Just another nerd.
How long do you have left to live? Northwestern Mutual has a very well done longevity calculator — you tell it your age, weight, and answer a few lifestyle questions and it will tell you your expected life expectancy.
The magic 8 ball says my life expectancy is about 91 (the short version is if you don’t drink, don’t smoke and aren’t accident prone, you should live a very long time).
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization warned in February that parts of southern Africa are at serious risk of famine over the next few months that could threaten as many as four million people.
The famine threat is greatest in Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe, of course, has seen its crop production cut in half thanks to the confiscatory and anti-democratic policies of Robert Mugabe.
Malawi has suffered from flooding the past couple years which has waterlogged crops and reduced yields. Food is available in Malawi, but the poverty levels there often make it impossible for people to obtain food.
In Zambia, too, flooding caused a 24 percent decrease in harvests in 2001 as compared to 2000.
Source:
Famine stalks Southern Africa. The BBC, February 19, 2002.
A few weeks ago Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty called on it supporters to harass Hughes Janitorial Services, a company that provides janitorial services to Huntingdon Life Sciences.
Hughes gave in pretty quickly and announced it had severed its business relationship with HLS.
SHAC and Kevin Jonas must really be proud of intimidating barely above minimum wage janitors out of a job. That will certainly stand as one of the more courageous victories for the animals.
Source:
Investor of the week: Charles Schwab. Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, Press Release, March 2002.
Karen Davis recently wrote an long, bizarre review of Charles Patterson’s absurd book, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust. Patterson’s book argues, as the title suggests, that human treatment of animals is akin to the Holocaust and, moreover, that human attitudes toward animals were, at least in part, responsible for the Holocaust.
Davis’ review takes a bizarre turn right off the bat when in the opening paragraph she writes,
Parallels between our treatment of nonhuman animals and humans considered to be less than human is what this harrowing book is about. To view such parallels as an insult to humankind merely illustrates its thesis.
This is, of course, a logical fallacy called begging the question. Questioning Davis’s absurd reasoning is hardly evidence that supports this thesis.
I have not read Eternal Treblinka, but from Davis’ lengthy description the book apparently argues that anytime the murder of human beings resembles the slaughter of animals, or language used to describe one is also used to describe the other, this proves that the two activities are intimately intertwined and perhaps even causally related.
Davis, for example, makes much of the role that Charles Davenport and the American Breeders Association played in promoting eugenics in the early 20th century United States. Of course this simply parallels a similar argument made by pro-life activists who note the role that abortion provider pioneer Margaret Sanger played in the eugenics movement. The fact that chicken researchers and abortion providers were involved in the eugenics movement at the beginning of the 20th century says nothing about the ethical position of those respective fields.
Davis, inevitably makes the comparison that all of this nonsense calls for — that, in the way they treated animals, Jews were no different from the Nazis. According to Davis,
It’s been said that if most people had direct contact with the animals they consume, vegetarianism would soar, but history has yet to support this hope. It isn’t just the Nazis who could see birds in the yard, slaughter them and eat them without a qualm, and in fact with euphoria. In this respect, the persecuted Jewish communities were no different than their persecutors.
. . .
Eternal Treblinka thus raises questions, and we long for answers. Why, in the words of Albert Kaplan, are the majority of Holocaust survivors “no more concerned about animals’ suffering than were the Germans concerned about Jews’ suffering?” . . . This is not to suggest that the Jewish community should be expected to rise above the rest of humankind, but that the Jewish response raises questions about our species no less than does Nazism.
That’s right folks — a Jewish family eating chicken for dinner is an act that raises ethical and moral questions comparable to those raised by the Holocaust.
Source:
UPC Review – Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust. Karen Davis, March 11, 2002, E-mail communication.
There is a vaccine for tuberculosis available that has saved many, many lives but it has an odd feature — in some people it just doesn’t work. That would be fine if it didn’t work in a few people, as happens with many vaccines, but in some parts of the world, the vaccine has an 80 percent failure rate. What’s going on there?
Enter researcher Peter Andersen with a hypothesis about that as well as a lab full of mice to test it.
Andersen’s hypothesis was simple. The TB vaccine exposes human beings to a weakened version of Mycobacterium bovis — a from of TB that afflicts cows. Exposure to this causes an immune response which will also protect people from the human form of the disease.
So why doesn’t it always work. Well, in some parts of the world people frequently come into contact with Mycobacterium tuberculosis — the strain that causes tuberculosis in human beings — long before having the vaccine.
Andersen hypothesized that what was happening was this. Some people were being exposed to a weak strain of human TB. This produced an immune response which that rendered the vaccine ineffective. People were essentially being immunized against the vaccine. Then, later in life, they were still vulnerable to the human form of TB.
To test this theory, Andersen used a mouse model of tuberculosis. He infected mice with three strains of mycobacteria taken from a part of Malawi where the bovine version of the disease does not exist. Then, later, he exposed the mice to the Mycobacterium bovis vaccine. Lo and behold, the vaccination did not work. In each case, when later exposed to full blown tuberculosis, the mice all contracted the disease.
