Lepto in Cuba - A great piece of writing

A plug for a great piece of work that answers the claim that a homeopathic vaccine prevents the infectious disease Leptospirosis.

A couple of years ago, there was a presentation at a conference in Cuba on the effectiveness of a homeopathic vaccine to prevent the lepto disease.

I thought it was garbage because the homeopathic vaccine was given to practically everyone in an area, so how could you tell if it was the vaccine or other factors that mattered. This is particularly  true of diseases where the physical environment matters.  For example, if you go from filthy water to clean water or from clean water to filthy water you can make a huge difference in the number of cases of typhoid or cholera.  These are disease where the physical environment matters.

Measles is a disease where the physical environment really doesn't matter.  Before vaccination, pretty much all children get infected sometime in childhood.  So any intervention, such as a measles vaccine, is great evidence that the vaccine works even if you haven't done a proper double blinded study.

Lepto is an environmentally controllable disease.  If you can keep out of contact with the animals that have it and distribute it in their urine, you won't get infected.  For this reason alone, any study that isn't double blinded and is supposed to be evidence that a vaccine works is pretty much worthless.

I wrote about lepto in this blog at Homeopathy - Water and Magic and Not Tested and Proper Testing Minimizes Differences.


Those who did the Cuban research have now published their paper. It ended up in Homeopathy apparently because it got rejected by better quality journal.


Apgaylard over at A canna’ change the laws of physics has done a great job of critiquing the published paper in Much ado about nothing.  Apgaylard demonstrates what can be done in critiquing a paper when someone has the necessary background and skills. Go and take a look.