The four-alarm fire

I present to you three recent articles with a linked theme.

The first is about a study at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research in Australia, and describes an mRNA vaccine that appears to be capable of stopping malaria in its tracks.  The impact of malaria is astonishing, a fact that often escapes the notice of those of us who live in temperate parts of the world where it doesn't occur.  I still remember my shock, when one of my biology professors asked what species of animal has caused more human deaths than any other -- in fact, more than all the other animals combined.

Turns out, of course, it's the mosquito.  Between malaria, yellow fever, and dengue, and a host of other less-common diseases like chikungunya, eastern equine encephalitis, and West Nile virus, mosquitoes (actually several species, but lumping them together for the sake of simplicity) have by far outstripped all other animals in their negative impact on humans.  And of the diseases they carry, malaria is the worst, infecting an estimated three hundred million people per year, and causing six hundred thousand annual fatalities.

The new vaccine is, like the COVID-19 vaccine, an activated piece of messenger RNA.  In this case, it targets a gene in the malaria microorganism that is essential to the pathogen's reproduction within the mosquito.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Supyyyy, Double-stranded RNA, CC BY-SA 4.0]

In preclinical trials, the vaccine caused a 99.7% drop in transmission rates.  The potential impact of a therapy with this efficacy is astronomical, especially given that post-infection medical treatment for malaria is of limited benefit -- and has to be administered for the remainder of the patient's life.  A vaccine that could stop malaria transmission almost completely would have as great a positive effect on life in equatorial regions of the world as the smallpox and polio vaccines did globally in the twentieth century.

The second is a series of studies having to do with the use of mRNA vaccines to target cancer.  The difficulty with conventional chemotherapy is that it's hard to find chemicals that kill tumor cells without damaging your own tissues; as I'm sure many of you know all too well, chemotherapy drugs often come along with miserable and long-lasting side effects.  The effectiveness of mRNA cancer treatments is that the strand of mRNA can be designed to target tumor-specific antigens, turning them into what amount to "smart bombs" that destroy cancerous tissues without harming the rest of the body.  The therapy has been demonstrated to be useful against a variety of types of cancer, including the deadly and extremely hard to treat pancreatic cancer.  There has even been dramatic work done that has raised the possibility of a universal cancer vaccine -- something about which University of Florida researcher Duane Mitchell said, "What we found is by using a vaccine designed not to target cancer specifically but rather to stimulate a strong immunologic response, we could elicit a very strong anticancer reaction.  And so this has significant potential to be broadly used across cancer patients — even possibly leading us to an off-the-shelf cancer vaccine."

The third is that the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., just announced that he's canceling five hundred million dollars in funding for the development of mRNA vaccines.

Let me be blunt, here.

This action will kill people.

Not that RFK cares.  His dangerous lies were directly responsible for the vaccine avoidance that caused a devastating outbreak of measles in Samoa that killed eighty people, mostly children -- an action for which he has yet to take responsibility.  (This, of course, is hardly surprising; "It's someone else's fault" should be the new motto of the GOP.)

RFK has built his entire stance on lies.  He called the COVID-19 vaccine "the deadliest vaccine ever made," despite the CDC finding that vaccination saved more than two hundred thousand lives during the peak of the pandemic.  He has claimed without any scientific basis that all mRNA vaccines are dangerous, and in fact has talked about it in such a way as to lead people to believe that mRNA itself is a dangerous chemical, despite the fact that anyone who passed high school biology should recognize how ridiculous this is.  (I actually saw someone post, apparently seriously, that they would "never allow mRNA in their body," to which I responded, "good luck with that.")

I know there's some stiff competition, but I think RFK would top the list of the Most Dangerous Trump Appointees.  His fear-based, anti-science policies are going to directly result in deaths -- if we're lucky, it'll only be in the thousands, but if we have another pandemic, it could well be in the millions.  The scariest part is that I have no idea what we can do about it.  Besides not taking responsibility, the other thing the Republicans seem to be awfully good at is not bowing to pressure from knowledgeable experts.  In fact, being countered makes them double down and hang on even harder.

And can I point out here that almost half of the research funding RFK cut could be offset by canceling the plans for Trump's fucking Versailles-wannabe golden ballroom?

This is a four-alarm fire, and it seems like barely anyone is paying attention.  Certainly no one who can do anything about it.  This goes way beyond whether any of us will be able to get flu and COVID boosters this fall; this is about basic medical research that can save countless lives.  But ignorance and anti-science dogmatism are winning at the moment.

I just hope that we won't have to wait until a deadly global pandemic for people to wake up and start objecting -- and getting this ignorant, dramatically unqualified ideologue out of a position he never should have been appointed to in the first place.

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Curse to cure

The always-hilarious Gary Larson, whose ability to create absurd combinations of cultural references is unparalleled, had a Far Side comic strip showing a typical office waiting room.  Sitting in one of the chairs, cross-legged and reading a magazine, is a mummy.  The secretary -- with the trademark Larson bouffant hairdo and cat's-eye glasses -- is on the phone to her boss, saying, "Mr. Bailey?  There's a gentleman here who claims an ancestor of yours once defiled his crypt, and now you're the last remaining Bailey, and... oh, something about a curse.  Shall I send him in?"

The whole "Mummy's Curse" thing usually brings to mind the "Boy King" Tutankhamen, and the claim that twenty members of the expedition that opened the tomb died not long afterward.  There are three caveats to this, however: the deaths happened over a decade, suggesting that Tut wasn't in a great hurry to get his vengeance; a statistical study showed that the average age at death of the people who did succumb to "King Tut's Revenge" was no lower than that of the background population; and there is a plausible case to be made that at least two of the deaths (Howard Carter's personal secretary, Richard Bethell, and Bethell's father Lord Westbury, both of whom were murdered) were killed by, or on the orders of, none other than Aleister Crowley.

Whether this last bit is true or not remains very much to be seen; in my opinion, the case relies on highly circumstantial evidence, and after a hundred years it's doubtful we'll ever know for certain.  What I'm pretty sure of is that a scattered bunch of deaths, over ten years or so, of men who were mostly upper middle-aged is not really that much of a mystery, and the curse is nothing more than an attempt to give an added frisson to an archaeological find that honestly is interesting enough without all the supernatural trappings.

On the other hand, consider the opening of the tomb of Casimir IV Jagiellon, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania.  Casimir is considered one of the most able Polish kings, and consolidated his territory, won many military victories, and generally was a force to be reckoned with.  He died in 1492, and was interred with much pomp and circumstance in Wawel Cathedral in Kraków.

Casimir IV Jagiellon of Poland [Image is in the Public Domain]

In 1973, a team of twelve historians and archaeologists opened his tomb.

Within weeks, ten of the twelve were dead.

So do we have a real-life example of tomb desecration?  Oh, and something about a curse?

