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Alzheimer's group wants more money thrown at dementia research (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Dementia now costs the UK economy twice as much as cancer but gets a fraction of the funding to find causes and cures, a report seen by the BBC shows.
For every one pound spent on dementia research, 12 times that sum goes on investigating cancer, figures from the Alzheimer's Research Trust indicate.
Bridging this gap is urgent, it says, particularly given the numbers with dementia are much higher than thought.
With 821,884 sufferers, dementia costs the UK £23bn annually, the report says.
The number of sufferers is 15% higher than had been estimated, according to the Dementia 2010 Report, and the trust says it will now pass the one million mark before 2025.
The annual burden on the economy meanwhile is 35% higher than the previous calculations of £17bn.
Researchers from the University of Oxford compared the cost of caring for a person with dementia to the cost of dealing with cancer, heart disease or stroke - the three main causes of death in the UK.
As well as immediate health care expenses, they looked at the costs of social care, unpaid carers and productivity losses.
Every dementia patient, they found, costs the economy £27,647 each year - nearly five times more than a cancer patient, and eight times more than those with heart disease.
It was the costs met by unpaid carers and incurred by long-term institutional care - rather than expenses shouldered by the NHS - that pushed up the burden of dementia.
But they also found that the costs of these conditions appeared to bear little relation to the respective amounts invested by government and charities in research into causes, treatment and prevention.
With nearly £600m a year, cancer research funding was 12 times that of the £50m devoted to dementia, while heart disease received three times as much. Only stroke research received less.
They calculated that for every person with cancer, £295 is spent on research, compared with just £61 for each person with dementia.
This reads just like a press release for the Alzheimer's Research Trust. No matter how well intended, the BBC should not just publish press releases for special interest pressure groups. Surprise, every special interest pressure group has a million and one reasons why the rest of society should throw more money at the special interest. It should be up to the BBC to critique the request, not just reprint it.
No report sanctioned by a special interest pressure group should be taken at face value. In particular, the "burden" on the economy allegedly being 35% higher should be taken with a pinch of salt. In particular, how does society value "unpaid" time for care, or for just about anything for that matter? If parents had to hire someone to look after their children then the cost would be huge, but that doesn't mean that that is how much the parents' "unpaid" time should be valued when they look after their own children.
On top of this, the Alzheimer's Research Trust is also playing a dumb game. No government minister who reads this press release is going to think "boy, we better throw some more money at Alzheimer research (and all the other non-cancer diseases)". Instead the obvious conclusion is going to be for the government to spend less money on cancer. The playing field, if anything, will be levelled down, not up.
Of course a lot of money for cancer research comes from charities like CRUK. And cancer charities do quite well because the British public over the years have decided, or been pushed into believing, that cancer is the most deserving medical cause.
And cancer often strikes relatively young people, whereas dementia is mainly an old person's disease. It's not too surprising that people might find it more important to help prolong the life of someone who is 40 or 50 than someone who is 70 or 80.
And there is a serious underlying issue here. The reason that dementia has come more into play these days is that other diseases have been somewhat successfully managed. The deterioration of the brain is an extremely difficult problem to solve. And, after all, you have to die of something, and if the ways of dying that are easy to fix are resolved, that is obviously going to leave the more difficult ones becoming more frequent.
Stem cell publication is allegedly run by a clique (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Stem cell experts say they believe a small group of scientists is effectively vetoing high quality science from publication in journals. In some cases they say it might be done to deliberately stifle research that is in competition with their own.
It has also emerged that 14 leading stem cell researchers have written an open letter to journal editors in order to highlight their dissatisfaction.
Billions of pounds of public money is spent on funding stem cell research.
The open letter to the major scientific journals claims that "papers that are scientifically flawed or comprise only modest technical increments often attract undue profile. At the same time publication of truly original findings may be delayed or rejected".
This is not just a problem in stem cell research, it's a problem generally in science. The editors for journals like Nature and Science and their favourite reviewers have become powerful gatekeepers for what is deemed to be worthwhile or not worthwhile science. Unfortunately, there is never going to be a perfect solution to this problem, since editors and scientists are humans. And unfortunately this will lead to the situation where some mediocre scientists get permanent jobs and some good ones are lost to science.
GM Policy in Developing Regions (permanent blog link)
The Cambridge branch of Triple Helix ("a student society that aims to raise the standard of debate surrounding issues of science and technology in society") held a panel debate on "GM Policy in Developing Regions: Yielding Much?" the evening of 28 January in Cambridge.
The title of the debate is already pretty telling. GM is relevant to the world, not just the "developing" regions. Unfortunately the anti-GM brigade has long since hijacked the political debate about GM crops, and scientists in the UK have long since given up on trying to promulgate its use here. Fortunately the debate was global in scope, i.e. the official title was ignored.
