AntiPolygraph.Org is an excellent site devoted to just one topic — documenting just how unscientific and unreliable polygraph machines and techniques are.

Along with reports and documents about the polygraph, the site tracks news stories and incidents where polygraphs fail. For example, the site points out that one of the reasons U.S. officials spent so much time searching for 19 alleged terrorists who had supposedly slipped into the country was that the person who perpetrated this hoax was apparently able to pass “extensive” polygraph testing by U.S. and Canadian authorities.

The other day I was watching NBC News which lead off its program with a segment on the latest victims of shark attacks off the coast of the United States. What was odd about this particular news program was that after the segment, NBC ran a second story pointing out that shark attacks in the United States and around the world are little changed from 2000, when every shark attack wasn’t featured on nightly news.

In this respect, the media is like a drunk who knows he shouldn’t have just one more drink, but cannot muster enough willpower to stop. NBC knew that shark attacks aren’t epidemic, but the ratings draw of leading off the news with a horrific attack was just to much to resist.

This is not some oddity, but is paradigmatic of how the news media operate to spread unwarranted fears about everything from cell phones to school violence. As George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack Files summed it up, “It’s a media frenzy not a [shark] feeding frenzy.”

The media flit from crisis to crisis, rarely providing any sort of context, in-depth analysis, much less follow-up. This is painfully obvious by seeing how quickly poorly thought out stories about the supposed energy crisis have all but disappeared from the American media, to be replaced by equally inane stories about the shark attack crisis and Gary Condit.

Source:

Shark attacks: on the increase?. Kate McGeown, The BBC, August 20, 2001.

Does using cellular telephones increase the risk of brain tumors? The short answers it that based on the evidence so far, any increased risk seems so small that it can’t be accurately measured.

Swedish researcher Lennart Hardell made news recently, for example, with a study claiming that people who frequently used cellular phone models popular in the 1980s and early 1990s had a “significantly raised” risk of developing brain tumors. But looking at the actual results, closely, there’s not much to this study.

Hardell compared 1,600 people who contracted brain tumors and survived with 1,600 people with no history of brain tumors. He found that people who used the phones for more than five years were 26 percent more likely to develop brain tumors, while those who used the phones for more than 10 years had a 77 percent higher chance of developing brain tumors. Both results are well below the threshold of risk that can be reliably measured in an epidemiological study of this size.

Moreover, the cell phone models that Hardell studied were older analog models that put out about 10 times as much power as contemporary, miniaturized versions.

Perhaps someday a study will find a robust connection between cell phone use and brain tumors, but so far the odds of that happening do not look promising.

Source:

Mobile phone users ‘at greater risk of brain tumour’. Charles Arthur, The Independent (UK), September 5, 2001.

The Washington Post’s Roy Furchgott recently wrote an excellent article looking back at claims a few years ago that bicycle seats impeded the flow of blood to the penis causing impotence in male riders. Although bicycle seats designed to prevent this are new widely available, the impotence claim appears to have no scientific grounding.

As Furchgott reports, the episode was started after an article in Bicycling magazine in 1997 that cited an unpublished study by urologist Irwin Goldstein. Major media outlets such as “20/20″ picked up the story and soon Goldstein was giving quotes like, “There are two kinds of cyclists: those who are impotent and those who will be.”

But even today, Goldstein’s study has never been published by a peer-reviewed journal. In fact when Furchgott asked Goldstein for a copy of his paper or the data behind his claims, Goldstein told him that they were unavailable, but that he would describe the results of his study over the phone.

There have been a number of studies on this published in peer-reviewed journals, but most of them appear to have had fundamental flaws, not the least of which is that the largest study to date study only 160 men.

William Steers, the chairman of the urology department at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville and a critic of Goldstein’s claims, notes that if bicycles do cause male impotence it is hard to explain the continued fertility of men in countries where bicycle use is almost ubiquitous. As Steers puts it, “In China 90 percent of the male population cycles, and they don’t seem to have a problem maintaining the population.”

