Archive for 2002
USA Today’s Sloppy Sludge Statistics
The Sept. 30, 2002 edition of USA Today has a long article about the controversies surrounding treated human waste, which is often repackaged and used as fertilizer. Critics of recycling sewage in this way maintain that it is impossible to ensure that all human pathogens are removed, where the Environmental Protection Agency responds that if the sludge is used according to guidelines then it is safe.
One of the major problems seems to be that under EPA guidelines if a farmer uses treated waste on his field, the treated waste is supposed to be left alone for at least one month — plenty of time for the sun to wipe out human pathogens. Actually keeping humans out of contact with the sludge, however, appears to be difficult and the USA Today article includes several anecdotes of people who were sickened, and in some cases died, from diseases that they might have contracted after coming into contact with treated human waste.
But USA Today writer Kathleen Fackelmann also totally flubs statistics from a British Medical Journal study on just how big the risk of contracting staph infection from waste is. According to Fackelmann (emphasis added),
David Lewis, an EPA scientist who says he red flags he raised about sludge led to a job dispute with the EPA, which then assigned him to a post at the University of Georgia in Athens, says he has evidence that exposure to sludge might pose a health hazard. His study published in the July issue of British journal BMC Health suggests that people living near sludge sites run a 25% risk of getting infected with Staphylococcus aureus . . .
Lewis and his colleagues studied 48 people who lived near sludge sites and had symptoms of sludge exposure. The researchers found that one out of four people had developed an S. Auerus infection that required treatment.
But finding that 25 percent of the people near sludge sites who showed “symptoms of sludge exposure” had developed S. aureus is not the same thing as saying that “people living near sludge sites run a 25% risk of getting infected” with S. aureus.
This is a bit like saying that a study of 100 people with measles symptoms in the United States found that 90 percent actually had measles, so the general risk of getting measles in the United States is 90 percent.
Source:
Moving slowly on sludge. Kathleen Fackelmann, USA Today, September 30, 2002.
Tags: Uncategorized
No Evidence for Beneficial Effects of Garlic, Soy Supplements
Although garlic and soy supplements are widely available and touted as providing a number of health benefits, a two-day conference sponsored by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute concluded that there is no evidence that taking such supplements provides any benefit.
One of the major problems with over-the-counter dietary supplements such as garlic and soy pills and powders it that there is little quality control involved to determine how much active ingredient is in such supplements. Similar supplements may actually vary widely in how much active ingredient they contain, and some supplements may contain soy and garlic in a form that the body can’t even use.
“Very, very high on the list [of issues to be resolved] is the need for standardization of botanicals to ensure that we know what we are getting,” State University of New York in Albany researcher Eric Block told the conference.
Pharmaceutical companies manufacturing processes are strictly regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, but supplements for things like soy and garlic are not subject to those regulations.
Source:
Experts: Benefits unproven for popular supplements. Maggie Fox, Reuters, August 23, 2002.
Tags: Uncategorized
Study: Media Distorts in the Way it Reports Medical Research
A study published in the British Medical Journal in July found that British newspapers generally only report on the weakest and most sensational medical research, underreporting strong research that reports good news.
The study looked at 1,193 articles published in the Lancet and the British Medical Journal, and then compared how press releases about those studies were described in the Times and Sun newspapers.
The study found that newspapers preferred reporting on stories based on observational data rather than randomized trials, even though the former is much weaker evidence than the latter. In addition, although press releases about studies were roughly equal as far as good and bad news, the newspapers were more likely to report on the studies with bad news.
Source:
Strongest medical evidence seldom considered newsworthy. EurekAlert, July 11, 2002.
Tags: Uncategorized
Is the Focus on MMR Hurting Autism Research?
Autism researcher Christopher Gillberg last week told the BBC that there is little to no evidence that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine is linked to autism, and more importantly that the intense focus on such a link is detracting from more promising avenues of autism research.
Gillberg, a professor of child and adolescent psychology at George’s Medical School in London, has prepared a review of 40 studies looking into the causes of autism. His conclusion is that it is earlier diagnosis and better awareness of autism that is leading to the increase in cases.
