medicine
ksharpe | July 19, 2007Please welcome the newest addition to ScienceBlogs, Angry Toxicologist.
As the Toxicologist says in an introductory post,
I am a Ph.D. scientist in the public health sector with a good amount of toxicology and regulatory knowledge. I'm not going to be dishing about projects I am privy to, but I am much freer to make my opinions known anonymously, than I could do in a completely public forum.
Although other topics will probably be brought up from time to time (Friday is no day for science), this blog will be focused on public health and the science behind it and will be written for the non-…
oracknows | July 19, 2007Little did I know when I posted my first article on the evidence supporting health hazards due to secondhand smoke that it would end up dominating the comments of this blog for three full days and lead me to a site that's so full of pseudoscience, logical fallacies, and just plain B.S. that it is worthy of the title of the Whale.to of the tobacco nuts. Even less did I expect that the crankfest would spread to fellow SBer Mark's denialism blog as well. The sheer vitriol that some of these "smoking rights" advocates direct at any suggestion that SHS might be harmful, quite frankly, took me…
oracknows | July 18, 2007The other day, in the course of posting about some deceptive quote-mining by someone who doesn't accept the science indicating that secondhand smoke is a health danger, I referenced the uber-crank of crank websites, Forces.org, a website so cranky that it denies not just health dangers from secondhand smoke, but rather that even smoking causes cancer in smokers!
Naturally, such a site was irresistable to Mark over at the denialism blog and he has some fun with it.
Sit back and enjoy.
Oh, and as has happened on my posts about the data supporting health dangers from secondhand smoke and about…
oracknows | July 18, 2007I really shouldn't do it.
I really shouldn't go perusing the blog of the house organ of the Discovery Institute's propaganda arm, Evolution News & Views, as I did yesterday. I'm not as young as I used to be, have a family history of cardiovascular disease, and am not in the greatest of shape. Reading idiocy such as what regularly appears there surely cannot be good for my blood pressure or my general health, nor can it be good for my mind. Still, for you I nonetheless delve deeply into the muck of logical fallacies, half-truths, distortions, and misinformation that spews forth from the…
oracknows | July 17, 2007Here's a video in which Andrew Wakefield, who, now that he's facing charges for research improprieties and failure to disclose conflicts of interest, now claims that he's fighting "for the children," shows his concern for the children whose blood he drew:
Yes, while recounting how at a party he drew blood from children for £5 each, Wakefield is joking about how children fainted and threw up. Yes, the audience and Wakefield are laughing.
Disgusting.
Hat tip: Black Triangle.
Here's a bit more background:
LONDON -- The Austin doctor behind a controversial study linking a common children's…
grrlscientist | July 17, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, birds, ornithology, evolution, radiation, Chernobyl
Normal Barn Swallow (a),
while the other pictures show signs of albinism (white feathers; b & c),
unusually colored feathers (d), deformed beaks (e & f), deformed air sacs (g),
and bent tail feathers (h & i).
Images: Tim Mousseau.
Twenty years after the Chernobyl reactor disaster, which released clouds of radioactive particles in April 1986, the uninhabited forests within the 19 mile (30 kilometer) "exclusion zone" around the disaster site are lush and teeming with wildlife, giving the appearance…
j7uy5 | July 17, 2007
href="http://www.webmd.com/digestive-disorders/tc/Clostridium-Difficile-Colitis-Overview"
rel="tag">Clostridium difficile cases
are on the rise,
according to a
study in Archives of Surgery. It seems
odd to me that this study would come out now, just a few days after I
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/07/uk_study_shows_benefit_from_pr.php">posted
about the same topic.
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">I posted about it
because of the finding that the active cultures, that are used in
yogurt, appear to reduce the frequency and severity of
face="…
oracknows | July 17, 2007After Mark and I took apart Mike Adams' misinformation- and logical fallacy-filled rant of idiocy against conventional medicine, it appeared that there was still some left to take on.
Fortunately, Dr. RW took up the slack.
Because when the woo-meister is as idiotic as Mike Adams, too much debunking is never enough.
oracknows | July 17, 2007Not surprisingly, in response to my article on the health risks of secondhand smoke yesterday, the "skeptics' came out in force, although I must admit that even I hadn't expected quite as large an influx as what appeared. Perhaps I'll prepare a general response in the near future (and, no, I didn't take the Surgeon General's report as the be-all and end-all, but it did make a compelling case for SHS causing increasing the risk of lung cancer and cardiovascular disease at least, and it also served as a convenient aggregator of the many, many studies out there). In the meantime one commenter…
j7uy5 | July 17, 2007This
qualifies for "quote of the decade" status. Unfortunately it
is in Times Select, but
href="http://choosingdemocracy.blogspot.com/2007/07/waiting-for-health-care.html">clever
persons can
href="http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/Paul+Krugman">figure
out how to find the whole text (some, but not all of the
time).
Actually, the hat tip goes to
href="http://ronbeas2.blogspot.com/2007/07/if-you-say-it-enough.html">Ron,
who found it before I did (which he does most, but not all, of the
time).
Bush said this, as reported by
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman"…
j7uy5 | July 16, 2007Apparently
it is now the role of the Chief Executive to tell
businesspersons how to run their business.
