Fall of dishonest doctor who started MMR/autism scare

From the Food & Health Skeptic:

Note that the crap was published in "Lancet" -- another reason not to trust that once-fine journal

The doctor who sparked a worldwide panic over the MMR vaccine could be struck off after being found guilty yesterday of a series of misconduct charges related to his “unethical” research. Andrew Wakefield, who in 1998 claimed an unfounded link between the vaccination and autism, “showed a callous disregard” for the suffering of children, subjecting them to unnecessary, invasive tests, a hearing found.

The General Medical Council (GMC) ruled that he abused his position of trust as he researched a possible link between the MMR vaccine, bowel disease and autism in children. It found that Wakefield and two colleagues acted dishonestly and irresponsibly in carrying out research on children against their best interests and without official permission.

Full article here

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Great Videos - Do Vaccines Cause Autism? The Education of Bill Maher?

From Respectful Insolence:

That's right. Vaccines educate the immune system, and Generation Rescue is full of...well, you know what it's full of.

Now if only Bill Maher would watch these videos. Let's make 'em go viral!

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Discover Magazine: most cancer caused by viruses?

Paul Ewald says infections are responsible for at least four-fifths of all cancers—and we have the tools to prevent them.

 by Andrew Grant

From the New Science of Health special issue, published online September 30, 2009

Most current research into the causes of cancer focuses on genes and environmental triggers. Evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald of the University of Louisville in Kentucky argues that scientists have overlooked the most important cause: parasites, especially viruses. Blending medicine and Darwinian biology, Ewald considers cancer and other diseases from the pathogen’s point of view, showing how natural selection determines why the smallpox virus, for instance, is a ruthless killer while viruses for the common cold are relatively benign. He says that once we identify the viruses that trigger cancer, we can work to prevent their transmission and force them to evolve from fatal scourges into mere nuisances, eventually turning cancer into a manageable disease.

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EU casts doubt on health claims of "super foods"

And not before time I'd add.

EU inquiry pours doubt on benefit of health foods

More than 50 food products and supplements have been exposed by a Europe-wide investigation for making unproven claims about their health benefits.

 

Ocean Spray cranberry juice, Lipton black tea and some probiotic supplements are among the items whose claimed health benefits are scientifically unproven, according to an investigation by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).

 

Fish oil supplements which purport to improve brain growth in babies and children have come under particular scrutiny, with the agency rejecting most of the benefits claimed by manufacturers.

 

The initial results of the inquiry suggest that consumers could be wasting millions of pounds each year on products they think will improve their diet and lifestyle.

 

As anyone prepared to look at the evidence has already known for some time, the claims made about this or that food or supplement have all too often rested on dodgy poor quality studies of dubious scientific validity.

 

To give an egregious example, several years ago there appeared reports in newspapers etc about how a study had proven the benefits of fish oil.

 

These reports were the result of media outlets regurgitating a manufacturer's press release without question.

 

However, had they bothered to look a little more closely and ask some questions, they would have discovered that this "study" involved the maker of fish-oil capsules simply handing them out to people and then asking them later how they felt!

 

No independent measuring of the test subjects before, during and after the period they were taking the capsules, a total reliance on self-reporting (known to be highly unreliable) and no control group against which to compare outcomes.

 

In short, completely pseudo-scientific rubbish.

 

Bare that in mind the next time you hear the promoter of one of these quack remedies say that their product's health benefits have been proven by studies.

 

Bullshit.

 

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Even obesity paradoxes can't "excuse" fatness

Junkfood Science's latest instalment in its series on the obesity paradox, that is, the disconnect between what we believe about being overweight and what the actual scientific evidence shows.

 

It also manifests itself in the knots researchers tie themselves into when trying to spin their own results so they give the "right message."

 

This study into the links between excess weight and increased risks of mortality was a null study. That means it found no such link. In fact, it found the opposite. So it was fun to see how this "inconvenient message" was spun in the associated press release and the media coverage of it.

Reporting research finding anything positive about fat is accompanied by disclaimers, caveats and every effort to minimize its significance. It’s even called an obesity paradox, perhaps hoping we’ll think it an anomaly, rather than where the strength of the evidence lies. You’ve probably caught the news stories about a Canadian study reportedly showing that people with “a few pounds,” who are “slightly overweight,” are carrying “a little extra weight,” have “excess pounds, but not too many,” and are “overweight but not obese” will “actually live longer than those of normal weight.” But that isn’t what this latest study found. It’s what the press release said it found.

So, what did the study actually find?