It turns out that (unsurprisingly) there's nothing supernatural involved here, either.  No need to invoke ancient Polish witchcraft.  The unfortunate researchers succumbed to infections of Aspergillus flavus, a pathogenic fungus that secretes an especially nasty group of organic compounds called aflatoxins.  Fungal infections are notoriously hard to treat -- fungal cells are similar enough to animal cells that chemicals which will kill a fungus often don't do our own tissues any good at all.  Fungal spores are also incredibly tough and long-lived; the Aspergillus spores that killed the research team members had likely been there since the tomb was sealed, over 530 years ago.

But Aspergillus isn't all bad.  A team at the University of Pennsylvania just published a paper in Nature Chemical Biology looking at a different set of compounds the fungus produces -- and found they target and disrupt cancer cells, especially those in leukemia.

The chemicals are called ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides.  The biochemists call them RiPPs, even though the actual acronym would be RSaPTMPs, which I have to admit would be a little hard to pronounce, so RiPPs it is.  And the scientists found that the RiPPs produced by Aspergillus flavus had as much potency against leukemia cells as cytarabine and daunorubicin, two of the go-to drugs used to treat the disease for decades.

"Nature has given us this incredible pharmacy," said Sherry Gao, senior author of the study.  "It's up to us to uncover its secrets.  As engineers, we're excited to keep exploring, learning from nature and using that knowledge to design better solutions."

Which I think you will all agree is a better approach than superstition about opening graves.

Still, it's probably best to be cautious in any tomb-raiding you're planning on doing.  Curses not withstanding, aspergillosis is nothing to mess around with.  Even if the fungus turns out to have some beneficial features, remember to wear your respirators the next time you investigate the burial sites of fifteenth-century Polish kings.

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Out in the ozone

Sometimes I run across alternative health therapies that are so freakin' weird I suspect, at least for a time, that the alt-med crowd is trolling us skeptics.  The sad truth is that when I look a little harder, I find that they're almost always completely serious.  And that includes the one that I just found out about yesterday, wherein just about anything that ails you can be cured by...

... blowing ozone up your ass.

Despite the disclaimer in the first paragraph, I feel obliged to reiterate that I'm not making this up.  "Ozone therapy" is a big deal; I've found that it's recommended for sterilizing wounds, treating SARS, AIDS, Ebola (for a third time, I'm not joking), Crohn's disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and various cancers.  Some treatments (as in the wound sterilization) merely wafts ozone over the affected area.  Others involve treatment with "ozonated olive oil," the aforementioned treatment of running a tube up your ass and blowing ozone therein, and (in one case) injecting a bubble of ozone directly into your vein.

The last-mentioned made my jaw drop.  A bubble in your blood vessels is known as an "air embolism," and can kill you.  It doesn't matter what the bubble is composed of.  If it migrates around until it gets into one of the arteries in the brain, you'll have a stroke.

Which means you now have an additional concern beyond a wound, SARS, AIDS, or what-have-you.

But the blow-it-up-your-ass method (known to the alt-med community by the more genteel name of "rectal insufflation") seems to be the most popular, which raises a question; how did anyone ever think of doing this?  I can't imagine being a medical researcher and thinking, "Wow, this ear infection could easily be cured if I just pump a toxic gas up the patient's butt."  Because any way you slice it, ozone is toxic.  It's O₃ (normal oxygen is O₂) and unsurprisingly is an unstable, highly reactive strong oxidizer. It does kill bacteria -- thus the suggestion that it'd be a good wound sterilizer -- but the problem is, the same properties that make it toxic to bacteria make it toxic to healthy cells.  Hell, single malt scotch kills bacteria, and I don't hear anyone proposing single malt scotch therapy.  (Although after doing this research, I'm seriously considering it.)

In fact, ozone is produced by electrical and gas-powered equipment (including car engines), and is considered a pollutant by the EPA.  According to the fact sheet about ozone, it "can trigger a variety of health problems including chest pain, coughing, throat irritation, and airway inflammation.  It also can reduce lung function and harm lung tissue.  Ozone can worsen bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma."

So positive health effects?  Not so much.

An ozone molecule [Image is in the Public Domain]

After spending over an hour searching, I only found one legitimate-sounding paper that took the idea of rectal insufflation seriously.  Titled "The Effect of Rectal Ozone on the Portal Vein Oxygenation and Pharmacokinetics of Propranolol in Liver Cirrhosis (A Preliminary Human Study)" by Saad Zaky, Ehab Ahmad Fouad, and Hassan Ibrahim Mohamad Kotb of Assiut University in Egypt.  The study was published back in 2011, and the authors kind of disappeared from the world of research publication afterwards, which says something.  Also, I notice that the one major effect they mention is that in their fifteen patients (yes, the sample size was that small), they saw an increase in oxygenation in the hepatic portal vein.

Oh, did I mention that what they blew up their patients' asses was 40% ozone -- and 60% oxygen?  Funny how that might increase your blood's oxygen saturation.

Of course there were plenty of sites advertising ozone machines and ozone therapy clinics and equipment so you can "insufflate" your own ass.  But it's unsurprising those weren't exactly peer-reviewed research, given that these people are making a bundle from the desperate and the gullible.

On the other hand, the sites explaining the complete lack of evidence that this has any therapeutic effect were numerous and vitriolic.  Here's what Andy Lewis, over at The Quackometer, has to say:

O₂ is what we breathe and absorb in our lungs for transport to our cells.  O₃ is a highly oxidising form of oxygen that has very harmful effects on our respiratory systems.  As such, if you squirt ozone on cancer cells on a dish they will die – but then so will all cells.  Cancer therapies work, in the main, by exploiting poisons that kill cancer cells faster than non-cancer cells.  This is pretty hard in practice as cancer cells are very, very similar to normal cells.  The mere fact that a poison kills cancer cells in a test tube does not mean that it can form a therapy...  Ozone has been proclaimed as a miraculous cure for over a hundred years.  There is yet to be any meaningful evidence that it can help cancer patients.  The available good evidence so far suggests that harms will outweigh any potential benefits.

Then there's Paula Kurtzweil, at Quackwatch, who tells the story of a couple in Florida who were fined and sentenced to prison terms for claiming people with AIDS and cancer could be cured by their magic ozone machines:

Proponents of medical ozone generators believe ozone can kill viruses and bacteria in the body. While ozone is used as a germicide in the cleaning of manufacturing equipment, FDA is not aware of any scientific data that supports the safety or effectiveness of ozone generators for treating medical conditions. In fact, the agency believes that at the levels needed to work effectively as a germicide, ozone could be detrimental to human health.

"These devices keep popping up," says Bob Gatling, a biomedical engineer and director of the program operations staff in FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health.  "We always tell their makers, 'Show us some data,' but no one ever pursues it." 

FDA's knowledge of [alternative medicine practitioner Kenneth] Thiefault's involvement in ozone generators dates to at least 1990, when Thiefault was interviewed during an FDA criminal investigation of one of Thiefault's associates.  This associate was later prosecuted and imprisoned for, among other things, manufacturing and selling ozone generators for treating medical conditions.  After release from prison, he returned to making and distributing ozone generators for treating medical conditions but fled the country before he could be prosecuted again.

