Natural Resources Defense Council hit by scientific criticism it overstates risk to public

The conventional wisdom is that environmental groups are  hip, on the side of the angels and, generally, are opposed only by fat, greedy capitalists, who cannot pass a pristine river or pastoral habitat without snickering – “ah, somewhere to dump the filth from my dark and lucrative satanic mill.”  So it apparently came as a bit of shock to Linda Greer Ph.D, a toxicologist who has spent 28 years advocating for environmental causes, that her colleagues in toxicology – even those working in academia – thought her employer, the Natural Resources Defense Council, was  polluting public debate with unwarranted panic over toxic chemicals.

Upon reading survey results which found that 79 percent of  toxicologists familiar with the NRDC’s work thought it overstated chemical risks, Dr. Greer stood up and said the survey should not have been made public. It was, she averred, “very unscientific” to present the results of a survey  before acceptance by a  peer reviewed publication -  a position, which if generally held,   would delay the publication of every electoral and political poll or opinion survey until their findings were long out of date. This is possibly why the National Council on Public Polls has never issued such a requirement.

When Dr. S. Robert Lichter, President of STATS, responded by pointing this out and  asking whether the NRDC ever released data before peer-review, Dr. Greer dodged  “we’re an advocacy group and we don’t hold ourselves out as scientific researchers.”  (Video of the exchange below).

Such is the logic of advocacy – we can say whatever we want about the science, but if scientists in a survey criticize those statements as inaccurate, they must be held to a higher (and in the case of survey data, erroneous) standard of accuracy before their criticism can be released to the public.  How… um… convenient.

Still, it was obvious why Dr. Greer went on the offensive,  the NRDC is urging the Obama administration to take action on a host of chemical threats; if it became widely-known on Capitol Hill that the NRDC, along with Greenpeace, Environmental Defense, and the Environmental Working Group, were widely regarded as inaccurate by scientists specializing in toxicology, their legislative recommendations might not seem so compelling.

Gloom is good if you’re gloomy: Sunshine brings suicidal blues

Yearning for those long days of summer? Think again. The results of a new study have shown that increased amounts of sunlight have an effect on suicide rates.

In a new study released by BMC Psychiatry, a team of scientists from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden examined all of the suicides in Greenland between 1968 and 2002. The team, led by Karin Sparring Bjorksten, found that 82 percent of the suicides occurred during the daylight months and the rate reached its peak in June. This pattern was particularly apparent in northern Greenland where there is constant daylight from April through August.

Count me in among people that assumed one’s level of happiness generally increases as summer draws closer. I don’t think I am the only one who anxiously awaits summer after months of cold temperatures and miserable weather. So what gives? As noted by Reuters:

“The researchers speculated that light-generated imbalances in serotonin — the brain chemical linked to mood –may lead to increased impulsiveness that in combination with a lack of sleep drives people to kill themselves.

“Light is just one of the many factors in the complex tragedy of suicide, but this study shows that there is a possible relationship between the two,” Bjorksten said.”

The researchers also mentioned insomnia caused by relentless daylight as a possible factor.

And it’s not just suicide; sunshine seems to bring out the homicidal maniacs too:
http://thestatsblog.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/springtime-for-homicidal-mania/

Dept of obvious research: don’t let kids with diarrhea into a swimming pool

In case you thought that “common sense” didn’t provide sufficient grounds for restraint, a new “scientific” study says that its really not safe for kids with diarrhea to plop into the local swimming pool – even if they’re wearing swim diapers.  Scientists from the University of North Carolina found that the diapers did not prevent cryptosporidium parasites from leaking out into the water.  They then did the math:

“When a fecal accident contains about a billion disease-causing Crypto oocysts, hundreds of millions of oocysts get into the water within minutes,” explains Dr. James Amburgey, the lead scientist in the study. “Swimmers only need to ingest about ten Crypto oocysts to become infected.”

The consequence? More diarrhea.

Scare-tistics and swine-fluence

Throughout the weekend, and now into Monday, CNN seems to have been turned into the influenza network, as “breaking” headlines highlighted soaring, leaping, and rising numbers of people with swine flu. But did banner breaking news headlines really tell us anything meaningful? A sixty five percent increase in cases sounds scary, but not when it refers to going from 331 to a grand total of 615 people across 15 countries. Using percentages like this creates a heightened sense of alarm, which – in tandem with the tens of thousands of news stories covering the story from every conceivable doomsday scenario – is driving people to seek out medical attention for every sniffle. Here’s a sampling of flu inflation from CNN:

Confirmed cases of H1N1 virus approach 1,000 – updated 4:12 a.m. EDT, Mon May 4, 2009
“The World Health Organization cautioned that the swine flu outbreak could gain momentum in the months ahead, despite claims by the health secretary of Mexico — the epicenter of the outbreak — that the virus “is in its declining phase.”

Confirmed cases of H1N1 virus approach 900updated 5:59 p.m. EDT, Sun May 3, 2009
“The World Health Organization cautioned that the swine flu outbreak could gain momentum in the months ahead, despite claims by the health secretary of Mexico — the epicenter of the outbreak — that the virus “is in its declining phase. “The number of confimed cases of the H1N1 virus continue to multiply. The outbreak is only about 10 days old, and even if the illness is declining, it could return, said Gregory Hartl, the WHO spokesman for epidemic and pandemic diseases, at a briefing Sunday.”

