I find it amusing that President Bush gets blamed for anything that goes wrong, including hurricanes.  But even I am incensed about this one.  Whatever his personal opinion might be—if he's aware of the situation at all—he surely bears part of the blame for the following insanity, because the president is ultimately responsible for the actions of his administration.From the Wall Street Journal:

The Bush administration said it will fight a ruling allowing meatpackers to test their animals for mad-cow disease. The Agriculture Department tests fewer than 1% of slaughtered cows for the disease. Kansas-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to test all of its cows. A federal judge ruled in March that such tests must be allowed. The Agriculture Department argues that widespread testing could lead to a false positive. Larger meat companies say if Creekstone tests its meat and advertises it as safe, they might be expected to perform the expensive test, too.

Huh?  Even a small-government advocate like me knows that one of the things government does best is enable higher standards than an unfettered free market can bear.

Suppose Company A and Company B both want to reduce their emmissions of pollutants.  If one takes on the added expense but the other doesn't, the second receives a decided market advantage over the first.  Even if they can agree to both reduce their emissions (without getting accused of illegal collusion), they are at risk from Company C which is not party to the agreement.

Enter governmental regulation:  If all companies in the industry are required to take on the expense, costs will rise, but more or less evenly.  (This is a very simplified analysis that doesn't take into account the problems of small businesses and other complicting factors, but you get the idea.)

So in this situaion I would expect to see the Department of Agriculture requiring more extensive testing to assure the safety of our food supply.  Instead, they are fighting a company that is voluntarily doing more for its customers than the USDA requires.  And why?

Because other meat companies might feel pressure to do more testing themselves?  This is a good thing!

Because widespread testing could lead to false positive results?  Well, yes, and I acknowledge that false positives can be a problem.  In any area.  By this logic we should abandon all mass screening from infant hearing checks to AIDS testing.  Somehow I don't think that's going to happen.

Perhaps we need a new test—one to screen members of the USDA for true concern for the safety of our nation's food.

Remember the story of the guy who got in trouble for (correctly) using the word "niggardly"?

Porter's boss once called him on the carpet for "using words I don't understand."

Now Missouri legislators are up in arms because their vocabularies failed them.  They passed a bill legalizing lay midwifery because they didn't realize what "tocology" means.

I suppose I ought to have some sympathy for them.  The legislation was attached to a popular health insurance bill, which was no doubt long and complicated, like most legal documents these days.  I fully admit that software companies could slip the most outrageous provisions into the EULA's I regularly "sign" after skimming, rather than closely analyzing, them.  On the other hand, knowing what legislation they are passing is their job, it's why they were elected, so if they don't personally know exactly what's in a bill, they had better have hired some trustworthy staff members to know and to keep them informed.

I happen to approve of the pro-midwifery legislation.  But if I didn't, and if these were my senators, I would not be directing my anger at Senator Loudon, who introduced the legislation and took advantage of his colleagues' ignorance, but at the ones who obviously aren't doing their jobs.

The most fun part of the story, however, is behind the scenes.  In yet another example of how the media routinely mess up the details even when they get the general story correct, use of the word "tocology" is credited to a homeschooled teen with a "college test prep guide."  Almost right, but the source of her knowledge of the word was good old A.Word.A.Day, to which my father, a great lover of words, instroduced many of us.  Here's what the girl herself has to say (from an A.W.A.D mailing):

My name is Sarah Greek, and I'm a homeschooled student in Mountain Grove,
Missouri, who just graduated from high school. I'm a subscriber of AWAD
and just read your latest email and its reference to 'tocological trickery'
with interest.  [see reference]

"If only they were reading AWAD"? We were. That's how this happened!

I live in Missouri, and have been working with Senator Loudon and
others on midwifery legislation all year. You might be interested to
know that I discovered the word 'tocological' as a result of your
daily emails. When we were working on midwifery legislation several
weeks ago, I remembered the word and informed Senator Loudon. We
inserted it into our amendment, resulting in the events that the news
article which you referenced narrates.

