Archive for 2000
Melanie Griffith Promoting Nikken Magnet Therapy
I’ve never been a big fan of Melanie Griffith, and I’m even less of a fan after reading that she uses her web site to promote “magnetic therapy” as an alternative to pain killers for pain relief (Griffith is recovering from pain killer addiction).
Some people were convinced by a double blind study at Baylor’s Institute for Rehabilitation Research in Houston which reported that concluded magnets helped alleviate pain in people recovering from polio. The only problem is not only was that study was very small — only 50 patients total — but the researchers who conducted it had a prior belief that the magnetic therapy worked for them. That wouldn’t normally be an issue in a double blind study (if properly performed), but while a research subject usually lacks the technical ability to differentiate between an active drug and a placebo, most people can probably think of a number of ways to differentiate between a magnet and a non-magnetic piece of metal.
This doesn’t rule out the possibility that magnets may have some pain relief effect, but given that so far there is no clear biological mechanism for how magnets would relieve pain (and no, forget the iron in the blood idea because iron in blood occurs as individual atoms which are magnetically independent). While it is true that the human body is mildly dimagnetic — i.e. it is repelled by magnetic fields, the dimagnetic effect of a permanent magnet is thousands of times smaller than the dimagnetic effect of gravity.
Moreover, there are some indications that companies such as Japan’s Nikken, which has used a multi-level marketing scheme to sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of magnets, either trains or looks the other way while its salespeople are trained in the most basic of parlor tricks.
For example, searching on Nikken in Google.Com, I came across a note by a gentleman who noted a relative had become a Nikken distributor. The man was genuinely perplexed by a series of demonstrations with magnets that the relative had given him including,
DEMONSTRATION of MAGNETIC POWER #1: Stand up straight with your arms
outstreached forward, parallel to the ground. The demonstrator pushes
upward on your hands until you lose balance. Repeat the same process while
standing on magnetic soles and it is much harder to make the person lose
their balance. Conclusion: magnetic footwear improves balance.
This is one of several variations on a pseudo-magic trick. There are a number of ways to accomplish this sort of feat, all of which rely to one extent or another on varying the force applied (i.e. when the person is wearing the magnetic footwear you simply don’t push as hard). You would think people would know this, but even people who are aware that the force or method of applying the force is different report that the demonstration is very compelling (and this particular demonstration has been used to promote a lot of different things, long before magnetic therapy became the rage).
Tags: Uncategorized
Benedictin Makes A Comeback
I knew some women experienced morning sickness while pregnant, but nothing prepared me for what my wife had to go through while pregnant with our daughter. Every morning for literally six months was a routine of vomiting that was so severe at one point that her doctor considered having her hospitalized. The sad thing was a perfectly save medication could likely have prevented her vomiting, but trial lawyers had driven it off the U.S. market in the 1980s.
The drug was benedictin and it had been widely prescribed to pregnant women since the mid-1950s as an anti-nausea agent. In the 1970s, however, some women began to complain that the drug had caused or contributed to their children’s birth defects and sued. By 1983, the manufacturer of the drug, Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals, threw in the towel on the drug and said the litigation over the birth defects was simply too costly to justify continued production of the drug. No longer would women with morning sickness have access to the drug in the United States.
Ironically, that was about the time when numerous studies demonstrated what a close look at the evidence hinted in the 1970s — benedictin was completely safe. About three percent of all infants born in the United States suffer from birth defects, and the children of women who took benedictin had the same rate of birth defects as those born to women who didn’t take the drug. Even teh Food and Drug Administration exonerated the drug and declared it safe.
But it was too late. Nobody was willing to take on manufacturing the drug and risking the inevitable lawsuits over birth defects. Now, though the drug seems to be making something of a comeback thanks to a Canadian company, Duchesnay Inc., which is seeking FDA approval to sell a generic version of benedictin. Duchesnay’s diclectin has been available in Canada since 1975.
Hopefully women in America will soon have the choice to use the same drug that women in Canada and the rest of the world have been using safely for the past couple decades.
Source:
Once maligned morning sickness drug prepares for comeback. The Associated Press, October 10, 2000.
Tags: Uncategorized
Once Again, Breast Implants Just A Political Football
In 1992, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration “temporarily” banned silicone breast implants until further studies cleared up whether they posed health risks. So what do you do if you’re a government agency and your $4 million dollar 8 year study once again demonstrates that implants are safe? You don’t tell anyone.
