I am a scientist and like many scientists my job is completely dependent on grant money. The Republicans in Congress have taken a hatchet over the years to federal grant money for scientific research. Let me be the first to say that if it's a choice between feeding hungry children and paying research scientists, of course the hungry children come first. There are a lot of Americans suffering from the terrible economy and that suffering is more important than publishing in peer-reviewed journals. However, it is due to the hatchet-wielding Republicans that we are having to make those hard choices in the first place. And while the toll is not as obvious as what they have done with shredding the safety net, it still has a profound and long lasting effect on the state of American scientific research.
Federal funding of scientific research was already cut to the bone before the sequester. Then the sequester came and a lot of scientific research funding took the brunt of the cuts.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/...
The first active federal budget "sequester," an automatic, across-departments spending reduction, in more than two decades will cut funding from several U.S. departments and agencies that fund scientific research. Currently, the government funds more than one third of all research and development in this country. Details remain to be seen and the situation is still playing out, but many of these organizations clearly foresee losses in jobs and crucial funding.
The terrible result of these deep cuts isn't just the loss of current scientific research, but for many potential scientists the decision to go into a different career. This generational loss is irreplaceable and will affect American scientific capability for years to come.
It also serves to chill the independence of currently practicing scientists. If they can no longer be reasonably assured of getting funding from the federal government, they will be forced to get funding from private sources. This necessarily will influence their choice of study subjects, as they will be either consciously or subconsciously be more likely to choose subjects of interest to corporations and other potential funders.
Personally I think a third of all scientific research should be privately funded, rather than a third of all scientific research being publicly funded--the percentages should be reversed. Corporations are in the business of making a profit, so, for example, in the area of biomedical research usually only patentable pharmaceuticals and devices obtain private funding to be studied. This can work well if done in tandem with robust publicly funded biomedical research, but that is not longer the case, at least in the U.S.
Pharmaceutical companies like to fund research into copycat drugs that have a very broad customer base. But this bias leads to the humiliating current scenario of random people pouring buckets of ice over their heads just to raise money for research for ALS treatments. We shouldn't have to do that. Even though ALS is very rare, such a debilitating disease deserves to have lots of federal money thrown at it to help develop a cure. Sure it wouldn't help that many people, and those people might not even be rich ( /sarcasm). But they deserve a chance to be able to live a healthy life. Scientists shouldn't be reduced to panhandling on the Internet just to get enough money to do their jobs.
It is from this deeply pessimistic view of modern American scientific research, particularly medical research, that I have been reading and commenting on many of the recent science diaries here at dKos. Because I have firsthand experience with some of the limitations of scientific research and some of its flaws I have a more nuanced view of current scientific research and findings than some of the diarists here at dKos. I understand that due to my day job I might have a different outlook about science than many here, but I did not expect to be labeled a crackpot, crank, CTist, etc. So I am writing this diary as a defense of my views (and of others of like mind who have written to me privately urging me to do so) and also as an explanation. Hopefully I will be able to get across my shades of grey. I also urge civility. Just because a person may, for example, use homeopathic products doesn't mean it is necessary to malign their character.
To do justice to my detractors, I will try to express the gamut of my unusual opinions that have recently come under fire, from the sublime to the ridiculous. First, the sublime:
This remarkable doctor came to my notice because I recently found out that I had a high hereditary risk of MS on both sides of my family. She has had truly miraculous preliminary results with her protocol and has sound science supporting it. Obviously a diet is not patentable; a pharmaceutical company cannot make money off a diet the way it can off a prescription drug. With the fact that patients with MS have so few effective options available to them, one would hope that the government would step in and help fund the study of The Wahls Protocol. But instead, Dr. Wahls is reduced to hunting for funding from private sources. That is annoying enough, but especially so when considering that her preliminary results seem to show an improvement in other types of autoimmune diseases, in other words that she may have discovered a more broadly applicable cure for disease. Now it's true there are other factors influencing her lack of federal funding.
http://terrywahls.com/...
