Posts by linger
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Access: Zika and microcephaly: things to…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
spit-tweeting
is a way of transmitting communicable diseases.
(It's a celebrity! Get me outta here...) -
Access: Zika and microcephaly: things to…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
One graph on p329 of Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science vividly illustrates the harm of anti-vaccination conspiracy theories. Following the anti-MMR campaign (with wide and alarmist media coverage from 2001), Britain had a mumps epidemic starting in 2004, with reported cases in the tens of thousands. Goldacre reminds us that, before the MMR vaccination programme,
mumps was the commonest cause of viral meningitis, and one of the leading causes of hearing loss in children.
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Hard News: Helen Kelly's letter, in reply to Alfie,
[NORML and ALCP’s] noticeable absence from any important debate […] gives stoners a bad name.
Or it may be that both groups already have a bad enough name that attaching it to an important case would not necessarily be a positive.
(What's that you can smell? Uh, just a politically suspicious odour...) -
Hard News: Helen Kelly's letter, in reply to Russell Brown,
The “in conjunction with radiotherapy” part is a fairly important concession – because one thing that is quite well established is that marijuana can moderate negative side effects of conventional cancer therapies (e.g. pain and appetite loss). So marijuana may allow more aggressive chemo or radiation with greater chances of success; but that's different from claiming that marijuana by itself can cure cancer.
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The studies Zukerman was commenting on were more scattershot, looking at effects on various different types of cancer in mice. Doesn't rule out the possibility of some effect against some types of human cancer -- but doesn't support it at all either. (Also, behind that label "no consistent effect" is the fact that some of the mouse tumours showed faster growth...)
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Hard News: A cog in the Mediaworks machine, in reply to Steve Barnes,
The first-draft text would have been “reality TV drama queen”. And as for the intersection of “reality TV” and “integrity” … minimal at best, ne. In the unlikely event a resignation results, it’d be hard not to see this as a manufactured excuse to leave the ship before it reaches the seafloor.
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Hard News: Helen Kelly's letter, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
One episode of Wendy Zukerman’s Science Vs podcast surveyed the evidence for effectiveness of medical marijuana, including against epilepsy. (For pain relief, yes; as a cure for cancer, probably not -- no consistent effect in lab and no in vivo human study at all; for epilepsy, maybe, but not much evidence beyond anecdote. Zukerman deplored the lack of evidence resulting from political pressure against approval or funding of research into possible positive effects.)
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Access: Zika and microcephaly: things to…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Latest theory seems to be that the Zika virus is mutating so that it is taken up more easily by the mosquito and is more infectious to humans
Yes, comparing the Brazilian outbreak to its earlier spread through Asia (mild effects only; this is attributed, speculatively, to previous vaccination programmes against encephalitis in the region) and French Polynesia (associated with significantly higher than usual incidence of Guillain-Barre syndrome, and – on subsequent checking – slightly but nonsignificantly higher microcephaly). So there are other local factors in play, making direct comparison difficult to interpret.
The possibility of a Brazil-specific Zika mutation can’t yet be ruled out*, and seems plausible at first sight given the widespread use there of mutagenic pesticides banned elsewhere … but also, the evidence that microcephaly is linked to Zika in Brazil is still only circumstantial: the causal chain, if it exists, has not yet been established (as per Rosemary’s links above).(* It's something that should be relatively easy to check, though: presumably someone is now doing a gene sequence comparison that could establish whether this has actually occurred.)
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Hard News: Sunday People, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Leguminus in fact
… cf. the original story, featuring legumes that go all the way up.
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You’re right that chickenpox isn’t a perfect protection against shingles (if you get it before 18 months of age, or if your immune system is weakened, it can reactivate as shingles in later life), but they are caused by the same virus:
Shingles is due to a reactivation of varicella zoster virus (VZV) within a person’s body. Chickenpox is due to an initial infection with VZV