The four panellists were David Baulcombe, a professor of Botany in Cambridge (but who spent most of his career at the University of East Anglia in Norwich); Adrian Dubock, who works on the "Golden Rice" project; Dick Taverne, a Lib Dem peer who has taken an interest in science; and Tony Juniper, ex-head of Friends of the Earth in the UK and currently the Green candidate to be the next MP of Cambridge. The chair was Gerard Evan, the recently appointed head of the Department of Biochemistry in Cambridge.
The panel was stacked three to one for GM, so Juniper was the lone "sceptic" voice. But in terms of stridency it was one against one, since Dubock and Baulcombe played the reasonableness card and it was left to Taverne to speak a few home truths. In this three-against-one circumstance the reasonableness card was a reasonable strategy, but in general, the anti-GM brigade are so strident that there is no point treating them with kid gloves. (This is the mistake the Democrats make in America when discussing policy with the Republicans. The Republicans are not interested in analysis but in dogma. There is no point being nice to them.)
Evan started out by giving potted biographies of the panellists. Amusingly enough he had obviously never heard of Juniper because he admitted to looking him up on google. Well, Evan has been at UCSF for the last decade so that's not too surprising. On the other hand, Juniper thinks of himself as the most important environmentalist in the UK, if not the world, so he was probably amazed that not everyone knows who he is.
The panellists were then given ten minutes to put their sales pitch.
Juniper went first. He's swimming against the tide of history on GM, like Tony Blair on Iraq, but, like Tony Blair on Iraq, he will never admit he was and is wrong. This is unfortunate because he's a clever enough chap that he could actually make a positive contribution to the world and not just be someone who stops progress.
He started out by saying that industrial agriculture has not brought about the end of hunger in the world so why would anyone think that GM would help. Well, given that he is one of the people responsible for blocking GM technology at every opportunity, it's a bit rich for him to complain that people are starving.
He insisted on using that dreadful phrase "sustainable development" several times. Well that buzz phrase just means anything you want it to mean. For Juniper it means using "traditional methods" in farming, i.e. going back in agricultural techniques a couple of hundred years.
He put down a few reasons why he was against GM. He was worried about loss of biodiversity. But that is an issue that is mostly orthogonal, although obviously relevant, to GM technology. Juniper purposefully conflated the issue. And needless to say, the biggest threat to biodiversity is the ever increasing human population and associated issues like climate change. Juniper himself has contributed to the ever increasing human population so he presumably doesn't want to discuss that issue.
He then mentioned that he once had had a public health concern about GM but that he was less concerned now about this. But this is the issue that he and his fellow travellers in the anti-GM brigade used to destroy the introduction of GM foods into Britain. ("Frankenstein foods" and all that.) So he and his media enablers really owe an apology to the nation. He was completely wrong on this, the headline issue. (Of course some GM foods in some circumstances will cause some disaster or other, but that's true about every technology on the planet.)
He then claimed that there was an ethical argument against allowing GM crops in the UK, but this really was a completely bogus argument. The "organic" food lobby has arbitrarily decided that GM crops are not "organic". And if you equate "organic" with "19th century" then technically this is true. As a result of this decision, if even trace amounts of GM pollen land in an "organic" field, then that crop is no longer deemed to be "organic".
Juniper used this to argue that allowing GM crops would harm people's choice about food. Of course this is completely backwards. By disallowing GM crops he has prevented people from having the choice to eat it. Why should the entire country be held to ransom by the blackmail of a religious cult which has decided that odd bits of DNA are against their religious beliefs?
He then went onto his next complaint about GM, and this one seemed to be the real reason he is so anti-GM. And this is that large companies (e.g. Monsanto) were making money out of GM. Juniper cannot seem to cope with the concept of corporations and particularly of corporations that make money. During the question and answer session at the end he made it quite clear that his real "solution" to global poverty was to smash the international capitalist system since evidently that will set the peasants free.
It is unfortunate that Monsanto in particular made such a disastrous series of decisions on GM food and IPR in the 1990s, because it played right into the hands of people like Juniper.
Juniper briefly mentioned something called the IAASTD (the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development). Apparently this was supposed to be a global attempt to come to grips with the problem of agriculture in the developing world. It included the companies that were pushing for GM but at some point it evidently became clear to them that the report was going to be anti-GM so they pulled out.
Not surprisingly the Juniper spin on this was that the pro-GM lobby was afraid of "evidence based science". But it seems that the real problem was that the IAASTD was dominated by non-scientists, in particular social scientists. Juniper was keen to mention that the IAASTD director is Bob Watson, who is also Chief Scientific Adviser to DEFRA. He's a real scientist (which is presumably why Juniper mentioned it) but a climate scientist, not a food scientist.
Juniper next claimed that the key to farming was "soil". Well, that's not saying very much, and the way he said it rather sounded like the chap in The Graduate saying that the future was in "plastics". But apparently, if we use "traditional farming methods" not only will we feed the world but we will also sequester lots of carbon in the soil.
He ended by claiming, apparently with a straight face, not to be against GM technology. Perhaps his next career will be in stand-up.
