Category: Uncategorized

    Multiple sclerosis is a degenerative nervous system disorder where the protective sheath that surrounds nerves, called myelin, is damaged, interfering with the nerves’ abilities to send message back and forth along the nervous system. Regenerating the myelin sheath would seem to be the obvious way to treat MS and similar illnesses, but the problem is that cells in the nervous system are particularly resistant to regeneration.

    Thanks to animal experiments there has been a lot of progress made in recent years in understanding why cells in the nervous system don’t regenerate along with progress on spurring them to regenerate. In the latest advance, researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, discovered antibodies which prod the immune systems of mice to repair the myelin sheath. The antibody attaches itself to nerve cells called oligodendrocytes which are responsible for the manufacture of myelin.

    Researchers infected mice with a virus that attacks the myelin sheath and causes symptoms in mice similar to MS in human beings. When the antibody was then injected into the mice, the damage to the myelin sheat was reversed.

    This does not mean, however, that a treatment for MS is right around the corner. This intriguing finding does, however, up open up many avenues for future research. In the real world of science, as opposed to the straw man posited by animal rights activists, important advances in understanding human physiology and disease first require years and decades of basic research aimed at understanding and explaining activities and functions that still mystify scientists. This is but one in a long series of experiments that bring us closer to the day when a viable cure for MS might be found.

Source:

Scientists reverse MS in mice. The BBC, June 5, 2000.

    Recently Amnesty International released a report accusing NATO of committing war crimes during its war in Kosovo. The alleged crimes included the attack by NATO warplanes on a Serbian TV station that killed 16 civilians. According to Amnesty International, that is a war crime, because NATO intentionally targeted a civilian facility.

    Not so, according to NATO spokesman Jamie Shea. According to Shea, civilians at say a BBC or CNN TV station are really civilians, while civilians at this TV station weren’t really civilians after all. Shea told ITN (Nato hits back at Amnesty war crimes allegation):

Asked about the bombing of a Serb TV station in which
several civilians were killed, Mr Shea said: “The
television station was attacked because it was not the BBC
or CNN, it was being used to push out propaganda and to
create a climate of hatred in which the persecution of
Albanians could be accepted as normal by the greater
majority of the Serb population.”

No civilian deaths occurred because of any deliberate
targeting by Nato forces, and they did not therefore
constitute war crimes, he went on to say. Nato pilots
should not feel any sense of guilt, he said.

    So, in other words, if NATO doesn’t like what they’re saying, it is perfectly legal for it to bomb civilians at any time — except, remember, they’re really not civilians, since NATO didn’t deliberately target civilians according to Shea. Perhaps NATO pilots spent a few seconds conscripting the hapless TV station employees into the Serbian army prior to firing their missiles to make it all legal.

    Even NATO’s after-the-fact justification of its intervention in Serbia make absolutely no sense, which is par for the course

    The Public Health Service recently issued guidelines for Xenotransplantation — the transplanting of animal cells, tissues and organs to treat or mitigate human diseases. As the background statement to the guidelines notes, 13 people in the United States die every day while waiting for an organ transplant and any advance that utilized animal tissues or organs would save many lives.

    There are legitimate concerns about risks, however. The biggest fear, which the activists latch onto, is the risk of passing a disease from a non-human to a human. After all, for as long as humans have domesticated animals or used them as a source of food, diseases have passed between animals and humans. The most familiar of these diseases is the influenza virus which relies on several different species, including humans, pigs, and birds, as disease vectors in which it thrives and mutates.

    It is certainly reasonable to take some precautions, but the message of the activists is that there is no acceptable risk. The misnamed Campaign for Responsible Transplantation, for example, immediately denounced the new guidelines as inadequate largely because they believe that it is impossible for Xenotransplantation to be risk free. Instead the CRT’s Alix Fano wants the United States to adopt the “precautionary principle.” This essentially means always minimizing risk regardless of the possible benefit, which very few people seem to actually agree with if their behavior is any evidence (if you regularly drive a car, for example, you are implicitly rejecting the precautionary principle.)

    There is also a certain irony that much of the legitimate fear of a possible spread of a disease across species boundaries comes from the very animal research which Fano and others believe is done for no better reason than to enrich the pockets of scientists. For example, the PHS guidelines note that researchers have shown that simian foamy virus in baboons has been found to persist in human beings who received liver cell transplantations from human beings. Similarly, in vitro research has demonstrated that retrovirus carried by pigs can infect human cell lines. This stuff scares the anti-xeno activists to death, but then again I thought all these claims that human and non-human physiologies were very close was just corporate double talk?

    The proposed guidelines find the reasonable middle ground — researchers should do everything possible to minimize the risk of this happening, but the risk is not great enough to forego the advantages of this technology. The PHS calls for a strict regimen of monitoring and health surveillance system coupled with strict requirements for animal procurement which will reduce the risk of a highly infectious agent ever crossing the boundary between animals and human beings through xenotransplantation very low.

    For example, the obvious way to reduce risk of transmitting diseases is to use animals that are free of diseases. The PHS guidelines call for “procuring source animals from herds or colonies that are screened and qualified as free of specific pathogenic infectious agents and that are maintained in an environment that reduces exposure to vectors of infectious agents.” Essentially this means implementing what the industry had already been moving to — animals intended for Xenotransplantation use will be special breeding populations that are kept under special clean laboratory conditions. Of course, the activists will complain in turn that this violates the welfare of the animals.