More importantly, Steers points out, it was a bit odd for the media to give such huge scrutiny to an activity like cycling which is a healthy form of exercise when behaviors like smoking, obesity and inactivity are much bigger risk factors in male impotence.

This whole episode is an almost textbook case of advocacy research trumpeted by the media despite lacking any credible scientific basis.

Source:

Much riding on a sore subject. Roy Furchgott, The Washington Post, August 28, 2001.

The New England Journal of Medicine recently published yet another study confirming that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine is almost certainly not a cause of autism and neurological problems in vaccinated children.

One theory of how the disease might cause autism and other problems in vaccinated children related to rare seizures that occur in an extremely small number of children who are vaccinated. Such children experience very high fevers after being vaccinated which causes febrile seizures that can last as long as 15 minutes. There had been speculation that the high fevers and seizures might predispose children to autism and other neurological problems later in life.

Out of the 639,000 children whose medical records were examined, only 63 experience febrile seizures after being vaccinated. In contrast 521 experienced febrile seizures as the result of an illness unrelated to vaccination. According to the New York Times, even in children who are not vaccinated, about 4 percent will experience such seizures sometime before adolescence.

Were the 63 children who experience febrile seizures more likely to be autistic or suffer from neurological problems? In a word, no. The study found that children who had such seizures were no more likely to experience additional seizures or neurological problems than were children who didn’t experience such seizures after being vaccinated.

Meanwhile, as many parents in Great Britain have abandoned the combined MMR vaccine for separate or no vaccinations, the number of mumps cases has started to take off. In Bradford, England, for example, there were only 5 cases of the mumps in the first three months of 2000, but 153 cases in the first three months of this year.

One of the main problems has been that there is a shortage of the mumps vaccine which means children who had a separate shot for mumps are often not able to get the booster shot for the disease.

The scary part is that according to the BBC, about one-third of the mumps cases have been in children over the age of 15. In children that age, mumps can cause serious complications including inflammation of the brain or pancreas. As Dr. Martin Schweiger of the Leeds Health Authority told the BBC, “If parents do not ensure their children are protected then there will be a real price to pay later.”

As an example of just how bad things can get without vaccination, consider the late 1970s outbreak of whooping cough in the United Kingdom. After massive media coverage claiming that the whooping cough vaccine was unsafe, the vaccination rate fell from 80 percent in 1974 to a mere 31 percent in 1978.

By 1977, Great Britain had a full blown whooping cough epidemic on its hands. By the time it was over, 100,000 cases of the disease were reported at there were at least 34 deaths

Sources:

Pertussis Vaccination and Serious Central Nervous System Disorders: Early Case Series Evidence and Public Reaction Margaret Ann Goetz, Harvard School of Public Health, 1997.

Study clears two vaccines of any long-lasting harm. Philip J. Hilts, The New York Times, August 30, 2001.

Fears grow as mumps cases rise. The BBC, August 30, 2001.

The case for vaccination. The BBC, August 29, 2001.

The Daily Telegraph (London) had an interesting summary of an Ohio State University study of using hypnosis to recover memories . The results confirm a lot of skeptical suspicions about the practice — the memories of people who underwent hypnosis were no more accurate than those who had not undergone the procedure, but the subjects who were hypnotized were far more convinced that there erroneous memories were accurate than were the control group.

Subjects in the study were either hypnotized or given a relaxation exercise. They were then asked to estimate the dates that certain historical events took place, such as the Persian Gulf War. Both groups were just as likely to be accurate, but when their memories were faulty the group that had been hypnotized were more likely to insist that their memories were accurate even after the errors were pointed out.

As Joseph Green, an associate professor of psychology who conducted the study, said, “While hypnosis does not enhance the reliability of memory there is evidence that it leads to increased confidence in memories.”

Those two effects in combination — enhanced confidence without an increase in reliability — is a potentially dangerous combination and the results add yet one more nail into the coffin of the supposed benefits of using hypnosis to recover forgotten memories.

Source:

Hypnosis does not help accurate memory recall, says study. Celia Hall, The Daily Telegraph (London), August 27, 2001.