David Baulcombe was next up. He plugged a Royal Society group that he chaired that produced a report called Reaping the benefits: Science and the sustainable intensification of global agriculture, whose time horizon was the next 30 to 40 years.
This report was pro-GM but only as one of many technologies. And throughout his talk and afterwards Baulcombe had to keep emphasising that GM was only one technology and that it wouldn't solve all the world's problems. This is how defensive scientists have had to become over GM. It's ridiculous.
One of the problems for the planet is that there are not large areas of uncultivated land that are available for food production (if you ignore areas like the Amazon forest which obviously you don't really want to use for that). So somehow we need to get more from the same or less. But he claimed that current high yields are often based on "unsustainable" practises. (He didn't choose to name any.)
Another problem is water supply for agriculture (and everything else, for that matter) due to climate change.
And he showed a graph which projected that the planet would now be facing a divergence between supply and demand for food. If true, a lot more people are going to be starving the next decade or two.
He went through a list of GM technologies that are already being used, that will shortly be used and that will come along in due course.
For example, he mentioned the possibility of increasing photosynthetic efficiencies. And of possibly having "perennial crops", so avoiding having to plant, plough, etc., every year.
Because of the Juniper anti-capitalist diatribe, at the end Baulcombe mentioned that GM does not have to be owned by big business. And he plugged Cambia, an organisation dedicated to putting GM technology into the public domain. It's not clear if this is the one organisation that will lead the way into achieving this, but it's a very important point.
Many years ago the UK was one of the main partners in the decoding of the human genome. Because of this effort this information was made available to the public domain. If it had not been for the UK public effort, a lot of this information might have become commercialised, and progress in science would have been held hostage. There were many people involved in pushing the research forward in the UK, in particular John Sulston, the then director of the Sanger Centre, where most of the British side of the work was done.
The UK should have made the same effort on GM technology. There is no reason that equal success could not have been achieved (although it's not such a tightly defined field). Unfortunately, there were no visionaries like John Sulston in the GM arena. Instead we had Tony Juniper and the rest of the anti-GM brigade, who decided to halt progress. The UK will live to regret this.
Next up was Adrian Dubock. He is the Project Manager for the Golden Rice project. The underlying problem that they are trying to address is that the part of rice that is eaten by humans does not contain Provitamin A (β-carotene), and so can lead to Vitamin A deficiency (VAD). Dubock quoted some grim statistics.
A quarter of a million people are blinded, and 1 to 2 million people die every year because of VAD. To put some emotion into these numbers, Dubock noted that this is equivalent to two 9-11 attacks every day, and to the December 2004 tsunami deaths every month or two, and the Holocaust even got a mention. It is unfortunate that pro-GM people feel the need to use such emotional comparisons, but this is what the anti-GM brigade have forced upon the world.
And apparently half the world's population gets 80% of its calorific intake from rice, so this is obviously a major reason for VAD.
A couple of German professors (one working in Switzerland), Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer, figured out how to insert genes into rice so that Provitamin A is contained in the part of rice that is eaten. They have in effect made the IPR public domain. Further, Syngenta and other companies (including Monsanto) also donated some of their IPR for the project. The project has also been supported financially by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Gates Foundation and others.
How could anyone object to this effort? Well they can, and when asked later about it, Tony Juniper refused point blank to say anything positive about it, instead saying he was worried about biodiversity and commercial gain. Well, there is no commercial gain for the Golden Rice project itself, although obviously there eventually might be gain for farmers who take this on board. (But Juniper seems to hate farmers who use GM almost as much as he hates Monsanto.) And the idea is to cross-breed with local varieties (apparently there are 20000 rice varieties in the world). Bizarrely enough, it almost seemed as if Juniper didn't know anything about the Golden Rice project, so couldn't come up with any real criticism, but he's supposed to be an "expert" on these matters, so perhaps that was a mistaken impression.
It's not at all clear if this project will succeed, even if the anti-GM brigade don't manage to sink it. First of all, as the name implies, the rice is golden. And white rice is what most people eat. It remains to be seen if that social hurdle can be overcome.
The project is doing some market research in the Philippines to try and understand how they might be able to market it. Unbelievably in certain areas the locals are all hostile up front because Greenpeace has so scared them into believing that all GM technology is bad.
There are of course alternatives, and Dubock, like Baulcombe, was cautious again and again to say that this wasn't the total solution to VAD. One alternative is Vitamin A supplements. Apparently USAID has been distributing pills since 1993, but it doesn't reach everywhere, and it seems it is much more expensive than Golden Rice. And similarly with fortified food.
Of course there is also the Tony Juniper alternative of smashing the international capitalist conspiracy.
The final speaker was Dick Taverne. He's a British eccentric, of the sort that seems to be dying out. His degree was in philosophy (over half a century ago) and he was the only non-scientist on the panel. He quipped that he was not a scientist but that he was married to a scientist.
He is chair of some organisation called Sense about Science, which campaigns for GM as well as other things. They published some book called "Sense about GM" (which Dubock later recommended).
