Month: March 2011

Asthma and Farm Life

Seth Roberts2 Comments

For a long time it’s been clear that living on a farm protects children against asthma (compared to city life). A new study, done in Germany, tried to go a little further than that: to ask if it was microbial exposure that made the difference. Non-American scientists have been far more interested in the environmental causes of disease than American scientists.

They measured microbial exposure by studying mattress dust. One branch of the study used DNA techniques to measure microbial diversity of the dust; the other branch measured microbial diversity by seeing how many microbes could be cultured from the dust.

They found the usual farm/city difference in asthma: The city kids had roughly twice as much. They found the expected farm/city difference in microbial diversity of mattress dust: For a given species of bacteria or fungi, there was roughly twice as much chance of finding it in the farm dust.

Did the microbial difference explain the asthma difference? To find out they corrected for the farm difference. I think this means they looked within the farm kids to see if in this restricted group there was a microbial diversity/asthma risk correlation. In one branch of the study, there was a significant correlation. In the other branch, the correlation was nearly significant.

In all, the results support the idea that differences in microbial exposure explain the farm/city asthma difference. The biggest strength of this study is that they gathered useful evidence related to a major problem (asthma). The biggest weakness is how difficult it was. It involved about 15,000 kids and probably cost more than a million dollars.

Thanks to Aaron Blaisdell.

Is Medical Research a Veblen Good?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Felix Salomon argues that fancy restaurants often manage to make their food a Veblen good — something that becomes more desirable when the price goes up. Restaurant food is a way to show off your wealth, in other words.

Veblen and I differ on the long-term value of Veblen goods. Veblen saw them as sort of ridiculous — which is why he coined the amusing term conspicuous waste. Whereas I see them as a way of promoting innovation: Long ago, desire for luxury goods, goods with “wasteful” features, helped the most skilled artisans make a living. These artisans were the best source of innovation within a society.

Unfortunately everyone likes to show off, not just fancy-restaurant-goers. Throughout the medical research community, there is an obvious preference for expensive research over cheaper research. (I’m not saying experimental psychologists such as me are any better: We’re not.) Few medical researchers understand that expensive studies are a last resort and the larger your sample size, the less you understand what you are studying. (Experimental psychologists do understand this.) When people doing research related to health are too concerned with showing off (e.g., doing studies that require expensive equipment) to do effective research, the benefit-cost ratio of Veblenian behavior goes below one. Desire to show off gets in the way of solving health problems. This is why personal science — using science to solve your own problems — is so important: The personal scientist will do whatever works, regardless of how impressive it is.

Terrific Essay by Cory Doctorow

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I highly recommend this editorial by Cory Doctorow about the dangers of allowing a small number of people — such as big companies — to control how everyone’s computer, smart phone, etc., operates. I especially like his conclusion, modeled on Isaac Asimov’s T hree Laws of Robotics:

But we’ll only arrive at those solutions once we stop reflexively demanding limits on the general functionality of a PC and a network — and the sooner we do, the sooner we’ll legitimize a technology world whose first rule is “Obey your owner” and whose second rule is “Protect your owner’s interests”.

In case it isn’t obvious, self-experimentation and personal science increase your control of your body, just as Doctorow wants each person to control the technology they own. Without self-experimentation and personal science — and their ability to solve health problems in a way best for you — you give control over your body to doctors, drug companies, medical school professors, nutritionists, alternative-medicine advocates, and many others whose interests differ from yours. Often the difference is large — drug companies prefer expensive dangerous solutions to cheap safe ones.

PFCs, Ultrasound, and Autism

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Robert Delaney is a geologist who does environmental cleanup in Michigan. While cleaning up an abandoned military base, he found remarkably high contamination by a chemical called PFOS. He had been wondering what causes autism. He came across a rodent study that found that the combination of PFOS and ultrasound was much more damaging to the nervous system than either alone. (See also this study.) He remembered that study when he read my posts about ultrasound and autism. He wrote to me:

You will know the chemical PFOS (perfluorooctane sulfunate) from spray-on fabric treatments that protect clothes from stains and water. IÂ want to tell you about the possible connection between PFCs (perfluoroalkyl chemicals, especially long chain PFCs) and autism. Â I learned that mice and rats contaminated with PFOS, a PFC, when exposed to ultrasound convulsed and died. Â I was reminded of that finding when I read your blog about Caroline Rodger’s idea that prenatal ultrasound causes autism. Â I have thought that PFCs were causing autism for some time. I wondered if lower levels of PFOS would cause some type of brain injury, short of convulsions and death, when the mice were exposed to ultrasound.

I work on cleaning up military sites and attend a lot of related conferences and meetings.  I am working on a focus group with the Association of State and Territorial Waste Managers Organization that is looking at emerging contaminants (contaminants that are not regulated or so recently regulated they are still a problem). Because of that, I was recently made aware of the PFCs because the military had identified these contaminants in firefighting foams.  I was doing a cleanup at the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Michigan.  I decided we should check for PFOS and PFOA at the site. There were high levels of both PFOS and PFOA even though it was 20 years since the based had been used. When we checked groundwater, we found it in every well at every depth.  In my 25 years in the environmental business I have never seen anything like it.

