Lift U.S. Quotas on Bangladesh Textiles

Bangladesh Commerce Minister Amir Khasru Mahmud Chodhury visited the United States in mid-November to ask the U.S. to life its quotas on textile products from that Asian country. The United States should do the right thing and oblige them.

Developed countries such as the United States complain incessantly about the lack of free markets within the developing world, but at the same time maintain backward trade regimes that prevent poor countries from developing export industries of their own (which also raise the cost of living for residents in developed countries).

If the United States really wants to do something about poverty in the Third World, it should immediately lift all trade restrictions with developing nations as soon as possible.

Source:

Bangladesh wants textiles curbs lifted. BBC, November 12, 2001.

Jeff Nelson is Either "Stupid or Intellectually Dishonest"

A study by researchers at the University of Minnesota made headlines this week because it found that teenagers who were vegetarians were actually less healthy than teenager who were meat eaters. Jeff Nelson of VegSource.Com wrote a reply arguing that this claim was contradicted by very data collected by the researchers and that, therefore, “the researchers conducting the study are either stupid or intellectually dishonest.” As usual, though, it is Nelson who is village idiot.

Nelson complains that the researchers relied on self-identified vegetarians who do not meet his definition of what a vegetarian is. Nelson write,

A mere 78 of the 215 “vegetarians” reported on in the study are actually vegetarians. Looking at the data of actual vegetarian kids against the rest of the group, there are little or no statistically significant differences in most categories, except that the vegetarian kids score better than the non-veg kids in a few — the opposite of what the researchers are trying to argue with the data.

Not surprisingly, given VegSource.Com’s track record, this is mostly a lie. The study did include 215 teenagers who self-described themselves as vegetarians. Of those 215 teenagers, researchers divided them into two groups: 78 restricted vegetarians, which included vegans and lacto- and lacto-ovo vegetarians); and 137 semi-vegetarians, who self-describe themselves as vegetarians but also indicated they ate chicken or fish.

Where Nelson outright lies, however, is in his claim that “there are little or no statistically significant differences in most categories.” In fact, the semi-vegetarians were more likely to engage in both healthy and unhealthy behaviors. But the research also found that the restricted vegetarian teenagers were twice as likely to be at risk for being overweight (and with a 95% confidence interval which is typically the bar set for statistical significance).

It is a little absurd for Nelson to whine that some of the “vegetarians” were still eating fish or chicken, since as the researchers note, people who move from meat eating to vegetarianism are likely to go through a transitional period where they gradually give up meat,

It may also be that semi-vegetarianism, for some, is the first step toward a more stable, restricted vegetarianism, and that once the transition is made or the vegetarianism is maintained for over 2 years, there might be fewer health-compromising weight control behaviors exhibited.

Nelson’s attack on the research is also a bit odd considering that the researchers are anything but hostile to vegetarianism. They do suggest that one approach might be to intervene with adolescent females who are using vegetarianism as an unhealthy weight loss technique, but they also add that,

Another approach may be to consider the choice of vegetarianism as an opportunity, and recruit adolescents to programs focussing on how to become a healthy vegetarian. Since adult vegetarians appear to be leaner and healthier than their nonvegetarian counterparts, learning how to become a “healthy” adolescent vegetarian may be one avenue for long-term and healthful changes in dietary patterns for adolescents.

Apparently, that’s Nelson’s idea of dishonest research. Pretty typical for VegSource.Com.

Source:

Characteristics of vegetarian adolescents in a multiethnic urban population. Cheryl L. Perry, Maureen T. Mcguire, Dianne Neumark-Sztainer and Mary Story, Journal of Adolescent Health, December 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.

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.

Study Claims Victims of Female Stalkers Not Taken Seriously

A conducted by Australian researchers and published in the American Journal of Psychiatry suggests that law enforcement and agencies dedicated to helping crime victims do not take seriously people who claim to be stalked by women.

Researchers Rosemary Purcell, Michele Pathe and Paul Mullen studied 190 stalkers — 150 men and 40 women — who had been referred to mental health facilities from 1993-2000. They found that female stalkers were rarely prosecuted for stalking. The three researchers, each who run centers that deal with stalking and threat management, reported that victims of female stalkers frequently reported difficulties getting law enforcement and other agencies to take them seriously.

“I think when someone is involved in stalking, it should be treated seriously according to the behavior shown, not the gender of the perpetrator,” Purcell told Australian newspaper The Age.

The study did find important differences between women and men stalkers. Female stalkers were far less likely to assault their victims than men, which is consistent with other findings about aggressive behavior in men vs. women, but they did threaten their victims and commit acts of property damage as their male counterparts.

Ninety-one percent of the male stalkers targeted women, whereas female stalkers were as likely to harass other women as they were men.

Source:

Victims of female stalkers ‘not taken seriously’. Peter Gregory, The Age, December 1, 2001.

Kenya’s President Says He’ll Enforce Ban on Genital Mutilation

In a speech on Kenya’s independence day, Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi promised to rigorously enforce a new law making female genital mutilation practices illegal on girls under 17. “Anyone found circumcising a girl of 16 will go straight to jail,” Moi said.

He also promised police protection for any young girl threatened with female genital mutilation.

Moi affirmed, however, that females 17 and older would be able to choose for themselves whether to undergo the procedure saying that, “for girls above the age of 16 years, it is their choice to be circumcised or not. Should they not want to be circumcised, they shall also be protected by the new law.”

According to the BBC, a 1998 survey found that 38 percent of Kenyan women aged 15 to 49 had undergone female genital mutilation.

Source:

Kenya bans FGM among young. The BBC, December 12, 2001.