Gillberg notes that today, children are often diagnosed as autistic when they are just 18-24 months old thanks to awareness of the symptoms of autism as well as changes in the way that babies are observed.
Gillberg told the BBC,
I think this whole MMR business has taken on proportions that have hampered research in autism. People are concentrating so much on disputing this or finding or finding that in relation to MMR, when there has never been any strong evidence that this would be a road we should be travelling.
And, Gillbert pointed out, this is hardly the first time that intense media focus has forced autism researchers down a blind alley.
A few years ago all of the rage was facilitated communication which supposedly allowed nonverbal autistic children to communicate. Facilitated communication, according to the American Psychological Association,
. . . is a process by which a facilitator supports the hand or arm of a communicatively impaired individual while using a keyboard or typing device. It has been claimed that this process enables persons with autism or mental retardation to communicate.
Researchers conducted numerous scientific evaluations of facilitated communication which, in the end, concluded that the practice “is not a scientifically valid technique for individuals with autism or mental retardation.” The information supposedly coming from the autistic patient was, in fact, actually communicated from the facilitator, either consciously or unconsciously.
Facilitated communication had an extremely dark side — facilitators began interpreting communications from autistic children as reporting sexual abuse accusations. As Gina Green summed up these cases in The Skeptic,
Beliefs about FC, the complexities inherent in the method, and the fact that the alleged victim may be seen as particularly vulnerable because he or she is disabled, now began to interact with the zealous pursuit that seems to typify investigations of sex abuse allegations. School or program administrators were notified, who in turn called in representatives of social services and law enforcement agencies. If the accused was a family member with whom the FC user resided, that person was either required to leave the home or the FC user was placed in foster care. If a parent was accused, both parents often faced criminal charges, one for perpetrating the alleged abuse, the other for knowing about it and failing to act. Often actions were initiated by social service workers to terminate parental custody or guardianship. If the accused was a school or program employee, they may have been suspended from their job or even fired. A long and trying ordeal was virtually guaranteed for all involved. An investigation began. Police interrogated the accused, and questioned the alleged victim through their facilitator. Other evidence was sought in the results of medical and psychological examinations of the alleged victim, and interviews with others who may have had information about the alleged events. A presumably independent facilitator was sometimes called in to try to corroborate the allegation, introducing another complexity: There appear to be no established safeguards or objective criteria for ensuring that independent facilitators in fact have no access to information about cases, nor for deciding what constitutes corroborating “facilitated” content.
Unfortunately it was only after numerous children had been placed in foster homes and parents charged with sexual abuse that medical authorities started paying serious attention to facilitated communication and ended up debunking it.
Sources:
MMR row ‘hampers autism research’. The BBC, September 6, 2002.
Facilitated Communication: Mental Miracle Or Sleight Of Hand? Gina Green, The Skeptic, vol. 2, no. 3, 1994, pp. 68-76.
Resolution on Facilitated Communication by the American Psychological Association. American Psychological Association, August 14, 1994.
Tags: Vaccination
Are More Black Men In Jail Than College?
In August the Justice Policy Institute generated a lot of headlines and broadcast news college with a study claiming that there were more black men in prison than in college. But a close look at the numbers finds the study doesn’t add up.
In a press release summarizing their findings, the Justice Policy Institute said,
Cellblocks or Classrooms? also reports that in 2000, there were an estimated 791,600 African American men in prison and jail, and 603,000 in higher education.
But as Iain Murray noted in a column for TechCentralStation.Com, the Justice Policy Institute’s estimate of the number of African American men in college is too low. According to the Census Bureau, there were an estimated 804,000 African-American men in college in 2000. So, in 2000, there were (barely) more black men in college than in jail or prison.
Of course the comparison is of little use since people of all ages are sent to jail, whereas college students tend to be 18-24 year olds. Murray tracked down the respective figures for those age groups and found that for African American men 18-24, there were 480,000 in college and 180,000 in prison or jail. An young African American male is, in fact, two-and-a-half times as likely to be in college as prison or jail.
The figures are even more impressive when African American women are included. Murray notes that there were 747,000 African American women 18-24 in college as opposed to only 9,000 in prison or jail in 2000. So, in total, there were 1,216,000 young African Americans in college compared to 189,000 in jail or prison.