Salon.Com originally broke this story, and so far few traditional media outlets have bothered to cover the story (although they had no problem whipping up anti-implant hysteria). Shortly after the ban on silicone implants, Dr. Louise Brinton began a major study that followed 14,000 women who had implant surgery purely for cosmetic reasons. Brinton’s study focused specifically on whether or not implants increased the risk of cancer, as some anti-implant activists claimed.
Her study was controversial from the beginning in large part because Brinton herself seemed to hope that her study would demonstrate that silicone implants did indeed raise the risk of cancer. Brinton had extensive contacts with plaintiffs lawyers suing implant manufacturers. She conducted presentations for plaintiffs lawyers, and wrote letters that circulated to women with implants saying things like, “The study provides an opportunity for women who may be suffering as a result of implants to be heard. Now is your chance.”
Unfortunately things didn’t work out like that. Her study was quite definitive on the issue of breast cancer. Not only was there not an increased risk of cancer among implant recipients, but in fact women with breast implants had lower risks of cancer (although this doesn’t mean women should rush out to get implants to lower their cancer risk. This effect is more likely to be due to some confounding factor).
Whew. So implants don’t contributed to breast cancer. Time to spread the good news and let women with implants know those fears are unfounded, right? Not by a long shot.
In fact although the National Cancer Institute prepared a press release, it buried the release on its web site and told NCI press officer Brian Vastag that he was “forbidden” to tell journalists about the press release’s existence. At the beginning of October, Vastag decided he’d had enough with the NCI’s nonsense, forwarded information about the press release and study to journalists anyway, and then resigned from his job. In an e-mail to journalists, Vastag wrote that, “It makes me crazy when tax-funded public health research doesn’t make it to the public.”
The NCI, of course, says the whole episode has a perfectly normal explanation, but there seem to be some holes in that explanation. NCI’s Mass media division told Salon.Com that it was respecting an embargo on the study since it was going to be published in the November issue of Cancer Causes and Control. The problem with that explanation is that a) that journal had already posted a copy of the study to its web site, and b) NCI was only issuing a press release announcing the results of the study rather than distributing copies of the study itself.
NCI’s denial of anything out of the ordinary become even more apparent when Salon.Com asked Newman if NCI would be publicizing the study when it came out in November. Her response? “We’ve already posted the press release, so why would we distribute old news?”
This from an agency that in May 2000 hired a public relations firm to publicize Brinton’s findings that the rupture rate of silicone implants was much higher than previously suspected (the tendency for implants to rupture is one of the few genuine problems with the implants). Letting women know that implants may rupture apparently is at the top of the agenda for NCI, while letting them know that their implants won’t cause cancer is something they should have to find out for themselves by searching the NCI’s web site for a press release buried on the site.
Brinton is also keeping silent. Even though she once touted her study as “the most comprehensive epidemiological study of breast implants to date,” apparently she doesn’t want to publicize the results too much since they didn’t have the outcome she had hoped for.
This is the sort of thing that is inevitable when politics drives scientific research. As the American Council on Science and Health wrote in a recent pamphlet on the breast implant controversy, “In a sense, the anti-silicone-implant crusade is a microcosm for so much that is wrong with how scientific data and principles are distorted and ignored when there is greater gain to be had by doing so. The resoundingly antiscientific — and, until recently — successful crusade against silicone implants portends problems for many other products that may be destroyed by analogous waves of hysteria.”
In this case, not only products but people were harmed, not only by the psychological fears induced by the wave of anti-implant hysteria, but the many women who underwent surgical procedures to have the implants removed on what turned out to be false, unsubstantiated concerns. Women deserve better from the media, government, and research community.
Source:
Covering up the breast. Denise Dowling, Salon.Com, October 9, 2000.
Hush–good news on silicone. John Meroney, The Washington Times, November 22, 2000.
Updated report: Scientific evidence fails to halt silicone breast implant controversy. Press release, American Council on Science and Health, November 27, 2000.
Tags: Uncategorized
Review of The Axemaker’s Gift
The Axemaker’s Gift: Technology’s Capture and Control of Our Minds and Culture
By James Burke and Robert Ornstein
After reading some dismissive reviews of The Axemaker’s Gift when it was first published I had no intention of reading the book. But then a couple years later I noticed that everywhere I turned people seemed to be reading it (in large measure because several professors here required them to do so). With my curiosity piqued, I thought I’d give the book a chance. What a waste of time.