Conducting research is an expensive endeavor. Seed funds to help collect a small amount of pilot data, like Dr. Wahls’ current study, range from $75,000 to $100,000. A somewhat larger study testing the safety and tolerability of a study will cost $250,000 to $500,000. A clinical trial that is large enough to prove that the intervention is effective often costs a million dollars or more. Dr. Wahls has sent multiple grant proposals for $450,000 to the National MS Society and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), but has thus far has not been funded.
But traditional funders of research, such as NIH, are less likely to fund the type of work that Dr. Wahls is doing, because they prefer to support studies that examine just one variable at a time rather many interventions simultaneously. As a result, The Wahls Foundation and the University of Iowa Foundation have the goal of raising funds independently to support Dr. Wahls’ research.
But I think she should be showered with grant money. Instead she has accepted money from one of the device makers of devices used in her protocol. Inevitably if her Protocol does show significant positive results, detractors here will blame her funding source and say the results cannot be trusted.
It is remarkable how little we do know about the human body. Part of this is due to the American research bias towards patentable medications, as explained above. Naturally occurring substances in the body are by definition, not patentable. This leads, for example, to the odd discrepancy of the prevalence of non-bioidentical hormone replacement therapy in women when bioidentical hormone replacement therapy makes more sense. Not too long ago it was major news that hormone replacement therapy has major bad side effects in women. Well, no wonder when it involves ingesting hormones from pregnant horses. In Europe it is more common for doctors to prescribe bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, where the hormones are an exact match of human hormones. This type of HRT has not shown the ill effects of the HRT studied in the United States. More studies need to be done, but good luck getting those studies done in the United States. Instead we have the accepted wisdom that HRT = bad, and women who could benefit from sensible HRT treatment are instead scared away from it.
Other remarkable recent findings that are poking holes in accepted science are the discovery of chimeras.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Or the REALLY eye-popping discovery that some humans have more genes in common with closely related Neanderthals than they do with some distantly related humans. That one, of course, is not politically correct at all, and I worry that I may be hide rated here for even mentioning it. In my defense, this anomaly is found only on those with very pale ancestors with red hair, and I fall into that group.
On the other hand, I will undoubtedly be hide rated for some of the other opinions I post in this diary, so I will forge ahead.
Many diaries have recently made the reclist touting the infallibility of medical and other scientific research, so I know that my opinions are unpopular, but they are based on commonly known and well researched fact. Here are a few links demonstrating the bias and corrupting influence of Big Pharma and other money on research:
http://www.forbes.com/...
Last year Glaxo paid $3 billion to resolve civil and criminal allegations of, among other things, marketing widely used prescription drugs for unapproved treatments and using kickbacks to promote sales.
And in 2009, Glaxo paid $750 million to resolve civil and criminal charges that quality failures led to serious contamination of drug products at its manufacturing operations in Puerto Rico.
Glaxo is a leader in pharma fraud and wrongdoing, with other industry heavyweights close behind. Over the past decade, whistleblowers and government investigations in the US have exposed a never-ending series of problems by numerous pharma companies in all facets of the industry, starting with fraudulent “research” papers used to bolster marketing and continuing through to the manufacture of contaminated and defective products, the marketing of drugs for unapproved and life-threatening uses and the mispricing of prescription drugs.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/...
Moreover, because average antidepressant efficacy is small and not clinically significant, if there is a sub-set of patients for whom antidepressants are highly effective, there must also be a sub-set of patients for whom antidepressants have no effect, or are even harmful. In addition, since pharmaceutical companies are now the major sponsors of drug trials, and they have an interest in maximizing the number of people for whom their medications can be prescribed, they have little interest in performing any trials whose aim would be to identify such sub-sets of patients. To do so would risk reducing their profits.