As Murray sums it up,
What is perhaps most annoying about the way the Justice Policy Institute chose to present its figures is that it helps perpetuate the stereotype that a young African American male is likely to be a troublemaker or jailbird. In fact, as a careful look at the figures shows, he is much more likely to be carrying books than a gun. Tremendous advances have been made in crime reduction in the African community . . . which should not be hidden by presentation of statistics that, however well intentioned, show that community in a negative light.
Source:
Behind Books, Not Bars. Iain Murray, TechCentralStation.Com, September 2, 2002.
Tags: Uncategorized
Animal Study Finds No Evidence of Harm From Cellular Phones
A study of rats exposed to intensive radiation designed to simulate heavy exposure to the electromagnetic fields of cellular phones found no evidence to support claims that such exposure could cause cancer or other ills.
The study exposed the rats to levels of electromagnetic fields that people would receive from a cellular phone. The rats were exposed to such radiation for four hours a day, five days a week, for two years to simulate the exposure that an extremely heavy cell phone user might receive. But at the conclusion of the study, researchers found no signs of increased risk of cancer in any of the 31 tissues they examined.
Researcher Joseph Roti Roti, a professor of radiation oncology at the Washington University School of Medicine told the BBC,
We tried to mimic a high level of exposure that humans might experience. We found no statistically significant increases in any tumor type, including brain, liver, lung or kidney, compared to the control group.
The BBC reported that such research is consistent with similar studies performed in the 1970s and 1980s that found no ill effects caused by exposure of cellular phone radiation in animals. The Washington University study was funded by the cellular phone industry.
Source:
Mobiles ‘do not cause cancer’. The BBC, June 25, 2002.
Tags: EMF
British Study Exonerates Nuclear Reactor in Childhood Cancer Clusters
Yet another study has looked at and refuted claims that the Sellafield nuclear plant in Great Britain was somehow responsible for cancer clusters that appeared in communities near the plant in the 1970s and 1980s.
The theory advanced to explain the clusters has been that children born to parents who worked at the Sellafield plant or at other nuclear power plants in Great Britain had a higher-than-normal risk of childhood cancers.
In 1999, a study examined the medical histories of more than 46,000 children who had at least one parent working at one of the implicated nuclear power plants. The study found that whose children had the same rate of childhood cancers as did children who didn’t have any parents who worked at the plant. Several other studies also found no link.
The latest study looked at the children of men who worked at the Sellafield plant. It found that although there was a small cancer cluster at Seascale — which started the whole Sellafield hysteria — children of parents who worked at the plant were no more likely to contract childhood cancers than were children whose parents did not work at the plant.
Source:
Child cancers ‘not caused by Sellafield’. The BBC, August 15, 2002.
Tags: Cancer
World Wildlife Fund Advertisement Criticized
Great Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority recently criticized an absurd ad by the World Wildlife Fund which sought to stir up hysteria over man-made chemicals.
The advertisement showed a picture of a human fetus with the text,
The womb should be the safest place on earth. But today our bodies are contaminated with over 300 man-made chemicals, to which our great-grand parents were never exposed . . . Many of these pollutants are found in intensively farmed food or everyday products and some have been linked with birth defects in people and wildlife.
In a summary of the criticisms leveled at the ad by the Advertising Standards Authority, the BBC noted that,
The ASA judged that the advert misleadingly implied all 300 man-made chemicals could be found in individual humans rather than people in general.
It also criticised the WWF for implying these chemicals could cause health problems when this had not been proven.
I certainly hope the WWF follows up this ad with another pointing out all of the evil manmade substances, such as vaccines, antibiotics, and vitamin and nutrient-fortified foods that human beings are exposed to that our great-grand parents never were. Hmmm, but didn’t our great-grandparents live in a world where infant mortality was far higher and life expectancy far shorter than it is today. Nah, couldn’t be — they must have been the perfect image of health given their lack of exposure to manmade chemicals.
Source:
WWF rapped for ‘alarming’ advert. The BBC, August 7, 2002.
