Sick unto death

New from the Dangerous Nonsense department: there's a new alternative-medicine model out of Germany that claims that viruses and bacteria aren't the cause of infectious diseases.

The website linked above, which was sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, had me muttering imprecations under my breath pretty much right from the first line.  The author, Caroline Markolin, starts with a line from the famous 19th century biologist Rudolf Virchow: "If I could live my life over again, I would devote it to proving that germs seek their natural habitat -- diseased tissue -- rather than being the cause of diseased tissue."

Virchow was a brilliant pathologist and cellular biologist, but being good at some things doesn't mean you can't be dead wrong about others.  And the article conveniently fails to mention that Virchow not only disbelieved that pathogens caused diseases, he was also an ardent anti-evolutionist who considered Darwin an "ignoramus."

Be that as it may, we then are treated to quite a confection of nonsense.  Colds and flu, we're told, are actually the same thing, and are both caused by stress, not by viruses:

The common cold is linked to a "stink conflict", which can be experienced in real terms but also figuratively as "This situation stinks!" or "I've had it!". During the conflict-active phase the nasal membrane lining widens through ulceration, which is usually not noticed. In the healing phase, however, when the nasal tissue is being repaired, the nasal membrane swells up. A runny nose (healing always occurs in a fluid environment), headaches, tiredness, an elevated temperature or fever are all typical signs of a vagotonic healing process. If the cold symptoms are more severe, then this is commonly called the "flu". The claim, however, that "influenza" viruses are the culprits, has yet to be proven.

Nor has this claim, of course.  The "germ theory of disease" has over a hundred years of hard data supporting it.  This theory (if I can dignify it by that name) has a few vague generalities, a couple of ten-dollar words like "vagotonic," a photograph of a woman blowing her nose, so q.e.d., apparently.

We then find out that the "Spanish" flu of 1918-1919, that killed between 50 and 100 million people (hard numbers are difficult to come by, since the epidemic occurred during World War I, and many deaths in rural or isolated places went unrecorded), was not caused by a virus, it was caused by "stress."  People were under "territorial fear conflicts" and "death fright conflicts," and sickened from those; the acute, and frequently deadly, symptoms occurred when the body was trying to heal itself and the lung tumors caused by "stress" decomposed.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Oh, and tuberculosis and AIDS aren't caused by pathogens, either.

And don't take antibiotics.  Ever.  Because they cause cancer.  Lung cancer, Markolin tells us, isn't caused by smoking; to hell with the research, which includes a study that demonstrated that 2/3 of the people who smoke will eventually die from conditions associated with tobacco use.  Cancer is caused by "shock," she says.  In a statement that should be an odds-on favorite for the Circular Logic Award of 2015, she states, "We have to bear in mind that every diagnosis shock can potentially cause... cancer," implying that the diagnosis of cancer is what caused the cancer to appear.

But how was the cancer there to diagnose if the diagnosis caused the cancer, you may ask?  To which I respond: stress vagotonic death fight conflicts.  And fear.  Stop asking questions, because you're going to stress me out and give me a cold.

Oh, and viruses, "if they existed," would "assist in the reconstruction of... tissues."  Because evolution, for some reason.  Microbes are our friends; all disease is caused by emotional conflict.

Makes you wonder, doesn't it, how plants get infectious diseases.  Maybe my tomato plants didn't get late blight last year, maybe they were just feeling lonely and unappreciated.

But I'm certain that Markolin would have some sort of bullshit response to this, too.  Probably that humans with all of their ugly unnatural habits are causing the plants to stress out, and so the tomatoes are picking up on our conflicted quantum vibrational states and becoming sick themselves.

Nothing whatsoever to do with pathogens.  Just like colds, flu, AIDS, tuberculosis, and the bubonic plague.

The difficulty here is that there is a germ of truth (rimshot) to what she's saying.  The mind does have a role in health; stress does cause physical manifestations, probably mediated by the hormone cortisol.  But this is a far cry from saying that all disease is caused by stress, and that pathogens have nothing to do with it.

The problem with all of this is not that a crackpot has a website.  Many crackpots do.  It seems to be a favorite hobby of theirs, in fact.  The problem is that naïve people will fall for this, and fail to seek out proper medical care for curable conditions.  So it's homeopathy all over again; a claim that is entirely unsupported by research and evidence, and only believable if you fall for some hand-waving foolishness that the students in my Introductory Biology classes could debunk without even breaking a sweat.  That hasn't stopped the story, however, from being picked up by Spirit Science, so it's popping up all over woo-woo alt-med websites just in the last few days.  (If you go to the Spirit Science article, don't read the comments.  Really.  I mean it.  It will result in your spending the rest of the day curled up in a corner, whimpering softly.  If you ignore this advice, allow me to say simply that, yes, there are people in the world who are this stupid.  And they vote.)