The whole situation, especially the word tocology, has been all over the
Missouri news this week. I spent the week in Jefferson City, and can
personally attest to the fact that the word tocology has been in the
mouths of nearly every politician all week. It's become the latest inside
joke in the Missouri Legislature. I've been called 'a tocological pain'.  :) 

Thanks to AWAD, midwifery is well on its way to becoming legal in
Missouri, and the whole state has added a new word to its vocabulary!

Among the more bizarre stories of the day, here's a study that claims to be able to predict your child's future SAT performance based on the relative lengths of his fingers.  Those whose ring fingers are longer compared with their index fingers are statistically likely to do better on the math portion, and those with the reverse situation to do better on the verbal.  This supposedly reflects prenatal testosterone/estrogen exposure.

It's a lot harder to measure finger length than I thought.  I finally settled on measuring from the knuckle, and it seems my ring finger is a bit longer than my index.  It's true, I did very well on the math portion of the SAT.  But I did even better on the verbal, so I must have measured wrong.  :)

The researchers plan to expand their studies into "other cognitive and behavioral issues, such as technophobia, career paths and possibly dyslexia."

My hearing is very good, probably better than that of many my age because I didn't ruin it in my teens with headphones and loud music.  But I still find that I can understand what people say better if I can see their faces.  Now I know why.

A Canadian study indicates that there is a signficant visual component of language understanding even amongst hearing people.  The four-month-old babies in the study were able to distinguish when adults in a silent video were speaking English and when they were speaking French.

The eight-month-old babies could do the same, but only if they were being raised in a bilingual French/English environment.

Just what parents didn't want to hear.  Apparently high-action video games can improve your eyesight.  (Rochester Review, May/June 2007)

Or hospitals in general, if you can help it.  I realize they perform a vital service, and I really am thankful for doctors and hospitals.  But sometimes I think they've completely lost touch with reality.

Check out this article about an Ontario woman who gave birth.  In her First Nation (Native American) culture, burying the placenta is an important ritual.  But the hospital wouldn't let her take her placenta home.  In the end, she finally received it, but only after it had been sterilized and passed through the hands of a funeral home!

This woman's complaint has a chance of making some change in the Canadian hospital policies, because of her Native status.  But Native Americans, and Canadians, are not the only ones who want to bury or otherwise use the placenta.  Why does the hospital think it has the right to keep the placenta?  Apparently because we gave them that right.  But if they don't want to drive even more parents to the friendlier options of midwives and home birth, pehaps they should rethink the issue.

Well, no, not really.  Sunscreen has an important role in preventing sunburn and skin problems.  But I've long thought that we are now going overboard to avoid the sun, and this article on vitamin D deficiency encourages that belief.  It turns out that vitamin D is valuable for far more than preventing rickets, and the recommended daily dose is probably much too low.  A few interesting quotes from the article (since I know it will become inaccessible after a while):

A series of recent studies has found that vitamin D, the so-called sunshine vitamin—once thought to be critical only to bone health—is useful throughout the body to strengthen the immune system and control cell growth. Yet researchers estimate that as many as half of all Americans are likely deficient in the nutrient.

[R]esearchers say [vitamin D] may help you stave off everything from osteoporosis to multiple sclerosis to diabetes, schizophrenia and breast cancer.

A mere SPF-8 sunscreen...uts vitamin D synthesis by roughly 95 percent.

[F]ew foods offer even modest amounts of natural vitamin D....They include cream, egg yolks, cod liver oil and fatty fish.

[T]hough milk and some cereals are fortified with D in this country, the vitamin is often delivered in the form of synthetic D2, which is more stable but not easily used by the body. Many multivitamins also use D2.

"Make sure you're taking D3...the same compound that is made in sun-exposed skin," advises best-selling author Dr. Andrew Weil, a physician and strong proponent of holistic medicine. "So often, you see orange juice or foods that say they're vitamin D-fortified. But many times, those are fortified with D2. [And] vitamin D has to be taken with fat. Taking a vitamin D pill with orange juice isn't going to work; it won't stick to you."

"It has taken science and medicine a long time to figure out how vitamin D really works," explains Dr. Luke Bucci, a biochemist and vice president of research for Schiff Nutrition International. "People were afraid because they thought it accumulates in the body. Well, no, it doesn't."

Gotta go.  It's almost time for my daily walk vitamin D-making session.