Tags: World Wildlife Fund
Ronald Bailey on the Long Island Cancer Cluster
Writing in Reason, Ronald Bailey has a nice look at the so-called Long Island Cancer Cluster and a recent study designed to find out why so many women in and around Long Island have breast cancer. After spending several years and $8 million, the National Cancer Institute study concluded that whatever might be contributing to the cancer cluster, it isn’t exposure to chemicals and pesticides in the Long Island area.
Research into breast cancer in Nassau and Suffolk counties in Long Island found that women there had rates of breast cancer that were roughly 3 percent higher than the rest of the nation. Some breast cancer advocates were convinced that the only possible explanation for the higher rate was due to chemicals in the area.
But a study of blood and urine from 3,000 women in the Long Island area found no evidence for this hypothesis. The study looked at levels of DDT, PCBs, chlordanes and chemicals indicative of cigarette smoking. The bottom line — women exposed to such chemicals were no more likely to develop breast cancer than women not exposed to such chemicals. This result was consistent with other studies such as an almost 33,000 patient study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1997 that found no evidence that exposure to DDT or PCB increased the risk of a woman developing breast cancer.
Why would advocates focus on DDT, PCBs, chlordanes and other chemicals? In part because those chemicals have all been found to be carcinogenic in mice, rats and other laboratory animals. Now animal tests are helpful in identifying substances that are potentially harmful to human beings, but they are not the last word. Some substances that are harmful to laboratory animals are perfectly safe in human beings, while some substances that do not harm mice or rats are nonetheless very harmful in human beings. Merely because animal tests indicate that a substance is likely to be carcinogenic does not mean that it actually is in human beings.
But that seems to be the message that some people are taking away from media reports on such research. The New York Times, for example, quotes Geri Barish, president of 1 in 9: The Long Island Breast Cancer Action Coalition, as wondering how, if these chemicals are carcinogenic in animal tests,
How could they absolutely say that a known carcinogen is not absolutely involved in the cause of cancer? . . . I refuse to accept the fact that they didn’t find anything. They didn’t find anything conclusive because in the scientific world it has to be exact.
Barish wants further studies to be done, but Dr. Barbara Hulka, a professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina, told The Times that so many studies have already been done looking for a link between DDT, PCBs and breast cancer that there may be nothing more to learn there. Hulka told The Times
I think it is important that these studies have been done. . . [but] There comes a point after so many studies are done that it becomes less productive to continue that line of work.
There have been so many epidemiological studies of DDT and PCBs, for example, that if they really caused or contributed to breast cancer one would think that at some point this would show up clearly in such studies. But in fact, all of the large studies of these chemicals have so far found no statistically significant connection between chemicals and cancer.
Perhaps it is time to recognize that cancer clusters are always going to occur largely because cancer is never going to be evenly distributed throughout a population, and begin taking the millions of dollars that have been devoted to looking at cancer clusters and spending it on more fruitful avenues of research.
Sources:
Looking for the link. Gina Kolata, The New York Times, August 11, 2002.
Cluster bomb. Ronald Bailey, Reason, August 14, 2002.
Tags: Cancer
Florida Group Finds No Risk to Arsenic-Treated Playground Equipment
A six-member panel of physicians in Florida issued a report earlier this month that found no health risks associated with playgrounds and backyard furniture made out of arsenic-treated wood. The arsenic is used as part of a treatment for wood that makes it resist pest damage and other decay.
The Florida Physicians Arsenic Workgroup, set up by the state of Florida to investigate the matter, found that any exposure to arsenic that children might conceivably get from treated wood “is not significant compared to natural sources and will not result in detectable arsenic intake.”
They physicians group also noted that the arsenic-treated wood had been in use since the 1960s and there is no evidence linking it to any health problems.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency is also conducting a review of arsenic-treated lumber which his expected to be released sometime in 2003.
Both it and the Florida study are largely irrelevant at this point, because the EPA reached an agreement with manufacturers to end the sale of arsenic-treated lumber by the end of 2003. Nothing like working to rid the world of something and then later deciding whether or not it really poses a threat.
Source:
Doctors: Amount of arsenic in playground wood not harmful. Associated Press, August 8, 2002.