Personal choice
I find Andrew Wakefield’s team very brave to publish a study on the risks of
immunisation
(This Week, 7 March, p 4).
For decades, many medical doctors have
suspected a link between autism and multi-component vaccines.
When I had children, I started to look into this. My own investigation and
personal observations led to increased doubts. I then looked for medical or
scientific proof. It’s hard to believe, but no one has ever performed a single
clinical trial or prospective cohort study to assess the long-term effects of
vaccination campaigns on the health of children. And yet most doctors will try
to persuade you to vaccinate your child against every possible disease.
I call this propaganda. Who, on the basis of such poor scientific evidence,
would sacrifice their child’s health for the overall good? I wouldn’t. And I
didn’t. Many acquaintances haven’t either.
We all have the most healthy children you could find. No skin disorders, no
asthma, no chronic diseases. But most of them hide behind false certificates.
That is the price paid for having healthy children and remaining part of our
society. Good luck to Andrew Wakefield.
Saintly escape
Netropolitan demonstrated splendidly how much misinformation there is on the Net
(This Week, 21 March, p 19).
St Patrick did not write his autobiography in
450. This is the right century, but exact dates are unknown.
He was enslaved from his home, somewhere in western Britain, and his
autobiography does not tell us about his conversion to Christianity. He was
already a Christian before he was enslaved.
And when he returned to Ireland after his escape, was he an exile? He said
that God told him to leave Britain to convert the Irish, but there were
unspecified charges waiting for him back home in Britain. He refused to be
extradited. Arguably he was an exile only in the sense Ronnie Biggs is.
Stretching it out
With regard to CompuServe’s offer of 750 free hours online in a month
(Feedback, 14 March) and
(Letters, 28 March, p 64), it would just about be
possible to use them all if you started just west of the International Dateline
(New Zealand, say) and travelled to just east of it (Hawaii, say) during the
month.
Italian spoon pub
Your report about magnets in airplane tables is not an urban legend
(Feedback, 7 March)
(Letters, 28 March, p 64).
In the Alitalia Douglas Super 90 I am flying on from Rome to Munich, the
fold-out table of the first row of Business Class has two magnets in the table
strong enough to make a coffee spoon stand up. I don’t know if this field can
overcome the shielding of the hard drive of my laptop, but don’t intend to find
out, so I am typing on my lap.
On tap
Mike Carrette’s generalising about “this side of the Atlantic”
(Letters, 7 March, p 55)
may include the Isle of Wight but it doesn’t cover much else.
Single-lever mixer taps have been around in France, Germany and Italy for the
past twenty years at least. Possibly they haven’t reached Britain yet, or
possibly they have and he hasn’t noticed. Or maybe he has noticed, but wanted to
indulge in that good old British pastime of poking fun at a country of which one
is jealous.
Numbers up
I was surprised to hear about the high price of BT’s CD-ROM phone directory
(Feedback, 7 March).
Here in Australia, BT’s equivalent, Telstra, provides the complete White
Pages on CD-ROM. It provides full name search any or all of the 55 phone
directories produced in Australia, exactly as they appear in the White Pages. It
also includes all the emergency information and your own personal phone book for
up to 1000 numbers. The CD-ROM is updated annually and includes the latest
version of all the phone directories鈥攁round 8 million numbers.
All this costs just $19.95 (about 拢8). And Telstra provides the
same service free on the Internet, at www.whitepages.com.au.
Letter
A few years ago, the health nurse at TVNZ was asked to supply a gross of
condoms to the crew televising a cricket tour. Unfazed, her reply was: “What
type would you prefer?” Subsequently she supplied several samples, including
some that glowed in the dark.
Finally her curiosity got the better of her, and she asked what they were
needed for. The answer: for protecting exposed male and female joints. The cable
joints of disconnected cables need to be protected if they are left out in the
open, which happens when there is a partial “derig”. The crew found that the
condoms provided perfect protection in any situation.
But the manager had a bit of a problem deciding what budget code to use for
the expense: consumables, small tools or miscellaneous field equipment.
Letter
Physiotherapy students trying to apply ultrasound therapy to awkwardly shaped
joints such as the shoulder would be dispatched to the hospital pharmacy to
obtain a “rubber bag”鈥攁 condom. This would then be filled with boiled
water and sealed, to serve as an improved contact medium between rounded skin
and the flat treatment head.
The pharmacy staff at the old Glasgow Royal Infirmary never missed the chance
to make first-timers squirm.
Perfect protection
For a published account of the use of condoms as underwater microphone
covers, as mentioned by Jon Moore
(Letters, 7 March, p 56), read Last Chance
to See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine.