Some have suggested that critics of antidepressant efficacy should keep quiet and not publicize their work. The reasoning is that if the effectiveness of antidepressants depends in large part on the faith of patients and their doctors, then publicizing the fact that antidepressants appear to have only minimal efficacy as compared to placebos will have the practical effect of harming patients. But this is putting our heads in the sand. The history of medicine is littered with treatments initially thought effective that we now know to be ineffective at best and actually harmful at worst (For example, bloodletting contributed to the death of George Washington). To ignore the evidence, is to return to a pre-scientific form of medicine. In the long run, this will not be beneficial to patients.
So what’s the bottom line? In clinical practice, many people suffering from depression improve after taking antidepressants. But the evidence indicates that much of that improvement is a placebo response.
I post the above link because of the recent popular diary strongly attacking supporters of homeopathy. Personally I think the efficacy of homeopathic medications is based both on them being very effective placebos and that they often have base "inactive" ingredients in the medications that have a long history in folk medicine of treating disease. As I mentioned above, non-patentable treatments rarely get funding to be studied, so this is a tricky way of selling folk medicine that actually works without having to fund the expensive research showing they actually work. Instead the beneficial effect is attributed to the magic water ingredient. But the important difference between homeopathic medications and antidepressants used as placebos is that antidepressants are not sugar pills. They have medically harmful side effects for many people.
http://online.wsj.com/...
The effectiveness of a dozen popular antidepressants has been exaggerated by selective publication of favorable results, according to a review of unpublished data submitted to the Food and Drug Administration. Of 74 studies reviewed, 38 were judged to be positive by the FDA. All but one were published, researchers said. Most of the studies found to have negative or questionable results were not published, researchers found. As a result, doctors and patients are getting a distorted view of how well blockbuster antidepressants like Wyeth's Effexor and Pfizer Inc's Zoloft really work, researchers asserted in this week's New England Journal of Medicine.
Since the overwhelming amount of published data on the drugs show they are effective, doctors unaware of the unpublished data are making inappropriate prescribing decisions that aren't in the best interest of their patients, according to researchers led by Erick Turner, a psychiatrist at Oregon Health & Science University. Sales of antidepressants total about $21 billion a year, according to IMS Health.
This disgraceful bias due to the influence of Big Pharma would have been avoided if we had robust federal funding of biomedical research. If it was common practice to replicate findings of pharma-funded research by unbiased third parties, this sort of shoddy science would be quickly discovered.
I find that posting comments with links to PubMed articles, MSM news sources and government websites supporting the widely known facts of research bias earns me insulting comments like this one:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
It is not a conspiracy to say that Big Pharma has undue influence over American biomedical research and prescription policies, it is a well-researched, well known and widely reported fact. There is no conspiracy, no cabal of Pharma CEO's. Billions of dollars of potential profit is the only mechanism necessary to distort research findings, just like billions of dollars of potential profit was all that was necessary for the banking industry to collective lose their minds over underwriting standards when it came to subprime loans. The solution to this problem is federally funded research to provide a counterweight in scientific reality.
Also there was this excellent diary by HoundDog about prescribing ADHD drugs to toddlers
http://www.dailykos.com/...
More than 10,000 American toddlers 2 or 3 years old are being medicated for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder outside established pediatric guidelines, according to data presented on Friday by an official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The report, which found that toddlers covered by Medicaid are particularly prone to be put on medication such as Ritalin and Adderall, is among the first efforts to gauge the diagnosis of A.D.H.D. in children below age 4. Doctors at the Georgia Mental Health Forum at the Carter Center in Atlanta, where the data was presented, as well as several outside experts strongly criticized the use of medication in so many children that young.
The American Academy of Pediatrics standard practice guidelines for A.D.H.D. do not even address the diagnosis in children 3 and younger — let alone the use of such stimulant medications, because their safety and effectiveness have barely been explored in that age group. “It’s absolutely shocking, and it shouldn’t be happening,” said Anita Zervigon-Hakes, a children’s mental health consultant to the Carter Center. “People are just feeling around in the dark. We obviously don’t have our act together for little children.”
