Slashdot Mirror

>Its starting to look like the increase is due to people living in an environment that is 'too clean'

Cite multiple peer reviewed studies in respectable journals or else stop spreading New Age myths on the internet. Thanks.

What, google too hard for you to use? There are literally hundreds of such studies with enough results to back my original statement.
How about from now on you fuck off with your self-aggrandizing judgmental imperative. Thanks.

Gibson, P.G., et al. Migration to a western country increases asthma symptoms but not eosinophilic airway inflammation. Pediatric Pulmonology, 2003; 36 (3):209-215

Marra F, Lynd L, Coombes M, et al. Does antibiotic exposure during infancy lead to development of asthma?: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Chest. 2006;129:610-618

Alm, J.S., et al. 1999. Atopy in children of families with anthroposophic lifestyle. Lancet 353(May 1):1485.

Oldstone MBA. Prevention of type 1 diabetes in nonobese diabetic mice by virusinfection. Science, 1988; 239: 500-2.

Braun-Fahrlander, C.H., et al. 1999. Prevalence of hay fever and allergic sensitization in farmer's children and their peers living in the same rural community. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Allergy 29(January):28.

Farooqi, I.S., and J.M. Hopkin. 1998. Early childhood infection and atopic disorder. Thorax 53(November):927.

Kramer, U., et al. 1999. Age of entry to day nursery and allergy in later childhood. Lancet 353(Feb. 6).

>Its starting to look like the increase is due to people living in an environment that is 'too clean'

Cite multiple peer reviewed studies in respectable journals or else stop spreading New Age myths on the internet. Thanks.

What, google too hard for you to use? There are literally hundreds of such studies with enough results to back my original statement.
How about from now on you fuck off with your self-aggrandizing judgmental imperative. Thanks.

Gibson, P.G., et al. Migration to a western country increases asthma symptoms but not eosinophilic airway inflammation. Pediatric Pulmonology, 2003; 36 (3):209-215

Marra F, Lynd L, Coombes M, et al. Does antibiotic exposure during infancy lead to development of asthma?: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Chest. 2006;129:610-618

Alm, J.S., et al. 1999. Atopy in children of families with anthroposophic lifestyle. Lancet 353(May 1):1485.

Oldstone MBA. Prevention of type 1 diabetes in nonobese diabetic mice by virusinfection. Science, 1988; 239: 500-2.

Braun-Fahrlander, C.H., et al. 1999. Prevalence of hay fever and allergic sensitization in farmer's children and their peers living in the same rural community. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Allergy 29(January):28.

Farooqi, I.S., and J.M. Hopkin. 1998. Early childhood infection and atopic disorder. Thorax 53(November):927.

Kramer, U., et al. 1999. Age of entry to day nursery and allergy in later childhood. Lancet 353(Feb. 6).

I listen to the following podcasts that cover technical subjects and are the best I've found. The Naked Scientists provide the best overall coverage in hour-long sessions. Leoville's Futures in Biotech is very good in this cutting-edge field, but offers a limited number of entries. Perhaps more donations would enable the producer to do more. Microbeworld offers one-minute bites. Some of the leoville material that covers his radio call-in program last 2 hrs. Except for the FIB, all of his stuff is electronics-related (computers--Mac and Windows --, computer security, cell phones, digital cameras, and home theater). Some casts involve panels and guests. I've not included several more he does relating to food and children. Time compression software or other enhanced playback options are helpful with it as well as the other items if your time is limited.The Lancet offers several categories of current medical info. Podnuts is a computer repair discussion. Ziepod on Vista Home Premium works well to download all new episodes once a week. http://leoville.tv/podcasts/twit.xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/microbeworld http://www.theworld.org/rss/tech.xml http://leoville.tv/podcasts/kfi.xml http://leoville.tv/podcasts/fib.xml http://www.thenakedscientists.com/naked_scientists_podcast.xml http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/quirksaio.xml http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/docarchive/rss.xml http://leoville.tv/podcasts/leo.xml http://podcast.thelancet.com/laneur.xml http://podcast.thelancet.com/lancet.xml http://podcast.thelancet.com/laninf.xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/podnutz http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/mh/rss.xml