The results of this epidemiological study were published in Obesity, the journal of the Obesity Society. This study found that none of the relative risks associated with mortality they examined were tenable [explained here], except for one. Age. At age 65, the relative risks of dying rose to 44.35 times compared to age 25; and by age 75, relative risks are 119-fold. We should stop right there, as tenable correlations are the only ones that deserve our focus. But that wouldn’t have made a news story, so what followed was splitting hairs among the rest.

Looking at corrected BMIs, according to the breakdowns adopted by the world’s governments, the authors found that compared to ‘normal’ BMIs (18.5 up to 25):

 

● being overweight (BMI 25 up to 30) was associated with a 25% lower risk of dying

 

● being obese (BMI 30 up to 35, which includes about 80% of all obese people) was associated with a 12% lower risk of dying.

 

● And the risks associated with the most ‘morbidly obese’ (BMIs 35+) — the uppermost 3% of this Canadian cohort— were statistically the same as those with ‘normal’ BMIs. [RR=1.09 (0.86-1.39, 95% CI) versus RR=1.0.]

 

Go to Junkfood Science to read the full post. Unsurprisingly, (I would have thought), it is age that is the most tenable risk factor it seems!

 

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Does it really matter how your body measures up?

The Figure-Flaw Paradox: Does it really matter how your body measures up? Part 2

The “figure flaw paradox” is really a retake on the obesity paradox. As obesity has proven to be a poor measure of health or mortality risk, new renditions are being proposed. But the fallacies are the same.

We’ve encountered all sorts of spins trying to preserve the myths of the deadliness of fat — from claims that the studies only show a paradox with really old people to that being overweight might be okay but not obese — hoping we won’t actually read the studies to see that that’s not what they found. It’s unpopular to spread the news that most fat — most overweight, as well as most obese — people have lower risks for mortality than those with “healthy” weights; or that thin people, regardless of their age, fair the worst. Some discount the better outcomes among obese people by saying they get better healthcare than thinner people — something completely opposite of decades of documented discrimination against obese people in healthcare.

Full post at Junkfood Science

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And hands off my Turkey Twizzlers!

 

Truth be told, I had never heard of Turkey Twizzlers before or that tiresome bore Jamie Oliver's campaign against them. Sadly I don't think they are on sale in Australia.

 

But going by this photo all I can think at the moment is "yum, yum, I wish they were."

 

This comes from the Food & Health Skeptic:

 

Some wide ranging food skepticism from Britain

Extracted from "Global Warming And Other Bollocks: The Truth About All Those Science Scare Stories" by Professor Stanley Feldman and Professor Vincent Marks. It reprises most of what I have been saying on this blog

THERE ARE FEW 'BAD' FOODS

Received wisdom, repeated by many doctors and public health professionals, says we can remain fit and avoid disease by cutting out certain 'bad foods' from our diets. Indeed, it is variously claimed that 35-50 per cent of all cancers are caused by the food we eat.

But while they are despised by the culinary elite, readily available hamburgers, sausages and pizzas have provided good nutritional value for many low-income families, who in previous days could afford only low-protein, high-carbohydrate, high-fat meals such as bread and dripping, and chip butties.

In fact, fears about hamburgers and sausages in Britain are especially irrational. Most countries have a national dish based on minced or processed meat - and none is suffering from an epidemic of junk food-inspired illness. For example, meatballs are used in many guises in the Middle East, chopped meat on a bed of onions is a national dish in the Balkans, and mince is also used in countless Italian sauces.

The terrines and pâtés of France and Belgium also contain processed chopped meat. Obesity is not caused by these foods, but by those who choose to gorge on them. Studies claiming to show the negative impact of a 'junk food' diet usually have little scientific validity.

ORGANIC FOOD IS NO BETTER FOR YOU

A widespread belief has emerged that organic foods are better for you than others because they do not contain 'chemicals' used in large- scale conventional farming.

This dogma is wrong. All plant nutriment comes from the air, in the form of CO2, and from water-soluble chemicals in the soil. The composition of these chemicals is the same, whether they come from a plastic bag or from 'natural' manure or compost. They are certainly the same by the time they are on your plate.

THERE'S NO NEED TO CUT BACK ON SALT

Salt is an essential food. Without it, we would die. Land-based mammals-such as humans control their body temperature by sweating and panting. Sweating is impossible without sufficient salt. In fact, strenuous exercise in a person depleted of salt causes overheating and death.

The Government has caved in to the anti-salt zealots in its advice to reduce salt intake. However, there is, in fact, very little, if any, truly scientific evidence that cutting back on it will do you any good.

TURKEY TWIZZLERS ARE FINE

The much-disparaged Turkey Twizzler, bugbear of TV chef Jamie Oliver, is made of recovered turkey meat and provides the same amino acids as normal turkey breast.