Also from Quackwatch, here's Dr. Saul Green's take on it:

In 1991, Wells et al. reported that gaseous ozone inactivated cell-free HIV-l in cell-free culture medium.  Using escalating concentrations of ozone, they showed that a l200 ppm dose delivered into the solution for two hours, reduced the number of infectious viruses... and detectable virions about 85%.  However, there was also a significant reduction in infectivity after virus exposure to nitrogen.  Other factors influencing the rate and degree of inactivation of HIV-I by ozone were protein and plasma components in the culture medium.  (HIV is known to be inactivated by a host of relatively inactive substances.)  While ozone might be useful in rendering commercial blood products free of infectious organisms, more extensive analyses of the HIV-I life cycle was needed before ozone's usefulness as an in vivo anti-retroviral agent could be defined.  Poiesz, Wells' co-author, wrote, "No further in vitro work has been done and to my knowledge no in vivo work has been done."

The alt-med monitoring site What's the Harm? lists thirteen people who sought out ozone therapy -- one of them paid $23,000 for it -- instead of legitimate treatment modalities, and found out that it is definitely not a miracle cure.

Because they died.

So anyhow.  If you have a chronic disease, and (for some reason) decide that the best treatment would be to insufflate your rectum with toxic gas, I would exhort you to reconsider.  There is no reliable peer-reviewed research that it provides any benefits whatsoever, and (cf. the word "toxic" in the previous sentence) can kill healthy tissue.  Now, y'all will have to excuse me, because I think I need some single malt scotch therapy after all.

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This week's book recommendation is a brilliant overview of cognitive biases and logical fallacies, Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly.  If you're interested in critical thinking, it's a must-read; and even folks well-versed in the ins and outs of skepticism will learn something from Dobelli's crystal-clear prose.

Permafrost permayouth

You might have heard about people consuming pills of dried shark cartilage as nutritional supplements.  They're still widely available, in fact.  It's supposed to be anti-carcinogenic.  Why, you might ask, did people get this idea?

Because, the purveyors of shark cartilage pills say, sharks don't get cancer.  So if you grind up shark parts and consume them, you won't get cancer either.

There are just two problems with this practice:

• Sharks actually do get cancer, something that has been known since at least 1908.
• Shark cartilage has been tested and found to have no beneficial therapeutic value whatsoever.  It is, however, kind of critical for the shark itself, and the practice of killing sharks for their cartilage has led to widespread decline in sharks in many parts of the world.

This did not stop two of the most prominent cartilage shark spokespeople, I. William Lane and Linda Comac, from writing a book called Sharks Don't Get Cancer.  When the book was completely trashed by scientists and other reviewers, Lane responded by writing a second book four years later called Sharks Still Don't Get Cancer.

His publisher wisely recommended that Lane eliminate the subtitle he was planning to use, which was So Take That Nyah Nyah Nyah Nyah pfffttptbtbtbtbtb.

As usual, we have people who aren't letting little things like evidence and facts stand in the way of their claim.  You can still buy shark cartilage pills in many pharmacies, including a brand called, I kid you not, "BeneFin."

I bring all this up because yesterday I ran across a story about a woman who is doing something even stupider than consuming shark cartilage to prevent cancer; she is injecting herself with bacteria so she won't age.

It's not just ordinary, garden-variety bacteria, either.  These are bacteria that had been frozen in the permafrost of Siberia for, by some estimates, 3.5 million years, and now have been resuscitated by the thaw.  A Russian professor of geology named Anatoli Brouchkov noticed that the Yakut people who live in the area have a reputation for long lifespans, so he decided that (of course) it had to be because they were drinking melted permafrost water that had the bacteria in it.

Couldn't be genetics, or diet, or anything.

So he treated some plants, fruit flies, and mice with the bacteria, which has been dubbed "Bacillus F."  Brouchkov that they "seemed to have a rejuvenating effect," although gives no details about how he knew.  How do you distinguish between a rejuvenated houseplant and a tired, listless one?  Do non-rejuvenated fruit flies fly about in a dejected fashion?

Be that as it may, Brouchkov is certain enough of his claim that he's drinking water with Bacillus F in it himself.  But an actress who calls herself "Manoush" has gone a step further; she is now injecting herself with the bacteria.

Manoush, best known for such A-list blockbusters as Zombie Reanimation, The Shrieking, Philosophy of a Knife, and The Turnpike Killer, says she started taking the bacteria because like many of us, she's not so fond of the idea of getting old.  "Aging is a disease," she says.  "It is a genetic flaw to me.  Even as a teenager I could never accept the concept of getting older one day.  I don’t care what people think. I will stop at nothing to look and feel younger.  Nothing."

Which, I think we could all agree, would leave us with no option other than injecting 3.5 million-year-old Siberian permafrost bacteria directly into our bodies.

Manoush is absolutely convinced she's now aging backwards.  Me, I'm not sure.  I'm not fond of the gray hair, stiff joints, and crow's feet I've gotten in the past few years, but I don't think the answer is to jump on some loopy idea about anti-aging bacteria.  In fact, injecting bacteria into yourself is kind of a bad idea in general; perfectly normal, ordinary skin bacteria become a serious problem if they get into your bloodstream.  A friend of mine's father, in fact, almost died of a Staphylococcus aureus infection when his thumb got skewered by a rose thorn.

Staphylococcus aureus, I should point out, is a ubiquitous part of our skin flora.  On the surface of your skin, it's harmless.  Inside you, it can result in blood sepsis, which is a quick and spectacularly nasty way to die.

Staphylococcus aureus [image courtesy of the National Institute of Health]

So as much as I'd like perpetual youth, I'm not going to get in line behind Manoush for my bacteria injection.  I'll put up with the gray hair, which I'm told makes me look "distinguished," which isn't as good as "drop-dead sexy," but I guess I'll deal.

Chemotherapy lies

A musician friend of mine, a flutist of tremendous talent, drive, and skill, was diagnosed with leukemia when she was seventeen years old, only months before her high school graduation.  This was (of course) a devastating blow to a young woman with aspirations to head off to college and pursue a career as a professional musician, but fate often intervenes in the best-laid plans (as Robert Burns said much more eloquently).

She began chemotherapy almost immediately after the diagnosis.  The process was excruciating.  She experienced all of the familiar awful side effects -- hair loss, weakness, nausea, headache.  She lost weight, and felt fatigue so crushing that it was hard for her to do anything other than sleep.  Her family and friends rallied around her, and she called on her own strength of spirit to get her through the pain.