The main problem with The Axemaker’s Gift is that James Burke and Robert Ornstein don’t even take their own advice. The message the duo try to get across is that technology has gotten “out of control,” and only a “participatory democracy” informed by a new “web of knowledge” will reign in technological excess. I am philosophically opposed to that argument, but Burke and Ornstein don’t even really give the argument the treatment it deserves.
For example, how are we going to have a new “web of knowledge” when in a 300+ page survey of thousands of years of technological history, Burke and Ornstein can’t be bothered to provide a single footnote in the entire book? Reading The Axemaker’s Gift there were several historical claims which I thought were inaccurate, distorted, or simply based on dated views. I suppose I could go through all of the books they list in their “selected bibliography” to evaluate their claims, but that would be extremely time consuming if not impossible altogether. By providing reader with no easy way to verify their claims, they commit the very sins they excoriate the high priests of technology for doing — not giving ordinary folks adequate information to evaluate technological progress.
Moreover, the historical flaws present in their book directly undermine their main argument — that laymen can adequately evaluate specialists. A major complaint of Burke and Ornstein’s is that technological progress has rendered important information accessible only to specialists, and that knowledge should be opened up to non-specialists. Maybe, but look at what Burke and Ornstein do when venturing into the areas of expertise of others. Their history of the medieval period is atrocious, and they relate speculative theories about prehistorical human artifacts as if they are the generally accepted interpretation, which in fact they are not.
Still, even with its problems, the book comes close to being worthwhile until the horrendous final two chapters when the authors abandon their disinterested, semi-objective sociological perspective in favor of a preaching, moralizing tone. Ancient Roman propaganda efforts on behalf of the empire are discussed in a neutral third person voice, but by the time they turn their attention to European imperialism, they’ve shifted to the ubiquitous “we” as if the colonization of North America, for example, were not conducted by specific individuals who could and have been delineated and written about extensively, but instead were carried out by some larger super-structural organism that survives to this day in the persons of Burke and Ornstein (and presumably in many of their readers).
The superficial nature of their analysis is most evident with their final recommendations to save the world. Only “participatory democracy” can save the world, they claim, urging their readers to go back to an Athenian-style democracy. Not once do they stop to note, much less address, that the extreme form of “participatory democracy” practiced in Athens tended toward reactionary conformism. A reasonable reader might hope that while extolling Athenian democracy they might note and even address the obvious problems such as the very democratic decision to sentence Socrates to death for corrupting the youth (which in large measure was responsible for Plato’s rejection of democracy as corrupt).
The authors probably avoid mentioning any of the problems associated with such extreme forms of democracy because they highlight where that system clearly leads — an insufferable government of nosey neighbors and conformist each trying to meddle in everyone’s lives and reinforcing the trends and problems the authors want to alleviate.
There is a rare birth defect called Dowling Meara disease. The skin cells of infants who suffer from this disease are unable to produce the specialized cells that hold skin together, the result being a horrific blistering of the skin at the slightest touch — the disease is often fatal. Recently a company introduced a treatment for the disease involving a synthetic skin genetically engineered from human cells and animal collagen.
Under Burke and Ornstein’s participatory democracy, such innovations would be put to a vote, and there are a substantial number of people who would vote no on such technologies on the grounds that — as Burke and Ornstein point out — often such technological innovations create new problems. I, on the other hand, would prefer not to have such important decisions left up to mob rule.
The only thing worse than out of control technology would be the sort of heavily controlled and restricted technology envisioned by Burke and Ornstein.
Tags: Uncategorized
Review of John Allen Paulos’ “Innumeracy”
Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences
By John Allen Paulos
No sense mincing words — this is the worst skeptical/debunking book that I’ve ever read. Period. How this book became a national bestseller and the end of the 1980s and its author a mini-celebrity for awhile is something I will never understand.
For one thing, the book is poorly written and difficult to follow. Although the title suggests that the book is primarily going to be about the abuse and misuse of statistics and other math-related issues, discussions of such things occupy only a small portion of Innumeracy. Which is probably a good thing because the math-heavy sections are confusing. If you don’t already have a good handle on probability theory, for example, Paulos is likely to make you even more confused.
Innumeracy reads like it is nothing more than a few transcribed lectures that were never edited. Perhaps Paulos’ editors didn’t understand him, but didn’t want to look stupid by questioning him and allowed the book to go straight to press. Either way, it’s disconcerting to read such a disorganized book from someone arguing on behalf of organized thinking.