I started researching the chemicals as it was apparent that I would have to deal with them. Â I discovered that at least 98% of Americans have them in their blood. That isn’t surprising because they are in everyday products such as food wrappers and popcorn bags, shampoos, cleaning supplies, carpeting, furniture materials, clothing, and dental floss. They are used in firefighting foams, pesticides, automotive parts, computers, electronics, and lubricants. Â They have ended up in our food supply and drinking water.

I had been researching the occurrence of autism for other reasons.  It had occurred to me that whatever was causing the dramatic rise in autism around much of the world, it had to be ubiquitous in the environment, of recent origin, with increasing use, and found in at least the US, Canada, Europe, Japan and Australia where the autism rates were exploding.

PFCs fit these characteristics. Â They are found around the world in mammals, birds, fish, shellfish, etc. Â In fact, the Canadian government reported that the blood levels of PFCs in polar bear above the Arctic Circle were higher than the levels of any pesticides they had ever measured.

Research in the Great Lakes Region is showing high levels of PFOS in the lakes. In some places in the Lakes the contamination exceeds preliminary drinking water standards. Because these are huge bodies of water, to have so much contamination is amazing. High concentrations have been found in mink, fish, gull eggs, eagles, etc. around the Great Lakes. Fish and drinking water in Minnesota have been impacted over large areas. Europe has now banned PFCs for most applications.

What got me wondering about autism and PFCs was that in lab animals and in test tube experiments with human brain cells they are developmental neurotoxins. Many chemicals are neurotoxins, such as chlorinated pesticides and other chlorinated compounds (such as PCBs), organic mercury, and lead. Â However, we in the western world have been aware of these facts and for the last thirty years have been reducing use and exposure to these chemicals. Â But while we have been reducing our exposure to mercury, lead, and so on, neurologic diseases have been on the rise. Â No one suspected PFCs were harmful to humans. Their use has continued to increase.

The half life of the chemicals in our body is around 5 years, so in 5 years, if you have not gotten any more exposure to PFCs, half of them would still be in your body.

There are a lot of reasons to think PFCs may cause autism. Here are a few. First, the company that invented PFCs (3M) is located in Minnesota. There is widespread PFC contamination in Minnesota. As I was preparing a talk last week, I googled…”autism state rates.”  The first site to pop up listed Minnesota as having the highest levels of autism of any state. New Jersey has unusually high PFO contamination of drinking water; they also have a very high level of autism. The military, which has used a great deal of fire-fighting foam, has double the rate of autism of the general U.S. population.

In laboratory experiments PFCs influence brain wiring. The impact of PFCs in some mammals is sex-dependent with males being more affected; autism is 4 times more common in boys than in girls. PFCs are associated with repressed immune systems in animals which has been associated with autism as well. Deranged behavior/ADHD behavior has been reported in PFOS-exposed mice. Â ADHD in children has been associated with prenatal exposure to PFCs.

Unfortunately, the EPA did not include PFCs in their list of chemicals that might be causing autism. My colleague and I have put together a web page if people want more information: https://www.autism-pfos.net/

Yes, why does Minnesota have such high autism rates? It is not an industrial state. It is not a rich state. Yet it is where PFCs were invented and manufactured in large amounts (e.g., ScotchGuard). I can’t think of a plausible alternative explanation. The lab results (ultrasound plus PFOS far more damaging than either alone) makes perfect sense: If there is a bad molecule in neural tissue, it is going to do a lot more damage if you start shaking it, which is what ultrasound does.

Climatology Light Bulb Joke

Seth Roberts16 Comments

Q: How many climate scientists does it take to change a light bulb?

A: None. No need to change it. Because it’s been changed in the past, they say, it will be changed in the future.

A tiny fraction of climate scientists publish papers showing how their model can fit past data — say, global temperatures from 1600 to now. The authors of these papers claim that this sort of thing shows their model can predict accurately. In fact, it means roughly nothing — perhaps the model was flexible enough to fit any plausible past data.

Outsiders take fitting past data seriously, but what do they know? However, when a graduate student in atmospheric science takes fitting past data seriously (“it is perfectly reasonable to treat reproductions of the past climate as [successful] predictions”), the whole field has a problem.

Kiviaq, the Fermented Food of Greenland

Seth Roberts4 Comments

From the new BBC series Human Planet, which I like even more than Planet Earth, I learned that Greenlanders store birds they catch in summer — during a migration over the island — in a sealskin bag. Stuff 300-500 little auk birds into the bag, press all air out, sew up the opening, cover with heavy rocks, and wait three months.

The fermented birds are called kiviaq. Kiviaq is valued highly, served on special occasions such as weddings. The aroma should “sting the nostrils. . . The flavor should resemble extremely intense Gorganzola cheese.”

The kiviaq segment ends with this voiceover:

And it’s nutritious, full of vitamins and minerals that will sustain people over the winter months ahead.

Reflecting the mainstream view that microbes (made abundant by fermentation) don’t matter.