His most amusing moment was when he compared the anti-GM brigade to the climate change sceptics. Poor old Juniper, being compared to another bunch of reactionary crazies. Perhaps, in spirit of this, we should start to use the phrase "GM deniers".
Taverne was scathing about Peter Melchett of the Soil Association (which is the biggest determiner in the UK of what is "organic" food). Apparently Melchett was asked by some parliamentary committee about GM and he said that no evidence would change his opposition to it. You can imagine saying something like that when you are drunk at a party with like-minded friends. Otherwise it is just plain dumb.
Taverne was scathing about Prince Charles, and his views about the "wisdom of nature". Taverne noted that "the whole of agriculture is unnatural". (Dubock repeated this later.)
Taverne was scathing about Doug Parr, the chief scientist of Greenpeace, for apparently going around Africa telling them not to "repeat Europe's mistakes" (like being able to feed its population).
Rather than shirk away from the profit motive of companies, as Baulcombe did, Taverne took this head on. So what is wrong with making money, he asked. Companies that sell medicine make money, and the world doesn't get (too) hysterical about that. And some of them use the same GM technology, for example with insulin for diabetics. Taverne claimed that 25% of drugs sold are GM in some way.
Juniper later came back to this point. So he claimed that the difference with medicine was that that was "needed" whereas GM food was not. Well that is just ridiculous. Juniper of course is happy to benefit from novel medicines, so he thinks these are "necessary". But Juniper is rich and well fed, so he personally doesn't need GM food. But to extrapolate that to the world is rather Juniper-centric.
Taverne claimed that most GM research was now being done in China and India and that China was making breakthroughs in GM rice. Well, it's a trivial lesson from history that cultures that turn their back on technology are cultures that decline, and the inverse is also true. Juniper thinks that the UK is too rich so he's probably happy for the UK to go downhill. Unfortunately there are far too many people like him in positions of influence in the UK (the major national newspapers, the BBC, etc.).
Taverne said that organic food was more expensive not because people were being ripped off (although that is probably part of it) but because it is just so much less efficient. Well, if for some reason it was just as efficient when you included all externalities then that would be fine. But it's hard to know if that's true or not since it's hard to find someone honest who is competent enough to analyse the situation.
Taverne finished by saying that the only thing "sustainable development" sustained was poverty.
After this the floor was opened up to questions from the audience. The initial batch was supposed to be about "clarifications" but it soon became obvious it might as well just be a free for all.
It's hard to tell exactly the split in the audience, but certainly there were plenty of biotech-type students and the like, but the questioning did not get heated.
There was one questioner who was obviously anti-GM and he bizarrely wanted to know if Juniper was an environmentalist or an ecologist, as if somehow that was relevant to the discussion. But then he also mentioned the so-called precautionary principle, and wondered how Taverne could promote action on climate change but not against GM foods based on this "principle". Taverne correctly answered that the precautionary principle was a "load of bollocks". And indeed, it is only used by people who don't have a real argument against something but don't like it and want to stop it. Funnily enough, Juniper then piped in to say that he was all for it, and that is indeed the kind of intellectual depth behind most of his arguments.
Patents came up. Dubock said that even though in theory companies have patented their technology, in practise patents were only ever issued in the rich country markets. And he also said that one of the problems today, thanks to Tony Juniper and his friends, is that there is vast over-regulation of the GM market so that mostly companies are the ones who can afford to jump through the hoops to bring something to market, and not so much public sector bodies.
Dubock said that in his view the anti-GM brigade hijacked the debate starting at the Rio conference in 1992. And Juniper then claimed he was there and seemed to be proud of it. (But don't the Green Party hate aviation? Perhaps he sailed there. Or perhaps it's ok for him to fly, just not the peasants.)
Taverne claimed that the cost of bring a GM product to market was 40 times that for a conventional product, and this was not down to any reason except that the regulations had been set up like that thanks to Tony Juniper and his friends.
Rather than GM as a way of producing more food on less land, Juniper has other "solutions". So apparently a third of food is wasted in the UK and obviously if that was dramatically cut then that would help. Well, obviously nobody is going to argue against that. Unfortunately, as one might expect, he mentioned "cheap food" as the source of this waste. Well, certain people in the UK will not be happy until the peasants are once more spending most of their income on food and/or starving.
Juniper also spoke out against meat eating, a policy which would get less widespread support, even in the developing countries whose citizens he seems to be more concerned about. Funnily enough, he didn't mention anything about not having children, although that is far worse for the environment than meat eating. Perhaps this is because he has children.
And he launched into a standard academic middle class rant about the "debt-fuelled consumer society" (funnily enough, he doesn't look poor). And he wanted a "culture change". Well the only way to read this is that he, the superior intellectual, knows better than the British peasants how the British peasants should behave, and if they don't behave then he would be happy to send them to re-education camps.
He also had a good rant against GM soya being fed to farm animals so that the British (and American) peasants could eat meat (but what does that have to do with GM?), and that a lot of food was now being used for biofuels (ditto). Dubock picked up on this and said that people were working on trying to make GM bioethanol from cellular waste.