I listen to the following podcasts that cover technical subjects and are the best I've found. The Naked Scientists provide the best overall coverage in hour-long sessions. Leoville's Futures in Biotech is very good in this cutting-edge field, but offers a limited number of entries. Perhaps more donations would enable the producer to do more. Microbeworld offers one-minute bites. Some of the leoville material that covers his radio call-in program last 2 hrs. Except for the FIB, all of his stuff is electronics-related (computers--Mac and Windows --, computer security, cell phones, digital cameras, and home theater). Some casts involve panels and guests. I've not included several more he does relating to food and children. Time compression software or other enhanced playback options are helpful with it as well as the other items if your time is limited.The Lancet offers several categories of current medical info. Podnuts is a computer repair discussion. Ziepod on Vista Home Premium works well to download all new episodes once a week. http://leoville.tv/podcasts/twit.xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/microbeworld http://www.theworld.org/rss/tech.xml http://leoville.tv/podcasts/kfi.xml http://leoville.tv/podcasts/fib.xml http://www.thenakedscientists.com/naked_scientists_podcast.xml http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/quirksaio.xml http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/docarchive/rss.xml http://leoville.tv/podcasts/leo.xml http://podcast.thelancet.com/laneur.xml http://podcast.thelancet.com/lancet.xml http://podcast.thelancet.com/laninf.xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/podnutz http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/mh/rss.xml

I listen to the following podcasts that cover technical subjects and are the best I've found. The Naked Scientists provide the best overall coverage in hour-long sessions. Leoville's Futures in Biotech is very good in this cutting-edge field, but offers a limited number of entries. Perhaps more donations would enable the producer to do more. Microbeworld offers one-minute bites. Some of the leoville material that covers his radio call-in program last 2 hrs. Except for the FIB, all of his stuff is electronics-related (computers--Mac and Windows --, computer security, cell phones, digital cameras, and home theater). Some casts involve panels and guests. I've not included several more he does relating to food and children. Time compression software or other enhanced playback options are helpful with it as well as the other items if your time is limited.The Lancet offers several categories of current medical info. Podnuts is a computer repair discussion. Ziepod on Vista Home Premium works well to download all new episodes once a week. http://leoville.tv/podcasts/twit.xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/microbeworld http://www.theworld.org/rss/tech.xml http://leoville.tv/podcasts/kfi.xml http://leoville.tv/podcasts/fib.xml http://www.thenakedscientists.com/naked_scientists_podcast.xml http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/quirksaio.xml http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/docarchive/rss.xml http://leoville.tv/podcasts/leo.xml http://podcast.thelancet.com/laneur.xml http://podcast.thelancet.com/lancet.xml http://podcast.thelancet.com/laninf.xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/podnutz http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/mh/rss.xml

There is the Lancet source.

> See Correlation does not imply causation. Not a wonder why biologists aren't logicians.

Note that I said "supports the assertion", not implying any kind of proof. Science isn't about absolute proofs, but instead is about formulating and testing theories that explain evidence. If it was a few hundred or thousand genes, maybe it wouldn't be worth noting, but this is millions of genes predicted to be found many years ago by biologists who noted the "missing" chromosome in humans and determined, based on evolutionary theory, that we would eventually find out where two chromosomes merged. Lo and behold, we found the exact merging location a couple of years ago. Such is the predictive power of good scientific theories. Good predictions aren't proof, but they certainly are evidence.

> Citing YouTube? That's classic. The wustl.edu reference is better ... Why don't you try to find a few papers from Google Scholar?

You are attacking the location of the material rather than the content. In case you didn't follow the link, it is a video of Ken Miller, who is a well-respected (Christian) biologist at Brown. It is a short lecture designed to be comprehensible to anyone about the merging process of human chromosome 2, but if you prefer technical details here is the original research for you including a link form Google scholar:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v434/n7034/full/nature03466.html
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=6874304214138842665

This paper was written by over 100 scientists collaborating at ~10 research institutions, peer reviewed, and accepted in one of the most respected science journals on the planet.

Maybe you think that genetic mutations can only result in less-adapted organisms. Though most mutations are either benign or harmful, some definitely are helpful to the organism, but often in complex ways that involve tradeoffs. For example, many Mediterranean and African people have genes that that give them resistance to malaria, but the downside is that same genetic gene also makes sickle cell disease more common, so there is a reason such a mutation is not as common in areas where malaria was not as serious a problem. For more information, see here:
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673602082739/abstract
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?&cluster=7405924406367694750

Sarver Heart Center

Lancet article (login required)

Here, have as many sources as you want.

