Day: May 30, 2002

Suicide Advocate Was Not Terminally Ill

It looks like Australia has their own version of Jack Kevorkian. Kevorkian, of course, earned the moniker “Dr. Death” for helping terminally ill people kill themselves. Kevorkian was sent to jail a few years ago for violating Michigan’s law against assisted suicide.

For someone like myself, who supports assisted suicide, Kevorkian was an unmitigated disaster. Not only did his presence make it easy for opponents to paint the assisted suicide movement as a bunch of kooks, but Kevorkian played fast and loose with the facts, helping some people to commit suicide where it was questionable whether the person was even terminally ill.

Last week, 77-year-old Australian Nancy Crick killed herself in front of friends and family. Crick said she suffered from terminal bowel cancer and her cause was taken up by Australian euthanasia advocate Dr. Philip Nitschke. Media accounts said Crick wanted to choose when she died rather than having her disease choose for her.

Now, though, it turns out that Crick did not have terminal cancer, and Nitschke knew this all along. News.Com.Au reports that medical specialists told Crick as late as a month before her suicide that she was free of bowel cancer.

Crick apparently also lied about her alleged weight loss and malnutrition. In an Internet diary, Crick claimed her weight had fallen to 27kg, but hospital records showed she weighed 38kg a month before she died, which was 2 kg more than she weighed in late 2001.

Nitschke’s response is that yes, well, “in retrospect we should have said that” Crick was not wasting away and did not have a terminal case of cancer. Nitschke believes this is irrelevant because Crick was apparently genuinely in severe, chronic pain.

Even if that is true, however, Nitschke just gave away almost all credibility his movement might have had. This is, after all, one of the most frequent criticisms of assisted suicide — that doctors, other medical professionals, and patients will inevitably twist or shade the truth. And Nitschke went ahead and proved them right.

Source:

Crick told she was clear Chris Griffith, Paula Doneman, and Hedley Thomas, News.Com.Au, May 29, 2002.

Australian suicide tests euthanasia law. Phil Mercer, The BBC, May 23, 2002.

As Many as 27 Million Forced Into Slavery Worldwide

A report published ahead of this month’s meeting United Nations Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery claims that as many as 27 million people worldwide are held in one form of slavery or another, most of them children.

The report, put together by Anti-Slavery International, highlights the plight of bonded agricultural workers in Pakistan, slavery in the Sudan, and the worldwide problem of child domestic servants and the sexual exploitation of children. Other countries cited by the report as tolerating slavery included Brazil, Mauritania, and the United Arab Emirates.

Sources:

United Nations Meets On Global Slavery. Anti-Slavery International, May 2002.

Millions ‘forced into slavery’. The BBC, May 27, 2002.

Poverty Is the Real Pollution

This web site has stayed out of the controversy over Bjorn Lomborg’s book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, though from the reviews and discussion, there is much it would agree with as well as some parts it would disagree. We wholeheartedly agree, however, with Lomborg’s comments to the BBC about the United Nations’ recent Global Environment Outlook-3 report which complained about the increasingly negative impact that humanity is having on the world’s ecosystems. The BBC quoted Lomborg as replying,

We think things are getting worse and worse but actually if we look at the facts we see that fewer and fewer people are starving, we’re better able to handle pollution in the developed world (for instance, air pollution) and in the developing world, it will be the same when they get sufficiently rich.

What we need to realize is that the real pollution problem is the pollution of poverty; when people are poor they cannot take care of the environment 10 or a 100 years down the line.

Eliminate the sort of abject poverty present in the developing world and many of the environmental problems would correct themselves as those societies were able to devote more of their resources to environmental protection.

Source:

Poverty is ‘real pollution’. The BBC, May 22, 2002

Small Study Suggests Benefit to Enriched Eggs for Infants

A study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition suggested that enriched egg yolks could improve the level of essential nutrients in weaning infants.

The study involved 137 infants about 6 months of age. The infants were randomly sorted into three groups that received either normal egg yolks, egg yolks from chickens that were fed a diet rich in n-3 fatty acids, or no egg yolk at all.

Researchers then measured levels of both iron and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). Breast milk tends to have a low iron content, while children formula fed children tend to have lower levels of DHA (which is important for brain development — many formula makers now fortify their formula with DHA).

Both breast and formula-fed infants who were given the DHA-enriched egg yolks experienced 30 to 40 percent higher DHA levels than those fed the normal egg yolks. Both groups increased their iron levels.

As a BBC report on the study noted, egg yolks have the advantage of containing heme iron, which is more easily absorbed than iron from vegetables, as well as being soft enough for babies to eat.

Source:

Egg boost for babies. The BBC, May 23, 2002.

ALF Takes Credit for Fire at Indiana Poultry Distributor

In early May somebody tried to set off a series of explosions at a small poultry plant but managed to only destroy a single truck (see Indiana Poultry Plant Targeted by Arson). On May 15, 2002, the Animal Liberation Front took credit for that arson in a press release that claimed,

The culprits for the Sims Poultry fire were not crazed arsonists bent on killing and maiming. They are serious political activists employing a strategy of economic sabotage against an industry which tortures and kills animals for profit.

Translation — crazed animal rights arsonists were responsible. The owner of Sims Poultry suggested to the Associated Press that the group might be trying to take credit for an action it did not carry out (which would not be unheard of for these folks).

Source:

Animal-rights group claims it torched, destroyed truck at poultry plant. Associated Press, May 16, 2002.