So the caveat emptor principle applies here, of course.  People should be smart enough not to believe appealing nonsense about preventing the flu by becoming less stressed.  But I still feel some sympathy with the folks who are ignorant, or desperate, enough to fall for something like this, and who will suffer the consequences of that ignorance.

And as far as Markolin and her idiotic theory, I'm about done with it.  The whole thing is stressing me out, and we can't have that.

A shot in the arm

The website of the World Health Organization states it this way: "Immunization is one of the most successful and cost-effective health interventions and prevents between 2 and 3 million deaths every year."  UNICEF places the lives saved at closer to 9 million, and states that "vaccines have brought seven major human diseases under some degree of control - smallpox, diphtheria, tetanus, yellow fever, whooping cough, polio, and measles."

The members of my family understand the impact vaccination has had all too well.  My grandfather's only full sister, and his eldest half-sister, died five days apart of measles at the ages of 22 and 17; and my mother had polio as a child, stunting the growth in one leg and leaving her with a permanent limp.  (Still, my mom was one of the lucky ones; less fortunate polio survivors ended up partially paralyzed and spent the rest of their lives in an iron lung.)

Vaccination, however, has been increasingly under attack, with spurious claims linking vaccines to everything from autism to allergies.  This, despite the fact that repeated controlled studies have found vaccines to be safe and effective, and despite the "studies" linking vaccines to negative health effects having been roundly discredited.

Even with all of this, there's still a scare campaign going on that "Big Pharma" is secretly trying to kill you every time you get a shot.  Just last year, we saw Stephanie Messenger's book Melanie's Marvelous Measles published, and it's still available on Amazon despite 147 (out of 200) one-star reviews:

In it, we get to read about little Melanie, who is just delighted to get measles so she can "heal naturally."  The book, Messenger says, "was written to educate children on the benefits of having measles and how you can heal from them naturally and successfully."  Even worse is The Mother magazine, which in its March/April issue had an article that stated that "Measles will only develop in a body that is low on vitamin A," and suggests eating more carrots as a preventative.  We are also told that "people don't die of measles -- they die of medical mismanagement of the fever."

Too bad my Aunt Anne and Aunt Emelie didn't know about all this, isn't it?

Unfortunately, though, the anti-vaxxer nonsense has caught on, based in equal parts on fear, a poor understanding of science, a sneaking sense of suspicion about the ethics of medical/pharmaceutical corporations, and a large dose of the naturalistic fallacy.  Most recently, the whole issue has hit Canada, where just yesterday the British Columbia Medical Journal released, in its May issue, an article stating that Health Canada has just granted license to "homeopathic vaccines" called "nosodes" -- and yes, they are the usual homeopathy bullshit, made from substances diluted past Avogadro's limit, which are therefore pure water.  Nevertheless, Health Canada saw fit to give their stamp of approval to "nosodes" for influenza, measles, pertussis, and polio, despite its stated mission to "(test) products for safety and efficacy before allowing them to enter the market."

So now, we don't just have people avoiding vaccines, we have them taking fake vaccines.

And we're beginning to see the effects of this foolishness.  Wales is still recovering from a measles outbreak that sickened 700 people last month, resulting in at least one death.  Two days ago, the BBC ran a story that states that "Levels of vaccination have been too low in some countries, particularly in rich western European nations...  Experts said it was not too late to hit the target, but 'extraordinary' effort was needed."  The WHO and other medical oversight groups are concerned that in many places, we have dropped below the levels needed for herd immunity, the number of immune individuals needed in a population to prevent the disease from catching hold.  Once that happens, epidemiologists warn, an epidemic is almost certain to occur.

It's hard to combat all of this.  Prominent voices like Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy have spent enormous amounts of time, energy, and money sowing suspicion and drawing false correlations, and once you've activated the fear module in people's minds it's almost impossible to repair the damage.  Doctors are said to be hand-in-glove with corporate interests; skeptics like me are seen as shills or dupes.  If the government itself forces its citizens' choices -- compulsory vaccination programs for school attendance, for example -- it is claimed to be infringing on rights.  When epidemics occur, as in Wales this year, it causes a brief flurry of activity, but once the survivors recover, most people forget about it.  The fear remains that the anti-vaxxers are right -- perhaps the epidemic would have occurred anyway, even if everyone had been vaccinated, and then maybe there would have been all of these cases of autism to contend with.

Here, have a carrot.

