Posts by dyan campbell
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
My apologies for turning this conversation back to genetic engineering, but this is the first chance I've had to respond.
Bart rephrased what I said as
If I can be forgiven for simplifying what you are saying is,
We don't know what we don't know.
And from that you are saying it may be dangerous so we shouldn't do it.What I said originally was:
The risks that are posed by the introduction of species that have entirely new gene sequences - and the implications of that vertical transmission - are not yet understood by anyone Bart, certainly not by those who work in the sole field of biotechnology.
You completely misunderstood what I wrote.
Far from saying "it may be dangerous and we shouldn't do it" I am very much in support of use of GM technology in medicine and the pursuit of GM science. What I object to is the lack of independent scientific research in GM. Companies like Monsanto using the word "science" when they really mean "technology" or "industry".
Of course there is consultation among researchers from various fields - and the message from every discipline - epigenetics, bioinformatics, epidemiology just to name three of the literally dozens of different disciplines that have concerns about GM - the message is "caution."
Molecular biology was a new, and single discipline in the 1950s. Now the field encompasses more than a dozen different specific disciplines - from computational molecular biology to bioinformatics. There is no kind of consultation that can make accurate predictions about anything. That's why we have computational molecular biologists and data mining - to give us probabilities .
Not predictions, you'll note.From just such a meeting:
"Kurland also chaired the last session entitled "Biotechnology, bio-industry, and bio-business". He introduced the subject by saying that the good, old fashioned "bottom up" planning and peer review in science was being replaced by "top down" control from government and industries. He called the new situation "command research" and deplored how science was now valued in political circles primarily as a means of accumulating wealth. Gone are the days of scientists being driven by pure desire to understand nature. Such lofty ideals are now regarded as naïve expressions of "mere curiousity", with no practical application. These comments were followed by two talks offering the industrial perspective. Friedrich von Bohlen described how the European biotech industry is lagging behind the US, and the necessity for competition, emphasizing that the only way for small companies in Europe to survive was to make deals and collaborations with bigger companies. His own company, LION Bioscence, Heidelberg, has already made fruitful alliances with Bayer and Celera. Manfred Kern, from Aventis CropScience, took up the issue of the world food situation with the question "How can we feed everyone and keep human dignity?" He went on to explain how biotech companies were concerned with increasing the food security margin for the future. At the moment, only 0.26% more food is being produced than is required on a global scale. He announced that companies now have the technology to support world food security and stressed the importance of keeping up with food demand as the world population increases. He also stated firmly that food distribution was not the concern of biotech companies. It was a little strange, in that case, that he opened his lecture with the question "how can we feed everyone". With 24,000 people dying of hunger every day in spite of the food security margin, world hunger is clearly a problem of distribution not production. To suggest that biotech companies will feed the world when they state categorically that food distribution is not their concern, was very misleading."
"The final talk in this section was from Julian Davies and was entitled "Antibiotics for the 21st Century". Davies highlighted the desperate problem of acquired antibiotic resistance in bacteria due to their overuse. He presented this as an illustration of what happens when society adopts a potentially beneficial discovery with cavalier enthusiasm, without realizing that there may be unforeseen repercussions. In this case, bacteria responded to the millions of metric tons of antibiotics that were thrown into the biosphere by becoming resistant to them. The situation is now irreversible because as well as gaining genetic information for antibiotic resistance, bacteria acquired compensatory genes which stabilized their new phenotypes. I asked Davies if he thought the removal of all antibiotics could change the current situation and he replied that certain experiments with Klebsiella showed that, though resistance would decrease, it would still remain at a higher level than before. What a marvellous example of natural selection due to human activity! In fact already in 1946, Alexander Fleming warned that we should be careful not to overuse antibiotics because of the possibility of acquired resistance but no one could have predicted either its extent nor its stability in the year 2000. It makes one wonder what the comparable consequences of the introduction of GMOs might be?"
We don't know what effect GM will have in generations to come. Look at the field of epigenetics. Could anyone have anticipated Prof. Barker's discovery that a person's maternal grandmother directly affects the health of descendants? It would have been dismissed as Lamarkian nonsense a generation ago, but there it is, as real as can be. It is the nature of science that we learn new things, and part of that progress involves unlearning what we once accepted as unassailable fact. GM has not been around long enough for us to predict the effects, much less assess them. -
But over the next 10 years you will see foods with altered nutritional content, anthocyanins, vitamins etc or reduced harmful compounds, reduced allergens or toxins. Foods that are higher quality at the supermarket because of improved shelf life or improved storage. And foods that are cheaper.