It was the title that struck me:

Study spotlights prenatal beef consumption

I found the image of tiny babies-in-utero chowing down on hamburgers quite amusing.

But the results of a study by researchers at my former employer, the University of Rochester Medical Center, are not funny at all.  Men whose mothers ate a lot of beef during their pregnancy were found to have a risk of fertility problems three times greater than normal, with 25% below normal sperm counts.  If this is due, as many suspect, to the hormones fed to beef cattle, there is good reason to believe that girl babies are adversely affected as well.

I'm no vegetarian, but organic meat is looking more and more to be worth the exorbitant cost.

I remember the response, too.

I've written about the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine campaign before.  Now I want to share this excellent article by Gina R. Dalfonzo from Christianity Today, (22 March 07) which begins,

You've probably seen the commercials. Over the last few months, it's been almost impossible not to see them. They parade endlessly across our screens—a multitude of women of all ages, from all backgrounds—and they all have the same urgent message to share: "Tell someone that human papillomavirus causes cervical cancer. Tell someone. Tell someone. Tell someone."

To which I can only respond, "We tried."

Many years ago, members of the Family Research Council, a Christian public policy group in Washington, DC, tried to publicize the connection between HPV and cervical cancer, and the fact that condoms are not an effective protection agains the virus.  They were trashed, bashed, and outshouted by the media and organizations such as Planned Parenthood and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS), which claimed they were just trying to get people to stop having sex, and anyway the number of people who would actually get cervical cancer from HPV was so small it was not worth worrying about.

The article is quite right, and well worth reading in its entirety.  I remember both the warning and the reaction.

What would be amusing if it weren't so sad is that the same people who once pooh-poohed the HPV-cancer connection are now trumpeting it loudly—but are still bashing the FHC, this time for not jumping on the bandwagon to coerce every girl, not just the small number who would benefit from it, to receive this new and mostly unnecessary vaccine.

Now it's Chinese food that's bad for you!  I'm especially sad that they singled out my family's favorite, General Tso's Chicken.  And how about this:

[E]ating an order of lemon chicken, which is battered and then deep-fried, is like eating three fried McDonald's McChicken sandwiches then washing them down with a 32-oz. Coke.

This report slams Chinese food for both high sodium and high calorie content.  What's critically missing is any mention of portion size.  I don't know anyone who thinks that the plates they serve you at Chinese restaurants were meant to be consumed by one person, and I'm sure both the calorie and the sodium numbers would look much better if analyzed for reasonably-sized portions.  Eating less makes a lot more sense than following this advice:  "[Stay] away from duck sauce, hot mustard, hoisin sauce, and soy sauce."  Could you then still call it Chinese food???

This article on making moral judgments is a good example of the kind of false dilemma that drives me crazy.  It reminds me of those soul-tearing questions sometimes inflicted on schoolchildren—by each other, and even by teachers—such as "If your house were burning and you could only save one parent, which would you choose, your mom or your dad?" I remember teaching my own kids that "I don't answer ridiculous questions" is a perfectly acceptable response.

The dilemma posed in the experiment is this:  "Someone you know has AIDS and plans to infect others, some of whom will die. Your only options are to let it happen or to kill the person. Do you pull the trigger?"  The premise, "your only options are to let it happen or to kill the person" is spurious, since there are always other options.  They could at least have set up a more plausible scenario, such as a sniper shooting steadily into a crowded schoolyard and you having a gun trained on the sniper—do you shoot him?  But even in that case one can shoot to disable, even though there's a chance your shot will end up fatal.

What they discovered about the responses of people with a particular type of brain damage may be important in helping those people and their families, but it's hard to see any general application that can come from false premises.

I suppose I should throw out my Peter Pan peanut butter.

Having read about the recall, I quietly scoffed at the paranoia of those who recommended getting rid of all peanut butter, as if the net of the "2111" product code weren't wide enough.  And all this fuss when no actual contamination has (yet) been found in the product—just a statistical link.

But just for fun, I looked at the product code on my jar, and lo and behold, it begins with the Number of the Peanut Butter Beast.

The fact that I've already consumed more than half the contents of the jar ought to count for something, though.