Corned beef, now an unfashionable meat product, is also no less nutritious than any other beef, although, like Turkey Twizzlers, it is also a reclaimed meat product.

Turkey Twizzlers are fine: The recovered meat provides the same amino acids as regular turkey breast meat

WE DON'T KNOW WHAT CAUSES HEART DISEASE

The medical (and social) consensus is that cardiovascular disease is caused by being overweight, by having a high-fat, high-cholesterol diet and by unhealthy activities such as smoking.

While being morbidly obese, eating nothing but lard and smoking 60 a day will probably lead to an early grave, there is nevertheless a lot of confusion about the precise link between lifestyle and this, the biggest killer of all.

Many people with high cholesterol levels in their blood do not get heart disease. Many people with very low levels do.

The very low levels of heart disease recorded in some populations, notably the Japanese, may have more to do with cultural variation and prejudice than with medical reality (in many societies, what are, in fact, heart attacks are often listed on death certificates as 'strokes').

Furthermore, some of the lowest levels of cholesterol and arterial sclerosis are to be found in populations such as the Inuit and Siberian hunter-gatherers, who live on a diet which is incredibly high in saturated fat.

TAKE HEALTH ADVICE WITH A PINCH OF SALT

Everything seems to be bad for you these days, but there is also plenty of scientific evidence to the contrary. Eggs seldom contain salmonella, even if some chickens do. Cholesterol in the diet does not cause fatty deposits in your arteries. There is probably little difference between the effect of saturated and unsaturated fats.

In those with normal kidney function, salt does not cause high blood pressure. Those with a body-mass index of between 25 and 32 live as long as or longer than those with a lower BMI. And avoiding the sun causes vitamin D deficiency; a suntan is nature's natural sun block, although sunburn is to be avoided.

MERCURY FILLINGS ARE PROBABLY HARMLESS

Anti-mercury campaigners believe that the mercury used in dental fillings will make you ill (mercury is a potent poison).

But a single amalgam filling provides just 0.03 micrograms/day of mercury, which is almost 3,000 times less than the safety level permitted for persons with occupational exposure to mercury, and is too small to be responsible for any symptoms.

SOURCE

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Can fat be good for you? Part 2

Continuing Junkfood Science's series on peer-reviewed research into fat, diet and health that has produced some surprising and counter intuitive results.

Though for those who keep an eye on the results of the good quality science, and not the pseudo-scientific epidemiological rubbish to underpins so much of the scare campaigns and hysteria surrounding our food, this will not come as a surprise at all.

The series is called Paradoxes compel us to think.

It's a long post, but worth a read. Here are the concluding paragraphs:

The adult years are characterized by a gradual and persistent physiologic increase in body weight, leading researchers to suggest that this age-related natural phenomenon may be protective and a major force in human longevity. The typical American adult gains 3–5 kg per decade beyond the age of 20 years, which translates into about 10–15 kg [22-33 pounds] between the third to fifth decades. The clinical research of Dr. Andres found that the fewest deaths occurred in those whose weights increased as they aged. Given the protective, fertility, immunological and nurturing benefits of fat stores, it is not surprising that the preponderance of medical research has failed to support beliefs that midlife weight gain is harmful to healthy women and men. With age, fat cells have also been shown to become less metabolically active, lessening their role in diseases associated with aging like diabetes.

“It’s acceptable, possibly even highly beneficial, for normal, healthy adults to gain gradually about a pound a year beginning around age 40,” said Dr. Andres in Food & Nutrition Digest, “so that by the time they’re in their 60s they weigh about 20 pounds more than the Met Life tables would suggest.”

The possible healthfulness of natural weight gain with aging, however, is a paradoxical idea in popular media. People may never think to question their beliefs about the deadliness of fat and benefits of weight loss when they never hear anything different.

The importance of research finding seeming paradoxes is that it make us think, question and not be afraid to learn where the evidence might really take us.

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Can fat be good for you?

Interesting research that went largely ignored by the media.

 

Sandy at Junkfood Science begins a four part series looking at recently published research that challenges the fashionable notions about fat and obesity.

 

In a nutshell, the research found that amongst its study group, it was men of so-called "normal" weight that had higher mortality rates.

Researchers, led by Dr. Paul McAuley with the Department of Human Performance and Sport Sciences at Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina, set to test the hypothesis that high cardiovascular fitness and high BMI were associated with a lower risk for death among healthy older men. As they noted, most studies, and the strongest ones, point to an inverse relationship between BMI among mature adults and mortality, with obesity having a protective role. Obesity’s survival advantage among patients with a wide range of diseases and health problems has also been especially well documented in the medical literature. Could being fat be associated with lower risk for premature death among healthy adults, and is fitness an independent risk factor?