This is definitive proof that there is something very wrong with American medical community. It is normal toddler behavior to exhibit signs that in an older child would be classified as ADHD. If toddlers cannot be diagnosed with ADHD, why are they being prescribed ADHD medications? And ADHD medications are stimulants--Ritalin is derived from amphetamine. We should study the hell out of its effects before prescribing to toddlers. This prescription pattern is an American phenomenon.
I was asked if I then think that pharmaceutical companies are bribing doctors to make these disturbing prescriptions, and mocked for my "CT" tendencies. But again, the influence that pharma sales reps wield over doctors' prescription practices is well known, well documented and well reported. This info is not from some kooky Mercola or naturalnews website, it has been widely reported in the MSM.
http://www.forbes.com/...
Last week, British Big Pharma company GlaxoSmithKline announced plans to dramatically reform the way it sells and markets its drugs to doctors. For years now, drug makers have been operating on the dark side, financially incentivizing doctors and health care providers to promote their drugs, and compensating pharmaceutical sales reps based on the number of prescriptions written by the doctors they call on. It’s a practice rife with conflict of interest, leading to over-prescription of medications that may not even be the most appropriate for patients, and it’s been the cornerstone of drug marketing for decades.
Granted, it’s far better than the 90s when high volume prescribers, called “champions” (conjuring up images of a Vegas high roller) were treated to free “conferences” in exotic locals and routinely wined and dined at the most expensive restaurants. But, when you incentivize a sales person with a hefty bonus check based on the number of prescriptions emanating from their territory, they’ll find a way to get doctors to write their drug.
Now, knowing all this about the current state of American medical research and the severe underfunding of scientific research at the federal level, when the topics of GMO foods and vaccines came up here at dKos in various diaries, I took a look at the evidence myself and made my own decisions. Those opinions have earned me the sobriquet of tinfoil-hat wearing Reptilian Illuminati believer. I will try to summarize my viewpoints here succinctly, with supporting links.
First off, as I mentioned above, I am a scientist. One of the fundamental rules of science is that anecdotes are not data. If something has not been researched, it is not scientifically valid to say whether it is true or not. You cannot rely on your gut feeling or commonly accepted wisdom. Science requires studied, analyzed and verified clinically statistical results, hopefully replicated multiple times by unbiased third parties.
Looking at GMO foods, there is immediately a big problem. It is impossible to conduct this sort of science on most GMO foods because of a highly peculiar clause in their seed-buying contract.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/...
Unfortunately, it is impossible to verify that genetically modified crops perform as advertised. That is because agritech companies have given themselves veto power over the work of independent researchers.
To purchase genetically modified seeds, a customer must sign an agreement that limits what can be done with them. (If you have installed software recently, you will recognize the concept of the end-user agreement.) Agreements are considered necessary to protect a company’s intellectual property, and they justifiably preclude the replication of the genetic enhancements that make the seeds unique. But agritech companies such as Monsanto, Pioneer and Syngenta go further. For a decade their user agreements have explicitly forbidden the use of the seeds for any independent research. Under the threat of litigation, scientists cannot test a seed to explore the different conditions under which it thrives or fails. They cannot compare seeds from one company against those from another company. And perhaps most important, they cannot examine whether the genetically modified crops lead to unintended environmental side effects.
So Neil deGrasse Tyson was simply wrong in his recent pronouncements about GMO foods. While it is true that there are no peer-reviewed studies showing harm from GMO foods, that is technically correct, the larger answer is that science has nothing to say about GMO foods because true scientific research on GMO foods has been outlawed. As my links above show, when an industry exerts complete control over published research, anything that those published results show manifests bias, especially when billions of dollars of profit are involved (and GMO foods certainly involved billions of dollars of profit).
