Author: Brian Carnell

Staph Vaccination Succeeds in Animals, Then Humans

Researchers at the U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development recently reported on the successful trial of a vaccination for staphylococcus infection — a relatively common, and potentially deadly disease usually contracted in the hospital environment.

Staph infection fools the body into not realizing that it is under attack. The surface of the bacteria is covered with two sugar molecules which most human immune systems fail to recognize as a threat.

Experimenting in mice, the researchers took those two sugar molecules and added a third protein that they knew the immune system would recognize as a threat. Researchers proved that, at least in mice, that approach would work.

They then conducted trials of the vaccine on 1,900 patients receiving dialysis. Such patients typically have weakened immune systems and are especially vulnerable to staph infection. In the first 40 weeks of the study, those receiving the vaccination had 57 percent fewer staph infections compared to a control group that did not receive the vaccination.

Longer term the success rate was lower, but still represented a statistically significant increase in protection against staph infection compared to the control group.

The upshot of that is that the vaccination is likely to work even better with people who do not have compromised immune systems. As the BC quoted Robert Naso, who works with a company working on developing the vaccine,

Kidney disease patients on dialysis are among the least like to respond to a vaccine because their immune system are generally compromised. Based upon previous clinical studies in normal, healthy volunteers, we believe that other patient populations at risk for rStaph infections will respond to the vaccine with even higher levels of antibodies than was achievable in kidney disease patients.

An excellent example of the sort of discoveries and advances that animal research makes possible.

Source:

Promising results for ‘superbug’ vaccine. The BC, February 14, 2002.

Is Positive Discrimination the Solution to Gender Imbalances in British Parliament?

After last summer’s elections in Great Britain, women made up only 118 of 659 politicians elected to the House of Commons. Great Britain is now considering requiring political parties to nominate women. Is this legal or even a good idea?

In the 1990s, Great Britain experimented with a system that forced parties to nominate more women for the British version of primary elections. That system was ruled illegal when it was challenged by law professor Peter Jepson.

On Jan. 28, Parliament approved a bill that would reinstate this system, essentially allowing political parties to engage in “positive discrimination” that would be illegal for private entities to do.

It is not clear that this is either legal or desirable.

Jepson told Women’s ENews that he would again challenge the practice, this time under European Union law. “I’m not at odds with the Labour Party over the inadequate representation of women in Parliament,” Jepson told Women’s ENews, “But there is nothing positive about discrimination.”

Current Member of Parliament Anne Widdecomb said she opposed the planned change not only because it would violate the human rights of men, but would also create a two-tiered group of female MPs. Widdecombe said,

It would create two groups of women MPs, one who could look everyone from the prime minister down in the eye, and the other that got there because of special favors. I wouldn’t find that helpful. I’d find it humiliating.

Widdecombe believes that the gender balance will shift when women who grew up in the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister reach their 40s and 50s. Even then, though, it is questionable if women will ever achieve the exact 50/50 split that some feminists seem to desire.

By comparison, Women’s ENews notes that only 14 percent of U.S. House of Representative members are women. That percentage will almost certainly be higher 20 years from now, but I suspect the same sort of factors that result in a rather persistent wage gap will also result in large gender imbalances in democratically elected legislatures.

Source:
British Parliament passes bill to elect more women. Paul Rodgers, Women’s ENews, February 15, 2002.

Giving a 419 Con Man a Taste of His Own Medicine

If you’re like me, you get 5 or 6 of these “419” scam letters in which the con man tries to convince the mark that he has access to gold or other valuables from Nigeria which require a third party to move them out of country.

Buddy Weiserman strung along one of these scam artists for a couple of months and ?posted voice mails, emails and even a description of how he conned the conman into flapping his arms and legs like a chicken at Independence Square in Ghana. Hilarious.

Google’s AdWords Select Rocks My World

A couple months ago I experimented with a Google ad for my animal rights site. Considering the site is largely noncommercial, the return on investment was very low. I paid something like $25 total for a few thousand text ads and the response rate was about what I’ve seen on ads I run on my own site — less than 1 percent.

Now, though, Google has followed that up with an excellent cost-per-click advertising system called AdWords Select. This lets people place text ads by keywords, but only pay on a cost-per-click basis.