I wonder how much of the harm in the world has been done to people "for their own good."  I think of the Crusades, forced conversions, overzealous social workers who have ripped children from their families without cause (and, when proven wrong, without apology), the punishment of Native American and Deaf children who dared speak their mother tongues in school, and court-ordered therapy against the will of the patient.  One might argue that there were mixed motives on the parts of the do-gooders in these cases, but always the benefit of the victim was used as an excuse, and I believe in most cases the confidence of doing a good thing was truly a major motivating factor.

No doubt those who would force young girls to take the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine are moved by similar altruistic desires.  What's the big deal?  If a simple immunization can greatly reduce one's risk of cervical cancer, why not?  Well, that may be a good reason for getting it oneself, although maybe not.  After all, cervical cancer is one of the most easily detectible and treatable cancers, and in any case one can virtually eliminate the HPV risk simply by remaining sexually abstinent or faithfully monogamous.  In any case, it's hardly a credible rationale for forcing the vaccine on other people.

It's true that most states already require several vaccines of their schoolchildren, and in some cases it's understandable.  Diseases such as measles and polio are highly contagious and can spread rapidly through a classroom.  This is not the case for HPV.  What's more, pending legislation in Kentucky would extend the HPV immunization requirement to homeschoolers as well!  For that there is no excuse.

Having lived long enough to see vaccines and other medical procedures come and go, with some touted as safe later shown to have devastating consequences, I'm openly skeptical of assertions that the new vaccine is safe.  All vaccines carry with them an element of risk, and the risk/benefit ratio is not the same for all people.  No law, however well-intentioned, should be allowed to force the risk upon those who see little or no benefit.

Not even for their own good.

A Candian study indicates that knowledge of two or more languages can play a significant role in staving off dementia.  Multilingual people in the study began showing dementia symptoms an average of 4.1 years later than their unilingual counterparts.  "How you learn the language probably doesn't make much difference; how good your grammar is probably doesn't matter." said principle investigator Ellen Bialystok. "What matters is that you have to manage two complete language systems at once."

Since previous research has found other mental workouts, like crossword puzzles, to be helpful as well, I'm now looking for a multi-lingual version of my World of Puzzles magazine....

Last night we heard the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra play Pierre Jalbert's deeply moving In Aeternum, which he wrote as a memorial to his niece who died at birth. Naturally, my thoughts were about Isaac as I listened, running a gamut of emotions, including anger during an intense part of the work with a heartbeat motif running through it—that brought back memories of the doctor who interrupted the family's last moments together to tell them Isaac's heart rate was slowing down.

I had the privilege of speaking briefly with Jalbert afterwards and was able to tell him (though not fully express) how much the music meant to me. You can hear an exerpt of In Aeternum here.

(Some readers of this blog will be interested to know that Jalbert is a native son of Manchester, New Hampshire!)

Having been set up by last night's experience, I was not prepared to handle this morning's news from the United Kingdom: The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology is recommending active euthanasia for severely disabled newborns.

In these days of extreme medical care, the right and wrong of a situation is often a messy shade of grey. I fully support the right of a family to bring a loved one—young, old, or in between—home to die in friendly, familiar, natural surroundings, even if medical intervention would extend that person's life. This has nothing to do with actively, purposefully killing a helpless, innocent human being whose existence has become difficult or expensive, and the two issues should not be conflated. That respected doctors should hold such a position does nothing to bolster my already-waning trust in the medical profession.

I have no doubt that financial considerations weighed heavily in this recommendation, and I am saddened and angry for the new parents who—at the moment of their greatest grief and heartache—will face pressure from the UK's National Health Service to allow their babies to be cheaply killed rather than run up expensive medical bills. Nor do I have any illusions that the trend will stop with newborns.

John Harris, a member of the official Human Genetics Commission and professor of bioethics at Manchester University, welcomed the college's submission. "We can terminate for serious foetal abnormality up to term, but cannot kill a newborn," he told The Sunday Times. "What do people think has happened in the passage down the birth canal to make it OK to kill the foetus at one end of the birth canal but not the other?"

If conception is not enough of a momentous occurrence to mark the beginning of a life worthy of protection...if viability outside the womb is not...if the moment of birth is not...then we are left with nothing at all.