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"You say tomato. I say tomato." It's not only a saying that fails to work when used in print instead of uttered aloud, it's also the wacky, devil-may-care opening line of a booklet promoting alternative medicine that Oxford Health Plans sent out a few days ago to all of their participants, including, ironically, us skeptics at the American Council on Science and Health.
Plague! Run for your life!
But wait: a plague doesn't necessarily mean the end of the world. We might feel less anxiety about such things if we appreciated the strides science has made and will continue to make in fighting some horrible-sounding scourges.
MMR and Chickenpox
MEMO TO:
Producers "60 Minutes"
555 West 57th St.
New York, NY 10019
From:
Dr. Elizabeth Whelan
President, ACSH
RE: Your Segment on PCB's in Anniston, Alabama - 11/10/02
The CBS/60 Minutes segment which aired on November 10, 2002 - citing public health risks of environmental exposure to PCBs - was completely lacking in scientific merit.
The search for elevated rates of disease among soldiers exposed to Agent Orange is never-ending, and since diseases do not occur at a perfectly uniform rate throughout the population, occasionally there's bound to be a disease that's unusually common among the vets. (For more on the variation in disease rates, see ACSH's booklet on Cancer Clusters.)
Physicians and scientists at the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) called a second filing of a lawsuit against McDonald's Corporation "without scientific merit." Lawyers for two overweight and obese New York teenagers today filed a revised suit to replace the one which had been dismissed last month by Judge Robert Sweet in the U.S. District Court of New York.
A New York City ban on smoking in bars goes into effect this coming Sunday, and a statewide ban goes into effect four months later. Some see it as reasonable regulation. Others condemn smoking but question the rationale for the regulations. And some see it as a direct blow against liberty. The differing opinions were nicely summed up by the article "Pataki Inks Strict Smoking Law" in today's New York Sun, which quoted, among others, ACSH's own Jeff Stier:
The website TomPaine.com seems to exist mainly to place large ads on the op-ed page of the New York Times, usually denouncing corporate greed in such cartoonish and oversimplified terms that one almost expects to see the pieces decorated with top hat-wearing Snidely Whiplash figures, chomping on cigars and carrying big bags of money.
That is standard left-wing politics, but TomPaine.com recently took up a new cause: attacking vaccine manufacturers.
To the Editor:
As a physician and public health educator, I say it's self-evident that parents' rights to evade vaccinations for their school-age children stop at classmates' respiratory tracts ("Worship Optional")
Parents seeking "religious" exemptions from vaccinations for their kids should be made aware of recent epidemics of whooping cough and other rare communicable diseases. When vaccination rates drop below 80 percent or so, community ("herd") immunity falters and even vaccinated youngsters become vulnerable.
Executive Summary
Beef is a highly nutritious food. It is particularly valuable as a source of zinc, iron, and other minerals; B vitamins and choline; and protein. Beef also contains components that may have health benefits, such as conjugated linoleic acid (CLA).
We know that cigarettes are bad for our health, but there is an indirect way they can kill that we rarely stop to think about. Cigarettes are the number one cause of fatal house fires.
The Toll
Last week, President Bush signed a bill allocating $15 billion for AIDS drugs in Africa (and funding efforts against tuberculosis and malaria). In his State of the Union address earlier this year, Bush said of the AIDS initiative that "seldom has history offered a greater opportunity to do so much for so many." It's good to hear some cost-benefit analysis being employed even on a grandiose government project, one that could easily be sold with nothing more than a tug at the heartstrings. With luck, it will pay off in millions of saved lives.
"For practical purposes, the supply of...plaintiffs claiming workplace exposure to asbestos but no injury is essentially infinite. Asbestos litigation will go on until the last dollar is extracted from an ever-widening group of defendants."
Lester Brickman, N. Cardozo School of Law,writing in the January 6 Wall Street Journal
"If plaintiffs were able to flesh out this argument...it may establish that the dangers of McDonald's products were not commonly well known."
Federal judge Robert Sweet, explaining that lawyers for obese patrons who are suing McDonald's, blaming the restaurant for making them fat, have failed to make their case but have thirty days to file an amended complaint (as noted by CNN).
You can have all sorts of irresponsible fun with statistics, but James Bond video games may be more educational, as I learned over the holidays.
This weeks brings news that Osama bin Laden may be alive, audiotaping new denunciations of the West, and planning new terror attacks. It also brings word that weapons inspectors may be allowed back into Iraq. It seems like a fitting time, then, to ask what we know about biological weapons that might used by our enemies, starting with anthrax, and what we know about ability to defend against such attacks. It's also a good time to hear a few words from Dara Friedman, who worked for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) tracking anthrax during the 2001 attacks.
Europeans, out of some romantic rebellion against America and high technology, were shunning U.S.-grown food containing G.M.O.'s [genetically-modified organisms] even though there is no scientific evidence that these are harmful. But practically everywhere we went in Davos, Europeans were smoking cigarettes with their meals, coffee or conversation even though there is indisputable scientific evidence that smoking can kill you.
Thomas Friedman, in his February 2 New York Times column.
For some reason, Marion Burros of the New York Times seems to have it in for food irradiation. In an article published in the Times on January 29 ("The Question of Irradiated Beef in Lunchrooms"), Ms. Burros and some authorities she quotes mislead readers about the proposed irradiation of beef used in school lunch programs.
Most of us would agree that it's cruel for hucksters to claim they have treatments for cancer if they do not. We ought to be just as wary of organizations claiming to have unconventional knowledge about preventing cancer by avoidance of various environmental threats. That's the central pitch of the Cancer Prevention Coalition (CPC).
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently instituted more lenient regulations regarding the level of scientific evidence needed to note health benefits of certain foods on packages. The FDA determined the benefits of nuts to be at a "B" level on its new ranking system of A (scientifically proven) to D (almost no evidence), according to Lauren Neergaard of the Associated Press. Previously, the FDA did not permit food manufacturers to make qualified health claims on its products.
Golden Ages, like most any mythic memory, are less about the past than about the present and a set of ideological guidelines meant to transform it. Tradition sanctifies. If it is alleged that some herbal medicine has been used for thousands of years, then it is thought it must have some efficacy that modern medicine cannot match. After all, that which is of ancient vintage has not only survived the test of time but has the added virtue of being closer to nature.
Plants do not have digestive systems, but they do have a genome like the rest of life as we know it (unless one counts viruses as a life form). However, the furor over transgenic ("genetically modified") crops has given rise to the belief among many that foodstuffs such as tomatoes do not have genes unless biotechnologists put them there and do not have toxins unless those toxins originate in factories (just this week, New York Times writer Marian Burros wrote another article implying the purity of organic food, and she is far from alone in purveying that message).
[Editor's note: Little more than an hour after ACSH president Dr. Elizabeth Whelan appeared on the Today show this morning to condemn the idea of a "fat tax" on certain foods, letter writer Aaron Sugarman sent in the following lengthy condemnation. We salute Sugarman's speed and his passion for the issue. TS]
Dr. Whelan,
It is shameful that you would use your position in what I consider to be the pseudo-science, or junk-science, community to attempt to discredit true scientific reality.
You are thoroughly disappointing as a human being.
[Editor's note: Paul Lee, in an article for SkepticReport.com, has argued that complementary and alternative medicine methods are by definition unproven and that we should prefer "evidence-based medicine" but Saul Green cautions that the term "evidence-based medicine" is often used not by responsible mainstream scientists but by CAM adherents who merely go through the motions of performing tests and gathering data without those tests and data producing reliable results in order
Pagination
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