Aside from the poor writing, the biggest problem with Innumeracy is that it purports to advocate for sound, logical thinking only to make rash, unsubstantiated — and in at least one case erroneous — arguments itself.
For example, like some skeptics, Paulos argues that not only are reports of visitors from outer space almost certainly not true, but he feels the need to go on to argue that it is almost certain that there are no advanced civilizations capable of or interested in visiting our planet. I happen to agree with Paulos on this, but his argument is filled with unsubstantiated claims (there isn’t a single footnote or reference in the entire book).
According to Paulos,
The third reason we haven’t had any tourists is that even if life has developed on a number of planets within our galaxy, there’s probably little likelihood they’d be interested in us. The life forms could be large clouds, or self-directed magnetic fields, or large plains of potato-like beings, or giant plant-sized entities which spend their time singing complex symphonies, or more likely a sort of planetary scum adhering to the sides of rocks facing their sun. There’s little reason to suppose that any of the above would share our goals or psychology and try to reach us.
Potato people? Self-directed magnetic fields? These sort of fantastic creatures might be good fodder for a Star Trek episode, but in the absence of evidence Paulos here is simply making an unsubstantiated assertion. Here Paulos goes on throughout his book about the importance of careful thinking and then slips in meaningless phrases such as “there’s probably little likelihood” and “there’s little reason to suppose.”
Similarly, Paulos ridicules psychics such as Jean Dixon and the people who believe such predictions, but concludes his book with a false prophesy himself.
For example, when the recent decisions by a number of states to raise the speed limit on certain highways to 65 m.p.h. and not to impose stiffer penalties on drunk driving were challenged by safety groups, they were defended with the patently false assertion that there would be no increase in accident rates, instead of with a frank acknowledgment of economic and political factors which outweighed the likely extra deaths
Where I come from, if you’re going to call something “patently false” you better be able to back it up — especially if you’re going to put it in a book about how erroneous the thinking of other people is.
In 1995, the U.S. Congress abolished federally-mandated 55 mph speed limits and most states quickly raised highway speeds to 65 mph and higher in some places. Measured on deaths-per-mile traveled, deaths from automobile accidents in 1999 were the lowest ever recorded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration since the NHTSA began keeping such statistics in 1966.
Highway deaths began declining almost immediately after the repeal. NHTSA had projected an additional 6,400 traffic deaths, but by 1997 all but one state (Hawaii) had raised its speed limits and in 1997 highway traffic deaths were the lowest ever recorded by the NHTSA up until that point.
Why the decline in deaths when everybody knows (including Paulos) that speed kills? Because the 55 mph speed limit artificially raised the differential between cars obeying the law and driving 55 mph vs. those who broke the law and drove 65 or 70 mph. As Eric Peters writes in the Wall Street Journal in 1998,
These higher speeds are safer because they reflect the normal flow of traffic–what highway engineers call the “85th percentile” speed. This is the speed most drivers will maintain on a given stretch of road under a given set of conditions. When speed limits are set arbitrarily low–as under the old system–tailgating, weaving and “speed variance” (the problem of some cars traveling significantly faster than others) make roads less safe.
As Peters notes, the interstate highway system was designed to be safe at speeds of 70 to 75 mph and that is the speed that the majority of cars travelled before and after the speed limit was raised.
It’s those sort of things about Innumeracy that make the book so irritating. There are some very good books explaining common misconceptions about probability, statistics and other mathematical subjects. Innumeracy is not one of them.
Tags: Uncategorized
Will Anti-Biotech Forces Let Children Die?
Working in Sweden, Dr. Ingo Potrykus accomplished an amazing thing by genetically modifying a strain of rice so that it produces beta carotene in its seeds.
Beta carotene is an excellent source of vitamin A, and vitamin A deficiency is an enormous health problem in the developing world. Up to 124 million children do not receive enough vitamin A in their diets, contributing to an estimated 1 million deaths and 300,000 cases of childhood blindness every year.
The New York Times recently ran a profile of Dr. Potrykus on the trials and travails he’s had bringing the GM rice to poor people. You’d think this would be a win-win situation. He worked out arrangements with the companies who hold the patents on the genes and techniques he used to allow him to give his vitamin A-enriched rice to any farmer with an annual income less than $10,000 which covers most small farmers in the developing world. The rice is self-pollinating so once they farmers have the rice and are growing it, they won’t be forced at some later date to buy new seeds. And, of course, it could save millions of lives.