Given the hysterical moralising about fat and obesity that we are subjected to these days, the findings may surprise you:

Among 981 healthy older men, 208 died during 6.9 years of follow-up. Compared to the reference ideal of a “healthy” BMI (20-24.9), men who were overweight were associated with a 34% lower risk for all-cause mortality, while the obese men (regardless of the degree of obesity) were associated with a 44% lower risk. In contrast, men with BMIs under 20 had more than a two-fold higher risk for premature death. When cardiovascular fitness was controlled for (as measured by MET = 3.5 mL/kg/min oxygen uptake on exercise tests), the slim men with BMIs below 20 were associated with an even higher 2.5 fold higher risk for premature death. Meanwhile, the most obese men had the lowest risk for all-cause mortality of all, at less than half (HR= 0.44) the “normal” weight men. As the authors noted, none of these correlations were significant. However, they do help to dispell popular beliefs about the deadliness of being fat as we age.

You can read the full post here.

 

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Weighing the risks of vaccinating children for whooping cough

Sandy from Junkfood Science begins: "Loving parents have a hard job. They want to protect their children from harm and make the best healthcare decisions for them, but with all of the health information and misinformation swirling around, it can seem impossible to know what to believe. One question for some parents is whether childhood immunizations are necessary anymore. With fewer children dying of childhood illnesses today, it can seem like the diseases are no longer serious and that the vaccines might be putting their children at needless risk." Unfortunately there is a lot of uninformed and downright ignorant false information about childhood vaccination circulating these days, but some acknowledgement needs to be paid to sceptical parents. They do want to do what is best for their children, and they are trying to inform themselves about the risks associated with vaccines. And we do need to be up front and honest with them - there are levels of risk with any medication. No medecine is without some possible side effects. (Though unfortunately we also have irresponsible and scientifically illiterate conspiracy pushers, as seen with the claims of a MMR vaccine and autism link. Complete rubbish that has been shown conclusively to be totally untrue.) But what these parents always seem to fail to do is try and understand the risks of not vaccinating children. So what are the risks of not vaccinating children relative to vaccinating them? Research just published in the June issue of Pediatrics looks specifically at pertussis, or whooping cough. The results speak for themselves: They...look[ed] at every case of pertussis infection identified in children in the Kaiser Permanente of Colorado health plan over more than a decade, between 1996 and 2007. They randomly matched each case to four controls and looked at the children’s vaccination records. The differences were striking. Only 0.5% of the healthy children had not been vaccinated, compared to 12% of the children who had gotten sick with pertussis. That means, unvaccinated children are associated with a nearly 23-fold higher risk of getting the disease compared to vaccinated children. [Now this is a tenable correlation and real relative risk.] Deciding not to vaccinate children does not keep them safer from childhood diseases, but puts them at considerably greater risk. You can read the whole thing by following the link at the top. So parents need to balance concern about either small or false risks from vaccines themselves against the increased risk that their child will get a serious disease that may even kill him. See also Lessons from the Vaccine-Autism Wars I'd also urge anyone interested to follow her links in relation to "tenable correlations" and "relative risks". These are absolutely vital in sorting the wheat from the chaff when it comes to assessing claims in the media about some study claiming to have found some link or other. All studies are not the same. The number that are poorly conducted pseudo-scientific rubbish with weak findings, but yet get saturation coverage in the media is not only astounding, it is depressing. Recent claims about red meat, alcohol and high GI diets causing cancer and other illnesses all fall into this category. Claims are made about the health implications for the general population based upon samples that are not representative of the general population. The red meat gives you cancer nonsense recently peddled by naive and credulous journalists was a particularly egregious example. In this case, the sample was formed by those members of the American Association of Retired Persons, ages 50 to 71, who could be bothered to fill out and post back a questionairre sent to them way back in 1995. (So yes, no new research at all was done for this study. It simply involved feeding the prior collected information through a computer that looked for correlations - hence the importance of understanding the difference between tenable and untenable correlations.) What this means is that they were using an unrepresentative sample of an unrepresentative sample! Why this wasn't setting off alarm bells for people is beyond me. Though I suspect that in truth, nobody bothered to check. Correlation does not equal causation. Seems simple enough, but not for many of these researchers. The number of findings based on untenable correlations is appalling. If you seach through any large enough data set, you will find correlations. Whether these correlations mean anything or are just the result of chance is another question entirely. All too often it is these simple correlations that form the basis of press releases claiming to have found a link between our food and disease. Then we have press releases claiming such links when the study's own data says something different. Again, the recent red meat study stands out for claims that were simply not supported by its own results. Despite the headlines shrieking that high red meat consumption increased your risk of getting cancer, examination of its results said something else. While claimed rates for a number of cancers for men who who ate the most red meat were higher than those who ate the least, the difference between the two groups was only 1.4%. Now, I'm guessing, (and yes, this is a guess, but I'm prepared to put money on it), but I suspect that this falls within the study's own margin of error and thus statistically there is no real difference. However, when it came to women, those with the highest consumption of red meat had lower rates of cancer compared to those with the lowest! A question arising from this is: why did the study's authors then issue a press release that claimed to have found a clear link between higher rates of red meat consumption and cancer, when their own results said the opposite? (Not that any of this study's results should be taken seriously I'd hasten to add. It is rubbish from beginning to end.) Part of the answer here is I believe the fact that health is one of those things that has replaced sex as the besetting concern of moral entrepreneurs. They already "know" that red meat, alcohol, high GI diets, fat etc are "bad" and they need to be seen to be sending the "right" message. This was obvious with the recent no safe level of drinking for women study conducted in the UK. You can see the author's predetermined determination to find that alcohol is bad for women, even at moderate levels, and then her consternation at finding that her results don't support her belief. So she reworks the data this way and that, trying to get the "right" result. In the end she fails. Her own data clearly shows that fully 95% of women who drank had lower rates of cancer compared to those who didn't. Only the top 5% heaviest drinkers had poorer health outcomes. But what does she announce to the media? The "right" result, ie that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption for women. Now, call me old fashioned, but I would have thought that the right result is what your data actually shows, not what you think it should show.