    Which is really the point of CRT despite all its attempts to sound like a scientifically-minded public interest group. Most people might consider the idea using cells from animals to perhaps cure diabetes as a good thing, but not CPT:

Who will decide how much animal suffering is justified? Up to 100 pig fetuses may be needed for a single transplantation of pig pancreatic islet cells into a diabetic patient. Each patient may need several transplants during the course of treatment. That’s a lot of pigs for one person.

    Not even pigs, after all, but pig fetuses.

Sources:

Anti-Xenotransplanation Coalition Denounces New Federal Guideline. Press release, Campaign for Responsible Transplantation, May 31, 2000.

Public Health Service Guideline on Infectious Disease Issues in Xenotransplantation. Public Health Service, 2000.

    Absolutely nothing! At least, according to a government hack.

    AntiWar.Com is an anti-war site, obviously, started by libertarian Justin Raimondo to oppose U.S. military intervention in Iraq, Bosnia, and elsewhere. The site does an excellent job of covering U.S. interventions.

    For that, government-subsidized hack Mark Pitcavage includes AntiWar.Com among his list of militia-related groups on his Militia Watchdog site. Mixed in with groups like the Army of God, which calls for the murder of abortion doctors, and the white supremacist Delta Rebel’s Reb is AntiWar.Com.

    Why was AntiWar.Com added to this list of right wing extremists? The description of AntiWar.Com describes the site as “An unusual site, essentially an isolationist right-wing/libertarian site consciously designed to appeal to anti-war activists from the left as well. Particularly against any foreign involvement in Kosovo.”

    Apparently, advocating an isolationist foreign policy (and it is unclear that AntiWar.Com is isolationist), is enough to lump an organization into the same category with folks who weave conspiracy theories about the United Nations and want to blow up abortion clinics.

    Should any of this matter, though? Does anyone really care whether Mark Pitcavage thinks AntiWar.Com is representative of right-wing extremism? It just might, according to the Left-ish CounterPunch. CounterPunch editor Alexander Cockburn is one of the few prominent individuals on the Left willing to meet the libertarian AntiWar.Com halfway to work against U.S. intervention.

    Writing for CounterPunch, Cletus Nelson (Antiwar.Com Meets the New McCarthyism) notes that Pitcavage is more than just a private individual with a web site — he is in fact directly involved in U.S. law enforcement. According to Nelson, Pitcavage is employed full time as a senior associate researcher with the Institute for Intergovernmental Relations which provides training services to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. Pitcavage head the Institute’s State/Local Anti-Terrorism Training Program. Since 1997, the U.S. Justice Department has given the SLATT program in the neighborhood of $4 million.

    As Nelson puts it,

Piss of Pitcavage and you could find yourself denounced on CNN as a terrorist. … The relationship between Pitcavage’s public and private roles poses the question whether his recent posting of Antiwar.Com on his personal web site was done to please his federal paymasters.

    Or it could be more of a personal dispute. Pitcavage was featured in an article for the New York Times last September defending the government’s actions at WACO — of course nowhere in the article did the reporter bother to mention that Pitcavage receives his funding from a Department of Justice grant. (In his interview, Pitcavage actually laments about the movie Waco: Rules of Evidence, “They [McNulty and Hardy] deserve a little bit of credit. But you wish that someone else had discovered this stuff instead. These guys have ulterior motives.” Bizarre considering in Pitcavage’s world view, people who don’t buy the government’s story about Waco are right wing extremists.)

    A third option is more likely — what scares people like Pitcavage to death is something that Nelson over looks. AntiWar.Com, as Pitcavage puts it, “appeal[s] to anti-war activists from the left as well.” This is the real danger. AntiWar.Com may be run by libertarians, but it strikes a blow against U.S. military intervention that is shared people across a broad range of the political spectrum. There is still resistance to Right-Left cooperation on issues. Alexander Cockburn has discussed some of the negative comments directed his way for his willingness to work with folks like AntiWar.Com, and similar attitudes exist on the Right.

    But web sites like AntiWar.Com are breaking down those barriers. The rise of libertarianism also creates a lot more opportunities, as libertarians and the Left tend find a lot of common agreement on issues such as the drug war, military intervention, etc.

    If I were a minion of the state, as Pitcavage is, I’d probably worry too about the effect that more coordination between Left and Right might have on deterring future U.S. intervention in places like Kosovo. God forbid an organized, persuasive critique of state power should threaten the positions of people such as Pitcavage.

    Activists on both sides of the Atlantic have decided to target, of all companies, the Bank of New York. What is BNY’s sins in the eyes of the activists? BNy owns 41 million shares of Huntington Life Sciences — the large EUropean research laboratory.

    A press release by Stop Huntington ANimal Cruelty included a quote from Joe Bateman saying, “We want Bank of New York to sell its 41 million shares in HLS. Their investment is not saving human lives nor supporting valuable research.”

    The press release practically gloats that Huntington “…has been the object of firebombs because of its cruel treatment of animals” (which would be accurate if written as “…has been the object of firebombs because of the irrational ignorance of some animal rights activists) and that “…workers for the Huntington Life Sciences have been targeted with arson attacks at their homes in Europe in recent weeks.”

    But, of course, it is the researchers who are cruel and unreasonable.

Source:

“Bank of New York Target of Protest; Activists Want BNY to Sell Research Lab Stock.” Press release, Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty, May 18, 2000.