Category: Health and Medicine

I once met the inimitable Adrian Berry (he took me and my wife to a fantastic seafood restaurant in Boston when we were guests of the Telegraph at a AAAS meeting). Anyway, his blog is fascinating and his views and understanding of science are tipified by one of his articles that explains why fixing the Hubble Space Telescope with robots is “preposterous”: Baffled Computers.

At that meeting, I was trying to enthuse about chemical chirality and a feature article I’d written for the paper’s science editor Roger Highfield on enantiomerically selective chemical syntheses. Unfortunately (for me), Adrian didn’t mince words and put me on the spot to explain chirality and quickly knocked the wind out of my intricate and long-winded molecular explanation with one word – handedness. Which is chirality in a nutshell. For more on chirality check out my cyclo-octatetraene molecule of the month

It’s great that an old client of mine, The Scotsman, sees fit to cover recent happenings at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society regarding oysters and mussels being the food of love, but did they have to reinforce the negative image of chemistry by using the phrase “the unromantic-sounding annual meeting”? It’s bad enough that the chemophobes make constant digs at the subject, but those reporting on science don’t need to reinforce the stereotypes, surely. Anyway, something that might appear unromantic ain’t necessarily so…who knows what goes on in between lectures and behind those poster displays…

Sexism is thriving in Washington science apparently. According to an article in the Post referrring to recent research on Chromosome X: “She was slow to reveal her secrets, but the X chromosome has
now bared it all”. The article, Human X Chromosome Coded, itself is interesting, but why employ such a lewd opening…? It’s certainly got people talking about it on the science journalist discussion groups, maybe that was the aim, but surely there were stronger metaphors they could have used.

You can read a past article by David Bradley on women in science here. Hopefully, sexism is kept to a minimum in it!

Ever since I first brought to Western attention the problem of arsenic in groundwater on the Indian sub-continent through my article in The Guardian a decade ago, I’ve tried to keep up with developments. Now, researchers have discovered that the dried roots of the water hyacinth can remove arsenic from contaminated water. This could provide a simple, effective and, most importantly, cheap method of removing arsenic from the water supply in some of the poorest regions of the world.

One week they’re telling us that fidgety people stay slimmer because they burn 350 (k)cals a day more than the non-fidgets, then there are warnings that exercise might not work for some people, might cause some people more harm than good, and gym goers might even pick up MRSA from infected equipment. Then we hear, cutting calories is the way to live longer, but at the same time laziness might reduce stress on the heart, presumably only if you are not of a gloomy disposition and laugh a lot. It’s a confusing world, the world of medical advice. Check out the sciencebase medical newsfeed for the latest word on discoveries in medicine.

Check out the Significant Figures blog also run by David Bradley Science Writer. In it, he and colleagues name and shame the perpetrators of the misuses of significant figures, the metric system, and other old sawhorses of scientific pedantry. Today, something positive with a cynical twist regarding the Large Hardon Collider

UPDATE: The Sig Figs site has rebranded as a blogging, browsing, computing tips, tricks and hacks site, although you will still find the criticism of media innumeracy on sciencetext.com

Friends and I were discussing the claim that US consumers are about to lose the right to purchase vitamins, minerals, and dietary supplements, and one member of the clan pointed out a Snopes page that debunks the news as a hoax:

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Politics (Vitamin See). However, there is a claim from cynical skeptics that Snopes is not so righteous as it claims…

Anyway, while this CODEX issue might very well be an urban legend, I’m afraid the truth is that here in the EU, they really are intending to stifle vitamins and supplements. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing I don’t know. Personally, I try to avoid supplements, but I realise millions of people have a use for them.

There are, however, lots of problems with certain supplements (natural cadmium levels associated with zinc, mean that zinc tablets are high enough to cause problems with long-term use, mega-doses of any vitamin cause toxicity, calcium bodies (kidney
stones) for instance with vitamin C, many herbal remedies need not necessarily be contaminated to be harmful, although contamination of Chinese herbal medicines with mercury and arsenic have been reported on many separate occasions here and
in the US), and wasn’t there a fairly recent problem with a contaminant in taurine?

Long-term use of echinacea can cause health problems, while the use of St John’s Wort is contraindicated for several prescription medicines. Even drinking too much grapefruit juice can interfere deliteriously with liver enzymes and cause heart
problems for users of certain antibiotics and antihistamines.

Dose is always the issue in toxicity, whether that’s dose of the active or a contaminant.

There may be a place for vitamins and supplements, but perhaps it is about time these were brought under more strict regulations so that benefit-risk management (BRM) can be considered in a more logical manner than it currently is. BRM is after all at the top of all pharmaceutical company agendas and adverse drug reactions (ADRs) feature prominently in the minutes.

http://tinyurl.com/6da7l – PDF from EU on the directive set to be enforced 1 August 2005

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3831931.stm – WHO warnings on supplements and vitamins

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3443651.stm – EU rule change attacked.

According to many of the media reports of the death of Arthur Miller he apparently died of congenital heart failure. Wouldn’t “congenital” imply he had heart failure at birth? Presumably, they meant to say “congestive”, he may have had a congenital heart problem of course that led to heart failure in later life. Meanwhile, one of my chums on the NASW discussion lists explained that in the US, “congestive heart failure” is not an acceptable cause of death for entry on a death certificate. Maybe they should have just said he died of a “dodgy ticker”, makes more sense than congenital.