"You Bet Your Life"

Alliance for Human Research Protection: A Great Group!

So, I have stumbled upon the AHRP (not to be confused with those do-nothing geezers at the AARP).

Wow! What a courageous bunch!

Supporting whisteblowers at the FDA, like Dr. David Graham!

"Today, the United States of America is worse off when it comes to drug safety than it was a year ago when I testified. That's because the FDA's recent drug safety initiatives serve only as window dressing, diverting attention away from real solutions, such as an independent Office of Drug Safety."

Exposing the junk science and massive fraud permeating the scientific industry today.

The U.S. press is focused on stunning revelations of fraud and data tampering that were uncovered during Vioxx court proceedings. Merck - "once the most esteemed name in the pharmaceutical business" - and its contracted academic scientists were shown to have deleted data linking Vioxx to cardiovascular damage from the major VIGOR report published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2000. The NEJM is viewed as the most authoritative scientific journal.

Exposing ugly, unethical, Nazi-esque clinical trials on orphans, that our friend, Liam Scheff unearthed with his wonderful reporting on Incarnation Children's Center in NY.

Detailing the numerous court cases against the big boys at Big Pharma, for bribing doctors to the tune of $278 million dollars to prescribe bogus, unecessary and toxic drugs.

I love these guys. Troll around on their site. Donate some sheckels to them. Pass this around. We remain ensconsed in an ugly age of science/medicine, mostly caused by pharmaceutical greed and medical stupidity. Time to break out of it. Makes some heads roll.

Also, many of our scientists in academia are clueless and sub-par, but I don't wanna name names:)

College Cheaters

Not to moralize, but, No, I didn't cheat in college or grad school. I didn't see the point. I figgered I was there voluntarily, paying oodles of money for school, desirous of learning the substance in  classes that I specifically chose.

So, why cheat? It's like lying to yourself about your weight -- what's the point?

But, I guess times have changed.

Nigerian Chicken Flu Waning, Experts Say

Hmm. Well, yes, we refer to the dreaded Avian Bird Flu as the "Nigerian Chicken Virus" because it sounds funnier.

But, Heck, the experts now say the "pandemic" is waning!

Lookee here:

Nabarro and other officials warn that it would be highly premature to declare any sort of victory. The virus has moved rapidly across continents and is still rampaging in Myanmar, Indonesia and other countries nearby. It could still hitchhike back in the illegal trade in chicks, fighting cocks, tropical pets or in migrating birds.

But this sudden success in the former epicenter of the epidemic is proof that aggressive measures like killing infectedchickens, inoculating healthy ones, protecting domestic flocks and educating farmers can work, even in very poor countries.

Yeah, that's the new spin -- we prevented it from happening:)

Kinda like, Hey, gimme a lot of $$ to fight off the dragons that will kill us all, sez the mighty dragon slayer.

2 weeks later: Well, sigh, it was hard work, but I think I cleared them out and you don't have to worry about them any longer.

Their version:

Status Quo Ante:  There was a huge risk of 1918 epidemic, spread by birds!

Status Quo Post:   Whew, by our hard efforts, we have avoided such risk!

My version:

Status Quo Ante: There was no risk

Status Quo Post:  There remains no risk.

Occam's Razor, Baby!

Big Pharma seeps into Young Culture

Interesting article (a bit old) about how kids are dispensing prescription drugs to each other -- junior varsity pharmacists.  Kinda pill-popping chic.

"I acquire quite a few medications and then dispense them to my friends as needed. I usually know what I'm talking about," said Katherine, who lives in Manhattan and who, like many other people interviewed for this article, did not want her last name used because of concerns that her behavior could get her in trouble with her employer, law enforcement authorities or at least her parents.

Well, that's great Katherine! I'm sure you're very well acquainted with the peer-reviewed literature, the package inserts, the PDR, the adverse effects of all these wonderful drugs!

Polypharmacy writ large appears to be the order of the day. If this keeps up, I'm going Vegan:)

Honey, can you make me another one of those wheat germ, brussel sprout shakes? I'm gonna stick it to these high-tech drug pushers!

Bausch & Lomb Acting Badly

FDA clamps down . Fungal infections -- failure to warn. Thatsa no-no:)

Bausch & Lomb Inc. failed to notify U.S. regulators about 35 serious fungal infections reported in Singapore in users of its ReNu with MoistureLoc contact lens solution within the required 30 days, the Food and Drug Administration said in a report released on Tuesday.

The Barnes Question

One day, Dr. Kary Mullis, the Nobel Laureate , was writing a paper on AIDS, and jotted down the phrase, "HIV has been determined to cause AIDS...." or something similar. He then lifted an eyebrow, and said to himself, in essence, "Hmm. I better get a cite for this important scientific statement." He then asked his colleagues for the proper cite. And, got no answer. He then asked Luc Montagnier for the cite, and got a bullsh%t answer. He kept asking, and asking, and asking, and still got no answer.

So, following in his great footsteps, I have asked (and continue to ask) a two-part question to my friends in the blogosphere:

1. Do you claim that HIV kills T4-cells?

2. In your view, Which paper in the scientific literature first proved this claim?

Our friend, Dr. Bialy, has written a short blurb here, both improving upon my questions and offering some answers.

