The Death of a Flea

Dr. Couz is in mourning today. I recently learned, along with the rest of the medical blogosphere, that Dr. Flea's Blog is now defunct. Gone. Dead webspace. No forwarding address. No goodbye.

Flea earned my undying admiration with his series on vaccines around the time that he made the mistake of messing with some of the less rational fringe of the anti-vaccination movement. Several of his posts collected 80 to 100 comments before they tired of the game. Rather than fighting the impossible fight (you can't debate a subject like vaccination with people who believe that peer-reviewed evidence is biased and false but that alternative websites are the word of God) the Flea chose to educate. He posted a brilliant series of posts, each dealing with a different vaccine-preventable disease. He covered diptheria, polio, HiB, mumps... many diseases that people don't have a good understanding of today in a well-written series that I now wish I had saved somewhere. Flea was one of the first bloggers in my blogroll, and I don't have the heart to remove him yet.

I know that Flea was in the middle of a malpractice trial. There had been some recent debate over whether or not he was blogging in real time, or if this was a trial that has long passed. Based on the sudden disappearance of his blog, I think it was likely the former.

First Barbados Butterfly was pressured by the hospital she worked for to remove her blog. Then Vitamin K was outed, and converted her blog to invitation-only. And now the Flea.

I can only hope this is a temporary hiatus.