Lancet's PDF here and the Wikipedia summary (including criticism) here.

Yes they have: http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/ lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf

People != Civilians.

Research published in The Lancet estimates that the war caused an extra 98,000 deaths in 2003.

If you're going to compare to the EU, let's go all the way. The EU has a declining birthrate and a large number of people on the verge of retirement. Their socialist systems will implode under their own weight.

The same is being said about our Social Security system, which btw, is the largest socialist program that is not identified as a socialist program. Socialism in the US?! Never!!

Let's also mention military might. The EU spends about $0.35/year on their military budget, and that's why when some asshole in Absurdistan starts massacring people, the EU sends a platoon of potato peelers and the US sends 20 battallions of armed and trained Marines.

I'd rather we followed the prime directive. We don't. But despite spending almost as much as the rest of the world does on military, we don't have a stellar record of policing the world.

I don't remember any of our marines showing up when Pol Pot butchered a million (give or take a few hundred thousand) Cambodians. Or when Idi Amin "Dada" wiped out half a million of his subjects. Where exactly where our marines when Juvénal Habyarimana was waging a genocidal war against the Tutsis? (Of course, after his death another 800,000 were slaughtered, so can't directly credit him with every death.) BTW, it was the French who stepped in to bring a fragile "peace" (a little too late for all the dead), but our marines were quite conspicuous by their absence during all this turmoil. Did our marines show up when Augusto Pinochet was busy imprisoning, torturing and executing 30,000 Chileans?

So yes, we send our Marines only to the Absurdistans that happen to have oil. See how our marines took care of the "Butcher of Baghdad"; but let us not dampen our euphoria by also mentioning the 17,500 to 100,000 we have managed to wipe out in the process of deposing Saddam Hussein.

BTW, it is not as if the EU is stingy when it comes to spending money on their military. France, Germany, the UK, and Italy are 4 of the top 7 countries when it comes to the military expenditures. France, Norway, Greece, UK, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland, Finland, all make it to the top 25 Military Expenditures per capita.

The EU socialist-lite system works because it depends on the charity of the American military.

For all the money we are pouring into the military complex, we'd better believe that we are doing it for charity, or we'll have to start asking some really disturbing questions. The EU may or may not collapse under the weight of their socialist systems. But one thing is certain - if current levels of military expenditures continue and 'boomers start to retire in 2010, then by 2015 the US budget will have little else to spend on other than the Defence, Soc. Sec, and medicare. No wriggle room.

By 2025 the proverbial shit will hit the fan. Don't take my or anyone else's word for it (such as the NYTimes, WashingtonPost or for that matter

What is your source for the 100,000+ killed figure?

Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey, Les Roberts, Riyadh Lafta, Richard Garfield, Jamal Khudhairi, Gilbert Burnham, the Lancet, Volume 364 Issue 9448 Page 1857

Could you be more specific?

Are you talking about the 1,000,000+ casualties when Saddam invaded Iran in 1980?

Or are you talking about the 300,000-400,000 casualties of Saddam's war on the Iraqi people?

Or are you talking about the 20,000 - 35,000 casualties when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990?

Or are you talking about the the 14,000 - 17,000 counted at Iraqibodycount which is a one time cost to stop Saddams murderous regime?

Or are you talking about the ... "creative" numbers in that now famous Lancet article? It is really amazing. The United States has a mortality rate of 8.5/1,000 whereas they found Iraq had a mortality rate of 5/1,000 before the war (p. 4, results) which they used to "calculate" a total of 8,000 to 194,000 excess deaths with the "most likely" value of 98,000. (Check out those confidence intervals.) Some find those numbers fishy, or simply unrealistic.

Do you care about the millions that Saddam killed? If so, don't worry, he won't be killing anymore.

A report published in The Lancet Medical Journal (although the link seems to be down at the moment) authored by researchers from John Hopkins University, Columbia University, and some University in Bagdhad. Even if the numbers are half of that, its pretty disturbing.

Hundreds of thousands...LOL. Where do you get your numbers, Michael Moore?