And she made it.  The leukemia went into remission.  She was able to resume normal activities, including playing her beloved flute.  She's been cancer-free for over five years now -- and is soon to release her first album.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It's stories like this that are why I become apoplectic with rage when I read things like a post that came out at The Mind Unleashed last week.  Entitled, "Chemotherapy Proven to Spread Cancer, Cause Lethal Tumors in Groundbreaking New Study," the writer begins with a bang by saying, "Albert Einstein College of Medicine proves chemotherapy is a cash machine for Big Pharma."  The post goes on to say:

In a groundbreaking new study, they’ve proven that chemotherapy causes cancer cells to spread throughout the body – to replicate themselves, making your cancer worse, not better...  The researchers, George S. Karagiannis, Jessica M. Pastoriza, Yarong Wang, Allison S. Harney, et all, suggest that though chemotherapy may shrink a cancerous tumor, but it simply sends the cancer cells off into other parts of the body to rebuild into yet additional destructive tumors. 

This study makes a massive move in exposing the perpetual fraud of the chemotherapy/cancer industry. In American alone, it’s a $200 billion-dollar industry. It’s part of the reason why our insurance premiums are ridiculously high, and unassuming cancer sufferers, keep suffering.

Of course, the Karagiannis et al. paper, released earlier this month in Science, says nothing of the sort.  Here's the summary of the study the editors of the journal wrote:

Breast cancer is one of the most common tumor types, and metastasis greatly increases the risk of death from this disease.  By studying the process of intravasation or entry of cells into the vasculature, Karagiannis et al. discovered that, in addition to killing tumor cells, chemotherapy treatment can also increase intravasation.  Groups of cells collectively known as tumor microenvironment of metastasis (TMEM) can serve as gateways for tumor cells entering the vasculature, and the authors discovered that several types of chemotherapy can increase the amounts of TMEM complexes and circulating tumor cells in the bloodstream.  The researchers also determined that a drug called rebastinib can interfere with TMEM activity and help overcome the increased risk of cancer cell dissemination.

Two things stand out.  The researchers studied one type of cancer -- breast cancer.  Chemotherapy differs greatly depending on cancer type, so it's highly unlikely that all chemotherapy increases TMEM production.  Second, and most important: did you catch the last line?

They showed that the drug rebastinib acts to prevent metastasis, thus removing any increased risk of TMEM formation resulting from the chemotherapy.

So basically, it's the opposite of what the people over at The Mind Unleashed claimed.  If "Big Pharma" wants us all to stay sick and keep suffering, they're doing a pretty lousy job.  Humans in industrialized countries have the highest overall life span, and (more importantly) the best health, of any society the world has ever seen.  A lot of the credit for this goes to the medical establishment -- especially the development of vaccines and antibiotics.  And the cancer sufferers who owe their lives to chemotherapy far outnumber the ones whose cancer recurred or metastasized due to the drugs they were given.

In other words: the article at The Mind Unleashed is misleading at best, and an outright bald-faced lie at worst.  They took a study whose title seemed to give some vague support to their anti-science stance, and (apparently without reading the actual paper itself) claimed that it proved that "Big Pharma" is engaging in some kind of giant conspiracy to make us all sick.

And this is not just an ordinary lie; it's a downright dangerous one.  Most of us aren't scientists, and a paper like Karagiannis et al. is beyond our ability to comprehend in anything more than a superficial manner.  On the other hand, bullshit alarmism like what I found over at The Mind Unleashed is easy to read -- and easy to swallow whole.  As we've seen more than once here at Skeptophilia, emotional appeals usually work better than intellectual ones.  If you hook into people's fears, you're likely to convince them even if what you're saying makes no rational sense whatsoever.

So what we have here is a claim that could very well make cancer patients -- who are already likely to be in a maelstrom of worry, doubt, and anguish -- decide that what their doctors are recommending is just going to make them worse.  Add to that the fact that even the best chemotherapies cause pretty unpleasant side effects, and you get a toxic combination that could well persuade someone to forgo treatment, or opt for some useless quack "alternative medicine" instead.

The case of Steve Jobs bears remembering -- who, when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, delayed conventional treatment for nine months, opting instead for "alternative medicine" and changes in diet.  Jobs realized his mistake, but too late.  "He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it," his biographer, Walter Isaacson, said.  "I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner...  I think he felt: if you ignore something you don't want to exist, you can have magical thinking.  It had worked for him in the past.  He did end up regretting it."

In the case of my musician friend, the situation is crystal-clear.  If she had chosen to ignore the advice of her doctors and avoid chemotherapy, she would have died.  Pure and simple.  We are fortunate enough to have a fine person and truly talented flutist still with us, living a healthy and productive life, because of "Big Pharma's chemotherapy/cancer industry."

And the biased, anti-scientific ignorance the people over at The Mind Unleashed are peddling is 100% USDA Grade-A bullshit.

Cancer, coffee, and science reporting

Given the way science is presented in the media, it's no wonder a lot of average laypeople have the impression that scientists don't know what the hell they're doing.

The situation is worst, I think, with respect to health research.  I hear students say it all the time:  "Meh, everything causes cancer."  "Doesn't matter, if they say it causes heart disease today, tomorrow they'll say it won't."  Some of it, of course, is wishful thinking on the part of people would like to live on bacon double cheeseburgers with no impact on their fitness, but a lot of it comes from the way medical research is reported.

Take, for example, the article in The Independent a couple of days ago, "Very Hot Drinks 'Probably' Cause Cancer, UN Says."  Starting with the quotation marks around "probably," which I'm guessing were supposed to indicate that the word was a direct quote from the paper, but comes off sounding dubious.  But worse, take a look at how the research was reported:

The World Health Organisation is due to make a number of announcements today on health concerns and benefits of drinking hot beverages such as coffee.  In 1991, the IARC announced coffee "possibly caused cancer."  However, the health body is expected to revise that today to suggest other than concerns over temperature, there is insufficient evidence to say coffee itself causes cancer...  It is believed the temperature, rather than the substance of the drinks, causes cancer of the oesophagus and becomes a risk once beverages have a temperature above 65 C, AFP reports.  The announcement follows a review of more than 1,000 scientific studies on whether there is a link between coffee and cancer, conducted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).

The impression you get is that the researchers were convinced that coffee was a carcinogen, and now they're saying no, it's not, but hot beverages in general are bad.  Only toward the end of the article do you find out that almost no one drinks beverages at temperatures above 65 C, because that's scald-the-mouth territory.  And the 65+ C liquid would have to still be at that temperature by the time it hits your esophagus (owie) in order to boost your risk of esophageal cancer.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So in fact, the research is indicating that almost no one is going to see an increase in cancer incidence from drinking hot beverages, which is exactly the opposite of what most of the article leads you to believe.  In fact, the article doesn't even mention the central issue -- that the problem isn't the temperature, it's the repeated tissue damage and resultant inflammation.  Research has shown that anything that causes chronic inflammation of the esophagus will increase the risk of cancer -- thus the connection between gastro-esophageal reflux disorder and cancer.