But pressure is so great against so-called “Frankenfoods,” especially in Europe, that Potrykus housed his rice plants in a grenade-proof greenhouse. That was probably wise since throughout Europe and the United States anti-biotechnology activists are destroying experimental crops right and left.
The activists see Potrykus’ rice as a publicity stunt by the biotech companies to gain widespread acceptance of genetically modified plants and animals, and so would sentence millions of children in the developing world to death and blindness to prevent scientists such as Potrykus from gaining the world’s appreciation — not to mention better understanding of the value of genetic engineering.
In Sweden, for example, anti-biotech forces are trying to pass a law that would make it illegal for corporations in that nation to export genetically modified organisms. That law, if passed, would make it illegal for the GM rice to be given to poor farmers in the developing world.
Leave it to extremists in the environmental movement to once again argue that people in the developing world must pay with their lives for the irrational anti-science views of a minority of First Worlders.
Golden rice in a grenade-proof greenhouse. Jon Christensen, The New York Times, November 21, 2000.
Tags: Uncategorized
A Leftist Opposed to the Global Warming Treaty
Since topic of global warming and the Kyoto Treaty which is designed to ameliorate the effects of global warming have become a topic of discussion here, it was interesting to see that British climatologist Mick Kelly attacked the West’s obsession with global warming, and the Kyoto Treaty in particular, as part of the free market’s war on the poor in the developing world.
Now obviously I disagree with Kelly’s anti-capitalist rhetoric, but it is good to see someone besides right wing nuts like myself noticing that the Kyoto Protocol would cause enormous damages to developing countries to combat what Kelly calls a “comparatively nebulous threat.” Besides which even if the most extreme claims about global warming are accepted, the rather Draconian proposals in the Kyoto Protocol would by the International Panel on Climate Control’s own estimate lower the projected warming by only 0.06 degrees Celsius.
The main point where Kelly is wrong is the so-called “flexibility mechanisms” that allow for markets in the trading of a pollutant — in this case carbon dioxide. Were global warming a legitimate long term threat that could be ameliorated through moderate reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, a global trading scheme would make sense. This is especially the case since the Kyoto treat effectively excludes the developing world from its carbon dioxide emissions limits. The transfer of income and technology to developing countries would be a boon so long as the income and technology actually wound up in the hands of individuals and small groups rather than governments and large corporations, as well as promoting private research into less polluting industrial methods.
Kelly also choose poorly in suggesting the world should be combating famine in Africa rather than global warming; actual famines in the African continent are, unfortunately, largely immune to the sort of interventions Kelly likely has in mind. A better example would have been to point out that more than 1.5 million children will die this year in the developing world from dysentery, most of whom could be saved at very little cost, while developed nations spend all their time selling such countries weapons and worrying about amorphous environmental threats.
Source:
Climate treaty ‘robs the poor’. Alex Kirby, The BBC, November 6, 2000.
Tags: Global Warming
Is There No Escaping Nature?
The folks at Common Dreams saw fit to reprint an article by George Monbiot, There can be no escape from nature, which illustrates an odd divide/duality in the Left. One half of the left maintains that the problem with capitalism is that it unevenly distributes economic progress, while the other half argues the problem with capitalism is the very idea of economic progress. Monbiot is on the side of the latter position. Monbiot sees things like space programs as examples of people trying to alienate themselves from the world. Whatever.
Beyond the philosophical point, however, Monbiot makes some pretty dramatic claims about industrialized capitalist societies destroying public health which don’t really stand up to serious scrutiny,
Yet, even as we defy mortality, the horrors associated with old age are multiplying. The incidence of some cancers has risen by 200% since 1950, with the scarcely publicised result that 60-year-olds are more likely to die of cancer today than they were 50 years ago. The cause, it appears, is the ever-increasing burden of toxic chemicals to which we are exposed.
In the era of eternal youth, we shut our ever more ancient old people away, perhaps because they remind us of the inexorable biological processes that will lead to our own demise. We are, as a result of our attempts to avoid the constraints of nature, in danger of exchanging a life that was nasty, brutish and short for one that is nasty, brutish and long.