The risks that are posed by the introduction of species that have entirely new gene sequences - and the implications of that vertical transmission - are not yet understood by anyone Bart, certainly not by those who work in the sole field of biotechnology.
The nitrogen cycle that enables the rainforests to thrive depends on an intricate relationship between salmon, bears, ravens, flies and the sitka spruce was beyond the understanding of those working in forestry or fisheries. No single science was able to predict or intuit the crucial interdependence of those relationships. But interrupt just one element of that cycle and there goes your forest - and fisheries industries.
Likewise the introduction of cash crops as opposed to subsistence farming, and the clumsy attempt to eliminate malaria did not seem in any way likely to unleash a previously unknown haemorrhagic virus on the world, but that is exactly what happened in Machupo.
Canadian geneticist David Suzuki sums it up best:
"Perhaps the most frequently cited rationale to get on with genetic engineering as rapidly as possible goes like this: In order to avoid clearing more forests and draining wetlands to meet this need, proponents argue, the only option to protect nature and feed the masses is to increase yields per hectare through biotechnology.
"However, biotechnology is being driven by vast sums of speculative money. In order to justify those investments and to attract even more money, a product is needed. That's why so many companies have already foundered - they've failed to live up to the hype. The very survival of biotech companies depends on the expectation of profits from the company's products. Those products are made at enormous cost. But the people who are most desperately in need of food are also the
poorest. James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, claims that 1.3 billion people
exist on a dollar or less a day while three billion struggle on $2 or less daily. It would be a breathtaking reversal if free enterprise capitalists were suddenly overwhelmed with generosity and concern for those less well off and make GE products available at prices the needy can afford. Feeding the starving masses through biotech in the near future is a cruel hoax that cannot be taken seriously."To think that you can predict the outcome of the use of GE anywhere outside the lab is naive in the extreme. Again, Suzuki says it best:
" I have no doubt there will be important products that come out of genetic
engineering, but in the more distant future. It is the profit-driven rush to grow GE
organisms in the open where they may contaminate other species and to introduce new products into the market that is most disturbing. My major concerns are based on simple principles. Every scientist should understand that in any young, revolutionary discipline, most of the current ideas in the area are tentative and will fail to stand up to scrutiny over time. In other words, the bulk of the latest notions are wrong. This is by no means a knock on science, it is simply an acknowledgement that science progresses by demonstrating that current ideas are wrong or off the mark. The rush to exploit new products will be based on inaccurate hypotheses and questionable benefits could be downright dangerous. Reductionism, the focusing on parts with the goal of understanding the whole of a mechanistic universe, has been a productive methodological approach. Thus, scientists focus on a subatomic particle, an atom, a gene, cell or tissue, separate it from everything else, control everything impinging on that fragment, measure everything within it and thereby acquire profound insights - into that fragment. But physicists learned early in the last century that parts interact synergistically so that new properties emerge from their combination that could not be anticipated from their individual properties. After defining all of the physical properties of atomic hydrogen and atomic oxygen, physicists would be at a total loss to anticipate the properties when two atoms of hydrogen are combined with one oxygen to make a molecule of water. Biologists and doctors have yet to internalize that understanding."And quite apart from the arguments that GE is beneficial or profitable, as philosopher John Ralston Saul has pointed out, why should companies have the right to foist their products on customers who do not which to purchase them?
-
</quote>Although in a true pandemic situation, it might be a bit like trying to run through the rain and not get wet - some of the drops are going to miss, but even with an umbrella it's inevitable you'll get hit in the end.</quote>
Heh, that's a good way of summing it up.
One of the things that is worrying epidemiologists is the fact that the current strain of H1N1 (which is really a combo of porcine, avian and human viruses, not carried by pigs, so not swine flu at all) is showing swift and increasingly sturdy resistance to the antiviral most commonly used, and the more the antiviral is used, the more quickly the virus develops resistance. Surely we have learned something from the over-use of antibiotics down the ages?
High risk of resistant H1N1 flu if single antiviral prescribed,
-
That flu had only a less than 2 per cent case fatality rate, which is to say more than 98 per cent of the people who got sick with flu in 1918 survived. So you look at that figure, 100 million, and you realise, wow, that was just... That was just the tip of the iceberg of who got infected.