Of course, that's not the impression you get from a quick reading of the article, and especially not if all you did was read the headline (which I think is sadly common).  A less-than-careful perusal makes you come away with the idea that you're going to get cancer from sipping your nice cup of hot cocoa -- which is clearly not true.

No wonder people get the impression that the medical researchers, and scientists in general, don't know what they're doing.

I know everyone doesn't have a background in science, so I'm not expecting that the average person is going to read and thoroughly understand an academic paper on cancer research.  So it really is up to the media to make sure they're communicating correctly the gist of what's been found -- and this article in The Independent illustrates that the tendency is to do a pretty piss-poor job.

Idiocy one-upmanship

A loyal Skeptophilia reader and frequent commenter sent me a reply to yesterday's post, about the office of Education Committee chair being filled by a creationist chemtrail-believer who thinks that the nation's problems would be solved if church attendance was mandatory.  The message said, in toto, "I see your Sylvia Allen, and raise you a Michele Fiore," followed by a link.

The link was to a story from ThinkProgress called "Nevada Lawmaker Says Cancer is a Fungus, Recommends Simply Washing it Out."  In it, we read about Michele Fiore, who has a weekly radio show, wherein we hear the following:

If you have cancer, which I believe is a fungus, and we can put a pic line into your body and we’re flushing, let’s say, salt water, sodium cardonate [sic], through that line, and flushing out the fungus…  These are some procedures that are not FDA-approved in America that are very inexpensive, cost-effective.

Inexpensive and cost-effective, sure.  But they aren't FDA-approved for a reason, to wit, injecting salt water and sodium carbonate into a cancer patient's pic line would have the unfortunate side effect of death.  Sodium carbonate, also known as washing soda, is a strong base, and is often used in soap manufacture, taxidermy, and as a silver polish.  You wouldn't want to drink the stuff, much less have it injected directly into your bloodstream.

Based on other places she's dispensed such wisdom, apparently she didn't mean sodium carbonate, but sodium bicarbonate.  In other words, baking soda.  Which likewise is perfectly fine for making biscuits, but is not meant to be put in a cancer patient's pic line.

If you're doing repeated facepalms over this, I haven't told you the most appalling part: Fiore served as Majority Leader of the Nevada State Assembly, and would still be in the position if not for her removal a few weeks ago (not for catastrophic stupidity, which at least would have been heartening, but for financial improprieties).  Worse still, up until last month, she was the CEO...

... of a health care company.

Her company, "Always There 4 You," says on its "About" page:

Always There 4 You is a locally-owned and operated business.  It has been serving the community for over 10 years. Your health and safety are secure with us.  If you don't want to worry your family members or trouble them with your daily care.  If you live by yourself and are either elderly or disabled, live a simpler life by getting aid from the kind and friendly staff of Always There 4 You.  We are trained to help you in all sorts of areas, With our in-home healthcare, you can get help with washing, bathing, preparing meals, dressing, taking medication, and doing light housework.  You'll also make great friends and companions!  Make life easier on yourself by getting help from Always There 4 You.

You'll also, apparently, get "sodium cardonate" in your pic line if you get cancer.

Encouragingly, the powers-that-be seem to be on to her, because in November Fiore lost her license to provide health care, and "Always There 4 You" closed.  Fiore was unrepentant, and blames the closure on harassment.  "The never-ending barrage of government red tape and regulations has made being in business not worth being in business," Fiore said, showing once again her knack for articulate exposition.

Oh, but you'll never guess what else!  She's also in favor of murdering refugees, not only here on American soil, but anywhere in the world!  She'll do it herself, in fact:

What, are you kidding me? I'm about to fly to Paris and shoot ‘em in the head myself!  I am not OK with Syrian refugees.  I’m not OK with terrorists.  I’m OK with putting them down, blacking them out, just put a piece of brass in their ocular cavity and end their miserable life.  I’m good with that.

So, think about it.  You've lost your health care license, you were removed as Assembly Majority Leader because of a million dollars in unpaid tax liens, you advocate shooting innocent people in the head, and you give health advice to desperately ill people even though you apparently don't know the difference between sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate.  What do you do?

You run for Congress, of course.

This is, I kid you not, a photograph from Michele Fiore's promotional 2016 calendar.

I would like to say, "Ha ha, I'm just kidding."  I would like even more to say, "Oh, but don't worry, there's no way she'll get elected."  But it's becoming increasingly apparent that you can be completely immoral, and also stupid to the point where it's a wonder you can walk without dragging your knuckles on the ground, and still win the majority of the votes.

So next November, keep your eye on Nevada.  We might just have someone in Congress who will make Louie Gohmert look like a Rhodes Scholar by comparison.

Bee all and end all

It's unfortunate how wishful thinking can turn off the rational parts of your mind.

I know we all want to live healthy for as long as possible.  There are a lot of scary illnesses out there that everyone would love to avoid.  But this fear drives us sometimes to pursue preventatives and treatments that are completely bogus -- in our desperation to avoid disease, we grab on to anything that seems even remotely possible.

I can't think of any other explanation for the link a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a couple of days ago, in which we learn that to avoid getting sick, people are breathing air from beehives.

Here's the pitch:

This is a place in Slovenia.  It's proven that breathing air from a beehive is very beneficial for ones [sic] health.  Hive air contains ingredients that boost the body [sic] healing capacity.  This is just more evidence that backs up why it is that beekeeper [sic] a have the highest life expectancy in the world.  Everything the Bee produces is of the highest value to humans.

…Beekeepers have the lowest incidence of cancer of all the occupations worldwide. This fact was acknowledged in the annual report of the New York Cancer Research Institute in 1965. Almost half a century ago, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Vol. 9(2), Oct., 1948, published a report by William Robinson, M.D., et al., in which it was claimed that bee pollen added to food (in the ratio of 1 part to 10,000) prevented or delayed the appearance of malignant mammary tumour. 

L.J. Hayes, M.D had the courage to announce, “Bees sterilise pollen by means of a glandular secretion antagonistic to tumours.”  Other doctors, including Sigmund Schmidt, M.D., and Ernesto Contreras, M.D., seem to agree that something in pollen works against cancer. 

Dr W. Schweisheimer also said that scientists at the Berlin Cancer Institute in Germany had never encountered a beekeeper with cancer.  A French study concerning the cause of death of 1,000 beekeepers included only case of a beekeeper that died of cancer. The incidence of cancer-caused deaths in a group of French farmers was 100 times higher than the group of beekeepers. 

Till date, no study has faulted the fact that beekeepers have very low, almost negligible incidence of cancer worldwide.  Due to the weight of this fact and coupled with his experience, John Anderson, Professor of beekeeping, University of Aberdeen, unequivocally declared: “Keep bees and eat honey if you want to live long. Beekeepers live longer than anyone else”.

The problem is, the basis of this claim -- that beekeepers have a lower (or zero, as the post claims) incidence of cancer than the rest of us -- is simply untrue.