Vaccines made from dead versions of TB, however, did protect the mice. There are currently several vaccines being developed that used dead versions of TB rather than weakened versions of live virus, and Andersen’s research is the first suggesting that these vaccines might offer protection to people for whom the traditional vaccine will not work.
Source:
New TB vaccines ‘in pipeline’. The BBC, February 13, 2002.
Someone sent me an e-mail today that was originally written by Rick Bogle that shows just how animal rights activists often blatantly lie about medical research involving animals.
In this case, the topic was a recent report by Harvard Medical School about research into heroin addiction with monkeys. Bogle sent an e-mail to an animal rights mailing list with the subject line: “Harvard announces major breakthrough in heroin research” and described the research in one sentence,
Researchers at Harvard University’s NIH supported New England Regional Primate Research Center have announced the breakthrough discovery that monkeys are able to distinguish between injections of heroin and a saline placebo.
The implication is pretty clear — what sort of idiots would sit around running experiments with monkeys to see if they can tell the difference between heroin and a saline placebo? The answer to that question is “no one,” because that is not at all what the study actually involved.
Given that drug addiction is such a problem in U.S. society, many people might think that researchers already know everything there is to know about addiction. In fact, the reality is that much about addiction is still poorly understood, especially when it comes to how specific drugs cause addiction.
To try to better understand addiction, researchers perform tests in monkeys called drug discrimination tests. Here’s the basic idea behind a drug discrimination test: suppose researchers have a drug like heroin and they want to find out what it is specifically about heroin that causes people to become addicted to it. One way to do that is to train the monkey to give a certain response when it is injected with heroin — for example, the monkey is trained to push a lever that rewards it with food. When the monkey is injected with a placebo, however, it is trained that if it wants the food reward, it needs to push a different lever. In this way, the monkey is able to tell researchers whether it is receiving an injection of heroin or of a placebo. The monkey can now discriminate between the two.
Now, the researchers move on to finding out what it is about heroin that makes human beings “high.” Heroin turns out to be a difficult drug to figure out for a number of reasons. As the Harvard researchers explain,
Heroin is a complicated drug with some unusual properties. For example, heroin is converted to a number of metabolites in the brain and liver. How this occurs is shown in the Figure below. Once heroin passes from the blood stream to the brain, it is rapidly converted to other chemicals by enzymatic activity. First, heroin in the brain is converted to a chemical called 6-MAM, then Metabolic pathway of heroin after intravenous injection. After activating the brain’s natural opioid system (by binding to proteins called “mu opioid receptors”), morphine returns to the blood stream where, like most drugs, it is metabolized by the liver. Enzymatic activity in the liver converts morphine into two other substances called M3G and M6G, which can re-circulate back to the brain.
So here’s what the Harvard researchers wanted to find out — do these 6-MAM, M3G, M6G, and morphine byproducts which go back to the brain contribute at all to the “high” that users feel after injecting heroin. Or, are they just an otherwise a relatively unimportant side effect in the way heroin is experienced? Before these studies, the general consensus was that M3G did not play much of a role in heroin experience.
To test this, they took a saline solution and put each of these byproducts in it, and then injected the monkeys with the solution. The result? When the monkeys were injected with a solution containing saline and 6-MAM, they pushed the lever just as if they had received a heroin injection. The results were exactly the same for solutions containing M3G, M6G and the morphine byproducts. As Harvard summarizes the importance of this research,
These studies, to our knowledge, provided the first demonstration of discriminative stimulus effects produced by i.v. injections of heroin in nonhuman primates. Also, the finding that M3G may contribute to the subjective effects of heroin was very surprising, since this compound previously was believed to be a harmless, inactive by-product of heroin metabolism. Another surprising finding was that the brain dopamine system the system most commonly implicated in the addictive properties of drugs seems to play almost no role in the subjective effects of heroin. The i.v. heroin discrimination model appears to be an especially useful tool for identifying potential medications that, by acting through the mu opioid system, may prevent the intense subjective experiences associated with heroin addiction.
This research, in other words, strongly challenged traditional thinking about heroin drug addiction.
But to animal rights activists like Rick Bogle, none of this matters. This is simply a case of researchers wasting time and tax dollars to prove that
“monkeys are able to distinguish between injections of heroin and a
saline placebo.”
And this will certainly enter animal rights lore in just this way — few activists (no activists, actually) seem interested in ever doing any sort of fact checking of these sorts of assertions. This will end up on some fact sheet at some group and be endlessly copied and pasted without any activist wondering if there might not be more to the story, much less anyone in the animal rights community bothering to do any research into the matter.
One of the ways to judge a social or political movement is by how accurately it presents the position of its opponents. The animal rights movement is apparently satisfied with distorting, obfuscating and outright lying about its opponents rather than try to make an extremely difficult case against them. Like creationists and other advocates of pseudo-science, animal rights activists rely on distorting science and playing to the general ignorance of the general public about medical research rather than objectively looking at research methods and ends and then critiquing those methods and ends from the animal rights position.
Source:
Heroin’s Effects in Monkeys. Harvard Medical School, Accessed: March 20, 2002.