PETA's Christmas Toy Recommendations

In early December, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals released a list of “nice” and “naughty” toys to “help compassionate Santas choose” gifts, which was typical of PETA’s over-the-top nonsense.

The animal rights group, for example, panned “Toy Biz’s violent Electric Whac-A-Mole Game, a dangerous toy considering that the link between cruelty to animals and violence toward humans is well known.”

It also complained about a “Got Milk?” puzzle claiming that, “Milk is cruel to cows and has been linked to childhood ailments including earaches, allergies, juvenile diabetes, and obesity.”

PETA’s press release quotes its education manager Danielle Moore saying,

Everyone is truly thinking about peace on Earth and goodwill to all now — and that has to include the animals, too. Gifts can be great for encouraging kindness to animals and empathy.

If Moore really wants to encourage empathy, maybe she could convince PETA to stop openly promoting animal rights violence.

Source:

PETA’s annual “naughty,” “nice” lists help compassionate Santas choose. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, December 5, 2001.

Meat, Milk Contribute to Cancer — Or Do They?

A study published in the January 2002 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that people who ate diets high in red meat and/or milk had much higher rates of stomach and esophageal cancer than those who did not. Some animal rights groups and activists are trumpeting this as the latest evidence that meat is not good for you. The activists might want to read the fine print since the study actually reinforces common sense advice about a balanced diet as exemplified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s nutrition guidelines — guidelines which have been much derided by animal rights activists and groups.

The study by Honlei Chen examined the dietary patterns of white adult residents of eastern Nebraska. The study included 124 subjects whom had been diagnosed with stomach cancer, 124 who had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer, and 449 healthy controls. Researchers asked the subjects about their eating habits and they were then classified into groups such as “healthy,” “high meat,” “high milk,” etc.

Right off the bat there are a lot of limitations as to how generalizable the results of this study are due to its size and other related issues, but lets ignore those objections. What did the study actually find?

The result that made headlines was that people who ate “high meat” diets had 3.6 times the risk of esophageal cancer and twice the risk of stomach cancer compared to those eating a “healthy” diet, while those who had “high milk” diets had a 2-fold risk of both esophageal and stomach cancers compared to the “healthy” diet group.

The first thing to note is that the “healthy” eating groups were those who followed existing USDA dietary guidelines — they ate about five servings of fruit and vegetables, lots of servings of grains, bread and pasta, and only 2-3 servings of meat daily. These are the same guidelines, of course, which groups like the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine have attacked as dangerous and racist (for their inclusion of milk).

Second, as with similar studies, what the study really seemed to track is not meat eating per se, but rather calorie consumption and lack of fruits and vegetables. The group designated as “healthy” consumed the fewest calories which should not be surprising given that someone who eats a lot of meat and/or drinks a lot of milk is very likely to be consuming a lot of calories (it would have been interesting to know about the weight distribution of the individuals in the various groups).

Similarly, recent studies have suggested that consumption of fruits and vegetables may play a role in reducing cancer risk, so people who consume lots of calories and get those calories mainly from meat without adequate fruits and vegetables may be increasing their risk of cancer due to not eating fruits and vegetables rather than from eating meat.

The upshot is that this is the latest study which simply reaffirms commonsense dietary advice. People need not adopt a strict vegan or vegetarian to reduce their risk of cancer and other diseases, but they do need to eat sensibly, consuming lots of fruits and vegetables and eating meat in moderation.

Source:

New research links meat with cancer. Reuters, December 20, 2001.

Diets high in red meat linked to stomach and esophageal cancers. Press Release, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, December 14, 2001.

Judge Fines Women for Violating Restraining Orders They Asked For

Kentucky Judge Megan Lake Thornton is drawing the ire of some domestic violence activists by issuing contempt of court citations to women who obtain restraining orders against their partners and then return to the men who were allegedly abusing them.

Thornton told the Lexington Herald-Leader that she was tired of seeing women come before the court and receive a preliminary restraining order, only to learn that the women had returned to the men named in the restraining order before a follow-up hearing which normally occurs two weeks later. Thornton said,

In my experience on the bench, I have found that there has been a number of petitioners who have chosen to come and get an order, and then ignore the order. I think that both parties are obligated to follow through with the order. You can’t have it both ways.

Domestic violence activist Sherry Currens said that this policy may discourage women from seeking help. “The risk here is that women will be discouraged from asking for an order if they think it can get them into trouble later, or if they think a judge is going to chastise them in a courtroom,” Currens said.

