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Rise in TB Is Linked to Loans From I.M.F.
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR, The New York Times, July 22, 2008
The rapid rise in tuberculosis cases in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is strongly associated with the receipt of loans from the International Monetary Fund, a new study has found.
Critics of the fund have suggested that its financial requirements lead governments to reduce spending on health care to qualify for loans. This, the authors say, helps explain the connection.
The fund strongly disputes the finding, saying the former communist countries would be much worse off without the loans.
“Tuberculosis is a disease that takes time to develop,” said William Murray, a spokesman for the fund, “so presumably the increase in mortality rates must be linked to something that happened earlier than I.M.F. funding. This is just phony science.”
The researchers studied health records in 21 countries and found that obtaining an I.M.F. loan was associated with a 13.9 percent increase in new cases of tuberculosis each year, a 13.3 percent increase in the number of people living with the disease and a 16.6 percent increase in the number of tuberculosis deaths.
The study, being published online Tuesday in the journal PLoS Medicine, statistically controlled for numerous other factors that affect tuberculosis rates, including the prevalence of AIDS, inflation rates, urbanization, unemployment rates, the age of the population and improved surveillance.
The lead author, David Stuckler, a research associate at Cambridge University, defended the study against the fund’s criticisms, noting that the researchers considered whether increased mortality might have led to more loans rather than the other way around.
Instead, they found that the increase in tuberculosis mortality followed the lending; each 1 percent increase in credit was associated with a 0.9 percent increase in mortality. And when a country left an I.M.F. loan program, mortality rates dropped by an average of 31 percent.
“When you have one correlation, you raise an eyebrow,” Mr. Stuckler said. “But when you have more than 20 correlations pointing in the same direction, you start building a strong case for causality.”
Salmonella Strain in Jalapeños Is a Match
By BINA VENKATARAMAN, The New York Times, July 22, 2008
Federal food officials have matched a bacterial strain found on fresh jalapeños in a Texas distribution plant with the strain responsible for what has become the nation’s largest food-borne outbreak in the past decade.
The strain found on the jalapeños, Salmonella Saintpaul, was a genetic match to the strain found in lab tests of many of the 1,251 people who have become sick from salmonella poisoning over the past three months.
It was the first time officials had found the strain on fresh produce. But the discovery still does not tell investigators whether the contamination occurred in Mexico, where the peppers were grown, or at the distribution center in McAllen, Tex. The contamination might have also occurred somewhere in between, Dr. David Acheson of the Food and Drug Administration said Monday in a conference call with reporters.
The agency is warning consumers not to eat fresh jalapeño peppers or foods containing them. The small-scale distribution plant, Agricola Zaragoza, initiated a recall of jalapeños, said Dr. Acheson, the associate commissioner of foods for the agency. But it is unlikely that the recall will account for all contaminated produce on the market because the McAllen distribution network was so small.
Dr. Robert Tauxe of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the salmonella outbreak, which caused at least 229 people to be hospitalized, was continuing.
“We are still getting new cases reported, and do not believe that it has ended at this point,” he said. On Thursday, the F.D.A. lifted its six-week warning to consumers to avoid certain raw tomatoes, which had been linked to the outbreak after initial epidemiological studies. Michael Hansen, senior scientist for Consumers Union, said the agency did “the precautionary thing” by warning consumers not to eat those tomatoes.
Several other food safety experts said the lag in finding the source of the contamination reflected the government and the industry’s weak ability to track the source of problems in the nation’s food supply.
“The recent situation shows that we have deficiencies in the system,” said Michael Doyle, the director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia. “My experience with the industry is that in part, certain segments of the industry would rather not have food trace-back.”
David A. Kessler, an F.D.A. commissioner in the 1990s, said “the agency needs to put the industry on notice that it has to develop a full trace-back system by a specific date.”
He added: “There’s always going to be concern about costs to the industry. But what we’ve seen is that the cost to the industry that consumers are already bearing would make an investment in full traceability have a significant payback.”
Vital Signs: Risks: High PCB Levels, Fewer Births of Boys
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR, The New York Times, July 22, 2008
Women exposed to high levels of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, are significantly less likely to give birth to boys, according to a new study.
PCBs, which have been associated with various negative health effects, have been banned in the United States since 1977, but they persist in meats, eggs, dairy products and fish. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says everyone has detectable levels of the chemicals.
Researchers studied stored blood from 399 women who gave birth to single children from April 1964 to April 1967. After adjusting for age, race and other factors, they found that women in the 90th percentile for PCB blood levels were 33 percent less likely to have a boy than women in the 10th percentile.
The paper appeared online July 15 in Environmental Health.
“Most people’s levels of PCBs are considerably lower today than they were when these samples were taken,” said Irva Hertz-Picciotto, the lead author and a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Davis. “The bigger significance of the paper is that compounds similar to PCBs are present in flame retardants used in many products today, and are increasing at a rapid rate.
“We should be concerned and looking at some of these similar chemicals,” Dr. Hertz-Picciotto added.
Climate Film Draws a Rebuke
By ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times, July 22, 2008
A controversial British documentary called “The Great Global Warming Swindle” unfairly portrays several scientists and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Britain’s television watchdog agency ruled on Monday.
The agency, the Office of Communication, issued a report rebuking Channel 4 in Britain, which broadcast “Swindle” last year. But the report said the film, while “intemperate” in its characterizations of the dominant scientific view that humans are the main force in warming the planet, “did not materially mislead the audience so as to cause harm or offense.”