It's code, tha nose
Your item about the Navaho and keeping messages secret rang bells with me
(Feedback, 14 March).
My brother, though born in the West Riding, has lived in the Czech Republic
for more than half his life, part of this at a time when, as Czechoslovakia, it
was under communist rule. When I wanted to send him information for his eyes
only, I used to write in broad Yorkshire, using dialect and homophones: fur it
wore double dutch if tha want a Tyke tha nose.
Try translating that with a Czech/English dictionary.
Dangerous trade
New 杏吧原创 often runs stories about food safety and consumer
health. Most of this material is of high quality, and many of the responses are
also interesting.
It is surprising, then, that scientists are so afraid of stating the obvious:
consumer health will be more and more difficult to protect as the market in
fresh foods becomes more and more international.
With the industrialisation of food production, and a global market in fresh
animal and vegetable foods, the inevitable consequence is that more and more
dangerous bugs will be spread around the world. Numerous papers about emerging
foodborne infections refer to the industrialisation of agriculture and
globalisation of trade as contributory factors.
Why are scientists so afraid of saying that we have to limit international
trade in some fresh foods? The inherent dangers have been documented for years.
Some countries鈥攅specially the Scandinavian ones鈥攈ave maintained a
high quality of fresh foods largely because they have restricted imports.
Free trade is not the way to ensure food safety, whatever the multinational
food industry says.
Helping Henry
Feedback talks about naming computers
(7 March)
(21 March).
I remember an incident during my second visit to the Findhorn Community in
Scotland. Our conversation was interrupted by a young lady, who came running up
from the cellar and said: “Henry’s having some kind of attack. He’s shaking like
mad and making horrible noises, and I don’t know what to do.”
Concerned, we started to respond, when our more experienced friend said with
a smile: “It’s OK鈥擧enry’s one of the washing machines!”
Jobbies and jollies
Some of Bernadette Hince’s examples of Antarctic neologisms
(Feedback, 21 March)
are hardly new, apart from being grammatically suspect. “Frazil ice” and
“pancake ice” are well-known terms. Similarly, “jolly” has long been used for a
pleasure jaunt. And surely “jobbie” is Scots?
Letter
There is a macho Polynesian insult still very much extant in Rapanui (Easter
Island) and sometimes in Aoteraroa (New Zealand) to the effect that “your
grandfather’s flesh got stuck between my grandfather’s teeth”鈥攍ocal
variants of this insult are common throughout Oceania, and can generate a very
high degree of offence.
Letter
You touch on the real reasons for the sensitivity of the cannibalism issue
without fully exploring them.
Representing American, African, Australian and Pacific peoples as cannibals
helped to justify the colonial project and certainly was not limited to the
Spanish conquistadors. It was an effective way to deny humanity to the
colonised, dispossessed and forcibly converted peoples of the non-European
world.
Even the most cursory reading of the contemporary literature shows why
allegations of cannibalism should always be treated circumspectly. Christy
Turner should be absolutely certain that he is not looking at mortuary remains
before he attempts to resurrect the belief in widespread cannibalism.
In a similar vein, another recent New 杏吧原创 article on the
origins of venereal disease
(This Week, 28 February, p 21) reported that
pre-Columbian South American mummies have been shown not to have been infected
with syphilis. I would guess that this was not a big surprise to the native
peoples of the Americas, who know a good deal about imported devastating
diseases, and who have always regarded the oft-repeated “fact” that syphilis
came from the New World as the greatest race slander of them all.
Take one human…
Despite the coverline “Cannibals: your nasty ancestors” for your tale of
cannibalism
(“The people eaters”, 14 March, p 42), the people I have met who
have told me they have eaten people are not my ancestors, though they and I do
have ancestors in common.
They reported that they were eating people in the late 1950s, and may have
done so as late as 1979. They are not “nasty”, “deranged” or “savage”, to borrow
your adjectives. They are gentle people and caring parents. One was my adoptive
father.
In the interior lowlands of Papua New Guinea, some of these people ate other
people because they liked the meat. In contrast to Jared Diamond’s
understanding, they had no difficulties obtaining protein from other sources;
indeed, they had a surfeit of protein.
They cooked people by laying the cuts on a bed of edible fern fronds,
covering the oven with large leaves and using hot stones. The fern fronds soaked
up fat and, if salt was available, it was added for taste. I suppose for William
Arens this is not a recipe, but it is what the same people do when cooking pig
or cassowary or fish, and I have certainly shared in those feasts. Indeed, it
seems no less elaborate than that great Australian pastime of “throwing another
prawn on the barbie” and although I have not seen a recipe for this, I do not
doubt that it happens.
