Always...uh...never...forget to check your references #3

On account of a sheltered though idyllic childhood being taught assassination skills in an apocalyptic death-cult, I was not previously appraised of the existence of the Alzheimers Disease Fund. This is one of several astroturfed charity grifts run by Florida Man, under the umbrella rubric of Project Cure, to shake the Money Tree and lobby the gubblement to stop wasting Alzheimers / Diabetes / Prostate Cancer / Heart-Disease research moneys on science, and give the dosh to shysters and Alt-Medscammers and supplement pimps instead.

Money tree, shaken

Reassuringly, the ADF does not spend all the hard-garnered donations on further fund-raising expenses and the Executive Director's $200,000 salary... a fraction is invested in Public Education, i.e. preparing on-line PDF "reports" to promote the aluminium-causes-Alzheimers garblement. "Preparing" is here used as a term of art meaning "stealing material from elsewhere and pasting it together", for "Project Cure" is aimed at the glibertarian property-rights FREEDOM demographic, an ethos known for respecting the sanctity of other people's intellectual property.

One particular patchwork caught the eye: "Aluminum in Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Neurological Disorders". Presumably this Report emerged spontaneously from the concentration of information that comprises the Intertubes for it is is devoid of authorship, but it recycles the Aluminati oeuvre of Shaw & Tomljenovic. Ref. 86 seems especially worthy of attention. A 120-page paper in Toxicology Letters? Can this be a thing?

Alas, life is full of Disappoint, and the collision between high hopes and harsh facts leads to the usual outcome. In the underachieving time-stream that we inhabit, the link resolves to a 245-word Abstract for a conference poster, on page S92 of a Special Supplement of the journal -- set aside to Proceedings of 47th Congress of the European Societies of Toxicology -- and the "S60-S179" is in fact the title of that section of the issue (Poster Sessions Day 1). Someone has been a silly bunny.

Following the Great Gazoogle on the trail of this spurious citation leads us to Patient Zero -- a 2011 exercise in cherry-picking by Tomljenovic and Shaw, published in J.Inorg.Biochem. as was the custom of the day.

To continue the horticultural metaphor, the authors' argument in that paper relied on comparing apples with oranges, with a special emphasis on apples that were clearly labelled "Do Not Compare with Oranges". But kudos to them for accurately summarising copying sentences from the Abstract.

The ganked citation and the summary of autism-causation found their way again into a 2012 Open Letter written by Tomljenovic to the legislators of Vermont, hoping to sway them against the idea of vaccines and vaccination laws.

Perhaps the "Reality inertia" of Sheldrake's Morphogenetic Field should be blamed, or else the authors had become addicted to the smell of paste, but anyway, citation and autism-causation reappeared in a 2012 paper by Tomljenovic, Dórea and Shaw (despite its ostensible focus on the use of mercury-based antibiotics in vaccines).

With this non-existent 120-page paper so firmly established in the literature, its appearance in the Alzheimers Disease Fund report was inevitable.

Meanwhile, the Brazilian authors of the original Poster expanded it into a 2013 published paper. This has not yet been cited in the Aluminati literature, as the original claims of elevated Aluminium levels in 12 autistic children were replaced with measurements for one child of the twelve [who had elevated Cr and Ar levels as well as Al, suggesting a diet that left much to be desired].

The most recent sightings of that ganked "S60-S179" pagination are also from 2013. First a Shaw-Tomljenovic paper in the Aluminati-friendly journal Immunologic Research:

Then again in Immunologic Research, a "Guest Editorial" coauthored by Yehuda Shoenfeld, who is an editor of the journal, so where the Guest status comes from is anyone's guess. Just saying, there is a lot to be learned from reading papers rather than cut-and-pasting other people's Reference lists.

Look at the Editorial itself. Just look at it. Is that the World's Worst Metaphor, or the Worst Metaphor EVAH! ?

Evidently autoimmune diseases have a collective soul, or possibly a cardigan at risk of unraveling. Also there is a chess game in progress: in which the disease is the bishop, its pathogenesis is the rook, and they are pitted against the knight, which is the treatment. This is not the version of chess I am accustomed to, so it is just as well that 'we are adding new rules to the game'. At the same time the situation is a puzzle, one in dire need of new dowels, and this is the point where my grasp of the narrative went all thumbless. THIS IS NOT HOW YOU METAPHOR, people.

[H/t WiseWoman]

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Second-Worst Metaphor sighting from the same authors (though in a French rheumatology journal):

...BONUS: When a mendacious publicity-whore like RFK Feckin' Jr turns out to have higher standards of scholarly probity, it's time to reconsider one's life-choices and where one went wrong.