Just noted this all over the Fairfax press.
The article – Autism coal link study stalled by government – is written as a straight science piece, but it’s a pretty poor example of the genre. The journalist appears to have pretty much just run straight off a presser, and done no background research at all.
The director of the Swinburne Autism Bio-Research Initiative, David Austin, said the data on autism incidence by postcode could quickly answer the question of whether mercury emissions from power stations are implicated in babies and infants developing the disorder.
Well, Swinburne University actually exists, which is better than most mercury/autism “researchers” manage.
When Professor Austin requested the information after a review of international scientific literature confirmed ”a mercury-autism relationship”…
Really? There go some alarm bells…
A University of Texas study two years ago found a statistically significant link between the amount of mercury released from industrial sources such as coal-fired power stations and increased autism rates.
That would be this study, which has been pretty roundly criticised since its release.
There’s no mention at all in the news article that the scientific consensus is that mercury has nothing to do with autism spectrum disorders. Nothing at all. That’s not to say they shouldn’t necessarily have published this article, but the journalist should certainly have mentioned (high, wide and often) that these ideas are well outside the scientific mainstream.
And even more alarm bells went off after a quick visit to the website of the Swinburne Autism Bio-Research Initiative.
The first thing to note is that, while they’re based out of Swinburne University they are privately funded: SABRI is privately funded and supported by Swinburne University of Technology. Our capacity to undertake critically important research is limited only by the level of funding we receive. We have several research projects that require urgent funding..
The major link on the Selected Publications section is to the Autism Research Institute References.
The Autism Research Institute is a fairly notorious anti-vaccination institute, and the linked document is shot through with references to studies conducted by disgraced autism researcher Andrew Wakefield, plus the Geiers and a plethora of others with poor reputations in the mainstream scientific community.
And at least four of the five links in the “Helpful Links” section go to known anti-vaccination campaign groups (I don’t know anything about the Mindd Foundation, though I wouldn’t be too hopeful).
And their major media link? An article from the UK’s Daily Mail.
‘Nuff said.
Their research is there to be downloaded.
Now, I’m not qualified to criticise their research in depth – but I will make a couple of points.
There are eight articles published, in seven publications.
A couple of the journals stand out from the start – like Contemporary Hypnosis, for example. Not the place you’d usually look for groundbreaking autism spectrum disorder research, you’d have thought.
And Autism Insights, which comes with something of a dubious history.
And can the journal Electronic Journal of Applied Psychology: Innovations in Autism, in which one of their articles is published, be the same Electronic Journal of Applied Psychology that two SABRI members (including one of the study authors) edit?? Surely not.
I don’t know much about the others – they appear respectable, to be fair, if small.
The Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, for example, has a five year impact factor of 1.897 (that’s not great), and is ranked 49/77 among toxicology journals, 58/122 among Public, Environmental & Occupational Health and 78/180 from Environmental Sciences.
Not dodgy, but not the major publications of the genre, either.
But it’s not a particularly strong list of publications, even leaving the publishing journals aside.
An epidemiological analysis of the ‘autism as mercury poisoning’ hypothesis is a lit review, no epidemiology (on the part of the author) involved.
Gastrointestinal microbiology in autistic spectrum disorder: a review also appears to be a lit review, rather than original research, though I can’t access the full paper.
And even to my inexpert eye An investigation of porphyrinuria in Australian children with Autism has some serious problems.
The major references are to two studies conducted by Nataf and the Geier father and son team, that purport to show elevated level of mercury in urine samples is a marker for autism spectrum disorders, and (in the case of the Geier paper) that giving kids with ASD chelating agents is a Good Idea.
These papers and their authors have been debunked around the internet. There’s no need to repeat that work here – you easily can do your own research if you’re interested.
The interesting thing with the Austin/Shandley paper, though, is that while it’s cited as confirming those two earlier studies it uses their research to supply the control group for their own (41 patient) study.
So, there’s no control group in the Australian study, and it uses data generated in earlier studies to confirm their results.
Make of that what you will.
To be fair, I don’t know much about SABRI other than what I’ve been able to discover in an hour poking about tonight. Maybe they’re genuinely seeking for the truth of the matter. Maybe there’s some link between coal fired power stations and autism (though the current state of the science says it’s unlikely).
There’s little doubt, though, that anything SABRI puts out in public could bear a little scrutiny given where they appear to line up in the autism wars.