But the bottom line is this — if a man is going to be punished for violating a restraining order when a woman voluntarily returns (and Judge Thornton also cited the men in each of these cases for contempt of court as well), it only makes sense to cite the women as well. Otherwise this creates the bizarre legal outcome that if there is a restraining order barring two people from having contact, and those people nonetheless consent to be in each other’s company, that only one is committing a crime.

There have been a number of egregious examples where this has happened, including a man who was arrested at his own wedding for violating a restraining order against his fiance, although no action was taken against the fiance. In other cases, individuals with restraining orders have used trickery to cause the person named in a restraining order to come into their presence and then call police (for example, when a woman might call up the individual named in the restraining order, ask him to come to clear out his things from her apartment, and arrange to have police waiting to arrest the man for violating the restraining order — which has actually happened).

There is some speculation in the Herald Leader about whether or not a restraining order in fact does apply to both parties, but whether or not it currently does, it most assuredly should or otherwise it creates a severe imbalance that is likely to be exploited and abused.

Source:

Judge fines women who return to their alleged abusers. John Cheves, Lexington Herald-Leader, January 3, 2002.

China’s Bizarre Ban on Condom Advertising

For a country that officially bars many couples from having more than one children, you might think that China would promote contraception measures such as condoms. You would be mistaken. Believe it or not, The State Administration for Industry and Commerce has banned advertising for condoms since 1989 under regulations that prohibit “any products meant to cure sexual dysfunction or help improve people’s sex life.”

The ban is enforced to the point that when China Central Television ran a public service announcement in 1999 touting condoms for birth control and disease prevention, the ads were quickly taken off the air. One of the effects of such a bizarre policy is that China may be in the midst of a runaway HIV epidemic.

Officially there are already 600,000 HIV positive persons in China, though international health agencies suspect that number might be as high as 1 million. Moreover, the number of cases is quickly accelerating. The number of official cases jumped 67 percent from 2000 to 2001.

Surveys of Chinese attitudes toward HIV reveal that few people in China know much about the disease. In a study conducted in 2000 by the State Family Planning Commission, 20 percent of those surveyed had never heard of AIDS, and 50 percent did not know that the disease could be transmitted by sex.

Chinese media, including the official Communist Party organ The People’s Daily recently called for a lifting of the ban on condom advertising. Hopefully the government will follow suit and begin a massive education campaign about and allow such advertising, or China could face the sort of pandemic that is now afflicting sub-Saharan Africa.

Source:

With ignorance as the fuel, AIDS speeds across China. Elisabeth Rosenthal, The New York Times, December 30, 2001.

China lets condoms out of the closet. John Schauble, TheAge.Com, January 1, 2002.

Researchers Succeed in Controlling Cystic Fibrosis in Mice Model

University of Iowa researchers this month published the results of their successful efforts using genetic engineering to prevent Cystic Fibrosis in mice.

Cystic fibrosis is the most common life-threatening genetic disorder in the United States — about 30,000 children and adults are affected by the disease. Due to a genetic mutation, salt does not get transported properly through the cells that line the lungs. This causes a thick build-up of mucus within the lungs and respiratory infections.

Although there have been numerous improvements in treatment for CF over the past couple decades, the median age of death for people with the disease is still around 25.

The new research conducted by Xiaoming Liu and colleagues in Iowa involved mice who received a graft of diseased human lung cells. The mice were then exposed to a virus which was engineered to implant a gene fragment into the diseased lung cells.

The gene fragment fools uses the process which the defective gene uses to create a new protein to slip in a corrected version of the gene in RNA. The mice exposed to the virus saw a 10 percent improvement in lung function which the researchers report was enough to keep the disease under control.

There are still a number of obstacles that will need to be overcome before this sort of approach could be tested in human beings, but it cannot be emphasized enough how animal testing has allowed researchers to make such significant headway into finding a cure for cystic fibrosis only a little over a decade since the gene defect that causes the disease was first discovered.

Source:

Gene therapy hope for cystic fibrosis. Jeremy Thomson, Nature, January 4, 2002.

UK Fur Farms Must Close by Jan. 1, 2003

Two years ago, Great Britain passed the Fur Farming Prohibition Act 2000 which set out a procedure under which it would eventually become illegal to keep animals solely to slaughter them for fur. The actual implementation date of the act had been delayed while details were worked out regarding compensation for the 13 fur farms that were in existence when the act was passed.

Those details were finalized recently and at the end of December the government announced that all fur farms must be out of business by January 1, 2003. Currently there are only three such business left in Great Britain.

Farms forced out of business will be able to receive compensation for the government for loss of earnings and for the disruption caused in needing to find a new line of work.

Source:

Last mink fur farms must close by 2003. Paul Brown, The Guardian (London), December 28, 2001.