Lack of Evidence For Climate Models Intensifies

Seth Roberts13 Comments

A few weeks ago I pointed out the lack of a good reason to believe the scary predictions of climate models. Al Gore, Bill McKibben, and a million other public figures say we should believe what the models predict about global temperature ten years from now. Yet, as far as I know, the models have never made accurate and surprising predictions of global temperature. They are claimed to do what they have never been shown to do. In contrast to the absence of accurate predictions of global temperature is the presence of wrong predictions.

The lack of persuasive predictions is clearest when experts who believe climate models fail to supply them. This is why I linked to a warmist web page with a wealth of “supporting” information. Surely its creator had studied the issue deeply. This is why I noted that the Science Editor of The Independent, a major English newspaper, failed to supply such evidence. Surely he had read a lot about the issue.

And this is why I note that a graduate student in atmospheric science has failed to supply such evidence. On my Psychology Today blog I reposted one of my earlier posts about this. The graduate student said I was “misinformed about the nature of climate models” and that he “could go on for pages” about why. But he too failed to supply an example of an accurate surprising global-temperature prediction. (For an inaccurate prediction of a 1986 model, see here.)

Indepedent German Journalism Students

Seth Roberts3 Comments

At Berkeley, I found that the more I let my students decide for themselves what to learn, the more they learned. What they chose to learn was more valuable to them than what I might have taught. A student with severe fear of public speaking decided to give a talk to a high-school class. Every step was a struggle, but she did it. “I have learned I can conquer my fears,” she wrote.

I told a friend of mine, a German professor of journalism named Lorenz Lorenz-Mayer, about this. He told me about some independent students in his department:

They were students in the class of 2007 in our online-journalism program at Hochschule Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. [They had just graduated from the German equivalent of high school.]

During their very first term as freshmen, instead of focusing on new-media projects as we expected, they started producing a kind of city magazine for students, called Darmspiegel. The name is a pun on the unsavory name of the city we work in (Darmstadt = Bowel City), and Germany’s most important newsmagazine, Der Spiegel. Darmspiegel literally means colonoscope. Another idea we couldn’t talk them out of. ;-)

Because they couldn’t afford to print their magazine they started with a pdf version. After some experience with it, they started a marketing department, acquired advertising, and successfully printed something like four more issues.

After having done this for a year and learned their lessons, they chose their next project, which was to be . . . a book. This was when the group, something like 60% of the 40 students in the class, together with some two dozen friends from other departments, asked us to make them media partners for a term project, voicing the unforgettable threat: “You can of course coerce us to do some other project, but you should reckon with the possibility that our heart will not be completely in it. If, on the other hand, we do this thing together…”

So two of our professors negotiated a compromise: It would have to be a book on Darmstadt. The outcome:

“nachts in darmstadt” turned out to be wonderful book, full of moving stories, beautiful pictures, even an oil painting on the night the bombs fell on the city at the end of WW II was painted, dedicated to become one of the illustrations. A delegation went to far north of Norway to see the midsummer sun in Trondheim, a partner city of Darmstadt. They used a Wiki to coordinate their efforts and a weblog to promote the ongoing project:

They tried several old and new forms of marketing (like nightly “guerrilla gardening”, illegally planting flowers in Darmstadt city). The book was published and — predictably — soon sold out.

Some minor projects followed, then the class had to do their obligatory 6 months of internship in different media companies. After returning, some of them majored in Public Relations, others continued Journalism, never quite reaching the prior level of productivity, as a team. Three of the group have burnt the midnight oil again (while still finishing their studies) and together with friends started a bookazine publishing house:

They’ve already published one multi-lingual magazine issue, on fashion topics (each issue is going to have a different topic), collecting and curating texts and pictures from fashion blogs:

A second issue on travel is ready for print, they have started taking preorders.

Wow! They did so much. I get the same impression I got with my students: Something powerful inside of them had been freed.

Does Blood Pressure Medicine Always Work?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Apparently not:

I was a very naughty patient and, after taking Atacand for 135/75 blood pressure (benign essential hypertension was the description) for a number of years on my doctor’s prescription, decided to do a little experiment. That is, I cut back on it gradually, monitoring my BP every day. No change.

 

I eventually got to no Atacand at all and have been there for the past four years, during which time the BP has remained the same as when taking the drug. Now, whether the BP is going to kill me is perhaps a separate question (I seem to be in excellent health at 65) but the Atacand doesn’t appear to have made much difference at all — except for the $600/year it cost me, even after insurance had picked up on some of the expense.

I began to grasp how helpful self-experimentation could be when I discovered that tetracycline, an antibiotic that my dermatologist had prescribed, did not reduce my acne. When I told my dermatologist about the research that revealed this, he said, “Why did you do that?”

Had this person’s doctor told him that Atacand might not work? Clearly not. Did the doctor even know that Atacand might not work? Apparently not, since there was no doctor-guided attempt to find out. Perhaps the doctor who prescribed Atacand would defend himself by saying, lamely, that all he knew is what the drug company told him. I wonder what the drug company knew.

How much money could be saved by stopping the prescription of drugs that turn out not to work? Should all drugs come with a label that says the fraction of patients for whom this drug doesn’t work? It is a warning that is truly needed.

Thanks to Rajiv Mehta.