Laurie Garrett is the sort of journalist you want reporting on an event like this.
Laurie GarrettHer point that the 100 million people who died from the 1918 epidemic represents only a tiny fraction of those who became ill is exactly why the WHO is on such high alert. With most flu epidemics there have been previous epidemics of that specific virus, or an ancestor of that virus that is close enough that the human population has some kind of herd immunity.
Herd immunity is when a sufficient chunk of the population has immunity to the virus, letting it fizzle out in localised outbreaks. So if your kid comes home from daycare, where all the kids have a flu, there is a good chance one or both of the parents will have immunity to that virus, and not take it to work.
In the case of an entirely new virus like H1N1
not one single person has immunity to this, making the herd immunity zero. So in a typical season where maybe 1 in 6 people get the flu, this will be quite different, and the infection rate will probably more closely resemble the 1918 epidemic. Only a few who get it will die, but many, many more people will get if because the rate of infection will be so much higher.Also, as this new strain is just that - new - there are several variables to the emerging epidemic that are not known.
Incubation period: they think it is between 2 and 5 days. Possibly 7 days. Maybe longer. This is crucial to stopping the spread, and they don't know this yet.
One of the things that does not seem to be addressed by the ARPH here is the fact that all someone coming down with the flu is really very contagious about 18 to 24 hours before they show any symptoms at all.
Another thing yet to be determined is how long does someone stay infectious? Again, with regular flu viruses the adult patient is no longer infectious once they stop manifesting symptoms, but it's quite different in children. Children can remain infectious for many days (up to 25) past the disappearance of all symptoms.
With all flu epidemics there are usually quite marked seasonal fluctuations. So the flu season is worse during winter months, and then it tends to ebb away during spring and summer, then return the following fall/winter. Again, the WHO does not yet know whether this first epidemic is a milder strain of the one seen in Mexico, and if the expected re-emergence the next time around will be either a milder or more virulent strain.
But then I'm not a doctor and I don't have a whole degree in anything, I'm sure the experts have this covered. Mostly...
Congrats to the genius who told people with flu symptoms to go to the pharmacy in person and prove they are sick. Sheer genius. I told a virologist friend of mine back in Canada about this and she thought I was joking, so I sent her the NZ doctor article.
-
Three of 11 tests back, all positive, authorities therefore assume entire group is positive.
Why isn't the first immediate public health step in this epidemic the use of surgical masks? When my sister lived in Japan whenever anyone had a simple head cold they would wear a surgical mask out of courtesy. And the cold wouldn't spread - which is unheard of in any Western school setting.
There was a public campaign to get people to wear red socks to promote a yacht race, why on not get them to wear masks to prevent the day to day spread of this virus? This would be a good precaution, as the flu virus is most contagious before there are any symptoms at all. (18 - 24 hours before symptoms).
-
But surely they could spell Auckland correctly, and find out where the Waikato is !
Well, NZ's media are unable to identify the continent in which Mexico is located, and that should be a lot easier to find on a world map.
-
And if you had washed your card and hands before doing anything else you would have probably avoided it.
Excellent advice, and having some background in microbiology, I am usually more vigilant at hand washing. But I made the mistake of being polite rather than cautious, and in putting the contaminated card in my wallet and waiting until I'd got home to wash my hands, I contaminated everything I touched myself - and probably left a trail of viruses for everyone else...
Though it's impossible to tell if the doctor's receptionist was even the source of the infection, it's quite possible to have contracted the virus from many other places - the doctor who saw me might have been the source of infection, as flu is contagious for a time (about 18 - 24 hours) before any symptoms are seen at all. All it takes is someone talking within a metre or so of your face.
Most viruses including flu are transmitted by hand to mouth or hand to eye transfer from an infected person to an uninfected person. Aerosol infection is possible with flu but is the minor form of transmission.
Er, other way around.
Transmission: how do you catch it?
In most cases, the influenza virus is transmitted from infected people coughing and sneezing. Droplets can settle on the mucosal surfaces of the upper respiratory tracts of susceptible people who are nearby (close contact as defined by WHO is "approximately 1 m"). Transmission may also occur by direct contact such as skin-to-skin or by indirect contact with respiratory secretions, as when touching surfaces contaminated with influenza virus and then touching the eyes, nose or mouth.]]
