Day: September 10, 2002

Pregnancy Test Records Should Remain Private

The New York Times recently reported about an outrageous violation of the privacy rights of women in Buena Vista County, Iowa, who received pregnancy tests at clinics and hospitals.

In May, Buena Vista police discovered a horrific crime. They found the dismembered body of a dead baby in the county recycling center. With almost nothing to go on, the county sheriff came up with a brilliant plan — ask clinics and local hospitals to turn over the names of women who had received pregnancy tests.

Unbelievably, almost all of the clinics and hospitals complied. The local Planned Parenthood did not, and is currently in a legal battle with the county over whether or not it can be forced to turn over records of pregnancy tests.

Since police have no evidence at all that the mother of the dead baby is a local woman, much less that she might have been a patient at any particular clinic, the police request is simply a fishing expedition that clearly violates patients’ right to privacy. This sort of blanket request is just as wrong as are proposals to build genetic databases of everybody who comes in contact with police in order to try to better track perpetrators of rape, murder and other crimes.

And some of the clinics who cooperated with the police request might have to pay. At least one woman whose name was turned over to police by the clinic where she received a pregnancy test is considering suing the clinic for damages.

Receiving a pregnancy test is not a suspicious criminal activity and women who request pregnancy tests should not fear that doing so may result in their names being released to police.

Source:

Privacy furor over subpoena in baby’s death. Adam Clymer, The New York Times, August 21, 2002.

Aleratec’s CD Shredder

A few months ago I posted a question about the best way to dispose of the hundreds of CD-Rs I have that I no longer want, but that contain data I would not want any dumpster diver to have access to.

Alera Technologies sells a CD/DVD shredder for $70. Alera claims its shredder can handle up to 30 discs/minute and destroys the data layers of any CD/DVD.

Alfred E. Neuman, Communist Party Hack?

Via Boing!Boing! is this fascinating site which reproduces letters sent to the FBI about Mad Magazine. Some of the letters want to know if the FBI considers Mad to be a communist publication, while others write to provide evidence that it is and demand the FBI crack down on the magazine (if there’s one thing the United States leads the world in, it’s busybody cranks).

I can just see HUAC asking people, are you now or have you ever been a reader of Mad Magazine?

It’s All Jimmy Carter’s Fault

Jimmy Carter wrote an article bemoaning the current state of affairs for the Washington Post recently. Jim Roepcke posted a link to it on his site and I responded with some very unkind words about Carter which elicted some other responses.

Anyway, Daniel Pipes wrote a column last week which really captured my feelings about Carter — namely that the current situation which Carter is so upset about is largely one of his own making. It was Carter, after all, who set the precedent of a completely weak and inadequate response to Islamic extremist actions against Americans.

Pipes writes,

In retrospect, the mistake began when Iranians assaulted the U.S. embassy in Tehran and met with no resistance.

Interestingly, a Marine sergeant present at the embassy that fateful day in November 1979 agrees with this assessment. As the militant Islamic mob invaded the embassy, Rodney V. Sickmann followed orders and protected neither himself nor the embassy. As a result, he was taken hostage and lived to tell the tale. (He now works for Anheuser-Busch.)

In retrospect, he believes that passivity was a mistake. The Marines should have done their assigned duty, even if it cost their lives. “Had we opened fire on them, maybe we would only have lasted an hour.” But had they done that, they “could have changed history.”

Standing their ground would have sent a powerful signal that the United States of America cannot be attacked with impunity. In contrast, the embassy’s surrender sent the opposite signal – that it’s open season on Americans. “If you look back, it started in 1979; it’s just escalated,” Sickmann correctly concludes.

And once the Iranians had the embassy, Carter waited for months before launching that ill-fated rescue mission. The embassy was seized on November 4, 1979, but the hostage rescue attempt was not launched until April 25, 1980.

And what did Carter have to offer the nation? Idiotic speeches about the “crisis of the American spirit” and lame nonsense that the nation just needed more “faith.”

Of course what the United States really needed was a president whose main qualification was something other than the fact that he wasn’t Gerald Ford.

Animal Rights Groups Sue EPA Over Animal Testing

Led by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, several animal rights groups filed suit on Sept. 5, 2002 against the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to require industry to perform animal toxicity studies on almost 3,000 chemicals.

Joining the lawsuit are the Alternatives Research and Development Foundation, the American Anti-Vivisection Society, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. According to a PCRM press release on the lawsuit,

At an estimated cost of $16 million each year for the EPA to administer, the H[igh] P[roduction] V[olume] program calls for thousands of duplicative animal tests that are not predictive of human harm. Available alternatives that are more sensitive than animal tests, such as in vitro genetic toxicity tests, are not being required, and the program does nothing to limit human exposure to known toxins.

PCRM is also suing on behalf of several individuals they claim were harmed by chemicals that tested out as safe in animals. Though the details of these cases reveal more than a few problems for PCRM. For example,

Plaintiffs John Gentry and Scott Mishler were exposed to toxic substgances at work and both have suffered serious illnesses. Mishler, a former journeyman electrician, is no longer able to work due ot illnesses caused by exposure to hydraulic fluid containing an HPV chemical slated for re-testing. Tests done in 1984 and 1995 showed that the chemical, trixylenyl phosphate, does not kill rats, yet phosophate-based hydraulic fluids can cause severe damage to workers’ nervous system.

This is an almost laughable description that cynically takes advantage of people’s lack of knowledge about phosphates and hydraulic fluids.

Trixylenyl phosphate is a trialkyl/aryl phosphate (TAP). PCRM forgets several important facts about tirxylenyl phosphate. First, it is one of the less dangerous TAPs in animal studies, and mice and rats are the least sensitive to TAP exposure. The LD50 dose for TAPs in rats, for example, is 5,190 mg/kg compared to just 1,500 mg/kg for cats.

The claim that “trxylenyl phosphate, does not kill rats, yet phosphate-based hydraulic flucis can cause severe damage to workers’ nervous system” is odd. Trialkyl/aryl phosphates are known to cause neurological problems in animal studies. Much of the research into the ill effects of TAPs, however, have focused on tri- o-cresyl phosphate. More research into neurological, carcinogenic and other effects of TAPs is definitely needed.

Or take this case which PCRM is also pursing,

Plaintiff Rosa Naparstek, a resident of New York City, has multiple chemical sensitivites syndrome, an environmental illness caused by toxic chemicals in the environment. Many HPV chemicals used in soaps, shampoos, perfumes, detergents, bleach, paints, glues, carpeting and gasoline caused Neparstek to experience headaches, dizziness, nausea, and muscle and joint pain.

Thankfully, federal courts have generally barred any sort of expert testimony about multiple chemical sensitivity on the grounds that it fails to meet the Daubert test of scientific validity. The odds of Naparstek prevailing are in the range of zero to none.

Reading between the lines, this lawsuit appears geared more to impressing animal rights activists and generating headlines than a serious challenge to the EPA’s HPV testing regimen.

Source:

Doctors sue EPA to halt toxic testing on animals. U.S. Newswire, September 5, 2002.