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The BBC, Mad Cows Disease and climate change

This is by David Whitehouse and is taken from the Greenie Watch blog:

 

It is very interesting to see today's story on BBC News Online about BSE/CJD "vCJD carrier risk overestimated.". It is the latest in a long line of similar assessments of the vCJD situation.

After many years of sporadic interest the BSE/vCJD story took off in 1996 after an admission in parliament by the health minister that there was a link between BSE contaminated meat and a new strain of the degenerative vCJD brain disease that had afflicted a handful of people. Initially, few people knew anything definite about the disease and its possible progression and, depending upon assumptions, computer models predicted anything from a small number of people being affected to a large fraction of the population. While such uncertainty existed it was right for journalists to reflect the scientific situation but as I was science correspondent for BBC Radio at the time, I soon began to realise the tension between science and journalism and the changing approach to science within BBC News at the time.

In terms of news the potential for a modern day catastrophic plague is a much 'better' story than the possibility that nothing much more will happen. So whilst the uncertainty persisted that was the story that was emphasised with the appropriate caveats. However, it soon became clear to most scientists at least that a major catastrophe was not in the making. The increase in numbers afflicted, despite the unknown incubation of the disease, was not increasing as some predicted, but that fact was inconvenient to some and did not impinge on our general approach to the story.

In such circumstances I took the view that journalists should stay close to the data and not let the scientific possibilities, however dramatic and 'newsworthy,' obscure what was actually happening, especially when those possibilities rested on a cascade of debateable assumptions being fed into a computer model that had been tweaked to hindcast previous data. It was not a point of view taken by other arms of the BBC one part of which was repeatedly promoting the same scare story coming out of one institution based on said computer models and predictions. I believed that taking a sober approach was the right one, especially for the BBC, which was looked to for responsible reporting. Wanting to get on air with a story and make an impression with editors and management was one thing, but I took the view that a journalist should not tailor the science to suit ones ambitions, or survival, that way. The political journalist John Sergeant summed it up when he said that there were many journalists who reported what they could get away with rather than what they know.

My approach was not favoured by the BBC at the time and I was severely criticised in 1998 and told I was wrong and not reporting the BSE/vCJD story correctly. But with hindsight I was correct in my approach. To date the total number of people afflicted with BSE/vCJD remains very small. In fact, far smaller than many illnesses that never get a mention in the media, and the scientific doom mongers have moved onto new pastures. But the attitude towards science still remains at the BBC and has been evident in its evangelical, inconsistent climate change reporting and its narrow, shallow and sparse reporting on other scientific issues.

Reporting the consensus about climate change (and we all know about the debate about what is a consensus in the IPCC era) is not synonymous with good science reporting. The BBC is at an important point. It has been narrow minded about climate change for many years and they have become at the very least a cliché and at worst lampooned as being predictable and biased by a public that doesn't believe them anymore.

Times are changing. New data is emerging, the world refuses to warm in the past decade, the sun becomes quiet, and scientists are beginning to study themselves investigating how entrenched positions become established and whether consensus is a realistic concept. History and science will always correct things in the end. It has done so with vCJD and it is not impossible that the judgement of history and science on current environmental reporting will be the same.