So why didn’t the Fairfax journo look a little harder, seek another source, or – if it had to run at all – at least balance the article out with comment from a more mainstream representative of the science of the disorder?
And the last couple of pars make it clear the department is acting within pretty clear ethical boundaries:
A department spokeswoman said that under government protocols, data referring to fewer than 20 individuals would not be released to protect privacy.
”Professor Austin asked for specific data by postcode. Most of this data would refer to less than 20 individuals,” she said.
So why is a researcher going to the media to try to pressure the minister to overrule those guidelines? And why is the media helping them do so, particularly when a quick bit of research throws up plenty of concerns about the researchers?
I would have thought that there were enough well documented health reasons not to breathe in heavy metals and coal smoke, without trying to establish some spurious relationship to autism.
Quite right Helen. Mercury and respiratory disease would be plenty good enough reasons to stay clear of it.
I’ve been unimpressed with the same journalist in the past: http://www.kablambda.org/blog/2010/05/17/more-smh-bashing/
Tom @3
And both from a former Walkley Award winner as well…
Once again, bloggers do a journalist’s job for them, and they wonder why we despise 90% of the lazy, ethically vacuous leeches.
But the story does play well to the prejudices of some (many? most?) Fairfax readers, namely, that coal is evil. (Also the prejudices of readers of a certain blog, but I digress.)
The reasoning is: coal is bad, autism is bad, therefore coal causes autism. Get rid of one and you get rid of the other.
Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V takes less time than Ctrl+T, http://google.com/, “SABRI”.
If every researcher who couldn’t get access to the data they wanted because of ethics issues of one sort or another got a press release in the paper, there’d be nothing else in it.
Bullshit, Sam @ 6, for a number of reasons other than your ridiculous straw man. People with autism spectrum disorders are not necessarily handicapped, just for a start. (They don’t make all those jokes about IT folk for nothing, you know.)
And also to be fair, the NSW Greens MLC John Kaye has obligingly added his ambiguous quote of support for the “research” and called for Health to go outside its “ethical boundaries” as crankynick says. I’m all for bashing Fairfax but they have accomplices in their cimres.
[ahem] crimes.
“The journalist appears to have pretty much just run straight off a presser, and done no background research at all.”
Welcome to my world. Pretty much any presser citing allegedly ‘breakthrough’ research gets exactly the same, once over lightly, MSM validation. The cure for AIDS has been in the immediate offing (usually based on a Phase I study report desperately looking for Pharma funding takeup) more times than I can remember over the last 20 years.
Helen @ 1 – it’s easy to say avoid exposure to heavy metals but in practice it’s not whether people are going to get exposed, especially in mining/smelter towns, but at what level the government sets the regulatory limits. And from an outsiders point of view it often seems like those who live and work in the towns whose livelihood depends on the mining companies are often in a state of denial of the effects of pollution on their children. So research into other effects, if it’s of good quality, is still useful.
My take on it is that it’s an oblique way to promote an anti-vaccination agenda. The coal story reinforces the mercury-causes-autism claim, which is one of the main arguments of the the anti-vax crowd. Also, the “stalled by government” conspiracy line is another favourite of the anti-vaxers. I doubt they really care much about coal, per se.
I was pretty much immediately suspicious of this too, for this reason.
Mind you, coal won’t help the argument. Lots of things go up the chute in parts-per-million quantities. Pretty much any mineral you care to name will pumped out in kilogram quantities because of the amount of coal burned at any one station in one year.
Mercury, lead, uranium etc. You name it, coal is putting it into the air.
“I would have thought that there were enough well documented health reasons not to breathe in heavy metals and coal smoke, without trying to establish some spurious relationship to autism.”
Paracelsus – “”All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous.”
Even water is poisonous in high doses. I recall a woman dying last year after consuming too much water to win a prize on a radio game show.
Thanks for the work! I was pretty appalled when I read that article yesterday – what a shocking attempt at ‘science’ reporting.
“Mind you, coal won’t help the argument. Lots of things go up the chute in parts-per-million quantities. Pretty much any mineral you care to name will pumped out in kilogram quantities because of the amount of coal burned at any one station in one year.
Mercury, lead, uranium etc. You name it, coal is putting it into the air.”
Clearly then, coal is causing all forms of population ill-health.
