by Tara, Mike the Mad Biologist, The Biology Files, Todd, and probably several others whom I've missed. I don't really care.

Regular readers of this blog and anyone who's ever followed the anti-vaccine movement more than superficially have probably heard of pox parties. These are, yes, parties where parents who don't want to vaccinate their children against chickenpox, hoping for "natural immunity," expose their children who have never had chickenpox to children with active chickenpox in order to intentionally infect them with the disease. (Thanks, Mom and Dad, for a couple of weeks worth of misery and intense itching and a small chance of serious complications!) Although there might have been a weak rationale for such activities back before there was a vaccine for chickenpox, today pox parties are about as dumb a concept as I can think of and only make sense in the context of equally idiotic anti-vaccine pseudoscience, and apparently, as is the case with many idiotic things, has co-opted Facebook and other discussion forums as a means of getting like minded (if you can call what is behind this a "mind") together for purposes of inflicting misery on their children. One such page even has a Quack Miranda-style warning:

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