No, the figures come from the well respected medical journal The Lancet

Here is the article

nice rant.
may I add my own?
Bush's Electoral Math:
4 years of Bush
- 100,000 dead Iraqi *civilians* and counting
- 1,000 US soldiers and counting
- 2,752 dead US civilians
- 2 World Trade Center Towers
- some civil liberties
+ 0 WMD
+ 0 Osama Bin Laden
+ 1 Saddam Hussein (but he wasn't hiding WMD, he was just being an evil dictator)
+ a record-setting deficit
- tax cuts
=
4 more years of Bush

I can do the math. All that lovely stuff in the middle adds up to zero for more than 50% of the USofA, which means a few tax cuts balances horrible atrocities and illegally invading a sovereign nation which had nothing *whatsoever* to do with the World Trade Center destruction.
Yes, my fellow Americans have been brainwashed apparently. Time to start dishing out some nasty liberalism. Enough of the make nice social disapproval. I want blood on the floor of the House every time the Republicans try to cut taxes for the rich, increase defense spending, funnel through Patriot Acts, and so on. The Democrats in offics have nothing to lose, so my Senators (yay Barbara Boxer!) had better start throwing themselves in front of this trainwreck. Sadly, my representative is a Red-neck.

So called "precision" munitions, when used in large numbers in densely populated urban areas (Baghdad, Fallujah) cease to be precise, and become instead insicriminate killers of tens of thousands of innocent civilians.

The respected medical journal The Lancet has an article on this which concludes that as many as100000 civilians have been killed since the US led invasion began.

Your argument amounts to saying "we know we're killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, but it's for their own good."

No, the 100,000 figure was based on research published by a peer-reviewed medical journal, and represents excess deaths in the period after the war began compared with the 14.6 months immediately before (i.e. whilst Saddam, his sons and cronies were still in power, and presumably, still practicing their favourite hobbies).

The problem with people like you is that you take rhetoric to be fact, without doing any research yourself.

This is an outright fabrication

No, this is the result of a peer-reviewed scientific study by the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, published in The Lancet.

Deaths were estimated at 98,000, but Slate points out that the 95% confidence interval on this estimate is 8,000-194,000 deaths. In other words, they are 95% sure that the true number of dead lies in this range. This estimate excludes surveys in Fallujah.

Not exactly precision estimates, you'll notice. The other critical thing pointed out by the Slate article is that this calculation tries to get at the number of deaths due to the invasion by factoring out the normal death rate. However, the Lancet study may have significantly underestimated the average Iraqi's chances of death before the invasion. For instance, if I say that 5 people would have died without the invasion, and we know that 10 people died, we know the invasion killed 5 people. BUT if my estimates says that 7 people would have died without the invasion and 10 died after an invasion, then the invasion has only killed 3 people.

Based on media reports, iraqbodycount.net estimates the (reported) deaths at 14181-16312. It is probably much higher than that, unless the media is doing a great job getting out there and reporting all the deaths. So who knows. It is probably higher than 15,000. Off by a factor of two, maybe at 30,000? Unfortunately its just about impossible to know.

It's still a tragedy regardless.

...and, despite what the powers-that-be would like you to believe, most were probably not organised by a certain Evil Genius lurking in a cave somewhere in central Asia, despite some superficial similarities in their respective declared aims.

In other news, The Lancet reckons there have been about 100,000 extra civilian deaths in Iraq since the war of 2003. Still, better them than us, right? Right?!

A 1996 poll of 1,000 adults found that 79% believed that spiritual faith can help people recover from disease [McNichol T. The new faith in medicine. USA Today, April 7, 1996, p 4.]. This idea is also popular among physicians. Although many studies have found associations between various measures of religiosity and health, no well-designed study has demonstrated that religious beliefs or prayer actually benefit health [Sloan RP, Bagiella E, Powell T. Religion, spirituality and medicine. Lancet 353:664-667, 1999. The full text of this article can be accessed online by registering at the Lancet Web site and going to the contents page of the Feb 20th issue.]. In fact, one well-designed study found just the opposite. The study involved patients whose progress was followed for nine months after discharge from a British hospital. They evaluated the outpatient records and the responses of 189 patients to questionnaires. the researchers concluded that the health status of patients with stronger spiritual beliefs were more than twice as likely to be unimproved or worse [King M, Speck P, Thomas A. The effect of spiritual beliefs on outcome from illness. Social Science & Medicine 48:1291-1299, 1999.]. Although some studies have found that churchgoers tend to be healthier and to live longer than nonchurchgoers, church attendance itself is unlikely to be responsible for the difference [Gorski T. Should religion and spiritual concerns be more influential in health care? No. Priorities 12(1):23-26, 41, 2000.]. [context]

--
Stephen Barrett, M.D.