The documentary, from the independent filmmaker Martin Durkin, has been seen worldwide on DVD and the Internet. It focuses on a small group of scientists who reject the idea that human-caused warming poses big dangers.
Since its release, the film has been widely circulated by opponents of restrictions on greenhouse gases and attacked by scientific groups and campaigners seeking action to curb such emissions. Criticism has been particularly sharp over the film’s assertions that the depiction of consensus on human-caused warming is a willful deception. In one particularly jarring line, a narrator says: “Everywhere you are told that man-made climate change is proved beyond doubt. But you are being told lies.”
While criticizing such statements, the agency said that “Swindle” was adequately framed as a polemic and that so many programs had focused on the dominant scientific views of global warming that the film had a place on television. Channel 4 must broadcast the results of the inquiry, which was prompted by complaints from scientists and viewers.
This conclusion was criticized by several scientists, including Carl Wunsch, an ocean and climate expert at M.I.T. Dr. Wunsch appeared in the film and later said his comments were taken out of context and made him appear to question the seriousness of human-driven warming.
The report upheld his complaint that he was treated unfairly, but he said the agency did not go far enough because the film clearly misled the public in harmful ways. “ ‘Swindle’ raises the noise level and politicizes an extremely complicated science problem without enlightening anyone,” he said in an e-mail message. “A film claiming to be a science documentary that is really a nonscientific political tract is poisonous.”
Mr. Durkin was on vacation and not available for comment, his office said. Executives at Channel 4 said they accepted the findings and defended their right to show the film.
Hubble images show that the Baby Red Spot on Jupiter, at left in first frame, has moved and seems to have been caught up in the Great Red Spot.
Observatory: On Jupiter, a Battle of the Red Spots, With the Baby Losing
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, July 22, 2008
Can a planet change its spots? Jupiter, where spots are really just large storms, seems to be in the process of doing so.
A small red spot that formed on the surface this year appears to have met its match in the Great Red Spot. Images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope on June 28 and July 8 show that the small spot, which has the misfortune to lie at the same latitude as the great one, has moved from the west side of the giant to the east side.
But more than that, the small spot, known informally as Baby Red Spot, seems to have gotten caught in the maelstrom that is the great spot (which is about 18,000 miles wide and packs winds up to about 400 miles per hour). Baby Red appears to be coming apart and is definitely turning paler.
Spots on Jupiter are thought to turn red when the winds become so powerful that they draw certain gases from deep in the atmosphere that change color when exposed to sunlight. So if Baby Red is losing its color, that probably means its winds are diminishing, its energy being absorbed by the giant spot. Subsuming smaller spots may be one way the great one persists — it has been around for centuries, at least.
A medium-size spot, officially known as Oval BA but often called Red Spot Jr., is also in the images, south of the giant. It has been going strong since 2000 and turned red about two years ago. It is far enough south of the giant to be unaffected by it — for now.
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Date: 2008-07-22 01:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-22 05:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-22 07:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-22 01:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-22 07:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-22 08:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-23 11:27 pm (UTC)PCBs
Date: 2008-07-22 06:55 pm (UTC)1) Gender is not determined by the woman's contribution. All those queens who lost their heads or their titles for not producing boys were whacked for naught.
2) 1964 to 1967? Um, this seems a bit out of date. Sure, I guess examining the raw data isn't really time-dependent, but there were also lots of other environmental factors present in the 60s that could have contributed to this type of result.
In fact, with women barely getting "real" jobs at that time, my gut says it's much more likely that the men were being exposed to something or some combination of things at work that harmed their Y chromosome-carrying little buddies. And then they brought them home to their women and failed to pass them on, or the Ys failed to win their races. Neither of which is directly linked to the level of PCBs in the woman.
3) What about the level of PCBs in the male contributor? What if you have to have a high level in both to get that drop in the boy birth rate? What happens when the male has a high level but the woman does not?
4) Finally, just like the arsenic and lead of old, we've always had to deal with some weird background level of toxin. The toxins change with our changing circumstances, but over the long run, it all seems to dampen out. Benzene is considered a major culprit in MDS, and MDS tends to show up in the above 70 crowd unless someone was exposed to Benzene or chemotherapies at a young age. MDS has been on the rise lately. Check out the age group - people who were working entry level jobs in the 60s-70s are now being diagnosed with MDS. But with the advent of more chemical awareness/avoidance that came later in the 70s, I'm expecting the occurrences to taper down to where the cause becomes almost always directly attributable to medical therapies in younger people.
To sum up, either the article was too high level, or the researchers were oversimplifying.
Re: PCBs
Date: 2008-07-22 07:08 pm (UTC)I also don't think they are claiming that these women were exposed at work. PCBs get into the water, the environment, the air, etc.
Re: PCBs
Date: 2008-07-23 02:47 am (UTC)Re: PCBs
Date: 2008-07-23 12:26 pm (UTC)Re: PCBs
Date: 2008-07-23 02:05 pm (UTC)Re: PCBs
Date: 2008-07-23 02:02 pm (UTC)And no, I'm not doubting that PCBs have an adverse impact on people - I'm actually a female that's had the opportunity to be exposed to more than the average person, but all that was post-partum for me.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-22 08:21 pm (UTC)