That review also mentions the case of Mohamed El Naschie, who managed to publish 290 of his own papers (out of 334 written since 1991) in Elsevier-affiliated journal “Chaos, Fractals and Solitons” (of which he happened to be Editor in Chief).

The Journal is “Evidence Based Complement Alternative Medicine”, and publish such crap as the bogus effect of pyramidal housing on mice. Besides that, they published papers of a local quack man that uses people in TV ads claiming they have cured from Cancer to diabetes. Some of these people have been appearing in TV long after they are dead saying how well they feel. This murderer has been publishing in this journal, and eerily, some of his papers (including groundbreaking research) are received one day, accepted the next day. What kind of Peer Review is that? Now the fucker claims that his research is “accepted by Oxford” on TV and newspaper ads. Local skeptics have no money or time to counter all these claims, we do what we can, but, meanwhile, people are still been swindled and are still dying thanks to this bastard, and peer review is being used to cheat and make profit form the desperate in the most vile ways.

You do not have to trust me. Go by yourself and check on Pubmed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez):

Look for

“Evid Based Complement Alternat Med”[Journal]

And you will see all the crap.

I wrote about this two years ago (http://globallyconnected.blogspot.com/2007/07/exposing-some-quacks.html http://globallyconnected.blogspot.com/2007/08/ive-got-comment.html). I even gave a presentation on SciFoo 07 about it, along James Randi (But I am a terrible public speaker), but no one seemed to care by then. Now, once people are paying attention to this awful Merck-Elsevier shit, maybe we can get some attention to this well-poisoning by Oxford Journals and its sCAM.

If you care about science, integrity, and peer review, would you please al least read a bit more about this? I think it is important to debug our databases before these things happen again.

It’s sick. The company is sick.

The other strains will just become more common. It’s not the greatest vaccine, and Merck clearly oversold it.

I have no idea what kind of marketing Merck has been using for this in the U.S., but medically it makes sense.

That all said, the fake journal thing is an especially deplorable subversion of the scientific process.

Well, I guess the vaccine is still better than nothing, and the hope is that before the other strains become more prevalent, we would have more comprehensive vaccines.

As for the younger age of vaccination, I’m not sure about the U.S., but the figures I saw for the U.K. were something like 25% of girls aged 14 testing positive for HPV. Whatever laws/society may think, some teenagers (and preteens) are sexually active and exposed to disease.

As for duration of immunity, there are always booster shots (and it shouldn’t be hard to do a study of volunteers every few years to track the need for this.)

Nevertheless, I’d buy the idea that Merck oversold it, and that better vaccines may not be forthcoming as a result.

I think nothing big pharma does surprises me any more but the publishing industry is steadily reaching the same levels in my estimation. This has given me fresh impetus.

i haz a cognitive dissonance nao

It’s pretty simple: the vaccine was grossly oversold, and is still marketed on TV towards parents with the “you’re a bad mommy if your kid doesn’t get this vaccine” attitude when it doesn’t obviate the need for screening. So, of course, sexually active kids will keep doing what they’re doing, and some of them will think they’re protected by the vaccine, and don’t need screening.

As for “The notion that the other types will simply become more common is a facile argument and utterly wrong,” it demonstrates a grave lack of understanding of evolution and population dynamics. If you vaccinate for several strains and leave the remainder unchecked, that does not imply they will be controlled. To the contrary: the behavior that spreads them continues unfettered (and possibly worsened by perceived immunity).

Merck knows this, and they will simply release a new vaccine that works against the new strains that fill the niche. So they get to sell the vaccine to the susceptible group once again.

In all likelihood, it’ll prevent a considerable number of cancers, yes- the vast majority of which would be picked up and treated correctly if PAP smears were performed annually as they’re supposed to be. But the manner in which the vaccine was marketed was just atrocious. Sales of their original product is starting to wane, so I expect there will be a new vaccine before too long- one that covers other strains, requiring re-vaccination of their target demographic.

A study showed that strains 16 and 18 are responsible for over 70% of all cervical cancer.

If those can be vaccinated for, then get that vaccine out there and try to save lives!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cervical_cancer#Causes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vioxx#Fabricated_efficacy_studies

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vioxx#VIGOR_study

Elsevier is just a disgrace, as are all the other periodical companies. It is a disgrace that such an important subset of human knowledge is monopolized by these companies for their own profit.

One of the biggest shocks of being a researcher was discovering that the only source for the data I needed for most of my research was controlled by these companies at exorbitant prices. This makes it hard to do research evenfrom within an institution, such as a university, and almost impossible as an independent researcher.

Generally, few people actually read print journals these days — typically, people find articles of interest by searching terms of interest on MEDLINE and downloading the PDFs of the matching papers.