 All the way back in 1979, J. A. McDonald, F. P. Li, and C. R. Mehta decided to test this claim (which does date back to the mid-20th century).  Unsurprisingly, they found no correlation at all between beekeeping and low cancer incidence:

Beekeepers had a slightly lower than expected fraction of deaths from cancer.  The deficit of lung cancers in male beekeepers was significant (p less than 0.05) and may indicate that fewer beekeepers were cigarette smokers. The frequencies of other cancers did not differ significantly from expectation...  Mortality from diseases other than cancer showed no unusual patterns.  At least two persons died from accidents directly related to the care of beehives.  Analysis of a subgroup of 377 males with major roles in the beekeeping industry showed no substantial differences in distribution of causes of death.

But that hasn't stopped people from doing things like claiming that honey is better for you than sugar (honey basically is sugar, or a concentrated solution thereof) and that "bee pollen" is good for your health.  In fact, there have been no studies supporting any positive health effects from ingesting "bee pollen," and at least three cases of people experiencing life-threatening anaphylaxis after taking bee pollen supplements.

"Natural" doesn't mean "good for you."  Nature is full of toxins, and there's a significant fraction of nature that would love nothing better than to kill you and eat you for dinner.  And while bees are certainly beneficial insects -- the decline of bees from colony collapse disorder should be of tremendous concern to everyone, given the role of bees in pollination -- that doesn't mean that attaching a hose to a beehive and breathing air from it is going to do anything but piss off the bees.

This didn't stop people from waxing rhapsodic about the curative powers of bee air on the original post.  Here are just a few of the comments, so you can get the flavor of the conversation.  You're going to have to trust me that spelling and grammar is as written, because I don't want to use up my daily allotment of sics this early in the day.

Bees are our medicine.  Honour and respect our companion to evolve.  Bees don't respond well to greed. 

Alot of things I think would help ease and even cure alot of the sickness in the world today.  I do believe there was medicine before any of us were born that would work better.  With the manufacturers of the drugs all the accessories that goes with on inhalers needles etc. Is worth billions and they don't want to cure a dam thing.  I believe the make drugs just to keep illness under control so we the consumer still has to buy there product just like buying your milk an bread. 

I knew that bee keepers on Russia had the largest group of centurions I knew it had something to do with all the bee pollen and honey they were eating.  But huffing bee hive air ... cool

I have to admit that the last comment defeated me for quite some time, which I attribute to my not having had any coffee yet.  I simply stared at it with my head tilted to one side, wearing an expression similar to my dog's when I explain difficult concepts to him, like why he shouldn't roll in dead squirrel.

The other shoe dropped eventually, of course.  And I do think it would be cool if people who lived 100 years got to be centurions.  I think that on a person's 100th birthday, they should receive the entire outfit and be allowed to wear it wherever they want to.

But I digress.

It'd be awesome if there was some cheap, readily accessible preventative for diseases like cancer.  The problem is, if there was something like that, we would have found it by now, and its therapeutic value would have been established by scientific studies.  

So cancel your trip to Slovenia.  Your best bet for staying healthy is still eating a balanced diet, maintaining a reasonable weight, finding ways to reduce stress, and exercising frequently.  And if you can't manage any of those things, bees are unlikely to help.

Risk, research, and red meat

Most people really don't understand the concept of risk.

Let me give you an example.  Let's say that there is a woman who has been identified as being at risk of having a stroke.  She goes to a doctor, who offers her one of three medications to reduce her risk of stroke over the next five years.

Medication A would increase her likelihood of remaining stroke-free from 91% to 94%.

Medication B reduces her risk of a stroke by 1/3.

Medication C reduces her risk of a stroke by 3%.

Which one should she take?

Most folks seeing this problem pick B, largely because it sounds better -- a reduction by 1/3 is a lot, right?  3% is a pretty paltry change, and 91% and 94% chances of remaining healthy are pretty close.

It comes as a big surprise to find out that all three of them are the same.

If she has a 91% chance of remaining healthy without the medication and 94% with it, her risk of stroke drops from 9% to 6%.  That's a drop of 3%.

It's also an overall 1/3 reduction in her risk.

Such mathematical monkey-business is why there's been such confusion over the WHO's recent declaration that red meat causes cancer (and processed meat, such as hot dogs and pepperoni, are even worse).   In fact, processed meat is now in "Group 1" -- "substances that cause cancer" -- along with tobacco, human papilloma virus, and asbestos.

[image courtesy of photographer Jon Sullivan and the Wikimedia Commons]

It's even accompanied by statistics that seem, frankly, pretty terrifying:

[M]eta analysis found that colorectal cancer risk jumps by 17 percent for every 100 grams (3.5 ounces) of red meat consumed each day.  Meanwhile with processed meat, colorectal cancer risk increases by 18 percent for every 50 grams (1.7 ounces) eaten each day.

Holy crap, right?  1.7 ounces a day (not much) translates to an 18% increase (a lot) in your chance of colorectal cancer (a disease that is high on most people's "Least Favorite Things to Think About" list).

Add that to another study that found that "2% of hot dogs contain human DNA," and it looks like we might see a lot of people finding other things for their summer barbecues.

The problem is that all of this stuff is misleading.  First, what does an 18% increase look like?  According to the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results Fact Sheet on colorectal cancer, current rates of diagnosis estimate the number of new cases at 42.4 per 100,000 each year.  An 18% increase brings that number up to a little over 50.

In other words, if 100,000 people ate 1.7 ounces of salami a day for a year, you'd expect there to be eight more cases of colorectal cancer in that group as compared to a comparable non-salami group of 100,000.

Here's another problem with the WHO information.  "Group 1" substances are said to be "known to cause cancer."  But all that means is "known to increase your risk."  It doesn't say by how much, nor what the risk was to begin with.  For example, cycling to work and swimming naked in a crocodile-infested river are both outdoor activities that are "known to increase your risk of dying in an accident."  So on the "Outdoor Activities Risk" list, these would both be classified as "Group 1."

Which one would you prefer doing?

At the risk of beating the point unto death, Casey Dunlop of Cancer Research UK cited statistics illustrating how silly it is to put tobacco and bacon in the same category.  Tobacco is a product that is toxic in any amount, confers no benefits whatsoever upon the people consuming it, and is directly responsible for 86% of lung cancers and 19% of all cancers combined.  Even assuming the worst-case scenario, daily consumption of processed meat is responsible for 21% of colorectal cancers and 3% of all cancers combined.

Puts things in perspective, doesn't it?

Oh, and about the human DNA in hot dogs thing; this doesn't mean that the hot dog manufacturers are incorporating Soylent Green into their meat.  Given the sensitivity of DNA tests, this probably means the presence of a few cells from a bit of dry skin or something.  And if you think that it's only hot dogs that have this kind of contamination, I have news for you.  The amount of extraneous cellular material (to put it euphemistically) that we consume by accident on a daily basis has not been tested, but is undoubtedly high.  If you are a pet owner, and don't think you consume dog and/or cat DNA every single day, well... either you clean your house far more frequently and thoroughly than I do, or you're living in a fool's paradise.