SOURCE

 

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Cereal trumps sports drink

From the Food & Health Skeptic:

 

A very good controlled experiment too

Eating a bowl of cereal beats guzzling an expensive sports drink after a workout, say scientists. A study of athletes found the breakfast snack was at least as good, if not better, at revitalising muscles.

As part of the research, eight men and four women fasted for 12 hours and cycled for two hours, then immediately refuelled with a sports drink. Five days later they repeated the fasting and exercise, then ate a wholewheat flake cereal with a splash of skimmed milk instead.

Exercise physiologist Lynne Kammer said: 'We found cereal and milk was good for protein synthesis, or muscle rebuilding, after exercise. 'Because of the protein in the milk you would expect to see this. 'But what was most surprising was the lactate in the blood, which causes muscles to stiffen, was greatly reduced after consuming the cereal and milk as compared to the sports drink.' The researchers said this was because the cereal raised levels of insulin, which converts sugar to energy, and blunted the production of lactate.

The scientists, from Texas University, found both the snack and energy drink replenished depleted glycogen - a fuel the body uses during exercise. But the cereal encouraged greater glycogen storage.

Miss Kammer, whose findings are published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, said: 'Cereal and milk is a less expensive option than sports drinks. The milk provides a source of easily digestible and high-quality protein, making this an attractive recovery option for those who refuel at home.'

SOURCE

 

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Human noses too cold for bird flu

Bird flu may not have become the threat to humans that some predicted because our noses are too cold for the virus to thrive, UK researchers say. An Imperial College London recreation of the nose's environment found that at 32 degrees Celsius, avian flu viruses lose function and cannot spread. It is likely that the viruses have adapted to suit the warmer 40 degree environments in the guts of birds. A mutation would be needed before bird flu became a human problem, they said.

Published in the journal PLoS Pathogens, the study also found that human viruses are affected by the colder temperatures found in the nose but to nowhere near the same extent. In effect, human viruses are still able to replicate and spread under those conditions, the researchers said. Both viruses were able to grow well at 37 degrees - human core body temperature and equivalent to the environment in the lungs.

They also created a mutated human flu virus by adding a protein from the surface of an avian influenza virus. This virus - an example of how a new strain could develop and start a pandemic - was also unsuccessful at 32 degrees.

Study leader Professor Wendy Barclay said it suggested that if a new human influenza strain evolved by mixing with an avian influenza virus, it would still need to undergo further mutations before it could be successful in infecting humans. "Our study gives vital clues about what kinds of changes would be needed in order for them to mutate and infect humans, potentially helping us to identify which viruses could lead to a pandemic."

She added further research could point to warning signs in viruses that are beginning to make the kinds of genetic changes for them to jump into humans. "Animal viruses that spread well at low temperatures in these cultures could be more likely to cause the next pandemic than those which are restricted."

She said swine flu - which was spreading from person to person, seemingly through upper respiratory tract infection - was probably an example of a virus which had adapted to cope with the cooler temperatures in the nose.

Professor Ian Jones, an expert in virology at the University of Reading, said: "This work confirms the fact that temperature differences in the avian and human sites of influenza infection are key to virus establishment. "It is certainly part of the explanation of why avian viruses, such as H5N1, fail to transmit readily to humans." He added that the research also showed that the proteins on the outside of the virus were key to its function at different temperatures. "This helps the monitoring of avian flu as it indicates which changes to look out for."

SOURCE

 

From the Food & Health Skeptic

 

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Does this kid look fat to you?

 

Dr John Ray asks the pertinent question here - when "will this totally unscientific mania ever fade?"

 

He reproduces an article from The Telegraph (see at the end of this post) that perfectly highlights the madness that wellness and healthy lifestyle programs are producing.

 

Let's be clear about this. These programs are often not based upon sound science.

 

They now form the basis for government advertising, both here and in Great Britain, that can only be described as a largely pointless waste of tax dollars that could have been spent productively elsewhere.

 

There is no credible evidence to support the claim that even if he were overweight he would be at greater risk of cancer later in life.

 

None at all. The high quality properly randomised double-blind trials have found no such linkage between diet, overweight and cancer.

 

The false claim that there is a link rests solely on a number of poor quality epidemiological studies with weak findings.

 

But the problem is that matters of health have been taken over by a collection of "moral puritans" and "moral entrepreneurs" who have been conducting a crusade against fat. I'm not saying that fat and diet is completely irrelevant to health, rather that this debate has become decoupled from the actual evidence and is not being driven by the evidence.

 

So it is interesting to see that The Australian and the Weekend Australian Magazine have now blown the lid on the fake childhood obesity epidemic here in Australia.

