Comments on: BSE/CJD

By: Rod Dacombe

Rod Dacombe — Mon, 12 Jan 2004 15:25:54 +0000

I think that if Milloy had seen at first hand what vCJD does he’d be less concerned about hammering the beef industry

By: Jon H

Jon H — Wed, 07 Jan 2004 04:15:07 +0000

It occurs to me that the mad cow thing is precisely the sort of situation where Tech Central Station’s ownership could become an issue and call their coverage into question. I know of one column they’ve run, which if I’m not mistaken was one saying that it wasn’t anything to worry about. I don’t know if they’ve covered it more. It would be interesting to know if TCS’s owners, the lobbying firm, have the beef industry as a client.

By: Tim Lambert

Tim Lambert — Mon, 05 Jan 2004 04:41:00 +0000

Jim, the difference between the Reynolds “why don’t they protest about X” argument and the critique of Milloy that I linked to, is that the protestors didn’t have a mission statement that implies they should be protesting about X. The only junk science that Milloy is critical of is that that does not suit his political agenda. Milloy’s criticism of Levitt and Donohue’s abortion study could be also be applied to Lott’s MGLC study. You don’t even have to change any of the words. But he doesn’t criticize Lott’s work. In fact, he has articles praising Lott’s findings on his junk science site. I emailed him about this discrepency and his defence was that he didn’t write those articles. He is a hack.

By: digamma

digamma — Sun, 04 Jan 2004 18:36:00 +0000

Those of us who habitually eat our ancestors’ brains are even more worried than the rest of you. It seemed like the proper thing to do at the time. Who knew? If zombie movies are to be believed (and certainly they are), the greater threat is our late ancestors’ eating OUR brains.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Sun, 04 Jan 2004 18:04:57 +0000

Some substances are never good and bad above a certain dosage. Asbestos, lead and mercury are examples, IIRC. Others are good in small doses and bad in large. This second list includes almost everything—salt, water, carbohydrates. “Toxic substance” is a shorthand term of uncertain definition (I suppose it is legally defined somewhere, and maybe medically, but the legal and medical definitions don’t govern everyday use.) What Miller’s post tells us is that some toxic substances are not in the mercury-lead toxic category, but the other one (with zinc, table salt, etc.). Also granting that the research is pretty preliminary, I doubt that we need to change the way we think about pollution in general yet.

By: Jim Miller

Jim Miller — Sun, 04 Jan 2004 15:49:18 +0000

Degustibus is no doubt trying to be funny when he (she?) says that “Toxic waste is good for you too”, but in fact there is some evidence that small amounts of some toxic substances can be good for living organisms. The effect is called “hormesis” and has been shown in many experiments on a wide range of organisms. There’s some evidence that low levels of radiation are also beneficial. And one amusing detail. One of the toxic substances thought to be helpful is arsenic. The right level for humans may be about 50 parts per million, the old “safe” level in the United States. By embarrassing the Bush administration into lowering it, the Democrats and media may actually have made us worse off. Please note that I said “may”, since I understand that the scientific study of hormesis is still in its initial stages.

By: back40

back40 — Sun, 04 Jan 2004 04:18:52 +0000

This MIT release discusses it clew. This BioMedNet article is also interesting. Protein folding variation is being recognized as a common mechanism, an elegant low energy method for quick state changes. But, things can go wrong…

By: clew

clew — Sun, 04 Jan 2004 03:59:19 +0000

Zizka, a recent Economist has an article which not only describes prions much as you just did, but says that they may be part of memory, esp. long-term memory. (Not, I think, the same prions as the disease ones.)

By: Zizka

Zizka — Sun, 04 Jan 2004 01:22:24 +0000

Those of us who habitually eat our ancestors’ brains are even more worried than the rest of you. It seemed like the proper thing to do at the time. Who knew? From what I’ve read, prion formation seems like self-catalysis, where a molecule of a certain compound, when added to a bath of components of the same compound, catalyzes the reproduction of more and more replicas of itself. Is there someone out there who actually knows chemistry and can tell me whether my hunch has any validity? It’s very hard to get used to a whole new kind of cause of disease—neither a living creature nor a virus nor a toxin (as we usually use the word), but something else entirely. My etiological universe has been discombobulated.

By: degustibus

degustibus — Sat, 03 Jan 2004 23:49:35 +0000

oh well, then let’s put downer cattle back into the food supply. (& Toxic waste is good for you too)

By: back40

back40 — Sat, 03 Jan 2004 23:19:17 +0000

Prions are interesting and may be part of normal protein functioning that goes wrong for several possible reasons such as old age or exposure to toxins of various sorts. The BSE scare has prompted a lot of work on a previously neglected area. There’s a fair amount of new and interesting research as well as an abundance of speculative writing.

By: Jim Henley

Jim Henley — Sat, 03 Jan 2004 21:41:45 +0000

Milloy is a hack. You can read more about him here. Tim, that has to be one of the least impressive “debunkings” I’ve ever read. It’s mostly a series of semantic games about the meaning of the word “science.” For example, it may be true that lawyers who try to get damage awards from cell phone manufacturers for post hoc brain cancers are not “doing science at all,” but they are making causal physical claims which require a theory behind them – that is to say, they are conjuring a scientific aura around their claims. That kind of conduct is certainly fair game. To complain that Milloy calls it “junk science” rather than, say, non-science or fake science is mere grumpery. Much of the rest of it was taken up with “Why doesn’t Milloy write about this?” which is the sort of thing I’d expect from Glenn Reynolds talking about protestors. Milloy may indeed be “a hack,” but you sure can’t tell it from the piece you cited. I’m somewhat surprised you seem so impressed with it.

By: Ray

Ray — Sat, 03 Jan 2004 18:03:52 +0000

So you have a difference of 1.3 per million and 2.6 per million. What that translates to, given Britain’s population of 60 million, is that you’re talking something in the area of 80 or so cases. Depending on how one draws one’s regions, it shouldn’t be too difficult to come up with a difference in occurrence rate. Reasonable people can differ on what is statistically significant in this case. That said, it doesn’t really matter. People died from a mysterious and unexplained ailment. That’s reason enough for scrutiny, and statistically significant or not, one’s odds of finding the correct cause improve by honing in on correlating factors. It doesn’t prove anything, but it gives you a place to start looking.

By: Motoke Kusanagi

Motoke Kusanagi — Sat, 03 Jan 2004 12:30:39 +0000

Here is the (disputed) article from the British Medicinal Journal to which Milloy refers. If the diseases are in fact related the epidemics of BSE in the 1980s and the later vCJD should develop in a similar way; so far that hasn’t happened. The BBC reported last year that in Britain 28 people died of vCJD in 2000, 20 in 2001 and 17 in 2002. In short, I’m skeptical. Venters’ hypothesis that vCJD is a previously unrecognized disease was also supported by something I read about the (mis-)diagnosis of normal CJD; apparently the number of cases of CJD has grown significantly in the 1990s, simply because doctors are better at recognizing it. But I can’t find a link for that so maybe I dreamed it.

By: Nasi Lemak

Nasi Lemak — Sat, 03 Jan 2004 12:30:03 +0000

Queniborough. See here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1233813.stm