Infant reactors
I was also at the presentation on infant health around the time of the accident at Chernobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine (29 June, p 6). John Urquhart began by looking at congenital infant mortality in England and Wales in the 1980s, and he observed an increase in variance in the phenomenon among different health areas in 1986. As you report, on further analysis he found five areas 鈥� Northern, North Western, South Western, Trent and South West Thames 鈥� which had higher rates in the period 1986 to 1989.
No prior hypothesis was offered that suggested these five areas should be differentially affected by Chernobyl: for example, they are not the areas of highest fallout. Indeed no common feature was identified that might bind them together even after the “effect” was proposed. In fact, the slides appeared to show that these five areas were exhibiting a rising trend in congenital infant mortality from 1984, a trend that continued to 1987 (just one year after Chernobyl), plateaued in 1988 and 1989 and then slumped dramatically.
Letter
Rob Edwards suggests that there may have been an increase in British babies born with Down’s syndrome, spina bifida and other abnormalities following Chernobyl. Folic acid deficiency is a significant known cause of many birth defects and a suspected cause of Down’s syndrome.
If in fact there was an increase in birth defects, a possible cause to be explored is decreased consumption of foods rich in folic acid. Many people were concerned about levels of fallout on fresh produce, in part due to media exaggerations, and may have decreased their consumption of fresh produce. Replacing fresh produce with more refined foods tends to lower not only folic acid levels, but a host of other essential nutrients as well.
Ssssssh!
There’s a vitally important proviso to Mick Hamer’s piece on the beneficial effects of music (and art) on patients in hospitals (22 June, p 38). Live music can usually be avoided if it’s not to your taste, but not if you’re immobilised. Any unwanted music could be distressing for a patient.
A survey from Nottingham University Medical School in 1995 showed generally negative results in trying to reduce stress and anxiety by playing piped music to 215 blood donors 鈥� so they have given it up. Tastes in music differ widely, and many older people prefer silence, according to a poll carried out in November 1998 for the Royal National Institute for the Deaf, which showed 51 per cent of people over the age of 45 dislike piped music. The same goes for art, of course, but it is easier to avoid looking than hearing.
Seminal theory
A very important question goes unanswered in your article about semen acting as an antidepressant (29 June, p 5). Does vasectomy affect the hormone levels in semen?
I don’t want to have this operation only to find that my wife needs antidepressant drugs for the rest of her life 鈥� or, worse, looks for another man because for some unknown reason sex doesn’t make her feel like it used to.
Gordon Gallup replies that his team’s sample was based on female college students and, not surprisingly, none reported having a vasectomised partner. More research is, as they say, required 鈥� Ed
Letter
As a senior majoring in sociology at the University of Wisconsin, I have been trained to notice such scientific propaganda as your article presents. It is preposterous to assume that 293 women aged between 18 and 24 (a fact you failed to mention) could represent all women and the hormonal nature of women in general.
I am disturbed that a credible journal would throw something like this together, and spread propaganda about this false notion of a link between depression and condoms.
Political contradictions
Steve Fuller highlights a number of contradictions in Tony Blair’s position on science (22 June, p 46). I fear he missed the most obvious one: the British Prime Minister’s support for science and rationality on the one hand, and for a school that teaches creationism as a credible alternative to evolution on the other.
Ultimately, I suspect, he’ll go where the votes are. It reminds me of the politician who once said: “We’ve turned around 360 degrees on that one”.
Letter
The US President’s top environmental adviser said that “Bush always believed the science showed that humans are contributing to global warming” (29 June, p 59). This reminds me of a quote from someone who many years ago tried to convince others of the reality of climate change, Louis Agassiz: “Every great scientific truth goes through three stages. First, people say it conflicts with the Bible. Next they say it had been discovered before. Lastly they say they always believed it.”
Island refuge
Am I the only one to notice that the best place for a genetically modified test crop is an island?
Burning question
As a firefighter I would be horrified to attend a fire in a building made of “magnetic wood” (29 June, p 20). Many fire departments now operate radios on frequencies very close to those of cellphones, and it appears that all frequencies 鈥� not just those in the cellphone part of the spectrum 鈥� would be cut off.
Has anyone considered the fact that firefighters working in a structure made of magnetic wood 鈥� which would still be flammable 鈥� would be unable to call for help if they needed it, or just stay in touch with their incident commander to relay conditions and receive orders?
Fire and emergency services worldwide have struggled for years to get their radio signals to penetrate into “normal” buildings. Many incidents have been recorded where the outcome would have been different if only the emergency workers had been able to talk to one another on their portable radios.
