Month: December 2001

Camel Antibodies and Human Disease

Could antibodies from camels fight human disease? A United Arab Emirates researchers thinks so and wrote an article for the British magazine The Biologist on the medical research potentials of camels.

Dr. Sabah Jassim argues that camel antibodies would make a good research tool since camels are highly resistant to a wide variety of diseases. Camels obviously evolved in an extremely harsh environment and are immune to diseases such as rinderpest and foot-and-mouth that afflict other mammals.

Moreover, because camel antibodies are both smaller and much simpler than human antibodies, Jassim argues they could be reproduced easily and could penetrate parts of the human body that antibodies from other species could not.

As it turns out, there is already some research being conducted in this area, including research to test the feasibility of using modified camel antibodies to create new generations of protease inhibitors. One of the diseases camels are immune to is river blindness, and research is also underway to clone the antibodies which provide this protection and develop a treatment for the disease in human beings.

Source:

Camels could help cure humans. David Bamford, The BBC, December 10, 2001.

Harvard Study: Risk of Mad Cow Disease in the United States is Low

On November 30 the U.S. Department of Agriculture release a study concluding that the risk of a Mad Cow disease outbreak in the United States is very low. The three-year study, conducted by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, concluded that current regulations governing the import of cattle as well as bans on feeding meat and bone meal to cattle make it extremely unlikely that U.S. cattle will become infected with the disease.

According to the report,

There appears to be no potential for an epidemic of BSE resulting from scrapie, chronic wasting disease or other cross-species transmission of similar diseases found in the U.S.

The current major debate over Mad Cow disease in the United States is whether or not cattle herds should be tested for the disease. So far, the United States has test only 12,000 head of cattle out of an estimated population of 100 million. In 2002, the USDA plans to expand that testing to 12,500 more animals.

In its coverage of the report, The New York Times quoted Mad Cow researcher Thomas Pringle as saying that such limited testing was a mistake. Pringle noted that nations claiming to be BSE-free had, in fact, found cases of the disease after ordering testing of cattle herds. Japan, for example, recently discovered several cases of Mad Cow disease after believing the disease had not reached its shores.

Still, American Meat Institute president J. Patrick Boyle argued that, “America’s B.S.E.-free status is not luck. The U.S. is free of many animal diseases that plague other nations, testaments to the success of government-industry efforts.”

Sources:

U.S. Mad Cow Risk is Low, A Study by Harvard Finds. Elizabeth Becker, The New York Times, December 1, 2001.

Report has final word on mad cow disease. Kay Ledbetter, The Amarillo Globe News, December 9, 2001.

They’re Praying for Me

Sometimes I write something and I know people are going to run across it and send me nasty or bizarre e-mail. Other times, I am surprised at how much people have personally vested in things that I have dismissed or slammed.

For example, John Edward turns out to have fans who are almost as dedicated as animal rights activists in coming to his defense. I’ve written a couple of things about Edwards, and received quite a bit of e-mail.

Several of his fans demanded that I either prove to them that it was impossible to communicate with the dead or else apologize to Edwards. A couple folks rather impolitely suggested that I was simply jealous of Edwards’ abilities and should get a life (that’s my G-rated version of their missives).

But the real kicker was the one I received yesterday from a person who said that she is going to pray for me to overcome my “doubtful mind” and insists that once I “cross over” I’ll understand where Edwards was coming from (and she did reassure me that despite my doubts, God will still accept me in the hereafter).

Wall Street Journal Nails Terrorist Apologias

James Taranto of OpinionJournal.Com (which is owned by the Wall Street Journal) takes just a few sentences to show the complete and utter absurdity of those who ventured that American foreign policy or poverty or oppression or [insert excuse here] was the “root cause” of the 9/11 attacks.

Taranto is writing about the arrest last night of two Jewish Defense League members who allegedly were planning to blow up a mosque and other targets. After outlining the basics of the arrest, Taranto writes,

Watch for the root-cause crowd to come forward with the usual explanations: The poverty and oppression under which L.A. Jews live makes this sort of thing understandable, if not inevitable; they did it as a protest against U.S. foreign policy; their alleged targets need to ask themselves: Why do they hate us? Yeah, we expect to hear this stuff any minute now.

Is Gray Davis Endangering Californians for Political Gain?

The San Francisco Chronicle had an interesting report about how even what should be a fundamental job of the California state government — protecting that state from the effects of earthquakes — is subverted by the political process.

In 1997, flexible gas pipes were approved for use in California. According to The Chronicle flexible gas pipeline is used in all 50 states as well as several other countries including earthquake-prone Japan. The idea is that during an earthquake, the flexible pipe will be less likely to fail than its more rigid counterpart. Since fire is a major hazard after earthquakes, this could potentially save lots of lives. California’s Seismic Safety Commission publishes a guide that says, “Flexible pipes for gas and water lines are safer in an earthquake than rigid pipes.”

Despite that, California is on the verge of making it illegal to use flexible pipes in new home construction. The California Building Standards Commission is currently in the process of choosing a new building code, and the current front runner is a code that does not permit the use of flexible pipes for gas lines.

Representatives of the California BUilding Industry Association believe that this is political payback from California governor Gray Davis to the California Pipe Trades Council — a labor group that donated more than $1.1 million to Davis. The Pipe Trades Council wants to eliminate flexible gas pipe. It argues that the pipes can puncture more easily than the rigid steel pipe, but another possible explanation is that unlike rigid steel pipe, the flexible pipe more quickly — potentially costing union jobs.

The union, of course, says that is nonsense and insists that the building industry is acting in a heavy handed manner by trying to keep flexible gas pipe legal (presumably the building industry also bought off the Seismic Safety Commission).

California residents must sleep well at night knowing their lives are in the hand of this kind of process.

Source:

State may ban flexible gas lines. Robert Salladay, The San Francisco Chronicle, December 3, 2001.

The Real Danger Facing America — Softwood Imports from Canada

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration took action in October to rid America of the scourge of softwood imports from Canada. On Halloween night, the Bush administration imposed 12.58 percent “anti-dumping” duty on top of an already announced 19.31 percent “countervailing duty” which was levied in August. What’s the problem here? The Bush administration thinks Canadian companies aren’t charging enough for softwood.

This from the same Bush administration that was recently claiming it absolutely had to have Fast Track authority to negotiate free trade agreements. Why does the United States need more free trade agreements, when it is not even interested in living up to the one it signed with its northern neighbor?

The main beneficiaries of the new tariffs will be the U.S. lumber industry. After decades of haranguing the government for subsidies and cheap rights to federal lands, the lumber industry had the gall to complain that the Canadian lumber was excessively subsidized — a claim that the World Trade Organization has investigated twice and found baseless.

The main victims of the new tariffs will be the Canadian lumber industry and the American consumer who will end up being socked with additional costs far in excess of the benefits garnered by the timber industry.

How does George W. Bush expect anyone to take him seriously as a free trader and a person who “trust the American people” when his administration can’t even stomach Americans freely trading with Canada? Apparently those donations from the timber industry count more than the votes from the people Bush supposedly trusted.

Source:

Costs of the softwood tariff. David N. Laband and Daowei Zhang, Mises Institute, November 21, 2001.