The answer to this problem is let the scientists do their job. As the Scientific American article recommends, the restrictions on independent scientific research on GMO crops should be lifted and generous federal funding should be provided for independent researchers to examine all aspects of these crops--environmental, health, and even the basic question of whether these crops outperform traditional crops and farming methods. In the meantime, science has nothing to say about GMO foods. Also I do not support the banning of GMO foods or restricting them in any way, I simply want to label them. I don't understand why that is such a controversial position. We label all sorts of things in foods, including Vitamin C and fiber content.
As for the topic of vaccines, I have been accused multiple times of being an anti-vaxxer by a few Kossacks. This assertion is ridiculous. Both my children and I are fully vaccinated, and I think that vaccines are one of, if not the most important advancement in medicine. One of my recent diaries was promoting the crowdfunding of a malaria vaccine
http://www.dailykos.com/...
How is that being anti-vaccine? I think everyone should be vaccinated. I simply have minor quibbles stemming from the science itself over three vaccines. My nuanced view about these three vaccines has caused very strident attacks on my character. Here are my views.
The pertussis vaccine has been the victim of very sloppy science. Vaccines are not very important to pharmaceutical companies, unlike, say antidepressants, so they get the short end of the stick when it comes to research. From what I can tell from looking at the literature, it looks like the vaccine companies were careless and did not keep the vaccine updated with the current mutation of the pertussis bacterium. In other words, the vaccine protects against the pertussis bacterium that was circulating when it was first created decades ago, but does not fully protect against the pertussis bacterium that is now common "in the wild". Researchers are now scrambling to investigate and reformulate the vaccine, but in the meantime it seems that the vaccine has the VERY unfortunate effect of allowing a vaccinated person to be infected with the modern pertussis bacterium and pass it along to other unvaccinated people without showing any symptoms of pertussis. It would be better for healthy adults not to be vaccinated (if they are not already) because then if they did contract pertussis they would show symptoms and have the good sense to avoid high-risk people like unvaccinated infants and the elderly.
http://www.forbes.com/...
Although this work was in baboons and baboons aren’t people, it provides compelling evidence for what many experts suspected: Acellular pertussis vaccine just isn’t very good at preventing pertussis transmission. It can keep a baboon–and maybe a person–from feeling sick, but doesn’t keep them from being infected and passing the infection along.
And before people rush to judgment to tar and feather me, let me repeat that science does not yet have ANYTHING to say about this, because this research on humans has not yet been completed. So while I do not yet have a peer-reviewed human study supporting my point, neither do you. Science takes time, and if we had a more robust federal funding of critically important vaccine research, we wouldn't be rushing to catch up with the science after ten infants have died from an American pertussis outbreak. If the research community had been on the ball, we would have been recommending that all Americans get vaccinated with the stronger pertussis vaccine available that does protect against the current pertussis bacterium, instead of the weaker one that is currently administered.
I also think that there is too much emphasis placed on the entire population being vaccinated against the flu each year. I strongly suspect that this push comes from the pharmaceutical companies trying to increase their profits, because scientifically it makes no sense. However, I am a scientist and open to reason and evidence, so if someone wants to persuade me otherwise in the comments, I welcome it. My reasoning against low-risk people getting flu shots is that we WANT them to get the flu, or more specifically if they are going to catch the flu, we want them to catch the versions that we have the vaccine for that year, so that if high-risk vaccinated people are exposed to the flu, they will be exposed to the particular versions they have been vaccinated for. Having everyone in the population vaccinated against one set of particular strains of the flu seems to just increase the odds that a different strain that we don't have a vaccine for will be popular that year. And it may explain why scientists have had such a bad track record recently for picking the wrong strains each year. But of course, if fewer people get flu shots, profits from vaccines will drop.