Juniper claimed that pesticide use with GM was up and Taverne claimed it was down. Well, it probably depends on how you measure "use".
Juniper had one stab at playing to the crowd. So there was a question about the public funding of GM research. And for once Juniper said something sane. He was for more public research. But it seems that the only reason he was for more public research was because it was "public" rather than because it was "research". So evidently Juniper has never seen a public sector worker he didn't like. If he could entirely squeeze the private sector into nothing he would be a happy man.
Bizarrely enough, Cambridge University has hired Juniper as some kind of consultant, presumably for great sums of money. (Profits for Juniper = Good. Profits for Monsanto = Bad.) Why did the university do this? It's hard to see why other than as greenwash.
Americans dislike social health care allegedly because of the ruling elite (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
The Republicans' shock victory in the election for the US Senate seat in Massachusetts meant the Democrats lost their supermajority in the Senate. This makes it even harder for the Obama administration to get healthcare reform passed in the US.
Political scientist Dr David Runciman looks at why is there often such deep opposition to reforms that appear to be of obvious benefit to voters.
Last year, in a series of "town-hall meetings" across the country, Americans got the chance to debate President Obama's proposed healthcare reforms.
What happened was an explosion of rage and barely suppressed violence.
Polling evidence suggests that the numbers who think the reforms go too far are nearly matched by those who think they do not go far enough.
But it is striking that the people who most dislike the whole idea of healthcare reform - the ones who think it is socialist, godless, a step on the road to a police state - are often the ones it seems designed to help.
...
Why are they manning the barricades to defend insurance companies that routinely deny claims and cancel policies?
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If people vote against their own interests, it is not because they do not understand what is in their interest or have not yet had it properly explained to them.They do it because they resent having their interests decided for them by politicians who think they know best.
There is nothing voters hate more than having things explained to them as though they were idiots.
It's hard to believe that anyone who wants to pass himself off as a political scientist could write such a silly article. Sure the ruling elite are obnoxious. But the Republican ruling elite are even more obnoxious than the Democrat ruling elite. Runciman completely ignores the role of the media (in particular Fox). And the health insurance industry is not going to throw away its pocketing of a seventh of American income without a fight, so it further feeds the media bias with advertising (not to mention that they have also bribed most of Congress). Runciman is treating BBC readers "as though they were idiots".
20 mph speed limit for central Cambridge (permanent blog link)
The Cambridge News says:
A 20mph speed limit in central Cambridge has been given the go-ahead.
Motorists in Cambridge's "core area" will be forced to go slow from March after the 12-month trial scheme was approved by city and county councillors.
Members of Cambridge's traffic management area joint committee voted unanimously to support the £50,000 accident reduction scheme at a meeting at Shire Hall.
The scheme will include all roads inside the Cambridge inner ring road of Queen's Road, Fen Causeway, Lensfield Road, Gonville Place, East Road, Victoria Avenue and Chesterton Road.
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The trial scheme follows a two-month consultation by Cambridgeshire County Council, in which it received no objections to the plans and seven letters of support.
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James Woodburn, spokesman for Cambridge Cycling Campaign, welcomed the new limit.He said: "Streets are not just for cars - they are for everyone.
You never know, this might help. But there is no indication that this will help. During the day it's hard to believe anyone can even get up to 20 mph never mind 30 mph. During the night nobody is on the road. Hopefully the county bureaucrats have done some analysis to indicate that this measure will help, but their track record is not good on this score. Cost - benefit analysis is not part of their lexicon.
The fact that only seven people answered the consultation is as good a sign as any that the consultation was not publicised, because they didn't really care what people thought. (And all consultations they do are pretty fatuous, so it's not as if this one was really any different.)
There are two main motivations for this policy. The first is that the Cambridge ruling elite hate car drivers (excepting themselves of course). The second is that the Cambridge transport bureaucrats have to constantly come up with new schemes in order to justify their existence.
And since Woodburn wants to be patronising, he should remember that "streets are not just for bicycles - they are for everyone".
Tony Blair sticks two fingers up to the British public (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Tony Blair has said the Iraq war made the world a safer place and he has "no regrets" about removing Saddam Hussein.
In a robust defence of his decision to back war, Mr Blair said Saddam was a "monster and I believe he threatened not just the region but the world."
Ever the lawyer, Blair will never admit to doing any wrong. For one thing, it might open the way to prosecution. For another, it would reduce how much money he could make on the American lecture circuit. Whatever, he started an illegal war which has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and cost billions and billions of pounds. There is nothing honourable about his involvement in this fiasco.
Science and the Media (permanent blog link)
The 2010 Darwin College Lectures are about Risk. The second lecture occurred on 22 January and was by Ben Goldacre, a columnist for the Guardian and author of Bad Science. The title of his talk was "Risk: Science and the Media". Well, the subject of Risk was pretty much missing from his talk but it didn't really matter since he had a lot to say about Science and the Media.