Have some cancer incidences risen by 200% since 1950 — absolutely and, as I pointed out the other day with breast cancer, that is a very good thing since it represents an enormous improvement in our ability to detect cancer earlier and often. The phrase “some cancers” is extremely deceptive because it is so broad. The ability to detect nonlethal tumors, for example, has increased dramatically thanks to new techniques and as a result the detection of nonlethal cancers has skyrocketed.
Also some cancers have risen because of other health problems. The rate of non Hodgkins lymphomas skyrocketed beginning in the mid-1970s which some environmentalists initially blamed on pesticides. Unfortunately it had a much more tragic cause as it turned out to be a side effect of the rise of the AIDS/HIV epidemic.
Similarly one wonders what is meant by the claim that people 60 years of age are more likely to die of cancer today than in 1950. Part of that could be detection, but since the author lives in Great Britain it could also be part of the UK’s government-run health system’s explicit decision not to aggressively treat cancer. Survival rates for cancer patients in the United States, for example, are typically twice that of people living under state managed health care systems in countries such as Canada and Great Britain (in large measure because aggressive cancer treatment is relatively expensive).
Finally, I’ve always found this strain of anti-technological babble to be ridiculous. Monbiot writes disapprovingly that, “Our attempts to cheat life have progressed to an attempt to cheat death. Human beings, we are told, will live for 150, even 200 years, by the end of the century. Some people are now convinced that they can evade death altogether.”
I’m definitely on the pro-cheating death side of the ideological divide and hope that not only does science find ways to let people live 200 years, but that it becomes available in a pill that is cheap enough for everyone in the world to use. Probably not likely in my life time, but if the choice is between helping people live longer and defying “nature,” I say screw nature.
Source:
There can be no escape from nature. George Monbiot, The Guardian of London, November 2, 2000.
Tags: Uncategorized
National Breast Cancer Month and the Precautionary Principle
One of the things you have to love about the Left is the never-ending supply of conspiracy theories. Sure right wingers have their share of conspiracy theories too, but rarely do they have the same sort of panache. In a recent column Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman outlined one such conspiracy — namely that large corporations have simultaneously created an epidemic of breast cancer and then turn around and try to drum up support for finding a cure with whitewashed events like National Breast Cancer Month.
Mokhiber and Weissman are taken with Breast Cancer Action, and advocates group convinced that environmental factors are responsible for the epidemic of breast cancer, even though their own propaganda concedes that the only known environmental contributor to breast cancer is ionizing radiation (i.e. women exposed to ionizing radiation have significantly higher risks of developing breast cancer). BCA wants more emphasis on studying what they think are the environmental causes of breast cancer. As Mokhiber and Weissman summarize the current state of affairs, however,
This is not exactly the agenda of the cancer establishment, which is hostile to the idea that environmental causation is a significant part of the story of the rising incidence of breast cancer in the United States.
The first time I heard this particular conspiracy theory was in a Molly Ivins op-ed column, and my reaction now is the same then — how can thinking adults swallow this hogwash?
First of all, is there an epidemic of breast cancer? No. Reported cases of breast cancer have certainly increased over the past 3 or 4 decades, but this is due largely to two external factors. The first is the widespread use of mammograms and other tools which have increased detection.
The other factor is simply that women are living longer than ever before. Breast cancer is a disease that overwhelmingly strikes older women. Seventy-five percent of all breast cancer cases occur in women over 50 years of age. More women today live past 50 then ever before, and they live longer once they hit 50. With average life expectancy for women approaching 80 years in the United States, far more women spend far more of their life at ages when breast cancer is most likely to occur. Do the math — something would be wrong if the number of cases of breast cancer wasn’t increasing.
Which doesn’t rule out the possibility of environmental causes, but when you look at the studies that have been done on breast cancer what stands out is precisely the complete failure to find any environmental causation for breast cancer. Alcohol consumption, obesity, herbicides, estrogen compounds, and a whole host of other factors have been examined and as BCA is forced to concede, so far breast cancer seems to occur largely independently of environmental factors.
BCA claims, for example, that “There is strong evidence that estrogen plays a part in the development of some cases of breast cancer,” but in fact there is little evidence of that. First of all, it should be kept in mind that the action of environmental estrogens such as from pesticide residue exert an extremely weak effect compared to the high levels of estrogen that women are exposed to thanks to the processes in their own bodies and from other natural sources. According to Texas A & M toxicologist Stephen Safe, for example, a typical glass of wine carries about 1,000 times as much active plant estrogen as chemical estrogens that a typical person would be exposed to in a single day.