I wish I had a good suggestion regarding what to do about all of this.  While I'm all for personal freedom, I really wish governments would step in and say, "Look, I'm sorry you have fallen for pseudoscientific superstition.  That's unfortunate for you.  Roll up your sleeve, please."  If this happened in enough places, maybe we could eradicate measles and polio, the way we eradicated smallpox in 1980.  While getting rid of diseases like the flu, which affect other mammals as well as humans, is unlikely, we could certainly get further along in stopping or slowing down epidemics.

Think of the human suffering this would eliminate, and the lives it would save.

Maybe it's time to apply some science and rationality, here, and not succumb to fear tactics, fallacious thinking, specious claims, and the "research" of outright frauds.  Wouldn't that be marvelous?

Modeling the zombie apocalypse

I usually tell you a little about my topic before I give you my solemn promise that I didn't make any of it up.

This one is so weird that I'm going to put the disclaimer first:

I swear I'm not making any of this up.

A team of medical researchers from two universities in Ottawa have released a paper (published in the Journal of Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress) containing a mathematical model of what would happen to a population during a zombie attack.

The team was comprised of Philip Munz, Ioan Hudea, Joe Imad, and Robert J. Smith?.  And no, I'm not being tentative, there, with that last name.  The question mark is part of Dr. Smith?'s name.  I wonder how it's pronounced, don't you?   Do you have to say it like a question?  At parties, do people go up to him and say, "Hello there, Dr... Smith?"

Myself, I wouldn't have thought it was legal to have a punctuation mark as part of your name.  But now that I find that apparently it is, I think I'll follow suit.  From now on, my name will be Gordon Bonnet!  That way, people will always seem excited to see me.

In any case, the aforementioned medical research team seems to take the whole zombie-study thing awfully seriously.  Here's the actual abstract of the paper:

Zombies are a popular figure in pop culture/entertainment and they are usually portrayed as being brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently, we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular, impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all.

I also have to quote the first line of the paper itself, just because it's so memorable: "A zombie is a reanimated human corpse that feeds on living human flesh [1]."  The coolest thing about this is that they sourced this information.  The source, if you're curious, is The Zombie Survival Guide - Complete Protection from the Living Dead, by Max Brooks (2003, Three Rivers Press, pp. 2-23).

The article then goes on through some amazingly abstruse mathematics to show that a zombie outbreak would be "catastrophic" and could be "disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead."

Have I mentioned that I am not making any of this up?

In the conclusion of the article, Munz, Hudea, Imad, and Smith? state:

In summary, a zombie outbreak is likely to lead to the collapse of civilisation, unless it is dealt with quickly. While aggressive quarantine may contain the epidemic, or a cure may lead to coexistence of humans and zombies, the most effective way to contain the rise of the undead is to hit hard and hit often.

What I find most amazing about all of this is that there was no attempt to tie this to any real, actual epidemic; the whole article was about zombies.  Doesn't that strike you as a little weird?  Now personally, I  love it when scientists take something whimsical and use it as a model for a real phenomenon; one of my all-time favorite studies was when a team of evolutionary biologists used "mutations" (i.e. typos and changes in wording) in chain letters as an analogy to random alterations in DNA, and used it to model how cladistic taxonomy works.  It was sheer brilliance.

This, though... well, I'm not sure I see the relevance.  I can't think of any disease that works anything like, um, zombification, so all of the mathematical twiddling about doesn't really have any apparent application.  Not, of course, that I object to scientists having a little fun once in a while -- but this made it into a peer-reviewed journal, and presumably was the result of a grant from a funding agency of some sort.  Dr. Neil Ferguson, who is one of the UK's top governmental medical advisers, seemed a little uncomfortable when asked about the study.  "My understanding of zombie biology is that if you manage to decapitate a zombie, then it's dead forever," he said, in an interview, and went on to state that other than that characteristic, "zombification" didn't really seem to parallel any known disease particularly well.  "[No infectious illness known] actually causes large-scale death or disease, but certainly there are some fungal infections which are difficult to eradicate."

Smith?, however, was undaunted, and told a BBC reporter, "When you try to model an unfamiliar disease, you try to find out what's happening, try to approximate it.  You then refine it, go back and try again."  Even, apparently, when said unfamiliar disease doesn't, technically, exist.

So, there you have it, then.  A mathematical model for the zombie apocalypse.

Oh, and by the way, if you still don't believe me, here's a link to a BBC article about the study.  In the lower right hand part of the page there's a link that says "Zombies Study (University of Ottawa)" that will allow you to download a free pdf of the entire paper.

Reading all of this stuff leaves me feeling kind of dazed, incapable of doing anything but stumbling around the house with a blank expression, making moaning noises.  Of course, that may be because I'm still waiting for the coffee to finish brewing.  No need to show up at my door with axes.  Honestly.