So my view of flu shots is that high risk people and people around high risk people (like medical professionals) should get them each year. But people who are in little danger of dying from the flu or spreading it to those who might die from it should not, and take one for the team. Especially since every vaccine, even flu vaccines, do involve some risk of harmful side effects. But this view has me labeled as anti-vaxxer, with the wish that I should be banned.
Which leads me to my third opinion about vaccines that seems to be a very hot button opinion indeed. I think it is extremely important that everyone be vaccinated with the MMR vaccine. However there is no reason that every single person must be vaccinated all at once with one trivalent shot. I know from my experience getting vaccines before traveling to Africa that I would have much preferred to get the vaccines spread out over a couple weeks. Yet it seems that individual measles, mumps and rubella vaccines are no longer even available, even for those who only need to be revaccinated for one of the diseases.
It seems pure common sense that those children with a history of a compromised immune system should be able to get these vaccines separately. Of course those with severely compromised immune systems to do not get the MMR vaccine at all. But there is a middle ground for those who have become healthier. Why subject them to all three at once and incur unnecessary risk?
When I posted this, the response was that spreading the shots over a period of time also incurs risk. However, those shots were spread out over a period of several years. It would be possible for this very small subset of the population to set up two separate doctor visits a week apart before the physical when a child typically receives the MMR vaccine and administer each part separately. And if the parents fail to show at those two preliminary visits, then the full MMR vaccine would be administered at the physical.
I was then attacked for having the temerity to suggest that parents might know the medical history of their child, and that if this option were to be put in place that it should be up to the doctor and the doctor alone to determine which children fall into this rare high-risk category. And I can see that point of view. But on the other hand, where is the freaking harm of doing it this way? And if it encourages some paranoid anti-vaxxer parents to actually get their child vaccinated with the MMR vaccine, it is a win-win situation. Why not offer the option? It can only increase vaccination rates for such a critical vaccine.
Then I was belligerently asked to provide links to peer-reviewed studies showing increased harm from the trivalent MMR vaccine compared to each of the three administered separately. "There is no proof of increased harm, show us the proof!" So I google around and found a very odd thing. First off, these severely harmful side effects from the MMR vaccine are very rare, whether administered as one vaccine or administered separately. And a child is much more likely to get those severely harmful effects from actually contracting the diseases (which is why these vaccines are so important and I strongly support that all children get vaccinated with them). But while I found studies showing the large amount of money saved by switching from three separate vaccines to one vaccine, I did not find a single study examining the rate of adverse events between the trivalent and single vaccines. I found that surprising, because the MMR vaccine has been around for decades. And I found a study confirming my suspicion. In particular I was concerned with the risk for contracting acute disseminated encephalomyelitis from the MMR vaccine, which is a known (although very rare) risk.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...
An except from that article:
In recent years, there has been growing controversy over the safety of the MMR vaccine, which has been allegedly associated with a variety of rare conditions including thrombocytopenic purpura, aseptic meningitis, joint pain, sensorineural deafness, convulsion, encephalopathy, chronic enterocolitis with regressive developmental disorder and Crohn’s disease [6]. From the public health perspective, it is important to identify whether the combined vaccine is associated with adverse events compared with its component vaccines.
Despite much attention on MMR, the methodological quality and applicability of the evidence of possible unintended events following MMR compared with its single or double antigen component vaccines have not been assessed.
Recent reviews are descriptive and mainly focus on the
alleged association with Crohn’s disease and autism [6,7].
Now that article was published more than ten years ago, so maybe such a comparative study of adverse events has been done since then, but I was unable to find it in the literature. And that means, the lack of peer-reviewed studies showing increased harm from the combined MMR vaccine over the separate vaccines is because they have not been conducted, not because there is no harm in the first place. Science doesn't know whether there is increased harm or not, because it has never been examined. No one can say whether there is increased harm or not. But considering that high-risk children might risk encephalomyelitis, an abundance of caution is justified.
In my googling, I did find this more recent research comparing the risk of adverse advents from a new vaccine called ProQuad, which combines the MMR vaccine with a fourth vaccine against chickenpox:
http://www.fda.gov/...
Increased rate of fever was previously identified as a safety signal in the ProQuad prelicensure studies. To better understand the risk of febrile seizures that might be associated with ProQuad vaccination, Merck committed to conduct a large, postmarketing study at the time of licensure. In January 2006, Merck initiated a large Phase 4 observational study to evaluate the risk of febrile seizures in 25,000 children receiving their first dose of ProQuad. The study was recently completed and the data are undergoing analysis, but the interim results of the study are reflected in this labeling revision.
The interim analysis of Merck's post-marketing study showed that febrile seizures occurred more frequently 5 to 12 days following vaccination of approximately 14,000 children with ProQuad (0.5 per 1,000) when compared with a historical, age and sex-matched control group vaccinated with MMR and varicella vaccines administered separately at the same visit (0.2 per 1,000). In the 0-30 day time period following vaccination, the incidence of febrile seizures with ProQuad (1 per 1,000) was not greater than that observed in children vaccinated with ProQuad's individual components, MMR and varicella vaccines, at the same visit (1.3 per 1000).
Just to point out, this was a comparison of adverse events between getting the new combined vaccine with getting separate MMR and chickenpox vaccines
on the same day. It seems likely that the rate of adverse events would be even more different if the MMR and chickenpox vaccines were given a week apart. And it also lends credence to the idea that it might be wise to separate out the MMR vaccine into three different vaccines administered a week apart for high-risk children with a history of compromised immune system.
Making these supported comments with links earned me accusations of being an anti-science vaxxer who believes in Bigfoot. The final nail in my quack coffin was my opinion on cellphone safety.
A couple decades ago I participated in one of the first meta-analyses of cellphone safety, funded by Motorola. I was a research assistant. The PI on the project was happy that the results showed that there was no evidence of increased risk of brain cancer, as Motorola was funding the study. However the PI told me the only reason there was no evidence of increased risk of brain cancer was because it took so long for brain cancer to develop in humans, and cellphones had not been in use for that long. The animal evidence at the time for brain cancer indicated the opposite, that cellphones did cause cancer.
Granted cellphones have dramatically changed since those early first models and by all accounts they are much safer. However, in the case of children I prefer an abundance of caution and have forbidden my teenaged daughters to have cellphones until they are a little older. Believe me, I get a lot of feedback about this at home. I also do not own a cellphone, but more from the expense and not needing one rather than safety reasons. This opinion has earned me contemptuous comments from posters here. However, my views are in keeping with the European scientific community, which as I have mentioned above, has more independence from multinational corporate influence than the American scientific community. For example, here is the official guidance from the UK government
https://www.gov.uk/...
The body and nervous system are still developing into the teenage years. Therefore, as a precaution, the UK Chief Medical Officers advise that children and young people under 16 should be encouraged to use mobile phones for essential purposes only, and to keep calls short. If you are concerned, you can take steps to reduce your exposure such as using hands free kits or texting.
I don't see how my agreeing with British medical authorities makes me some sort of anti-science crackpot.
Obviously I am in the minority here at dKos because various strident "science" diaries regularly make the reclist. I have no quarrel with the science in the diaries, I am a scientist, although I do think many of them take a very black and white approach and do not see that there can be different conclusions drawn from the same studies, due to conflicts of interest, lack of replication, powerful financial incentives and simple lack of important baseline studies. Many assumptions are made about the safety of this or that thing when no safety studies have ever been conducted. Lack of a peer-reviewed study showing proof of harm is more often than not a lack of the studies themselves rather than lack of harm.