Two human made estrogen-like compounds that some people believe are responsible for cancer, especially breast cancer, are DDT and PCB. Yet the largest study ever of the effect of these compounds and breast cancer was unable to find any link between the two. Using blood samples taken as part of an enormous epidemiological study of nurses (with almost 33,000 nurses giving blood samples), Harvard epidemiologist David Hunter compared blood samples taken from 240 women in the study who subsequently developed breast cancer and compared them with a control group of 240 women with similar lifestyles who didn’t develop breast cancer. After measuring the levels of DDT and PCB in the experimental and control groups, Hunter found no correlation between DDT/PCB levels and breast cancer rates.
DDT and PCB have to be two of the most common artificial estrogen-like compounds in the world. If they are not contributing to breast cancer, it’s hard to imagine what other chemicals are.
Don’t worry though — the folks at BCA aren’t going to let the complete lack of evidence stop them. In fact the lack of evidence actually is considered a positive thing because it lets them bring in the so-called precautionary principle. Here’s how Mokhiber and Weissman sum up this bit of sophistry,
First, [BCA's Barbara Brenner said] cancer prevention efforts must embrace the precautionary principle — the idea that when an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken in the absence of scientific certainty.
I don’t want to mince any words — the precautionary principle makes absolutely no sense, largely because there are very few things for which scientific certainty is available. If the precautionary principle were taken literally a great deal of activity that occurs in contemporary civilizations would have to go out the door.
For example, it has been studied pretty extensively and it is probably the case that the computer monitor I am using right now will not raise my cancer, but in fact there is some degree of scientific uncertainty on this matter — at least among environmentalists. Are we going to ban CRTs based on the precautionary principle?
This is not an idle issue. Several years ago the town where I grew up in had some environmental activists very angry at the state electrical utility. Again, the scientific evidence indicates that it is very unlikely that electrical power lines contribute to cancer, but there is some scientific uncertainty. Shouldn’t we spend tens of millions of dollars more, the activists wanted to know, to bury the power lines in the ground and take the precautionary route? (Most precautionary principle claims, you will usually find, completely ignore the problem of opportunity costs or attempt to evaluate the potential costs associated with say banning a useful product because of a completely unknown risk).
The precautionary principle could also be extended far and wide. After literally thousands of studies, there is still no good scientific answer to the question of whether or not violent movies, comic books, video games, books or images contribute to real world violence. So in the face of such scientific uncertainty, shouldn’t we just ban such entertainment to be safe?
On both philosophical and factual grounds, the sort of claims advanced by Mokhiber, Weissman and BCA simply don’t hold up. Certainly corporations should not have a license to poison the water and the air, but on the other hand deciding whether or not certain activities are dangerous must be grounded in solid scientific principles not on unsound scare tactics and fuzzy thinking.
Tags: Uncategorized
Feeling the Heat
One of the most amusing parts of the 2000 presidential campaign was watching Republican candidate George W. Bush question global warming orthodoxy, which might have been interesting if it weren’t obvious that he didn’t know what he was talking about (as Cathy Young recently wrote in an article generally supportive of Bush, he couldn’t make a halfway decent argument for celebrating Mother’s Day.)
On the other hand liberal and left journalists have jumped all over Bush, and Gore to some extent, for not taking global warming seriously. Bob Herbert is typical of this crowd (though to be fair he is relatively even handed in presenting Bush and Gore’s respective policies on the matter). In Warmer and Warmer, Herbert insists that a new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report establishes once and for all that human beings are causing the world to get warmer and warmer as he puts it, and asks, “Is anyone paying attention?”
Unfortunately, journalists such as Herbert as just as mind numbingly stupid as Bush, basically never getting past the two page press release summaries of the IPCC’s heavily politicized summary of its own findings. Can the IPCC really reliably predicted a 2 to 11 degree warming? Of course not. Don’t take it from me, though — the IPCC report itself concedes that computer climate modeling is still more guesswork than science. In the conclusions to its summarization of the scientific facts on global warming, the draft IPCC report notes:
In sum, a strategy must recognize what is possible. In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-liner chaotic system, and therefore that the prediction of a specific future climate state is not possible.
Of course that doesn’t quite pack the same punch as “the world is warming, the world is warming.” Average global temperatures clearly increased slightly in the 20th century and are likely to increase slightly in the 21st century, but the cause and the upper bound of future temperature change are both questions about which there is still far more heat than light.
Tags: Global Warming