In the context of the pro and con lobbying over the proposed expansion
of the State
Children’s Health Insurance Program, pharmaceutical
companies decided to join the pro side. After all, if more
children are insured, more of them will get prescription medication.
But is is not just the drug companies, it is a broad-spectrum
coalition:
According to the
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/09/washington/09child.html?ex=1341633600&en=f8f5eba22324ed32&ei=5090&partner=…
omnibrain | July 16, 2007Wow... I knew that many animals had herpes and if you want to get a herpes free lab animal it costs many times what a 'normal' herpes carrying animal does. But wow... Chlamydia in Koalas?! Maybe some of you bio people out there can tell us whether it's the same Chlamydia humans carry. So basically If I go to Australia and nail a koala - can I catch it and give it to my sheep?
Here's the exciting details on how Australian scientists are going to protect the koala population from STD's.
Professor Peter Timms, from QUT's Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation, said chlamydia was a…
oracknows | July 16, 2007I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I just don't understand it.
I just don't understand how anyone can take the charlatan Andrew Wakefield seriously anymore.
If anyone had any doubt that there is a cult of personality around this discredited vaccine fear-monger, whose shoddy science and undisclosed conflicts of interest managed to ignite a false hysteria over the MMR vaccine, wonder no more. Observe the support that he still commands from parents as he is finally called to account for his misdeeds:
Waving placards and chanting support for Dr Andrew Wakefield, parents from across the…
oracknows | July 16, 2007"What do you think about second hand smoke?" he asked me. I sensed ulterior motives behind the question, but I wasn't sure. I suspected that he was just looking for an argument.
"It's bad," I joked.
"Some have told me that the studies don't show any health problems from second hand smoke," he replied.
"I'm sure 'some' have," I retorted somewhat sarcastically.
"No, really, is there any evidence," he replied. "I'm open-minded about this topic."
Somehow I doubted this, but I figured, what the heck, and did a little reviewing. It makes for some interesting reading.
The question of whether second…
j7uy5 | July 16, 2007While
looking for information for my last post, I encountered another
interesting article at PNAS. This one is about a new molecule
that improved survival in mice infected with
href="http://www.aphis.usda.gov/lpa/pubs/fsheet_faq_notice/fs_ahscrapie.html"
rel="tag">scrapie.
Scrapie is one of the
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmissible_spongiform_encephalopathy">transmissible
spongiform encephalopathies (TSE).
Transmissible, because the infection can be transmitted from
one creature to another; spongiform, because the brain tissue of an
infected animal looks like a…
j7uy5 | July 15, 2007There is a
letter published online at Nature, ahead of the
print version, that describes a technique of analyzing an entire genome
to find genes that may be associated with disease.
The newly-identified gene, in this case, is linked to Type 1
href="http://www.merck.com/mmhe/sec13/ch165/ch165a.html">Diabetes
Mellitus (T1D). That is the type that usually
starts in childhood and always requires treatment with insulin.
The study was done by research teams in Canada and the USA.
The gene they found is on the short arm of chromosome
(16p13). There are two versions of the gene, Hakonarson…
oracknows | July 15, 2007As a result of my e-mailing the link to a mailing list I belong to asking members whether they thought it was outside the pale, Dr. Offit became aware of Mark's blog post about denialism in the Wall Street Journal editorial page that I castigated for its casually lumping Paul Offit's editorial on the Michael Moore movie Sicko in as an example of how the WSJ editorial page was a "clearinghouse for denialism." Moreover, Dr. Offit actually responded. I suggested that he post his response to Mark's blog as a comment, but instead he gave me his permission to post his e-mailed response on my blog,…
oracknows | July 15, 2007I'm afraid I must reluctantly take fellow SB'er Mark Hoofnagle to task here, because he appears to have allowed himself to get a bit carried away when it comes to throwing around the label of "denialist."
In an otherwise excellent takedown of some really bad propaganda in the Wall Street Journal editorial page, he did something below the usual high standards of his blog. He casually and offhandedly lumped Paul Offit in with the other "denialists" that he was castigating, based on this editorial about Michael Moore's new movie Sicko. It's something that most people probably wouldn't have…
oracknows | July 14, 2007While perusing my comments yesterday, I became aware of what looks like a promising new blog, Occam's Trowel by Scott Prinster. Check out his self-description:
Scott Prinster is continuing his graduate studies in the History of Science department at the University of Wisconsin. His current interest is in the interaction of religion and science in the pre- and early Reformation period in Eastern Europe, especially as part of the movements known as the Radical Reformation. Scott has also been a Unitarian Universalist minister for 12 years, and has served congregations in Michigan and here in…
j7uy5 | July 14, 2007
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
href="http://www.kcl.ac.uk/phpnews/wmview.php?ArtID=1918">This
press release (HT:
href="http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2007/07/got_moles_they_might_be_good_for_you.html">medGadget)
from King's College tips us off to an article in the journal,
href="http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/">Cancer
Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention.
This is something that news sites picked up on.
Specifically, the authors reported a relationship between the
number of moles a person has, and the length of their
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere…