Category: Science

I reject evolution.

Not really, but my veganism could be perceived that way based on new research:

A drink of milk was off the menu for Europeans until only a few thousand years ago, say researchers from London.

Analysis of Neolithic remains, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests no European adults could digest the drink at that time.

University College London scientists say that the rapid spread of a gene which lets us reap the benefits of milk shows evolution in action.

If true, it demonstrates how adaptive biology is to one of the stranger ideas of the human mind, nursing after infancy, from the milk of another species.

Via: Boing Boing

It makes a great spread for toast, too.

Via Kip comes the disturbing but unsurprising news that Texas Gov. Rick Perry signed¹ an executive order that has no coherent public policy justification:

By issuing an executive order, Perry apparently sidesteps opposition in the Legislature from conservatives and parents’ rights groups who fear such a requirement would condone premarital sex and interfere with the way parents raise their children.

Beginning in September 2008, girls entering the sixth grade — meaning, generally, girls ages 11 and 12 — will have to get Gardasil, Merck & Co.’s new vaccine against strains of the human papillomavirus, or HPV.
…

“The HPV vaccine provides us with an incredible opportunity to effectively target and prevent cervical cancer,” Perry said in announcing the order.

“If there are diseases in our society that are going to cost us large amounts of money, it just makes good economic sense, not to mention the health and well-being of these individuals to have those vaccines available,” he said.

As Kip pointed out, becoming infected with HPV does not guarantee cervical cancer. All this will do for public health is prevent a few cases of HPV infection. His grandiose rhetoric to the contrary, Gov. Perry has done nothing quite as dramatic as he claims. Or rather, the dramatic result is not what he now claims.

Kip also pointed out that the key factor in this debate and whether it makes sense to make vaccination mandatory is that “HPV is not casually contagious.” There is no reason to mandate such an action. Boys are not going to enter the doors of George W. Bush Middle School, sneeze, and infect every any girls with HPV. This is over-reaction with no reasonable basis.

The obvious parallel, of course, is infant male circumcision, which has been justified because it appears to have an impact on HPV transmission. Whether or not that prevention is substantial is irrelevant. The core principle when making a permanent change to someone’s body is medical need. Medical need rarely exists in infant male circumcision; likewise, there is no medical need here to force such an action on young girls. There is no public health basis and a highly subjective personal health basis. Behavior can be taught, and like boys with the behavioral negatives that circumcision supposedly cures, some understanding of the individual affected should influence the decision.

This is naked rent-seeking for Merck poorly disguised as social engineering by Gov. Perry. He delivers millions of customers to Merck. What is he getting in return? Gov. Perry should be ashamed.

¹ Note the wonderful headline to the AP story: Texas Gov. orders anti-cancer vaccine. Gardasil is an anti-HPV vaccine. There is an important difference. Gov. Perry is not mandating an anti-cancer vaccine, no matter how well-intentioned he believes his action to be. It’s being sold with that exaggeration to make it more marketable. Unfortunately, there are individuals involved who can’t consent to such politically warm and fuzzy experimentation on their bodies.

“I disagree” is mature; the delete key isn’t.

Last week I entered a short exchange with a pregnant woman about circumcision. I thought it might go well enough, although I’m well aware that when people get it in their head that genital cutting is reasonable, there is little anyone can do to restore sanity. The need to dig in and not confront truth seems quite powerful.

One particular phrase jumped out at me in her entry:

…oh, the terror that awaits him. I hope I don’t have to take Alec in to get his circ done…

If it’s a terror, and you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. Maybe there was some connection to reality in there. So I commented, asking why she would go through with it if she knows it’s a terror and clearly doesn’t want to do it. Simple enough, I thought. Her response?

That was a little more like a “kidding around” type of thing. I don’t think it’s a horror. If it was a serious problem, they wouldn’t circumcise babies. 🙂

It gets worse from there, which you can’t validate for yourself because she deleted the first two comments and my response. It was long, but I addressed each of her wishful thoughts with facts. Clearly she didn’t like being challenged, so she deleted the “debate”, presumably to believe it never happened. Like I said, the need to dig in and not confront truth seems quite powerful.

I won’t bore you with the details of my second comment for I’d have to excerpt everything in her comment for it to make sense. But I opened with this:

If it was a serious problem, they wouldn’t circumcise babies.

That’s not true. Just because something is easy does not mean it’s right or in the boy’s best interest. Doctors regularly removed tonsils, but now it’s clear that tonsils fight infection. It’s not a routine procedure now. Doctors wait until disease that can’t be treated with less invasive measures. Explore history and you’ll find examples of medical practices that are now known to be wrong. Our medicine is the most advanced in human history, but that doesn’t mean we know everything and won’t know more in the future. We will rediscover the foreskin’s value. Other developed countries have abandoned infant circumcision to no ill effect.

That should be enough, but another example came to my attention yesterday, via Ken Jennings. Consider:

Everyone who has even thought about exercising has heard the warnings about lactic acid. It builds up in your muscles. It is what makes your muscles burn. Its buildup is what makes your muscles tire and give out.

Coaches and personal trainers tell athletes and exercisers that they have to learn to work out at just below their “lactic threshold,” that point of diminishing returns when lactic acid starts to accumulate. Some athletes even have blood tests to find their personal lactic thresholds.

But that, it turns out, is all wrong. Lactic acid is actually a fuel, not a caustic waste product. Muscles make it deliberately, producing it from glucose, and they burn it to obtain energy. The reason trained athletes can perform so hard and so long is because their intense training causes their muscles to adapt so they more readily and efficiently absorb lactic acid.

How many more examples do we need from history? When we look back in the future at the madness that is forced circumcision, how will we view it? We’ve shown too much willingness to dig in despite facts for me to believe we’ll be harsh on ourselves. But history will not be kind.

Science changes, but even beyond the basic evidence-based facts, however flawed the methodology that generated them, common sense must prevail. That’s where the general idea “first, do no harm” originates. It’s one thing to believe the opposite about lactic acid. With infant circumcision a doctor willfully removes healthy tissue from a child for potential benefit, if the parents even care about the potential benefits. Too often the justification is purely social. Read many of the comments at Suburban Turmoil if you question how nonsensical some parents get when deciding to have someone cut their children sons. I will never understand why parents value the possible opinion of another, future person over the normal, intact penis of their son.

Of interest, from the article on lactic acid, I doubt I’d phrase my indictment this nicely, but the basic idea is applicable to circumcision.

“It’s one of the classic mistakes in the history of science,” Dr. [George A.] Brooks said.

That’s just a theory with limited permanent impact. What would we call medically unnecessary genital surgery on non-consenting individuals? Parental choice? Classic, indeed. And insane.

The scalpel will not teach responsibility.

This editorial is a mess, so it’ll be easiest to just jump in:

In inner Sydney it has been estimated that between 10 and 18 per cent of the homosexual population are HIV/AIDS-affected, similar to the UN’s figures for parts of Africa.

In NSW and Victoria, the rate of diagnosis of infectious syphilis doubled between 2001 and 2005, “almost entirely through increased numbers of cases among homosexual men”.

Alarmingly, the NSW Government has failed to take the smallest step toward preventing the spread of AIDS and syphilis, though still parading its support for the homosexual community’s annual orgy of self-celebration, the mardi gras.

You know where this is going, right? I’ll get to that in a moment, but it’s impossible not to also highlight the implication of “the homosexual community’s annual orgy of self-celebration” as an important facet in this essay. It will return. But let’s get back to what is the painfully inevitable nonsense masquerading as a strategy:

The step that NSW Health Minister John Hatzistergos won’t take is the adoption of circumcision as a routine surgical procedure.

His health department describes the removal of the foreskin as “social circumcision” and not to be performed in the state’s hospitals unless a clear clinical need is established.

Last month, the World Health Organisation (WHO) established such a clear clinical need. It stopped two large clinical trials it was conducting in Kenya and Uganda because it felt the results were so overwhelmingly positive for the circumcised group it could not ethically proceed without offering those in the uncircumcised control group the chance to get snipped.

The writer of this essay, Piers Akerman, made the illogical leap from it being unethical to not offer circumcision to the still-intact adults in the study to demanding that the New South Wales Health Minister adopt circumcision as a routine surgical procedure¹ for infants. The WHO’s conclusion included the two key words Mr. Akerman is now ignoring, as well as buried-but-appropriate warnings that circumcision is not a magic bullet. As such, there is not a “clear clinical need” for sexually-inactive infants.

Continuing:

The NSW Government is in politically correct self-denial, as is Sydney’s homosexual community.

While spokesmen such as The Sydney Morning Herald’s cultural commissar David Marr and High Court judge Michael Kirby make gay marriage their gay issue of choice, their cohorts are dying because governments see no mileage in doing more than promoting so-called safe sex.

This at a time when a group within the homosexual community has been identified as promoting high-risk sex and actively pursuing infection or passing it on in a macabre practice known as “bug chasing”.

Mr. Akerman is woefully misinformed if he believes that circumcision will prevent HIV infections among those who are “bug chasing”. Circumcision is not immunity from infection. It will still be possible to become infected without trying too hard. But it’s easier to lambast gays as a group for the irresponsibility of a few than to focus on irresponsible behavior by individuals, gay and straight. The consequences should fall on those who are irresponsible, not infants.

Despite what came before the conclusion, it takes a strained thought process to propose this:

Reckless indifference to safe sexual practices by members of the homosexual community is responsible for most of the transmission of HIV/AIDS in Australia.

State governments need to get off their politically correct hobby horses and prescribe the operation to all male infants to give them a better chance to avoid this plague.

This is ridiculous, as should be clear by the two statements I’ve emphasized. Some gays will behave irresponsibly. This warrants circumcising all male infants, the majority of whom will not be gay? Unless we can identify which infants will be irresponsible when they become sexually active, routine infant circumcision is not the answer. Even then it wouldn’t be acceptable, but until that discussion is warranted, routine infant circumcision as an HIV preventative is little more than a universal punishment for potential future irresponsibility that only placates Mr. Akerman’s apparent animosity towards gays.

Update: For a refreshing look at common sense overtaking the bigotry and stupidity, read the comments at Mr. Akerman’s blog entry for his published essay. They started out badly, but recovered well.

¹ We’re discussing socialized medicine here, with the procedure paid by the taxpayers through the government. Parents in Australia can still circumcise their male children for any reason on their own dime.

How do we protect government from itself?

This is a few weeks old, but I’m just seeing it now. Accidental vacations have a way of encouraging information delinquency. Anyway, the underlying concepts won’t age, so here it is:

Trans fats are largely synthetic fats widely used in fried foods and baked goods. There is substantial medical evidence that they are significant contributors to heart disease (perhaps increasing the incidence of heart disease by as much as 6 percent) because they both raise the cholesterol that is bad for you (LDL) and lower the cholesterol that helps to protect your arteries against the effects of the bad cholesterol (HDL). About half of New York City’s 20,000 restaurants use trans fats in their cooking; and roughly a third of the caloric intake of New Yorkers comes from restaurant meals.

That’s from Richard Posner, at The Becker-Posner Blog. It’s a fair enough assessment of trans fats and why health officials think it’s bad. There is no harm in information, right? But how do those facts justify a complete ban on the ingredient in all New York City restaurant meals?

What is missing in this analysis is a cost that, ironically, a great Chicago economist, George Stigler, did more than any other economist to make a part of mainstream economic analysis: the cost of information. It might seem, however, that the cost of informing consumers about trans fats would be trivial–a restaurant would tell its customers whether or not it used trans fats, if that is what they’re interested in, and if it lied it would invite class action suits for fraud. But there is a crucial difference between the cost of disseminating information and the cost of absorbing it.

When I first read through this, I’d intended to discuss “the cost of absorbing it” in this context. But that would be less interesting than this, from later in the paragraph:

Actually the danger would be impossible to explain to diners, because it would depend on the diner’s average daily consumption of trans fats, which neither the diner nor the restaurant knows.

Want to take any guesses about who else doesn’t know the diner’s average daily consumption of trans fats? The government, of course, although it’s less far-fetched to believe that the government wants to know. Rather than the invasive, suspect process needed to keep an accurate, or even approximate, tally, it’s easier to just ban everything. That way, the government knows how much trans fat diners will consume in restaurants.

The acceptance of paternalism continues:

In such a situation, even those of us who distrust government regulation of the economy should be open to the possibility that the ban on trans fats would produce a net improvement in the welfare of New Yorkers by satisfying a preference that most of them would have if the cost of absorbing information about the good in question were not prohibitive.

There are tidbits of possible solutions sprinkled throughout the entry. Instead of less troublesome tactics such as mandatory labeling and government marketing against trans fats, Judge Posner finds government prohibition amenable. Unreal. The cost is less prohibitive in either of my hypothetical solutions, although they’re still far from libertarian dreams. Judge Posner’s conclusion is incompatible with liberty.

Hat tip: Hit & Run

Science isn’t the primary facet of this debate.

One point of follow-up on the Scottish article I discussed this morning. Further along in the article, this:

“The presumption against male circumcision in Scotland should be lifted,” said Dr Tim Hargreave, a urologist at Edinburgh University and a senior adviser to the WHO.

“There needs to be a policy shift in light of this evidence. Parents who seek circumcision for non-religious reasons should have ready access on the NHS.”
…

“There is an enormous anti-circumcision lobby that has very real concerns. But you have to separate the science and the evidence from the emotional baggage,” he said.

Isn’t it convenient how easily Dr. Hargreave lumps “real concerns” into emotional baggage, since the science is so convincing? That would be truthful if it were true. Dr. Hargreave’s position, like most who support infant circumcision, falls into the realm of truthiness.

Yes, I’m angry about being circumcised, a fact I admit. That does not change my argument. My “emotional baggage” appears in the tone and lack of patience I sometimes take surrounding the issue of infant circumcision, but there are facts and logic behind what I say. I do not deny the science, instead explaining why it isn’t enough to overcome the ethical concerns and the reality that less invasive procedures exist to resolve medical issues if they arise.

Orac, at Respectful Insolence, has an interesting take on the battle against vaccines that I think can be applied equally to the circumcision debate. I have no idea if Orac would agree with me, but his words speak truth to what I’m trying to say. Consider:

Supporters of pseudoscience … always have the advantage in such events, because the pseudoscientist can throw canards, dubious data, and distortions with abandon and force the skeptic or scientist on the defensive batting the canards aside, so much so that it is very difficult and sometimes impossible for a skeptic to get his message across.

Obviously the pro-infant circumcision lobby would classify me as the pseudoscientist in the circumcision debate, but that doesn’t fit. Skeptic versus non-skeptic is the key. Skepticism to Dr. Hargreave, and presumably most pro-infant circumcision folks, is “emotional baggage”. Circumcision is the panacea for all that ails society. Males should accept that the men and women who came before them and made their decision for them were wise and only acting with the best of intentions. The skeptic sees that this is modern medicine’s version of snake oil. Some people will improve by accident, but most are getting nothing measurable out of it. Does that mean everyone should drink up because it might work? Of course not. But that truth is “emotional baggage,” stifling the debate away from where it should be.

To their credit, the NHS stated that the recent results are not sufficient for it to reconsider its current policy that circumcision is unnecessary and should not be funded.

Thanks to Kip for the Science Blogs link.

“…whether their use should be restricted…”

But we’ve done it this way for a long time; it must be effective.

New drug-releasing stents used widely to keep clogged heart arteries open appear to increase the risk for potentially life-threatening blood clots more than older bare-metal versions, government investigators told an expert panel assessing the safety of the devices today.

But the blood clot risk from the tiny metal mesh struts, known as drug-eluting stents, appears relatively low and it remains unclear whether it translates into an excess risk for heart attacks or deaths, according to the Food and Drug Administration analysts.

Nevertheless, because some studies have suggested the increased risk of blood clots, known as thrombosis, may be causing thousands of excess heart attacks and deaths each year, it is urgent that experts determine whether their use should be restricted and patients who already have them should be treated longer with anti-clotting drugs, the agency officials said.

My opening statement is stupid because it lacks the logic involved in questioning and striving for something better. Yet people do this all the time and think nothing of it. Progress is good, but sometimes it requires a retrenchment to a prior point. Not necessarily with heart stents, but we must be open to ideas.

Some things are worth paying for

I rarely post items Instapundit-style, with a link and a Heh. Such aggregation of links can be useful, but my interest drifts quickly because the information is out there for me to find almost as quickly. Instead, I want insight or commentary. I like for people to offer me a perspective to ponder, which is another reason I like reading things I disagree with. But this post at Cato @ Liberty is worth mentioning, even though I can only add my own Read the whole thing.

The Fraser Institute of Vancouver, B.C., has released its 16th annual “Waiting Your Turn” report on waiting times for health care in Canada’s state-run Medicare system. The average wait for surgical and therapeutic services increased slightly over the 2005 average to less than one day shy of their all-time high of 17.9 weeks in 2004. Throwing more money at the system doesn’t seem to make a difference; the Frazer Institute has documented that waiting times often increase with increased spending on Canada’s Medicare program.

National healthcare or insurance is not the answer, no matter how many pleas we hear about the expense of our system or how many people don’t have adequate health insurance. The Cato post doesn’t offer a solution, but it demonstrates why our problem is a better problem than countries now dealing with the drawbacks of socialized medicine.

This should be an episode of House, M.D.

I went vegetarian in early ’94 (vegan in ’02) for its potential health benefits. The animal rights/ethics implication mattered little, as I was mostly unaware. Health reasons still dominate, but the disturbing callousness with which we disregard animals as sentient beings is enough to keep me vegan on the unlikely chance I falter in my dedication. Consider Exhibit A, the E-Z Catch Chicken Harvester:

I don’t expect any mass abandonment of meat as a food item in my lifetime, but who can watch that and consider it the mark of a civilized society?

Following that line of thought, how does this story read in the animal rights context?:

[Dr. Jennifer] Eddy is one of many doctors to recently rediscover honey as medicine. Abandoned with the advent of antibiotics in the 1940s and subsequently disregarded as folk quackery, a growing set of clinical literature and dozens of glowing anecdotes now recommend it.

Most tantalizingly, honey seems capable of combating the growing scourge of drug-resistant wound infections, especially methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, the infamous flesh-eating strain. These have become alarmingly more common in recent years, with MRSA alone responsible for half of all skin infections treated in U.S. emergency rooms. So-called superbugs cause thousands of deaths and disfigurements every year, and public health officials are alarmed.

Though the practice is uncommon in the United States, honey is successfully used elsewhere on wounds and burns that are unresponsive to other treatments. Some of the most promising results come from Germany’s Bonn University Children’s Hospital, where doctors have used honey to treat wounds in 50 children whose normal healing processes were weakened by chemotherapy.

I’m sure there are vegans who could argue against such a use as animal exploitation; I am not one of them. I don’t think I’m prone to relying on any sort of relativism to justify some things while denouncing others (example), but this is fine with me, if it works. Although there is a price, preventing disability and death is a clear benefit.

For more on honey from a vegan perspective, read this, including its fuzzy (and stringent) indications of how honey might be ethically harvested. For more on MRSA, read this again.

Video link found at Boing Boing

The ethics of vanity

Here’s an excerpt from a presentation (from 2001, I believe) entitled “Rejuvenation of Aging and Photodamaged Skin Utilizing Fibroblast Conditioned Media”:

A newborn baby’s skin produces an abundance of compounds important to healthy young skin, including growth factors antioxidants, soluble collagens, and matrix proteins that confer structure to skin. Over time, environmental stressors like ultra-violet radiation, cigarette smoke, wind and pollution deplete these compounds. Meanwhile, as we age, our bodies gradually lose the ability to effectively produce these elements. So our skin wrinkles, sags and roughens.

This natural mixture of newborn skin compounds is produced by Advanced Tissue Sciences, Inc. to from a pioneering process in the emerging field of tissue engineering that utilizes fibroblast cells from neonatal foreskins to produce human tissue replacements for the treatment of serious burns, wounds and other therapeutic indications. Fibroblasts are the cells responsible for growth and repair of the dermal layer of skin. The patented tissue engineering process stimulates normal human newborn skin fibroblast cells grown in the laboratory to deposit matrix proteins, including collagens, growth factors and antioxidants to form a human dermal tissue structure. In addition to assembly of these components into a tissue, the cells secrete soluble forms of these compounds into the solution (termed media) used to nourish the cells. The resultant fibroblast conditioned media is separated from the cells and tissue to serve as a natural, highly efficacious, ingredient for anti-aging cosmeceuticals. The fibroblast conditioned media contains the array of naturally produced factors which aging skin makes less efficiently and sometimes in smaller quantities.

Advanced Tissue Sciences, Inc. sold its assets in 2003 to SkinMedica in bankruptcy. SkinMedica now has an array of products that include human fibroblast conditioned media. Its site does not indicate specifically that this means “developed from neonatal foreskins,” so I am not making that claim with regard to its products. However, Dr. Patricia Wexler said as much when she appeared on Oprah.

Does anyone else see the ethical quandary this presents? The boy has not consented to unnecessary surgery, yet a healthy portion of his body is amputated. The discarded foreskin is then used by a third party to develop a commercial beauty product¹. Somebody is making money on this, and it’s not the now foreskin-free boy.

Providing compensation to the circumcised boy would not change my opinion, or ease the violation of routine infant circumcision. That should be obvious. But it does further illustrate how little the rights of infant males are considered in the routine practice of circumcision in America. There is a disconnect when reason does not tell us that using an infant’s foreskin so that adults can pretend that time does not exist is not acceptable.

Note: It makes no difference if the human fibroblast conditioned media is used to treat burn victims instead of those too vain to age. The boy does not lose his right to bodily integrity because someone else suffered burns. Individual rights can’t be trumped by any notion of who “needs” the skin more.

¹ Two human collagen products, CosmoDerm® and CosmoPlast®, contain cells replicated from discarded foreskins.