Goldacre is evidently fairly well known because all three halls used for the lectures were full already ten minutes before the lecture was due to start (it started a quarter of an hour late because he got stuck in the Cambridge traffic).
Goldacre is full of energy and confidence, so much so that he doesn't really seem British, although he is. He's a (junior) doctor working for the NHS but evidently his gift of the gab has introduced him to opportunities in the media. In this lecture, at least, he jumped around from topic to topic with barely time for a breath in between.
His main point (which is not news) was that the media do a terrible job at reporting science (with some exceptions), and that all they are interested in is fantasy and sensationalism. And this is not only true of the usual tabloid suspects, but also of the allegedly serious newspapers and the BBC. And this particularly happens on matters of health, which, not surprisingly, given his background, is what he discussed. The media has an obsession with miracle cures and scare stories and alleged breakthroughs.
The media is also corrupt. So PR companies will plant stories with the media on behalf of their corporate clients. So stories about the alleged saddest day of the year appearing at the beginning of January are down to some holiday company or other wanting people to start buying their summer holidays, and stories about the alleged happiest day of the year appearing in the summer are down to some ice cream company wanting people to buy more ice cream.
Before he got down to his many examples, he looked briefly at the history behind disease and lifestyle risk factors. So once upon a time medical researchers figured out that not only was there a high correlation between smoking and lung cancer, but that smoking was pretty much the main cause of lung cancer. So if you changed your lifestyle you could prolong your life.
Goldacre claimed this was pretty much the one and only example that demonstrated such a clear causal relationship between lifestyle and disease, and unfortunately the medical profession promised there were going to be many, many more such examples. Goldacre claimed that instead the real main factor affecting disease prevalence in most cases is not lifestyle but instead social depravation.
Then he got onto his examples. He mentioned that there had recently been an important article in the BMJ (British Medical Journal) looking at whether the government's Sure Start program (aimed at helping children in deprived areas of Britain) was effective, the conclusion being yes. And another article in the same journal showed that it was also allegedly cost effective. But apparently there was no coverage of this at all in the media.
Instead what we got was some crap about the alleged benefits for kids of taking some fish oil supplement. Goldacre claimed that the trial which allegedly showed this was fatally flawed. So it involved 3000 kids taking 6 pills a day for a year, and it looked at their GCSE results after a year and compared these with what had been predicted.
But there was no control group and so not even an understanding of any possible placebo effects or whether it was the extra attention being given and extra effort being made (by both students and teachers) that was the real cause of the improvement. But the media didn't care about that, they just claimed that fish oil pills were the way to go.
Goldacre claimed the pills cost around 85p per pupil per day and that the local authority where the trial was done was meanwhile spending 65p per pupil per day on school meals. It doesn't take a genius to deduce from this that some corporation selling pills was probably behind the whole effort.
Then he went after the Independent for claiming in 2007 that "Cannabis is now 25 times stronger" (than when the Independent was claiming ten years before that it was a relatively harmless drug). He showed a graph where if you were being lenient you might claim that it had doubled.
The Daily Express (and no doubt others) reported that some "expert" had claimed that suicides were linked to mobile phone masts. Apparently this "expert" looked at the distance of suicide victims in some town (Bridgend) and found they lived closer than "average" to a phone mast. Only Goldacre claims he talked to the "expert" and found out that what this "expert" meant by "average" was the average geographic distance of the UK land area from the nearest phone mast, so not weighted by the population distribution. Well, if so, that is obviously nonsensical.
The Observer (which the Guardian owns, so Goldacre's newspaper) reported that some Cambridge University researcher had allegedly claimed that the recent "surge" in autism was down to the MMR vaccine. Well, not only was the "surge" claim bogus (confusing differing ways of measuring the incidence of autism) but Goldacre talked to the researcher and she said straight out she did not believe there was any connection between autism and MMR. The Observer ran some kind of feeble retraction about the "surge" but still claimed the bit about MMR was true, and the only way the researcher was given space to deny it was to write a comment for the online version of the story.
A few years ago the British media went hysterical about the alleged plague of MRSA in NHS hospitals. Goldacre had some friend who went undercover into a hospital and took lots of swabs and sent them off to be tested and they all came back negative. Well, this was a bit discouraging since all the media was reporting how easy it was to find MRSA anywhere and everywhere.
This friend talked to a journalist who told him he should send his samples "to the lab that always gives positive results". Well, that phrase is obviously rather damning. And it turned out the lab was run by someone by the name of Christopher Malyszewicz, who the media trumpeted as an "expert" and a hero of British health care.
Goldacre talked to him and it turns out his undergraduate degree was in engineering (and it wasn't clear if he had even finished it) and his alleged PhD was bought from some firm in America. And when some microbiology inspector finally managed to inspect Malyszewicz's lab, it turned out to be in his garden shed, and not of suitable lab standard. Apparently various medics wrote to the media but were ignored.
Goldacre had an amusing turn of phrase. So there are people who are "too incompetent to assay their own incompetence".