Don’t you understand anything about modern epidemiology Jacques?
FDB @17
I think, to be fair, FDB, Jaques was saying that blaming coal wouldn’t help the researchers isolate mercury as a cause of autism, because other heavy metals etc are also released by coal fired power stations.
Certainly the way I read it, anyway.
@ me.
And obviously I’m not saying (or implying that Jacques is saying) that any heavy metal is the cause of autism. Only that there’d be enough confounding data to stuff up the study anyway.
ABC ran the piece as well. Perhaps it’s one for Media Watch to dig into…
Though I’m sure future generations wish we’d just phased-out coal rather than debate its effects.
Being a little closer to the action than most people here, I think it fair to say that getting the money to do the research from private foundations is not a problem. That’s just the way universities work now — results for sale — and often the money they are giving out is money for the converted anyway (although there are probably a few cynical people willing to take it even if they arn’t). Alternatively, many of the other things are problematic, and some which wern’t mentioned either (which I’ll refrain from commenting on, but you can imagine them from anywhere that links to anti-vaccination sites).
It’s worthwhile noting that apart from the research here, the rather simple prediction that the hypothesis makes is that in countries where there is mercury all over the place compared to Australia (and they arn’t to find — that would be almost everywhere), you should find a higher level of autism, but you don’t. This is a worthwhile question to ask incidentally, because mercury is a developmental neurotoxin (as is lead and other stuff that comes out of power stations, where you could ask the same question). It just turns out to be false.
Indeed, even within countries with good public health monitoring but where there is a fair bit of mercury floating around, rather more reputable null effects have been reported. For example, these results from Hong Kong (smog/pollutant city) don’t find any effect of mercury on autism, and the amount of exposure it should be possible to get in some places there is certainly far higher than almost anywhere you could find in Aus. This suggests it is a real null effect.
crankynick – I was being sar-car-stic. I know Jacques well enough to know he knows more about scientific method than I do.
My mum’s an epidemiologist incidentally, and this normally mild-mannered, warm, kind and giving lady can turn really nasty when the anti-vacc crowd come up in conversation. I love a good stoushy rant as much as the next guy, but it fairly turns me ears red and I’ve learned not to bring it up.
@kuke,
Cheers, kuke.
You really have to wonder on what basis the ABC decided to describe him as a “leading autism researcher”.
Leaving aside everything else I’ve said the publications cited on the site wouldn’t indicate Austin is a “leading” researcher in anything. And PubMed only throws up seven articles on his name, btw, so even the most basic of checks should have killed that lede.
@21 FDB
Whoops. My apologies, dude. Completely failed to spot the interplay.
Consider me redder faced than thou. I obviously don’t spend enough time reading LP comment threads these days.
FDB @21
And if your mum feels like spending half an hour running her expert eye over any of those linked studies, btw, I’m sure there are plenty of people would like to hear about it.
This mob hasn’t really hit the radar of any of the US blogs that watch this sort of thing more closely, but I’m pretty sure they’re about to.
When it comes to public health and ‘industry’ interests though there’s questions to be asked about whose interests might be served by not investigating things sometimes as well.
A related but apparently very real impact recently documented in no less than the MJA (important enough?), also a subject of a class action for compensation in the courts I gather.
Too many get hot and bothered, from all positions, in such an area of complexity and uncertainty.
Personally I think it’s more dangerous to not ask questions and not think, than to ask questions and think about what if anything might be the source of the problem (no matter how supposedly stupid or illinformed).
“The only stupid question is the one that doesn’t get asked”
– quoting someone I don’t remember right now
Quoll, nobody’s saying that these scientists shouldn’t have the ability to look into the issue.
The problem is that:
a) their current view goes very much against the scientific mainstream. They are a long way out there. That point is not made clear anywhere in the article.
b) They’ve been denied access to data on what appear to be routine privacy grounds.
Quoll, with all due respect that is not a related case.
Crankynick is drawing attention to a small body of ‘research’ linking autism with environmental mercury that looks questionable, and perhaps spurious.
In comparison, the effects of environmental lead on the development of the nervous system in children have been very closely studied for a very long time. Its sufficiently well understood that researchers can predict the likely loss in IQ for a given blood lead level.