But that's a matter for debate, and of course more robust federally funded independent scientific research, so those important safety studies and comparison studies and all the other studies that need to be done, that most laypeople assume ARE being done, do get done. The more troubling pattern is the contempt and incivility shown towards fellow Kossacks who may draw different conclusions from the same studies. Insults, contempt, and calling Kossacks' opinions shit, complete with diagram of toilet and plumbing take civil debate into a more inflammatory arena. On the other hand, these diaries regularly make the reclist so perhaps I am the one out of line in objecting to them.
1:46 PM PT: calling all microbiologists--in the comments below, commenters have pointed out that flu viruses do not compete against each other, so my points about the flu vaccine are incorrect. However, when I look online for corroboration, I found this:
http://scienceblogs.com/...
The response of your adaptive immune system (T-cells and B-cells) will be a bit different, since there would be two sets of activating signals with a co-infection, but it’s hard to max out an immune response, and to some extent the different viruses will be competing with each other. It’s possible that it will take you longer to recover, but I’m not aware of any solid data on this.
2:22 PM PT: Further research shows that my last update is wrong:
http://www.livescience.com/...
"Influenza is a mutating virus, and this feature is related to [its] genome structure; it has nothing to do with vaccines," explained Mohammed Alsharifi of the Australian National University, lead author on the paper "Intranasal flu vaccine protective against seasonal and H5N1 avian influenza infections," recently posted on PLoS ONE, an online journal. "[The concept of] antibiotic resistant bacteria cannot be applied to viruses."
I'd like to get a second source to verify, but this seems to show that I am mistaken about my concerns with the drive for universal flu vaccination. But the fact that this article was even written shows that it's not a hugely crazy thing to ask.
2:36 PM PT: No, actually I might just be correct. Holy shit, who knew they were giving flu vaccinations to animals in factory farms. That is just damn stupid.
http://www.motherjones.com/...
The second is the rise of flu vaccinations on factory farms:
In 1995, swine flu vaccination was so new that the National Swine Survey conducted by the United States Department of Agriculture didn’t bother to assess its extent…Today [i.e., back in 2003], more than half of all sows are vaccinated against both H1N1 and H3N2 viruses, says Robyn Fleck, a veterinarian at Schering-Plough, one of the nation’s three producers of swine influenza vaccine.
All those vaccines created concerns of a treadmill effect—theoretically, when all the pigs in a building are vaccinated, only vaccine-resistant flu mutations can survive, creating a constant need for new vaccines. Already in 2003, Science reported, researchers were finding flu in vaccinated pigs. "Flu is also showing up in piglets thought to be protected by maternal antibodies passed on from vaccinated sows," the article states. Here's a choice bit:
Widespread vaccination may actually be selecting for new viral types. If vaccination develops populations with uniform immunity to certain virus genotypes, say H1N1 and H3N2, then other viral mutants would be favored.
3:04 PM PT: Final update--curiosity killed the cat. This seems to be the last word on the subject with the most current research. Link from MIT News.
http://newsoffice.mit.edu/...
Yes I am correct, vaccination CAN cause flu strains to mutate and become more infectious.
"If you get vaccinated against the flu and then become infected with the virus, your body mounts an immune response that prevents you from getting sick. However, that pressure from the immune system can provoke the virus to mutate into a slightly different form — one that could be more infectious."
However, the answer to that seems to be universal flu vaccination. Seems counterintuitive but I'm going to assume he knows what he's talking about.
"The previous MIT/NIAID study concluded that the more people that get vaccinated, the less opportunity there is for influenza “escape mutants” to spread through the population. “Incomplete vaccination could be causing a lot of these problems and therefore effective vaccinations are key to limiting drift,” Sasisekharan says."
So while my points in this diary about flu strain mutation are correct, my remedy is not--the remedy for these mutations is universal flu vaccination. I will uneasily agree.
The article ends on a hopeful note, saying that a potential universal flu vaccine could be on the horizon. That is more my style. Once again, though, the delay is due to lack of fricking grant money. Stupid Republicans.
And we needed to have stopped factory farming like yesterday. They are like pandemic incubators, that is scary as all get out.