Without the hype and the connotations of primitivism, eating other people
emerges as simply part of the interesting diversity of humankind. It should not
be forgotten, though, that relying on people as the only source of dietary
protein might not have been sustainable, and that people who ate other people
could not have indulged their taste too often.
Millenary leap
D. R. Ladd writes that it is a mere coincidence that the end of the century
and the end of the millennium coincide
(Letters, 14 March, p 59).
But 2000 is especially significant because it is the first centenary year to
be a leap year since the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in England and its
colonies鈥攊ncluding America鈥攊n 1752. So we have to hope that computer
programs know that leap years do not include centenary years unless they are
divisible by 400.
If computers are programmed for only the first part of that rule, they will
have problems on 29 February, 2000.
Letter
The Editor replies: New 杏吧原创 was aware that a background paper
comparing cannabis with alcohol and tobacco is to be published later this year.
If anything, this adds to our suspicions about the WHO’s decision to exclude the
comparison from its report. If the comparison is good enough to publish as a
background paper, why not include it in the report? Part of the answer is that
reports are widely circulated and read by policy makers and journalists, whereas
background papers are not.
If “uncertainties” were the only reason for excluding the analysis, one must
question the consistency of the peer review process. Much of the material deemed
fit to include in the report could scarcely be described as certain. Take one
example, the hormonal effects of cannabis. Here the report says: “This action of
cannabis might be of importance in the prepubertal male鈥� however, at
present this is purely conjecture.”
Letter
Like the premature reports of Mark Twain’s death, New 杏吧原创’s
report of the alleged “suppression” by the WHO of our paper comparing the health
effects of cannabis with those of alcohol, opiates and tobacco has been greatly
exaggerated
(This Week, 21 February, p 4).
Our paper is being prepared for publication later this year (along with the
other background papers) by the Addiction Research Foundation and the WHO.
The content of our paper was not reflected in the WHO report because some of
the experts who were consulted by the WHO in the process of peer reviewing the
report believed that there were too many uncertainties about the adverse health
effects of cannabis to permit such comparisons to be made. These uncertainties
were acknowledged in our paper, but we undertook the comparison because of its
public health policy significance.
The fact that on current patterns of use, cannabis is a lesser public health
problem than alcohol and tobacco does not mean that cannabis use is harmless or
that its public health consequences are trivial.
The comparison emphasises the unacceptable burden of disease and disability
that alcohol and tobacco cause in much of the developed and developing
world.
Finally, the disagreement between the experts about the validity of
comparisons of the adverse health effects should not detract from the fact that
they were agreed on the adverse health effects of cannabis summarised in the
report. They also agreed on the priorities for future research that would enable
us to better understand the adverse health effects of cannabis use.
High anxieties
Philip Cooper refers to the current problems we have with alcohol as the
reason we should not legalise marijuana
(Letters, 14 March, p 58).
What he fails to mention is that the US tried banning alcohol, and it was a
disaster. Prohibition failed to produce any long-term reductions in alcohol use
and created new problems of its own.
One such problem was a massive increase in the use of alcohol by children.
During Prohibition, school officials reported that they were unable to hold
school dances and other events because it had become fashionable for all the
male students to show up with a hip flask of whisky. They even had to close some
schools for a while because so many kids were coming to school drunk.
The slogan of the campaign for Prohibition was “Save the Children”. The same
slogan was used in the campaign for its repeal鈥攂y some of the same people
who had campaigned for Prohibition in the first place. They reported that,
before Prohibition, their children had been unable to get alcohol easily. After
Prohibition came into effect, their children became involved in the liquor
trade. The major problems of violent crime and alcohol use by children did not
diminish until alcohol was legalised once again.
The lesson of history is that these drugs may be bad, for a lot of reasons,
but that prohibition doesn’t solve those problems, it only makes the situation
worse.
Correction
Correction: In the article headed “Croon like the King”
(This Week, 21 March, p 14),
an error was made when identifying where Ken Lomax worked. He
carried out his research on the “voice morpher” at the University of Oxford, not
Cambridge. Our apologies to Isis Innovations for the confusion.
Did they eat cake?
I wonder if Molly Reynolds
(Letters, 14 March, p 60) can reveal whether the
students at Erwin Schr枚dinger’s tea parties both had their cake and ate
it?
Letter
It’s an act of piracy! “Jobbie” is not a new word coined by people at
research stations in Antarctica. The word has been in common use in Scottish
vernacular for generations, and is, as any Scottish schoolchild will tell you,
simply any well-formed, shapely item of excreta: dog, human, horse,
whatever.
Letter
Although “jobbie” hasn’t made it into the Oxford English Dictionary,
it has made it into the 1993 edition of Chambers Dictionary, where it
is defined as “a lump of excrement”.