And amazingly enough, most of us are pretty healthy.  Funny thing, that.

Now, I'm not saying we should eat hot dogs and bacon and pepperoni with wild abandon.  Reducing your consumption of red and processed meat is definitely a good thing.  But everything has dangers; there are risks associated with every food out there.  The trick is to figure out which calculated risks are worth taking, and what the tradeoff is.

After all, as Chuck Palahniuk put it in Fight Club, "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."

Farts, craters, Mick Jagger, and the problem with lousy science reporting

One of the reasons that it is critical that we all be science-literate is because it is becoming increasingly apparent that the popular media either (1) hires reporters that aren't, or (2) values getting people to click links over accurate reporting.

I suspect it's (2), honestly.  The most recent examples of this phenomenon smack of "I don't care" far more than they do of "I don't know."  Just in the last week, we've had three examples of truly terrible reporting in media outlets that should have higher standards (i.e., I'm not even considering stuff from The Daily Mail).

And, for the record, this doesn't include the recent hysterical reporting that melting roads in Yellowstone National Park mean that the supervolcano is going to erupt and we're all going to die.

The first one, courtesy of the Australian news outlet News.Com.Au, pisses me off right from the outset, with the title, "A Mysterious Crater in Siberia Has Scientists Seeking Answers."  Because seeking answers isn't what scientists do all the time, or anything.  Then, right in the first line, we find out that they're not up to the task, poor things:  "Scientists baffled by giant crater... over northern Siberia -- a region notorious for devastating events."

"Baffled."  Yup, that's the best they can do, those poor, hapless scientists.  A big hole in the ground appears, and they just throw their hands up in wonderment.

Before we're given any real information, we hear some bizarre theories (if I can dignify them by that name) about what could have caused the hole.  UFOs are connected, or maybe it's the Gates of Hell, or perhaps the entry to "the hollow Earth."  Then they bring up the Tunguska event, a meteor collision that happened in 1908, and suggest that the two might be connected because the impact happened "in the region."

Despite the fact that the new crater is over a thousand miles from the Tunguska site.  This, for reference, is about the distance between New Orleans, Louisiana and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Only after some time are we told that the Siberian crater site is also the site of a natural gas field in which explosions have taken place before.  In fact, the whole place is pocked with circular craters, probably caused by methane explosions from the permafrost -- i.e., it's a completely natural phenomenon that any competent geologist would have been able to explain without even breaking a sweat.


But this is world-class journalism as compared to ABC News Online, which just reported that Brazil got knocked out of the FIFA World Cup because of Mick Jagger's support.

To be fair, ABC News wasn't intending this as science reporting, but from all evidence, they did take it seriously.  Here's an excerpt:

It seems the Rolling Stone frontman has developed a reputation for jinxing whatever team he supports. Some Brazilian fans are even blaming Jagger for their team’s 7-1 thrashing by Germany in Tuesday’s semifinal game. 

The 70-year-old singer turned up at the game with his 15-year-old son by Luciana Giminez, a Brazilian model and celebrity. Though he wore an England cap, his son was clad in Brazil jersey and they were surrounded by Brazil supporters. 

The legend of the “Jagger Curse” dates back to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, where he sat next to Bill Clinton for the USA-Ghana match, only to see the U.S. lose 2-1. When he attended the England-Germany game the next day, wearing an England scarf, his home country lost. But it wasn’t until the Dutch defeated Brazil during the quarterfinal round, where Jagger turned up in a Brazil shirt, that the Brazilians first blamed him for the loss.

Seriously?  It couldn't be that the winning team played better, could it?  You know, put the ball into the net more times?

It has to be Mick Jagger's fault?  Because of a magical jinx?


So I'm just going to leave that one sitting there, and move on to the worst example, which has been posted about five million times already on Facebook, to the point that if I see it one more time, I'm going to punch a wall.  I'm referring, of course, to the earthshatteringly abysmal science reporting that was the genesis of The Week's story "Study: Smelling Farts May Be Good For Your Health."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I'm hoping beyond hope that most of the people who posted this did so not because they believed it, but because most of us still don't mind a good har-de-har over flatulence.  But the story itself is idiotic.  Here's the first paragraph:

The next time someone at your office lets out a "silent but deadly" emission, maybe you should thank them. A new study at the University of Exeter in England suggests that exposure to hydrogen sulfide — a.k.a. what your body produces as bacteria breaks down food, causing gas — could prevent mitochondria damage. Yep, the implication is what you're thinking: People are taking the research to mean that smelling farts could prevent disease and even cancer.

Well, at the risk of sounding snarky, any people who "take this research" this way have the IQ of cheese, because two paragraphs later in the same article the writer says what the research actually showed:

Dr. Matt Whiteman, a University of Exeter professor who worked on the study, said in a statement that researchers are even replicating the natural gas in a new compound, AP39, to reap its health benefits. The scientists are delivering "very small amounts" of AP39 directly into mitochondrial cells to repair damage, which "could hold the key to future therapies," the university's statement reveals.

There is a difference between smelling a fart and having small amounts of dissolved hydrogen sulfide enter the mitochondria of your cells.  It is like saying that because sodium ions are necessary for proper firing of the nerves, that you'll have faster reflexes if you put more salt on your t-bone steak.  Worse than that; it's like saying that you'll have faster reflexes if you snort salt up your nose.

I know that media outlets are in business to make money, and that readers = sponsors = money.  I get that.  But why do we have a culture where people are so much more interested in spurious nonsense (or science that gets reported that way) than they are in the actual science itself?  Has science been portrayed as so unutterably dull that real science stories are skipped in favor of glitzy, sensationalized foolishness?

Or is it that we science teachers are guilty of teaching it that way, and convincing generations of children that science is boring?

Whatever the answer is to that question, I firmly believe that it's based on a misapprehension.  Properly understood, the science itself is cool, awe-inspiring, and fascinating.  Okay, it takes a little more work to understand mitochondria than it does to fall for "sniffing farts prevents cancer," but once you do understand what's really going on, it's a hell of a lot more interesting.

Oh, and it has one other advantage over all this other stuff: it's true.

Ethics, religion, and the right to die

One of my failings is that I never seem to be able to see ethical questions in black-and-white.

Life would undoubtedly be easier if I did.  Humans, myself included, appear to me to be impossibly complex, full of competing motives, attitudes, thoughts, and prejudices, with an incomplete access to the facts (and a fallible machine with which to process those facts).  Given all that, a lot of the time I really don't know how to make decisions on ethical matters -- I can too easily see the arguments from both sides.  All of which makes it all the more baffling to me how people can seem so sure of themselves in (for example) politics.

Maybe it's why I'm comfortable in the realm of science.  There, there's a clear decision-making protocol, and rules of logic that govern it.  Things may not always be simple in science, but they sure are a hell of a lot clearer.