Currently, for example, I have textads running on about 100 different search words. I’m paying $.05 per clickthrough and can limit the total amount per day per ad (so if I set a $1 limit, after the 20th click-through of the day, the ad will no longer be served until the next day).

Clickthrough rate is still about in the 1 percent range or so, but this is still a bargain basement promotion method (in fact, I’m less interested in clickthroughs than having my shortened URL appear on Google searches for topics like “animal rights” or “peta.”)

This is an incredible — and cheap — promotional tool.

Let Mike Tyson Fight Already

The other day an e-mail from the National Organization for Women crossed my desk. The e-mail was outraged that Washington, DC, had granted Mike Tyson a license to fight and called for people to protest to city officials to have Tyson’s permission to fight revoked. Huh? Let Tyson fight already.

The NOW e-mail complained that Tyson was being investigated for sexual assault by Las Vegas prosecutors. Fine, then lets see police arrest and/or indict him, but until then Tyson has just as much right as anybody to pursue his career and applying political criteria to decide whether or not to allow him to fight is obscene.

As George Getz puts it in a Libertarian Party press release on the Tyson controversy,

If Tyson is willing to fight; if an opponent is willing to step into the ring with him; if the bout is sanctioned by professional boxing organizations; and if fans are willing to pay money to see the fight — then no meddlesome government bureaucrat should have the power to veto it.

Exactly. I was trying to figure out what NOW was thinking with its idiotic e-mail. You’d think a group of feminists would be the last people in the world wanting to blacklist someone from working at his profession simply because he is unpopular or has a criminal record. As Getz said in the LP press release, “We don’t need Soviet-style economic commissars deciding who can work, and where they can work, and under what conditions they can work.”

Boxing commissions should be required by law to render fight decisions based solely on objective criteria as Getz outlines, not based on who NOW or other groups like or dislike. Let Tyson fight already.

Addendum: After this was written, Las Vegas announced, in fact, that it did not have enough evidence to pursue sexual assault charges against Tyson.

Source:

Let Mike Tyson box in Washington: It’s a matter of economic freedom. Libertarian Party, Press Release, February 21, 2002.

Glenn Sacks on Bogus V-Day Statistics

Glenn Sacks wrote an interesting article about a lot of the statistical claims that Eve Ensler‘s nonprofit V-Day was spreading around about domestic violence. The entire article is worth reading, but I was especially intrigued by this claim which Sacks debunks,

1 in 3 murdered females are killed by a partner, versus 3.6% of males.

This statistic is both impressive and absurd at the same time. It is absurd because, of course, it is completely misleading, but impressive nonetheless because somebody obviously spent a great deal of time thinking about the best way to spin the fact that very few women are murdered and then turn that on fact on its head.

As Sacks notes, very few men or women are killed by a partner. According to Sacks the figures are about 1,300 women killed by intimates as opposed to 600 men murdered by intimates. In absolute numbers, of course, almost 2,000 people killed by intimates is a horrific tragedy, but in a nation of 260 million or so people, the risk of being killed by an intimate for both men and women is very low and, more importantly, the rate of intimate murder has steadily been declining (along with other murders).

Few people will look at that statistic, though, and realize that what it really means is that only about 4,000 women are murdered in any given year in the United States compared to almost 17,000 men.

So a completely different way to frame V-Day’s claims about violence against women is that almost 81 percent of murder victims are men and that we have a crisis of male murders and need to respond as a society to do more to reach out to the underserved male population with specialized violence programs offering men help and counseling.

But, of course, Ensler and her ilk take the opposite view and insist that violence (both being a victim of and a perpetrator of) is strictly a male vs. female phenomenon. Or as Sacks sums up his article,

Ensler, whose popular play “The Vagina Monologues” is the primary financial and public relations force behind V-Day, says that, for women, “Afghanistan is everywhere.” Unable to find an Afghanistan for American women, Ensler has used discredited statistics to invent one.

The obvious question being why do radical feminists prefer to live in this dark fantasy land of their own making rather than face the world as it is and work to improve it rather than simply regurgitating back their ideology through false and misleading statistics?

Source:

Eve Ensler’s V-Day: For Women, Afghanistan is Everywhere. Glenn J. Sacks, GlennJSacks.Com, February 22, 2002.