Public Health

A few years ago, France's International Agency for Research on Cancer, a United Nations body with a checkered scientific and ethical history, used statistics to suggest that red meat was bad for health. It was easy. All they had to do was gather together studies that used rows of foods to meet columns of diseases and create a statistical link. Since they didn't have to do any actual science, they were able to declare that bacon was just as dangerous as plutonium or World War I mustard gas. To IARC, it's safer to drink glyphosate than to eat a hot dog Here is IARC's technique. They publish a…

Union of Concerned Scientists is only really in top form when a Republican is in the White House because when the GOP is in control, they can be angry outsiders, but when a Democrat is in control, a bunch of their employees leave and join the administration. After the Obama election, they even lost their President to Department of Energy - ironic, because they hate energy, but preventing nuclear and natural gas was a cornerstone of their work so it made sense to officially engage in that effort. They are not sending employees to this one. The Trump administration is instead manna from heaven…

More than half of adults and one third of children in Europe are classified as overweight or obese, with the highest proportion coming from lower socio-economic groups where Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) is prevalent. NAFLD is the accumulation of excess fat in the liver and has become the most common cause of liver disease in Europe due to the rapid rise in levels of obesity. It is a major European health burden resulting in liver cirrhosis and liver cancer, as well as big increases in cardiovascular disease and non-liver cancers. Lack of physical activity and excess calorie…

A new paper looked at farm workers in Hawaii and found that before 1999 some of them had more heart attacks than non-farm workers and concluded the reason must be safe levels of pesticide exposure creating "subtle effects" over time. Epidemiology can achieve anything, like show that autism is linked to organic food, if the correlates are tortured enough.  The confounders are obvious, like that the level of exposure to pesticides made no difference, but the authors declare their correlation is probably valid because a similar link was created in Taiwanese men who were exposed to high…

Hemophilia, a rare inherited bleeding disorder in which blood doesn't clot normally - meaning any cut can be deadly - is a lot less rare than previously estimated.  A new paper states that as many as 1,125,000 men around the world have it, 418,000 with a severe version of the mostly undiagnosed disease, which is 3X greater than the 400,000 people previously estimated. Hemophilia is caused by a defect in the F8 or F9 gene which encodes instructions for making the factor proteins that helps blood clot. For those with hemophilia, lack of treatment leads to chronic and disabling joint…

If we want to understand why one political group denies vaccines and another that pollution is bad, we need look no farther than press releases touting mouse studies or statistical correlation as having human relevance, when they are only exploratory. Everyone sees this stuff gets promoted in mainstream media, they know it is fake, and it becomes impossible for people to trust anything. Even their own political side or field. People assume everyone is hyping results for attention if even their own side is. Neither mouse studies nor epidemiology can show an effect in humans - you read that…

Emily E. Petersen, MD; Nicole L. Davis, PhD; David Goodman, PhD; et al. have produced a report on racial disparities in pregnancy-related deaths between 2007 and 2016. The sample is small, only about 700 women die of pregnancy or its complications each year, and that is out of 6,000,000 pregnancies, so it is hard to draw conclusions but data from CDC’s Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System (PMSS) for 2007–2016 find that black and American Indian/Alaska Native women had significantly more pregnancy-related deaths per 100,000 births than did white, Hispanic, and Asian/Pacific Islander women.…

The microbiome is the collection of microorganisms in an environment and plays an important role in human health. An imbalance of 'good' microbes compared to 'bad' is linked to adverse health outcomes. A person's gut microbiome with a higher number of different bacterial species is considered a marker of gut health but no one is really sure what that means. The qualifications out of the way, a new study in Gastroenterology says that the gut microbiota of red wine consumers observed in three different cohorts (U.K., U.S., Netherlands) contained a greater number of different bacterial species…

The first analysis of data from the Kardiozive Brno 2030 study examines the association of pet ownership -- specifically dog ownership -- with cardiovascular disease risk factors and cardiovascular health. It finds that owning a pet may help maintain a healthy heart, especially if that pet is a dog. The study first established baseline health and socio-economic information on more than 2,000 subjects in the city of Brno, Czech Republic, from January 2013 through Dec. 2014, follow up are schedule every five years until 2030. In the 2019 evaluation, the study looked at 1,769 subjects with no…

Making fun of Michele Bachmann, when NCCAM is zealously protected by Democrats, only tell us how you vote. In December of 2012 when various members of Congress ranted at the CDC about vaccines and autism, the only person that academics, 84% Democrat, was the one Republican who did it. What skeptic Dr. Steven Novella calls "Quakcademic Medicine", which is when academic institutions, which supposedly are not hijacked by greed and marketing and can engage in more pure thought, nonetheless engage in endorsements of science-y sounding mysticism . Even Mayo Clinic, which should know better,…