I ran into an especially good example of this yesterday, with the story of the seventeen-year-old Sydney, Australia boy who is fighting in court for the right not to be treated for his probably-curable Hodgkin's lymphoma.

The boy is a Jehovah's Witness, and they believe that you are showing a lack of faith in god if you seek medical care when you're ill.  You should, they say, pray for healing.  If you die, then (1) you didn't pray hard enough, or in the right way, or (2) it was god's will that you died.  Either way, they're insulated against criticism of the claim, which strikes me as pretty convenient.

The case was in the courts in April, and was characterized as a situation of neglectful, ultra-religious parents victimizing an ill child by denying him treatment.  Supreme Court Justice Ian Gzell agreed, stating in his ruling that, ''The sanctity of life in the end is a more powerful reason for me to make the orders than is respect for the dignity of the individual.  X is still a child, although a mature child of high intelligence.''  The boy was ordered into Sydney Children's Hospital, where he began chemotherapy.

But the case jumped back into the news when it was reported that the boy himself is threatening to rip the IV needle out of his arm -- after his father wrote a line from the bible on a whiteboard in the boy's hospital room that allegedly supports the contention that it is against god's will to have a blood transfusion.

A spokesperson for Sydney Children's Hospital said the boy had a ''cocooned upbringing'' and his family had ''little exposure to challenges of their beliefs from outsiders''-- implying that he and his family were simply wrong, and therefore incapable of making a responsible decision.  The boy himself expressed horror at the thought that he might be sedated and treated against his will -- likening it to being raped.

So, what's the answer?  I teach seventeen-year-olds, and a good many of them are highly mature, sensitive, and intelligent.  Some are less so.  Even the less mature ones feel strongly that they should be able to make their own decisions.  In the eyes of the law, however, they are still legally their parents' responsibility.

Then we have the religious aspects.  It's easy enough to ridicule the beliefs of these folks from the outside -- but put yourself in their places.  What if you really, truly believed that death was not final, that your soul lived on -- but that you might end up in eternal torment if you sought out medical care?  You are in pain now, but that's temporary.  Hell, on the other hand, lasts forever.  Wouldn't you choose a few months' discomfort over an eternity in agony?

Then there's the aspect of "brainwashing" -- as it's been widely characterized.  I agree to the extent that the Jehovah's Witnesses' view of the world is unsupported by everything I know about science, logic, and nature.  There is, in my opinion, not a shred of evidence for their claims.  Still -- shouldn't we all be allowed to make those decisions for ourselves?  Why should my reliance on science and logic dictate what someone else does?  I sure as hell would resent that if the situation were reversed -- which it sometimes is.

It's not an easy thing to decide, is it?  It would be different if the boy were younger; but even that is an ethical conundrum, because there's no on/off switch for maturity.  Are you capable of making this sort of decision at sixteen?  Fourteen?  Ten?  In most places, you become the master of your own fate at eighteen, but even that is an arbitrary number.  I know some people who are more mature at fifteen than others are at twenty-five.

So I'm left with a question.  We have a boy who is almost certain to die because of his, and his parents', religious beliefs, and a hospital that is desperately trying to stop that from happening.  And all I can say is that I'm glad I'm not the one who has to make the decision about what is best to do.

Cellphones and brain explosions

A while back there was a rumor circulating that using cellphones could give you brain cancer.  A study published in 2010, sponsored by the National Cancer Institute, indicates that there is no correlation between cellphone use and cancer, which caused sighs of relief from the thousands of people who like to discuss details of their sex lives and intimate health issues in public places.

Now, however, thanks to a scary email I received yesterday, I find that cellphone users have worse things to worry about than brain cancer; using your cellphone can simply make your head explode.

Don't believe me?  I'll show you.  I excerpt part of the email below:

Do not pick up calls under the following given numbers:  9888308001, 9316048121 91+, 9876266211, 9888854137, 9876715587.  These numbers will come up red in color, if the call comes from these numbers.  It's with very high wavelength, and very high frequency.  If a call is received from mobile on these numbers, it creates a very high frequency and will cause you to have a brain hemorrhage.

It's not a joke, it's TRUE.  27 people have died receiving calls from these numbers.  This has appeared on news programs and has been verified as true, it's not a hoax.  Please forward this on to all the people you care about!

Well, first off, it's a little ironic that I was the recipient of this email.  My wife recently perused the cellphone use by the members of our family, and found that in the months of May and June I accrued a grand total of seven minutes of cellphone use time.  I suspect that this was actually unusually high, because during May I was away teaching classes at a music workshop weekend in Pennsylvania, and had much higher need for my cellphone than normal.  I use my cellphone so infrequently that when I do need it, I often (1) can't find it, and then when I do find it, (2) the battery is dead, so I have to (3) locate my cellphone charger, and (4) wait several hours for the battery to charge, by which time (5) whatever need I had for a cellphone is long since past.

I think my problem is that besides being a Luddite, I just hate telephones in general.  I actually enjoy being in a place where I can't be reached by telephone.  I'm sort of like Pavlov's dog -- but instead of salivating, when the telephone rings, I swear.  The idea of taking a telephone with me, so I can be reached anywhere, has about as much appeal as taking along my dentist on vacation so that he can interrupt my lying around on the beach by doing a little impromptu root canal. 

But I digress.

For those of you who actually can find your cellphones, and do use them occasionally, should you worry about picking up your cellphone, for fear of your brain exploding?  The answer, fortunately, is no, and we don't need to have a study funded by the National Brain Explosion Institute to prove it.  Without even trying hard, I can find three problems with the contents of the email:

First, there's no way that a cellphone could transmit sound waves at a high enough volume to cause any damage.  Cellphone speakers are simply not capable of producing large-amplitude (high decibel level) sounds -- cellphone use isn't even damaging to your ears, much less your brain.  You're at more risk of ear damage from turning your iPod up too high than you are from your cellphone.

Second, how do they know all of this, if all the people it happened to died?  Did the victims pick up their cellphones, say "Hi," and then turn to their spouses and say, "OMIGOD I JUST RECEIVED A CALL FROM 9888308001 AND THE NUMBER CAME UP RED AND NOW I'M HAVING A BRAIN ANEURYSM ACCCCCKKKKK"?

Third, the email itself indicates that the originator has the intelligence of cream of wheat, because anyone who's taken high school physics knows that it's impossible for a wave to have high frequency and high wavelength at the same time, as wavelength and frequency are inversely proportional, sort of like IQ and the likelihood of watching Jersey Shore.

So, anyway, feel free to continue using your cellphones without any qualms, and I'll continue to not use mine.  Maybe one day I'll eventually arrive in the 21st century, and stop being such a grumpy curmudgeon about telephones, and consent to carry one around so I can have constant, 24/7 availability to receive calls from telemarketers.

But don't expect it to happen any time soon.