The lead smelters at Port Pirie in SA have provided a textbook case study of the consequences of lead pollution that has had decades of international attention. So claims of lead-induced impairment at Mt Isa are not in any way ground-breaking science. The only aspect that is surprising/shocking is that no-one had thought to look sooner….
Quoll, it’s been known for centuries that mercury impairs brain function. The claimed “link” with autism is a whole ‘nother thing. It’s leading the reader down the path to organisations whose agenda is to oppose vaccination, which will simply lead to more deaths.
Let’s talk about the deleterious effects of industrial pollutants on childrens’ health and brain function, but not tie it to a wingnut theory.
FDB, looks like cranknick has defended my honour.
As for epidemiology, I’m no expert. My last assignment was writing and running an epidemic simulator; it was remarkable how effective vaccinations were at stopping epidemics cold in that artificial world.
*crankynick
I thought it had been well-established in the MSM that autism is actually caused by single mothers?
Just kidding. Thanks for this article, which confirms my impression of the standard of ‘science’ reporting in Oz media.
And John Kaye should really know better.
When it comes to public health and ‘industry’ interests though there’s questions to be asked about whose interests might be served by not investigating things sometimes as well.
Quoll, call me naïve, but I wouldn’t find it remotely credible that Federal government health department bureaucrats would fail to release data in order to protect an industry.
CJ Morgan, I think working mothers, at least, was the original explanation back in the 1940s when Kanner first described it in the US. That’s almost single mothers.
I’m not sure whether Asperger (whose work preceded Kanner’s) had an explanation. He certainly had a more positive outlook on it.
If you care to look, there’s a world of lunacy out there …
Populations with a high level of exposure to mercury, like the Faroese have a similar rate of autism to other populations.
Apart from the anti-vaccination crowd there is a whole predatory industry of people pushing invasive and dangerous procedures like chelation therapy and they won’t let go of this regardless of the evidence. I hope they do release the information. Wasteful as it is to keep investigating an extremely tenuous link we do now need as much evidence as possible that argues against the connection with mercury because it is an idea that has gained so much traction with parents.
Problem is, su, the parents of autistic children are often desperate. (Believe me, I know why.) Everyone would like to have someone or something to blame, preferably with a cure thrown in.
It’s a lot like the lunacy surrounding apricot-kernel therapy for cancer in the 70s. There’s always some opportunistic prick who’ll sell you a solution to your problem.
su @34
I kind of hope they don’t, personally.
I don’t think that ethical/privacy guidelines should be overturned as a result of pressure from researchers abetted by the media (though there may be a way round it, perhaps, that doesn’t violate the guidelines).
And I don’t have a lot of faith that this kind of research will be conducted in good faith even if they do.
It’s also worth noting this as an example (in the US) of where this kind of pressure leads.
I recommend this as a template for evaluating scientific/medical research published in the MSM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/sep/24/1
I am a little surprised that there is a privacy issue as my recollection of the process (>14 years ago now in our case) is that passing on the data about your child’s diagnosis is voluntary and that all of that data is deidentified first. This immediately adds to the confounds that this study will encounter, because despite what the author says that data will be incomplete. Overall I favour combatting bad science with better science and critical analysis rather than imposing limits on what can and cannot be studied but I agree with you – there are ways around genuine privacy concerns, by aggregating postcodes for example.
The names are removed to protect the innocent, but a motivated person can use the remaining data to deduce who is who. For the same reason the ABS does not release data below CCD level (about 200 households, as I recall).
Jacques @39
Particularly as researchers rowing this particular boat don’t have a good track record on ethics and privacy issues.
Not making any conclusions about SABRI, btw – but the precendents are there to say that data collectors should be very careful about who they hand out data to.
Jacques @15 — of course coal *does* help the argument to the extent that some people dislike coal already for other reasons — if you published research claiming that eating organically grown vegies caused autism, I suspect the Greens would think more carefully before endorsing it.
Ok, I see what you mean JC.
su – from what little I can see aggregating the data in this case would pull in postcodes from outside the area they want to “study”
Robert Merkel – this is the same Swinburne that a few years ago had a School of Complementary Medicine or Graduate School of Integrative Medicine or some similar name and also the same Swinburne that spent many millions of, presumably taxpayer education, dollars on purchasing a private hospital in Camberwell with much fanfare to provide “complementary medicine” that would provide “breakthroughs”
The hospital went belly up, the university copped the loss of millions of $$$ and we don’t hear much now about the integrative medicine and University hospital do we.