Swine flu count tops 800 – Posted: 02:09 PM ET, May 3rd, 2009
‘The number of known swine flu cases worldwide topped 800 on Sunday, with another 66 cases confirmed in the United States, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

CNN Saturday morning news, aired May 2, 2009 – 06:00   ET
“Overnight, there is a big jump in the number of swine-flu cases worldwide. The World Health Organization reports 615 people infected in 15 countries. That is a 67 percent increase from the number reported just yesterday.”

Number of swine flu cases soars – CNN Wire, Saturday, May 2, 2009, Posted: 05:33 AM ET
“Cases of people infected with the H1N1 virus soared Saturday with the World Health Organization reporting 615 people in 15 countries infected with the virus commonly known as swine flu.”

Confirmed number of global swine flu cases: 367 and counting – updated 10:09 p.m. EDT, Fri May 1, 2009
The number of confirmed swine flu cases across the globe kept rising Friday, but some signs of hope emerged in the battle against the worldwide outbreak.

Worldwide swine flu cases continue to rise – updated 11:45 a.m. EDT, Fri May 1, 2009
“The number of confirmed cases of the H1N1 virus has jumped nearly 30 percent with 331 people being infected so far, the World Health Organization said Friday.”

Confirmed swine flu cases leap – updated 10:44 p.m. EDT, Thu April 30, 2009
“Confirmed cases of swine flu worldwide increased to 257 on Thursday, up significantly from the previous day’s total of 147, the World Health Organization reported.”

Worldwide swine flu cases continue to rise – updated 9:11 a.m. EDT, Thu April 30, 2009
“The number of confirmed swine flu cases worldwide rose to 154, with six additional cases reported in Spain, the World Health Organization said Thursday. Until now, the country had four confirmed cases.”

(Blessedly, CNN did not report this as a 250 percent increase)

This doesn’t include stories about wild boars being killed, Dr Sanjay Gupta advising people to rub elbows instead of kissing or shaking hands, interviews with “survivors” of the 1918 flu pandemic, and a story about how a farmer might have given flu to his pigs in Canada. CNN did wonder whether it was overdoing it and decided to investigate the issue by turning to Ron Paul for insight:

“There is too much hysteria in the country and so far, there hasn’t been that great a danger,” said Congressman Ron Paul, a Republican from Texas. “It’s overblown, grossly so.”

The online article failed to note that Paul was a trained doctor.  Dr. Mark Bell, principal of Emergent Medical Associates, which operates 18 emergency departments in Southern California was also deeply critical:

“Right now, people think if they have a cough or a cold, they’re going to die. That’s a scary, frightening place to be in. I wish that this hysteria had not occurred and that we had tempered a little bit of our opinions and thoughts and fears in the media.”

But there is hope: As the absence of virulent death becomes ever-more obvious in the data, the media, says Gawker, are growing bored with being swine hounds.

Swine-hounds: Porking the panic

With the number of news stories about swine flu pushing 50,000 in the past week, some journalists are beginning to wonder whether the press is suffering from swine fever. As the Los Angeles Times  James Rainey puts it:

Desperate to fill to the top of the hour and armed with little clarity – no one can say for certain how prolonged or deadly this flu episode will be – some newsies can’t stop spinning. And conjuring a frightening reality that isn’t quite real.

Fox News warned the virus was spreading from coast to coast; CNN asked whether people should stop shaking hands and hugging; meanwhile the LAT reported that the consensus among experts was that H1N1 wasn’t “shaping up to be as fatal as the strains that caused some previous pandemics.”

The absence of pre-existing immunity to a new variation of the flu virus is responsible for driving the expert community to respond to the potential of a threat, as MedPage Today reports – and the worldwide public health response has been reassuringly swift, showing how the lessons from dealing with the threat of the SARS pandemic in 2003 have been put to good effect. It took months to identify SARS as a new disease; it took researchers less than a week to determine that there was a new strain of flu. As Richard E. Besser, M.D., CDC’s acting director tells MedPage Today,

The fact that we have been exercising several times a year for a pandemic has meant that when it occurred, we didn’t have to sit down and say ‘Let’s talk about the flu. Here’s the things you need to look out for with flu.’

But the swiftness of the response, something that should reassure the public, has actually become a source of panic: An effective precautionary public health response requires acting on limited information, but that limited information simultaneously becomes the source of speculation in the press, spurred to report the story with almost as much alacrity as the health authorities. Sensible precaution in public health becomes sensational panic in the press.

Unfortunately, as yet, there is no way of knowing the virulence or attack rate of the virus. But putting the numbers in context, as Michael Fumento notes on Forbes, provides a counterbalance to the idea that we are facing a new threat: we’re always dealing with the threat of flu, and it always exacts a toll:

A calm perspective of the current outbreak of the virus now known as influenza A (H1N1) would compare it to seasonal flu. According to the CDC, the seasonal flu infects between 15 to 60 million Americans each year (5% to 20%), hospitalizes about 200,000 and kills about 36,000. That comes out to over 800 hospitalizations and over 250 deaths each day during flu season.

Worldwide deaths are 250,000 to 500,000, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), or about 700 to 1,400 per day spread out over the year.

For the very latest WHO estimates, click here