Next he went back to the MMR issue. So in 1998 a doctor by the name of Andrew Wakefield published a case study in the Lancet saying that he had had 12 child patients who were autistic and had the MMR vaccine. Well, given that supposedly around 1 in 100 or 1 in 200 (depending how you measure it) children are autistic and given that most children were getting the MMR vaccine, you are bound to have lots of cases where both are observed in the same child. Of course these kind of observations might be relevant, so the Lancet was correct to publish it, and let scientists do more work on the issue.
Of course the media went hysterical and the rest is history. The take-up of MMR declined a lot in spite of there never being any real evidence that there was even a link, never mind a causal link.
Goldacre claimed that although some media people realised the story was likely bogus, they still had to run with it because their competitors did and because Wakefield was an "expert". Goldacre pointed out that with a hundred thousand doctors in the UK you could probably find one who would back any claim you wanted.
Although the controversy started in 1998, Goldacre showed a graph which indicated that the real interest in the controversy spiked in 2002 because of poor little Leo Blair, the youngest child of Tony and Cherie Blair. So the Blairs refused to say whether or not he had had the MMR vaccine. The general feeling was that he had not (although it was government policy that children should), because Cherie Blair was rather against conventional medicine and instead was into the usual New Age crackpot alternatives. Goldacre claimed that at the time, 32% of all MMR stories mentioned Leo Blair, and only 25% mentioned Wakefield. A bit ridiculous.
Some American by the name of Krigsman kept pushing the MMR and autism story, with claims in 2002 and 2006 that he had found a link. But this research has never been published, so should not be considered worthy of anything. At the same time in 2006 there were two peer-reviewed papers that found no link between MMR and autism. Needless to say, almost all the media pushed the Krigsman story rather than the other one. Goldacre claimed that only he and some blogger (the boyfriend of one of the authors of one of the papers) mentioned it.
Wakefield was found out to have various conflicts of interest, and so the media ended up blaming him for the fuss, rather than face up to their contribution to the sorry saga.
And apparently these vaccine scares are country specific. So MMR and autism ran in the UK, Hepatitis B and Multiple sclerosis ran in France, thiomersal and autism ran in the US, etc. Because of the bogus thiomersal scare, the US government asked drug makers to stop using it in vaccines. The alternatives are more expensive, which is not a problem in America but is a problem in Africa.
David Cameron spouts more nonsense about "broken Britain" (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
David Cameron has said the case of two young boys tortured in Doncaster was not an "isolated incident of evil" but symptomatic of wider social problems.
The Tory leader said the "truly awful" incident meant people must ask "deep questions" about social breakdown.
In a speech in Kent, he said this was a seminal incident, likening it to the cases of Baby Peter and Jamie Bulger.
Labour accused Mr Cameron of "tarring" the people of Britain by "seizing on one absolutely horrific crime".
...
The Tory leader said he would not flinch from raising the case as he believed it was symptomatic of levels of social breakdown in Britain."I think when things like this happen it is right to stand back, reflect and ask ourselves some deep questions about what is going wrong in our society," he told an audience at a community centre in Gillingham.
Mr Cameron denied that his frequent references to a "broken Britain" was an over-statement and "terrible crimes" such as those which had happened in Doncaster could not be ignored.
"I don't think it is right every time one of these events takes place to say that it is just some isolated incident of evil that we should look away from and forget about."
"Are we going to do that every time there is a Jamie Bulger or a Baby Peter or a Ben Kinsella or a Gary Newlove or what has happened in Doncaster? We shouldn't. We should ask about what has gone wrong with our society and what we are going to do about it."
And he hit back at critics who have accused him of exploiting the Doncaster case for political ends, saying: "I think it is right to raise it in a responsible way and it is right to have this debate about how we can strengthen our society."
Cameron is despicable. Even worse, he is playing the Tony Blair soundtrack, and it is over ten years out-of-date.
There are over half a million children born in the UK every year. It would not be very surprising if some of them have pathological behaviour, especially when their parents have pathological behaviour. The Bulger case is already from almost 20 years ago, when the Tories were (unfortunately) in power. Cameron could no doubt find cases in the same proportion going back through the entire record of human history. It is ridiculous to claim that here and now something different is happening (and of course all allegedly the fault of the Labour government). It is unfortunate that the next leader of the country insists on spewing nonsense over and over again.
UK government wants to introduce a no-fly list (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
Fresh measures to track terror suspects and strengthen airport security after the attempted Christmas Day bomb plot have been announced by Gordon Brown.
A "no-fly list" is to be set up to stop suspected terrorists from travelling to the UK while other individuals under suspicion will undergo thorough checks.
...
A new "no-fly list" will identify individuals who will not be allowed to enter the country because of suspected terrorist links.Individuals who have attracted the attention of the authorities but are considered lower-risk will be listed in a second category.
They will be subject to "special measures", such as more extensive screening, before being allowed to fly to the UK, although officials said they could not divulge what this would entail.