Well, sorry, Drs. Gallo and Weiss, your answers aren't very good. Detecting a virus in a culture, yapping about anti-bodies, yapping about T4 surface receptors, yapping about molecular cloning, ain't sufficient to prove its cause!

Does anyone out there claim that the 3 papers cited by Dr. Bialy established HIV as the cause? We'd love to hear from you!

More Scientific Fraud

This time, it's a top computer scientist from China.

The distinguished scientist, the government said, had faked research conducted at Jiaotong University and simply stolen his chip designs from a foreign company, then passed them off as his own.

Mr. Chen, who has not admitted wrongdoing in the case, declined to comment when he was reached on Sunday by telephone. "This is not the right moment to talk," he said.

Not the right moment to talk? I love it when these weasels clam up!

In a society where honor is particularly important and where the fear of public shame runs especially deep, the story of Mr. Chen has a profound resonance. Now, after all the honors and accolades bestowed on this 37-year-old favorite son, who returned home to China from the United States with a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin six years ago, people here are beginning to question whether China is pushing its leading thinkers too hard to innovate and catch up with the West. Could Mr. Chen's downfall, they ask, represent an example of how even smart and successful people in China are being forced to cut corners to meet the nation's hyper-ambitious goals?

Yee-Haw! University of Texas! Mebbe at these fancy American Universities is where he learned to "cut-corners" to meet those dern "hyper-ambitious goals".

When will it ever end?:)

Roger Hodge is on the Mike!

Nice, but short radio interview with Roger Hodge, Editor at Harpers, about Celia Farber's recent brilliant piece in said esteemed mag.

Harpers will be going places with Hodge at the helm -- the guy gets it.

Great money graf:

In essence, [the Farber piece] involved a clinical trial of an AIDS drug called Nevirapine for treatment of maternal-to-child transmission of HIV, in Uganda under the auspices of the National Institutes of Health. And everything that could go wrong went wrong. Records were lost. People died. The primary investigators had little contact with the subjects. All of this was covered up by people in the NIH, the very highest levels of the Division of AIDS. It was whitewashed, published and was the launching pad for the distribution of this drug throughout the world.

There's your NIH and Big Pharma working hand in hand to produce "high-quality" medications!

Dr. Bialy is on the Case!

Once again, our friend, Harvey, is nailing these nanny-state Gestapo-types at the CDC, who are enamored with bogus HIV "tests" -- tests, of course, that don't even detect HIV.

Ok, maybe that's a little over the top. Let me start afresh.

Let's assume for the moment that HIV kills T4-cells, and that's bad for your health. So, to address this problem, the first order of business would be to detect infectious virus particles in sufficient amounts in your body to indicate disease, right Jethro? Is this not common sense?

E-mail me immediately if you do not understand this.

So, does the HIV "test" detect infectious virus in your body? No, it detects antibodies.

Does PCR detect infectious virus in your body? No, it detects RNA fragments and cellular debris.

Does an P24 antigenemia test detect infectious virus in your body? No, it detects a solitary protein, which is not unique to HIV.

Ok, wise-guy, what's your solution, Hank?

Very simple -- take a blood sample from an HIV+ person, and culture HIV in a petri dish in a lab. If this cannot be done, it tends to mean -- there ain't no HIV in your blood, let alone in sufficient titer to cause disease. And, it also means -- your test, whatever anti-bodies it detects, ain't very accurate.

South African Messiness

Check out this NY Times article re the acquittal of a political figure who allegedly raped an HIV+ activist.

Here are the salient facts:

President Thabo Mbeki leaves office in 2009 -- so he's got plenty of time. One of his potential successors is a zulu, named Jacob Zuma.

But, Zuma has political problems: (1) He allegedly took bribes while in office from a French military contractor and stands trial on this charge in June and (2) He was charged with raping an HIV+ positive activist.

I am not making this up!

To add fuel to the fire, he makes some insensitive statements about HIV, which pissed off the court and various AIDS activists:

Mr. Zuma testified that he believed he had little risk of contracting the AIDS virus because he had showered after having sex with the woman. The remark enraged women's-rights and AIDS groups ...

Of course, we don't think showering after sex will prevent transmission of HIV from woman to man (or, more precisely, we've seen no evidence of this in the literature.) So, Zuma doesn't know what he's talking about.

However, not to open up a huge can of worms,  Padian did estimate that female-to-male sexual transmission of HIV was incrediblly low -- slightly less than 1/10,000. There's no mention in the article whether Zuma contracted HIV, which means he probably didn't.

So, it's the opposite situation of what is claimed to be happening in South Africa. Zuma was not an HIV+ man infecting a woman thru rape --rather, he was (likely) HIV-, raping an HIV+ woman and not worrying about the potential infection!

Now, of course, in general , we think rapists ought to be taken out and shot, because we are law-and-order types, and care about victims. For whatever reason, Zuma was acquitted, so that's off the table.

The other stuff though is wild, ain't it?