To put a couple of things straight first. Professor Wickramasinghe hasn't said that SARS comes from space. In the Lancet letter (free reg required), he says "With respect to the SARS outbreak, a prima facie case for a possible space incidence can already be made". Note the word "possible". Note the words "prima facie" (roughly="sufficient to warrant further investigation").

This isn't some crackpot who's just heard of SARS, can't understand epidemiology and therefore thinks it must have come from outer space without thinking things through. Along with Fred Hoyle, he's long been a proponent of panspermia - the theory that life originated in space, rather than on Earth.

There is plentiful evidence of complex organic molecules in cometary and interstellar material. The environment on periodically warmed comets is every bit as suitable for the generation of life as the alternative theory of the primordial soup. Organic compounds, quite tightly concentrated, intermittent energy, water. The theory is that life on Earth originated Out There, so it would be no surprise that DNA/RNA from space would fit earthly organisms - they share the same origins.

In his letter, Prof. Wickramasinghe estimates that "a tonne of bacterial material falls to Earth from space daily, which translates into some 10^19 bacteria, or 20 000 bacteria per square metre of the Earth's surface". It would be surprising if none of these found a viable host. On the rare occasion that there is a good match, a pandemic could result. We don't know if SARS started this way or not.

Note that meteors aren't involved. Nothing gets burned up on re-entry. The stuff just drifts in.

I don't know what the answer is, but I know that it's not as clear cut as some would like to think. It's just possible that data from Beagle2 this Christmas might help shed a little more light.

I didn't see confirmation of the story though...

Just in case anyone's tempted to write it off as an urban myth, here is a link to the original report in The Lancet, a very well-respected UK medical journal. (Free reg. reqd.)

Ouch.

I didn't see confirmation of the story though...

Just in case anyone's tempted to write it off as an urban myth, here is a link to the original report in The Lancet, a very well-respected UK medical journal. (Free reg. reqd.)

Ouch.

If you have access to a good newsagent or a University library (or any reasonably sized metropolitan library I suppose) track down their New Scientist collection. There is an article in the 10th of April issue covering RSI from a slightly different angle than normal. There's an interesting theory that RSI is not caused by physical damage to the wrists/hands, but rather caused by blurring of the brain's distinctions between the fine motor control areas for the hands.

The strain is in the brain Too much typing can leave you in agony. But rather than damaged muscles or tendons being to blame for RSI, says Bob Holmes, things might be going wrong in the brain

It seems that when you spend a lot of time moving your fingers in very precise, accurate ways your brain can blur them together: you lose fine control over time. This effect has been shown to take place in monkeys made to earn food by `typing' (aside: presumably they put them on Usenet...), and there seems to be some evidence of it occuring in humans. Particularly susceptible, as you might expect, are keyboard operators and musicians.

There is a tiny tidbit from some while ago on the New Scientist web site -- unfortunately they don't appear to have put up the article I'm talking about. If anyone's sufficiently interested I daresay I could type in a couple of short extracts for review.

Here are a couple of links which you might find interesting (tracked down from the broken NS links...):

• Repetitive Motion Injuries--Annual Reviews of Medicine (1995):

  Repetitive motion injuries have presented clinicians with a significant challenge over the past two and a half decades. Acceptable treatment of inflammatory disorders is well established, but compressive neuropathies and nonspecific complaints of numbness, tingling, and discomfort in the upper extremity present vexing dilemmas. Current research and experience point to multilevel problems, including posturally induced muscular imbalance. Although surgical solutions to these problems are sometimes indicated, conservative approaches successfully treat many individuals and have narrowed the scope and indications for surgical intervention. These approaches include ergonomic changes at the workstation, postural changes, and muscle stretching and strengthening to correct imbalance.

• Stretching and Flexibility -- Everything you never wanted to know. Apparently this is a frequently recommended treatment.
• The Lancet also has a couple of hits for `RSI' and `repetitive strain': the usal username/password will get you the `free' version of the site.