 

Junkfood Science comments:

It’s easy to lie with statistics, graphs and scary marketing, and even to get people to believe the opposite of reality, such as in an epidemic of obese, unhealthy and sedentary children. As alarming claims are repeated and the most extreme examples are depicted as representative of the crisis, few people stop to question how a statistic is being defined.

 

With today’s new definition of “overweight” (children ≥95^th percentile on new BMI growth curves, also called “obese” depending on the author), a mere 5 pounds makes the difference between a first grader being labeled as “normal” or “obese.” Even doctors are unable to recognize the children who meet the definition and few people understand what most “obese” and “overweight” children really look like. If they did, of course, they’d realize how incredible the claims of a crisis really are.

(It'll be worth your while following the embedded links in that quote.)

 

There are going to have to be some hard questions asked of health academics and government health agencies who have actively promoted this myth, even when any sober consideration of the evidence should have made it clear that there was something terribly wrong with it.

 

The crucial question here is how is it possible for bad ideas, poorly supported by hard evidence, to take over whole areas of science and public policy and become moral crusades, not carefully thought through and considered policy decisions?

 

For this I would yet again refer people back to the article by John Tierney, the science writer for The New York Times, entitled Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus, and its notion of informational cascades.

 

Briefly, this is the process where the loudest voices and not the evidence take over a topic. These voices, because they seem authoritative and most of us don't have the time or the ability to do our own research, set what others think about an issue and everybody proceeds on that assumption.

 

Then this becomes entrenched as an orthodoxy and to speak against it carries the threat of being denounced as a "heretic."

 

This is what happened with our understanding of diet, fat and health.

 

The loud voices convinced other academics who didn't bother to look very deeply at the claims being made, and then the bureaucracy and politicians came on board, deciding that "something had to be done" and it was their responsibility to do it.

 

So it got to the point where other scientists would appear before Congressional committees in the US to try and explain why the concern about fat may not in fact be supported by good evidence, only to be ridiculed and derided as enemies of the public good.

 

And woe unto them if they had ever done any work of any kind for the food industry at any time. Then they were pilloried as the paid stooges of big business, putting the interests of money ahead of people's health and well being.

 

A kind of McCarthyism prevailed.

 

It is now dawning on some people that they were probably also right.

 

The Telegraph's article:

 

Children's advisor on healthy eating told son is overweight

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Why "wellness" is a crock of sh*t

 

It's the new buzz word around town. No company or government department today is now complete without a "wellness program".

 

Some of it is harmless, you know, those stupid signs telling you to wash your hands in the toilet or to take the stairs near the lifts.

 

But much of it is actually based upon highly dubious pseudo-science or very poor quality studies with weak findings that are only a step or two up from pseudo-science.

 

As a general resource on this and other health and diet matters, check out Junkfood Science.

 

But recently it's been noted that the left-wing blog The Huffington Post has taken a strange and disturbing direction in promoting all kinds of crackpot medical and health ideas that have no actual scientific evidence to support them, such as conspiracy theories about vaccines.

 

Now we know why.

 

It has a "wellness editor".

 

Here are her "qualifications":

Patricia Fitzgerald is a licensed acupuncturist, certified clinical nutritionist, and a homeopath. She has a Master's Degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine and a Doctorate in Homeopathic Medicine. She is the founder and Medical Director of the Santa Monica Wellness Center and the author of the best-selling, award-winning The Detox Solution: The Missing Link to Radiant Health, Abundant Energy, Ideal Weight, and Peace of Mind. You can learn more at TheDetoxSolution.com.

 

Her mission is to inspire others to live their passion, while creating and enjoying optimal physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.

Oh dear, so much stupidity and snakeoil compressed into so few words.

 

And for fuck's sake, isn't having a "mission" so friggen last century?

 

In response to the question "what is a docorate in homoepathic medicine," a comment left on the Pharyngula blog gave the perfect definition:

...a doctorate in homeopathic medicine would be a blank piece of paper soaked in a 1:10,000,000 tincture made from the ink of an actual doctor's diploma.

As Mike the Mad Biologist says, it's "...like having a creationist as the science editor. And it explains quite a bit about The Huffington Post's War on Medicine."

 

 

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OMB memo queries EPA's CO2 & health claims

All is not well in CO2 regulation land. You may have heard about a leaked memo from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that questions the EPA findings on CO2 being a “threat to human health”. BTW there is still time to lodge your comments (as is your right as a US citizen) on this finding, details here.

 

The leaked internal memo, was  marked “Attorney Client Privilege”.

 

The rest at Watts Up With That?

 

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Aussie woman had swine flu!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But got better.

 

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Diseases Coming Back, Thanks to Anti-Vaxers

From Little Green Footballs (The headlong flight from reason and the modern world continues!)