Not surprised some vestiges of woo woo thinking are still around in the University and have picked on Autism.
You wont have to scratch very deep to find some anti vaccination people there.
The university is possibly smart enough to keep away from miracle cancer cures but I wouldn’t count on it.
su – and what JC says – its pretty easy to identify people from de-indentified data if the numbers are low.
Maybe its been mentioned but didn’t I see The AGE (New Age?) run a legit news item on Danny the Catch a Fire boy bringing back a women from the dead? In Israel no less and certified a miracle by a medico on the bus!
Bugger off Mary McKillop we want St Danny.
I was wondering – of all the priorities in the Middle East – how does the lord decide that reviving an elderly Australian on a bus trip is where the miracle energy will go – that will teach those foreigners and jews and arabs, not to mention any USA fundamentalist who dies on a bus trip there, whose god is the one.
“we want St Danny”…
You might very well think that; I couldn’t possibly comment.
Industrial pollution the source of potential neuological and developmental dangers and risks? Not related?
I wouldn’t seriously call anyone here anything because I don’t really know any from the proverbail bar of soap, aside from the fraction expressed in text here.
I gather the parties being sued re lead levels in Mt Isa include both Xstrata and the Qld government, who were reported to have removed some data from reports and refused to conduct further testing in children in 2008.
Would I have to be naive to believe a state govt would withhold data to support an industry?
Whatever your take, my quick reading of some of those papers or reviews titles appeared more about reviewing evidence of some widely held public perceptions (right or wrong) than promoting anything.
There is actually a lot of valid evidence that industrial pollution can have deleterious effects in health generally, particularly in regard to developing human central nervous systems.
Plus just reviewing or considering even supposedly ‘outlandish’ questions does not per se constitute support, and pretty facile statements about wingnuts and woo does nothing to address or provide help for a significant number of people and families who really appear to be suffering from a significantly increased burden of social and cognitive deficits compared to previous generations. As was raised in a conversation I had with my parents recently, older generations are simply stunned at the apparent increased prevalence of ‘autism’ and other cognitive/social ‘disorders’, compared to previous ones.
The truth is no-one has a significant idea that is widely accepted, or at least evidence for any specific thing as a cause. Maybe it’s more than one.
The attacking of people rather than the evidence (or lack of evidence, which in itself proves nothing anyway) appears hardly a scientific response to the story either.
Quoll, speaking from personal experience, the socialisation process for kiddies with ASD was much more brutal 50 years ago than it is now. We learnt to fake normal earlier, and better.
I have wondered about that DI(NR). One of the papers on the Swinburne site seems to claim that autism sprung into existence in 1930 which is clearly rubbish. I have wondered whether the more authoritarian child rearing practices of the past had the effect of masking the people at the Asperger’s end of the spectrum (and giving rise to the folk wisdom about kids “growing out of it”).
I have no personal experience of other ASD but at least as far as ADHD and allied ocnditions are concerned I was informed some years ago that this condition was first identified over a century ago.
http://www.ehow.com/about_5071166_history-discovery-adhd.html
The way to cope with it back then and in the years since seemed to be to laugh off the behavioural “quirks” and simply not notice the underperformance and wasted lives. I would imagine that in some cases where the degree of disability was severe that the affected child may have been institutionalised.
su, most of the “socialisation” happened in the school-yard. As in, “You’re weird” [thump]. There’s a strong incentive to work out how to fake normal behaviour. Although you’re right, child-rearing generally was a lot more brutal than it is these days.
Quoll @49
As has been said before, there’s no doubting the link between lead poisoning and a whole host of disorders – that’s not in doubt.
There is no credible evidence, however (and lack of evidence does not constitute evidence, I’m sorry) to indicate that mercury is in any way linked to rates of ASD – whether through vaccines or other means.
Multiple large studies have demonstrated it time and time again.
Quoll @ 49 (following on from crankynick @ 54)
My understanding is that heavy metal poisonings (lead, mercury, cadmium et al) are associated with characteristic histological changes to nervous and brain tissues that are visible by light microscopy. See Gene & Aileen Smith’s devastating book on the Minimata disaster for examples. This is also valuable, if not directly pertinent.
But AFAIK no such changes are visible in people manifesting symptoms of autism or ADHD. Nor am I aware of autism clusters around Minimata or any of the other areas of known high levels of mercury contamination.