-
The last place you want to go is to your local GP - one of the bloggers here on PA wrote a very funny and disturbingly true piece about getting sick every time he went to see his GP, how the office is a great big petrie dish of germs.
The last person to give me the flu was a receptionist at my doctor's office, who coughed wetly while processing my bill... covering her mouth with her hand that happened to be holding my credit card.
For a moment I hesitated between demanding and germ free ("wash your hands and wipe down that card with germicide before you hand it back to me!") and polite (smile and take put wet card back in my wallet). Unfortunately I chose the latter and was sick for a week.
-
And what of golliwogs, Dyan?
I only ever read about Golliwogs in English stories - I never heard of it except in Engish stories, ironic as it was an American doll.
Maybe it was because because of Canada's pride in the "Freedom Train"
Underground Railwayand the famous explorer
Sir James Douglasbut what eventually became called "political correctness" was rife in Canada by long before I was born. When I was little things had already become post-modern and ironic - I played in a teepee, had plastic tomahawks, bows and arrows, wore war-paint instead of a t-shirt in the summer. Actually I have a fringed buckskin jacket now, though I bought it at Neiman Marcus.
These won't link as they're from a legal PDF. please excuse the length, but it should give you an idea of what Canada's mindset was like in the 50s and 60s.
Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman. Published in 1899 and republished over the years ... Banned from Toronto public schools in 1956 The library moved it to a restricted area, available upon request.
The Georgia Straight was a hippie magazine, or "underground paper" as they used to be called in those days. Bob Geldof was a music reviewer for them in the 70s, but in the 1960s the Straight carried a lot of cartoons that were not allowed to be published in the US. They did a roaring trade in T-shirts of the comics, like Fat Freddy's Cat, Acid Man and The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Harold Head.
In October 1967, the City of Vancouver suspended the Georgia Straight's business license "for gross misconduct in selling issues at city schools", and because it was felt to be obscene. The business license was later reinstated. (The City Cannot Stifle Dissent, The Province 30 September 1967) -
And I think you're right about words/phrases being of a place and a time. I can't see that Eskimo pies or lollies are any different to the vast array of Maori kitsch that is now pretty collectable
Well, as I said on another thread in reply to a similar comment:
Can someone explain to me how the use of Eskimo in this context is offensive?
The word itself is offensive, and deeply so. That people will accept a word that describes their race does not mean the word is not racist in its origin, if not its intent.
The self-designation of the Eskimos living in northeastern Siberia is yuhyt or yupikhyt, but yupik is not widely spread.
The terms Eskimo and Asiatic Eskimo date from the end of the 19th century, and were borrowed from US researchers who had adopted the Algonkin name eskimatsik or askimeg meaning "eating raw meat'". The name spread and came into common use in the early 20th century.
"Coloured" and "Nigra" were both words that were considered polite through the 19th and 20th centuries, but this does not mean people are happy to accept these terms now.
Until the 1980s the term "cancer victim" was also happily used - until the term "cancer survivor" or "cancer patient" was adopted as it was finally recognised the previous term has a negative effect on the patient's sense of identity.
My Dad tells me that "Jelly Babies" used to only be licorice or chocolate, and were called 'Nigger Babies" (ten for one cent!) and he used to buy these when he was a child in the 1920s in Canada. To his recollection the name was changed to "Jelly Babies" around 1935 or so, but as he'd stopped buying penny candy by then, he's not sure. He does remember his parents were very disapproving of the term "nigger" and even at 6 or 7 he was quite conscious the name of the candy was unpleasant.
My oldest sister (born in 1946) can remember the same feeling about "Little Black Sambo" pancake syrup, which was removed from sale sometime in the 1950s. In my own childhood in the 1960s I remember Fritos Cornchips used to sell their product with a cartoon character called "The Frito Bandito" who was supposed to be Mexican - and that this was taken off the air due to pressure from Hispanic groups who found it offensive.Russell, I haven't seen "Eskimo Pies" sold in Canada, but that doesn't mean they don't exist, but to sell them would be to invite an ongoing battle. As I've said, racism is still alive and well in Canada.
The "Edmonton Eskimos" still play football, and they even trot out Inuit dancers before games, but they sure piss off a lot of people.So anyone for a handful of Nigger Babies?