Bound to home
Individually customised homes sound very nice (15 June, p 38). But what happens when you want to sell? Will your ideal home also be someone else’s?
For the record
鈥� In our story about the US defence against anthrax attacks, we got the wrong locations for two of the researchers. Andrew Cannons works with the Florida Department of Health Bureau of Laboratories, Tampa Branch, and Segaram Pillai is in the Department of Health Bureau of Laboratories at Miami (1 June, p 17).
鈥� The fourth paragraph of Eric Blyth’s Comment and Analysis article on sperm donor anonymity (6 July, p 28) stated that reform was being held up because “doctors, fertility clinics and many Members of Parliament oppose change”. The sentence should have read “doctors and fertility clinics oppose change”. The mistake was an editing error for which the author bears no responsibility.
The measles debate
With respect to your item on MMR and autism (22 June): in 1993 Andrew Wakefield published a paper implicating the wild measles virus in the inflammatory bowel disorder Crohn’s disease. Later he blamed vaccine strains for Crohn’s, before going on to implicate the MMR vaccine in autism.
Yet to our surprise, Wakefield’s paper in the journal Molecular Pathology reports that no measles virus was found in Crohn’s disease patients despite the high frequency alleged in the past. No previous statement has been corrected, to our knowledge. So is Wakefield still saying measles causes Crohn’s or not? It would be nice for the public to have fewer things to worry about.
The same paper reports that 75 out of 91 autistic children had measles virus in their intestine. This is higher than we would expect in a measles epidemic. The techniques described are sensitive to contamination, and no attempt is made to rule this out as the explanation.
Finally, the method later used to identify the virus found in these children as the MMR vaccine strain is flawed, because the sequence looked for is also found in many wild-type strains, including some found in Britain. This would have been obvious to anyone consulting the GenBank database.
Many laboratories would like to examine samples from these cases to find out why only one group and their associates seem able to detect measles virus. As your piece mentions, the difficulty is getting materials from those who claim to have found something.
Letter
I was very interested to read about Wakefield’s never-ending cause to prove that mixing three live vaccines in one shot will cause autism. I am nearly 30 and have been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome.
It is interesting that Wakefield and his colleagues seem to have invented a new form of autism, certainly one I am not aware of. If, as I have been led to believe, autism is a highly genetic disorder, I would be more convinced of the findings of the researchers if some kind of neuropsychological testing were performed on the parents. If we could at least say that it was very unlikely the parents had autism themselves, then and only then would a link to MMR be worth pursuing.
It could also be that the signs of autism are only recognised after the injections are given. I, for one, have always felt being injected almost akin to being violated, possibly because of the aspect of putting trust in someone you do not know.
Farm facts
I am dismayed at the persistent misrepresentation of the purpose and application of agricultural subsidies (29 June, p 29).
Food supply is very variable 鈥� due to weather, pests, diseases and, most importantly, the inability of farmers, individually, or jointly, to plan and execute a cropping plan to meet demand precisely. Nobody, but nobody, knows what area has been planted with which crop until it is too late to change. For John Hamblin to imply that Australian farmers can respond any better than others to market signals, given that these signals can change by the hour, is ridiculous.
The agricultural support schemes which so many blame for so much are there to ensure surpluses so that the price of food remains low. The wheat in the average loaf of bread only costs 4 to 5 pence at the farm gate, and milk is leaving British farms at about 13 pence a litre. The plight of Third World farmers is not down to agricultural support schemes in the West, but the nature of world market trading in commodities, currencies and hence capital movements to avoid taxation.
A patent too far
Mervyn Jacobson writes in defence of broad patents (29 June, p 27). He criticises New 杏吧原创’s implication that “broad patents are intrinsically wrong”, and asks: how do you reward broad inventions, if not by patents?
The answer is that basic research, which is surely a synonym for “broad inventions”, has been carried out for decades without rewards of this kind. Admittedly, some scientists 鈥� among whom Jacobson presumably numbers himself 鈥� are driven by the lure of big financial rewards. But for these workers, the rewards come when the basic work leads to detailed inventions, which can and should be rewarded by patents.
If, in Jacobson’s case, his 13 years of research have yielded specific and unique techniques for the use of non-coding DNA sequences, it is right and proper that these should be recognised with patent protection. However, if he is trying merely to take a percentage out of the profits of others who may perfect working techniques for his generalised ideas for exploiting non-coding sequences, then surely he is retarding rather than facilitating progress.
What would have happened if Watson and Crick had been given a patent covering the exploitation of the DNA code for the treatment of genetic diseases? Patents are necessary at the end of a process of development, not at the beginning.
Surely the time has come to put an end to this creeping takeover of science by the legal profession.