 

The Wall Street Journal has an article about a report from the Centers for Disease Control warning about new outbreaks of diseases thought to be eradicated—due to parents who are buying into the anti-vaccination craziness promoted by people like Jenny McCarthy: Fear of Vaccines Spurs Outbreaks, Study Says.

Parental doubts about the safety of childhood vaccinations are leading to outbreaks of largely eradicated diseases like measles and whooping cough, doctors warned in a new report.

 

A U.S. measles outbreak last year — almost exclusively among unvaccinated people — has sparked concern about places where many parents opt out of having their children vaccinated.

 

In Ashland, Ore., more than a quarter of kindergartners aren’t vaccinated, leading the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to hold a town-hall meeting on vaccination there earlier this year. ...

 

Too many abstainers can put a town at risk, wrote Dr. Saad Omer, of Emory University in Atlanta, the lead author in the report in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine.

 

“People need to recognize that in the case of infectious diseases, what other people do impacts my child,” Dr. Omer said in an interview. “If they live in a community that has a cluster of refusers, their risk of getting a vaccine-preventable disease goes up, just by virtue of who they play with.”

 

Vaccines for diseases like whooping cough aren’t 100% effective for each individual, and some children can’t be vaccinated for medical reasons. That means that eradicating a disease requires vaccinating a large percentage of the nearby population to stop infections from spreading — what’s called “herd immunity.”

 

Schools with many abstainers have been linked to outbreaks.

There are actually schools that accept children who haven’t been vaccinated?

 

And by the way, in addition to being a shill for “intelligent design” creationism, Republican Tom Tancredo is also an anti-vaccination kook:

A woman asked Tancredo, “What do you think of autism in this country?” She has a 4-year-old with autism. Tancredo said, “I think much of it is due to the number of shots we give to kids . . .” They talked about mercury in vaccines’ preservatives.

UPDATE at 5/7/09 10:32:34 am:

 

And if you haven’t heard already, Oprah Winfrey is now promoting the anti-vaccination kooks too, by giving a talk show to Jenny McCarthy: Why is Oprah Winfrey promoting vaccine skeptic Jenny McCarthy?

 

UPDATE at 5/7/09 10:41:35 am:

 

And to make things even worse, support for anti-vaccination insanity is now beginning to show up in GOP state platforms; from the Oklahoma platform:

5. We support the right of parents to apply for exemptions for their children from school vaccinations requirements for medical reasons, religious reasons, or other reasons of conscience.

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2.3 million and counting

That's the number of news stories about swine flu on Google News.   As I understand it, the actual number of cases hasn't even reached 1,000 yet.   Confirmed deaths around 20 or so.   But despite the fact that this latest swine flu is in all likelihood not as virulent as ordinary seasonal flu, (which kills on average 36,000 people every year in the US alone), the US government is talking about diverting resources from the production of vaccines for seasonal flu to one for swine flu!   Junkfood Science has more in "All of humanity under threat…"

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The nocebo effect or CRAP Syndrome

This just further adds to my considerable misgivings about all of the so-called healthy lifestyle and healthy living campaigns that the government and quasi-governmental bodies are subjecting us to nowadays.   Certainly the current ad of the Commonwealth targeting chronic disease, centred on the issue of body weight, is almost certainly a complete waste of health dollars because it is based upon very questionable assumptions that are largely underpinned by poor quality epidemiological studies with very weak findings.   But also the false claims of outfits such as the Cancer Council that diet can cause cancer (and its corollary that diet can prevent it). There is simply no good evidence in the scientific literature to support this claim (but plenty of bad), but it is now almost accepted universally as true.   There was an ad in today's West flogging apples as some kind of "miracle food" in relation to cancer. False advertising pure and simple. Anyhoo - the nocebo effect:   A financial publication isn’t a place you might expect to find an insightful article on health, but Financial Times proved the exception. Last weekend, Stuart Blackman explored how seemingly helpful educational health messages can be bad for our health. In fact, they can lead us to believe we are unhealthy and to actually feel quite unwell.   His article, “Why health warnings can be bad,” began by describing the nocebo effect. That’s the powerful phenomenon of developing the most extraordinary physical symptoms when we believe or fear that something is bad for us. It’s the negative stepsister of the placebo effect and the full significance of both isn’t understood by many people.   And:   According to John Adams, professor emeritus at University College London and Britain’s leading risk expert and author of Risk, a major contributor to our negative expectations is the popular trend among health professionals and health agencies to issue precautionary advice concerning health risks, even when there is no evidence for any credible risk to people’s health. He labeled it a “syndrome” he calls C.R.A.P.   Full post at Junkfood Science

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