Of course this does not conclusively rule out any link between mercury and autism, but a) the principle of parsimony demands that we require some compelling evidence before jumping–or even leaning–toward this conclusion, and b) that if there is a link, it must be via some mechanism that substantially differs from the ones responsible for the classic heavy metal-induced neurological disorders.
Or to put it another way, why is mercury a suspected cause of autism and not, say, bipolar affective disorder or any number of other neurological conditions?
Second link redux (I hope!).
“The hospital went belly up, the university copped the loss of millions of $$$ and we don’t hear much now about the integrative medicine and University hospital do we.”
No, not integrative medicine, but try looking up complementary medicine instead, and make sure you have your fish oil, chocolate, rosemary, etc. .
“Not surprised some vestiges of woo woo thinking are still around in the University and have picked on Autism.”
Actually they’re two totally different groups. Perhaps Swinburne is a haven for them!
The line Swinburne is taking FA, is that methyl mercury (encountered in the foodchain) may have a different effect to ethyl mercury (from amalgam fillings, mercury preservatives). Unless there have been great changes to the understanding of Autism that I am unaware of, it seems completely bizarre that mercury could cause neuronal degeneration in its methylated form, and the complete opposite in the ethylated form, because AFAIK autism is associated with the failure of the normal pruning of neuronal connections that occurs from the last trimester of development onwards, hence higher brain volumes etc. In some individuals with classic autism, whole structures have been missing or greatly altered, for eg the superior olivary nucleus (only one case study), but again that seems to be due to a failure of development rather than later cell death.
The whole mercury-autism thing looks like a bad case of confirmation bias at work. Having decided mercury plays a role, they just keep changing the theory until it fits that conclusion. Part of me thinks we should just let them get on with it until it burns itself out. Since mercury preservatives have been removed from vaccines and amalgam fillings are no longer the default, there should already be a sharp drop in incidence of autism but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence for that.
Thanks Su, I wasn’t aware of the distinction being made between ethyl- & methyl mercury. Some quick googling turned up some interesting differences in absorbtion and excretion between the 2 forms.
There’s some irony there too, for if I recall correctly the methyl mercury pollution of Minimata Bay was initially considered to be benign. Unlike the inorganic salts, organic forms of mercury were not thought to pose any risk to humans at the concentrations in the factory waste water. But I guess the magnitude of bioaccumulation was not appreciated at the time.
I share your scepticism re Swinburne’s postulated differential neuronal effects: at first glance it sounds unlikely if not implausible.
OTOH qualitative differences may not be out of the realms of possibility. It seems methyl mercury is much more readily transported into the brain, and that it has a longer half-life in the body than ethyl mercury. So the nature of exposure is likely to differ between the ethyl- and methyl forms. Broadly speaking, it’s not unheard of for chronic exposures to toxic substances to have qualitatively different outcomes to acute exposures. I’d certainly be interested in hearing an opinion about this from someone whose understanding of heavy metal toxicology is more profound than my rudimentary grasp of the field.
Nevertheless, I’d have hoped that any responsible research group would have kept a very low public profile on the matter until such time as they had some convincing data to give weight to their claims.
Sadly, the nature of the research funding game in Australia provides strong financial disincentives against appropriate scientific caution in public statements.
Ok the researchers may be suspect – but it might be worthwhile people spending a little bit more time thinking about how the cry of ‘privacy’ is used as a mechanism to prevent information being made public.
A minimum cell size of 20 is much much more than is required to maintain confidentiality – and there are many more sophisticated techniques available. For example contrary to Jacques’ claims, ABS does release data at the Collector District (and I think even now at the meshblock) level, but runs a little bit of random pertubation – so if a cell is reported as being 15 it might be 13 or 17 – or actually 15 – but as a consequence even very small cells can be released – which when used with many statistical techniques, while reducing the statistical strength of the analysis by adding a bit more to the noise in the dataset, still permits some serious research.
As to people who are upset that a person who is after data dares to go to the media to build up their case rather than just allowing bureaucratic processes simply take their course – what a mob of servile little creatures aren’t you (and I suspect this is not the line you take when you want something).
Let the data be released – but not just to this researcher but to others also who can then do their own analysis – and come to their conclusions. (A few of us actually believe this is how scientific progress is made – and how an open society should work.)