By the end of the year, all UK airports and ports will be covered by the e-borders scheme, which he said meant information passengers provide when buying tickets can be checked against the watch lists.
...
The Conservatives, who have called for a "radical" rethink of the UK's security approach, welcomed the introduction of a "no-fly list".
This is a typical knee-jerk government proposal. The US no-fly list has been a complete shambles. 4-year old kids and grannies and famous pop stars are routinely harassed. And is there any evidence that even a single terrorist has been stopped? There is no reason to believe that the UK no-fly list will do any better.
The key is in the innocuous BBC reporting. It says "A new no-fly list will identify individuals". How are they going to "identify individuals"? Through "information passengers provide when buying tickets". Information such as name and address. But in the US the authorities seem to filter only on name, and presumably nobody trusts the address, since it is easy to change that. But in any case every terrorist organisation knows that this information is used as a filter, so (surprise) will use people not on the list, or get names and addresses, etc., changed. It is only innocent people, or dumb terrorists, who will be caught by these filters.
Even worse, once you are (somehow) on a no-fly list there is no way you can get off it. The government can decide you are guilty without any trial and without any redress.
And it is unfortunate that the next Tory government is already setting itself up to be just as bad as the current Labour government, because once they are in power, they will no doubt go downhill from their current expressed views.
Suddenly everybody is against "garden-grabbing" (permanent blog link)
The BBC says:
The government has promised to act against "garden-grabbing" by property developers, after a report showed it was a problem in many parts of England.
Fifty of 127 councils who responded to a survey said building on previous green or empty land was a concern.
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Garden-grabbing refers to the practice of building homes on open land attached to existing urban or suburban houses, which increases population density and, campaigners say, damages the character of an area.As part of government-commissioned research, academics at Kingston University sent a survey to 363 planning authorities in England.
Of the 127 who responded, 50 said it was an issue in their areas. Of these, just seven had specific policies in place to deal with it.
...
Shadow communities secretary Caroline Spelman said: "Labour ministers are in denial that the problems of garden-grabbing stem from their own planning rules."Thanks to regulations issued by John Prescott, leafy gardens across the country are being dug up, and replaced with blocks of flats and high-density buildings that spell disaster for the local environment and local infrastructure."
For the Lib Dems, Sarah Teather said: "This tired Labour government has been stuck in power for so long it is now having to go back and fix its own mistakes.
"John Prescott effectively sold off precious green space across the country and now that half of it has already disappeared, Labour is belatedly stumbling into action."
It is unbelievable what kind of poor analysis you get on the BBC sometimes. So out of 363 planning authorities, a whole 50 (less than 14 percent) said there was "an issue". There is no attention at all as to what "an issue" even means. Instead we just get the standard ten seconds of response from the opposition parties to spout their uncontested propaganda.
It is not too surprising that the Tories are against "garden-grabbing". They are the party that believes there should be no house building anywhere in the south of England, and being against "garden-grabbing" is one small part of that general view.
On the other hand, it is amazing that the Lib Dems have jumped on the same band wagon. It's getting harder and harder for anyone to choose between the three main parties these days because they all parrot the same things.
There is a serious issue here, which unfortunately the BBC and the political parties have decided not to address. So it is believed by many urban planners that high-density building is exactly what we should be aiming for, since allegedly this is more "sustainable". That is largely a bogus claim, but none of the political parties seems to be willing to push for policies which will counteract that, in particular introducing standards for minimal house sizes and minimal garden sizes.
It's all very well claiming you are against "garden-grabbing" but until you have a proper proposal for development to replace that, then it is just complaining with meaningless slogans. Well, to be fair to the Tories, they want to solve the problem by not having a housing shortage in the first place, and to achieve that they would like to kick all foreigners out of the country (well, except for Lord Ashcroft, the foreign donor who is buying them the coming election).
There's not enough bike parking at the Cambridge train station (permanent blog link)
The Cambridge News says:
Councillors have hit out after a plea for more cycle racks at Cambridge railway station was snubbed by rail bosses.
Cambridge Liberal Democrats said the city council had offered to pay for extra racks if the rail operator, National Express East Anglia, would offer some land at the station as a new bike parking area.
But the Lib Dems said the rail firm had "stopped the bid in its tracks" and said no, because it would mean "losing income from valuable car parking spaces".
...
Cllr Nichola Harrison, who represents the city's Petersfield ward on the county council, said cyclists were finding it difficult to park their bikes securely at the station because the racks were taken up with dumped and disused bikes.
The train station is one big bike parking disaster area, and the main problem is indeed that that many of the spaces are taken up by dumped bikes. And that is really what should be sorted. But can anyone fault the rail operator for not adding more space for bikes because it would mean "losing income from valuable car parking spaces"? (Except the academic middle class, such as the Lib Dems, who hate all corporations, and who hate all car drivers excepting themselves.) Car drivers are expected to (more than) pay for the services they are provided, but funnily enough cyclists never expect to pay for anything. If cyclists were willing to pay for parking then the situation at the train station would change.
For more articles (older ones) see archive.
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