Category: reason

Last month the San Francisco city
council introduced a proposal to tax soda at a rate of two cents
per ounce. The tax, which would have to be approved by voters,
would add a whopping $1.44 to the cost of a six-pack of soda. The
council liked the idea so much that they soon introduced a
competing proposal to tax soda at exactly the same rate. But, as
Baylen Linnekin points out, Research also shows soda taxes don’t
work. For example, a 2010 study published in the Archives of
Internal Medicine suggested that even an enormous soda tax of 40
percent would not make people healthier. Maybe that’s why lawmakers
and voters elsewhere have defeated and repealed such soda-targeting
schemes.

View this article.

Last month the San Francisco city
council introduced a proposal to tax soda at a rate of two cents
per ounce. The tax, which would have to be approved by voters,
would add a whopping $1.44 to the cost of a six-pack of soda. The
council liked the idea so much that they soon introduced a
competing proposal to tax soda at exactly the same rate. But, as
Baylen Linnekin points out, Research also shows soda taxes don’t
work. For example, a 2010 study published in the Archives of
Internal Medicine suggested that even an enormous soda tax of 40
percent would not make people healthier. Maybe that’s why lawmakers
and voters elsewhere have defeated and repealed such soda-targeting
schemes.

View this article.

Earlier this week the Food and Drug
Administration sent a warning letter to the direct to consumer gene
testing company 23andMe ordering the company to stop marketing its
$99 genotype screening test. So what are the FDA’s bureaucrats
worried about? Evidently they fear that purchasers of 23andMe’s
personal genome services will do something dangerously stupid in
reaction to the genetic risk information that the tests provide.
Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey points out that
the FDA has offered no evidence that 23andMe test results are going
to produce an outbreak of do-it-yourself mastectomies.

View this article.

A
study last year by the French anti-GMO campaigner who sometimes
masquerades as a scientist, Gilles-Eric Séralini, has been
retracted by the journal in which it was published. Seralini
claimed that rats that he fed a diet of GMO corn developed mammary
tumors and liver disease. The study was
widely hailed by anti-GMO activists and soundly denounced by
actual scientists.

In my article, “The
Top 5 Lies About Biotech Crops,” I reported:

One
widely publicized specious study (also cited by
the IRT) was done by the French researcher Gilles-Eric Seralini and
his colleagues. They reported that rats
fed pesticide resistant corn died of mammary tumors and liver
diseases. Seralini is the president of the scientific council
of the Committee
for Research and Independent Information on Genetic
Engineering, which describes itself as an “independent
non-profit organization of scientific counter-expertise to study
GMOs, pesticides and impacts of pollutants on health and
environment, and to develop non polluting alternatives.” The
Committee clearly knows in advance what its researchers will find
with regard to the health risks of biotech crops. But when truly
independent groups, such as the European
Society of Toxicologic Pathology and theFrench
Society of Toxicologic Pathology, reviewed Seralini’s study,
they found it essentially to be meretricious
rubbish. Six French academies of science
issued a statement declaring that the journal should never
have published such a low-quality study and excoriating
Seralini for orchestrating a media campaign in advance of
publication. The European
Food Safety Agency’s review of the Seralini study “found
to be inadequately designed, analysed and reported.” Sadly, such
junk science has real-world consequences, since Seralini’s article
was apparently cited when Kenya
made the decision to ban the importation of foods made
with biotech crops.

The journal Food and Chemical Toxicity has
now retracted Seralini’s article, noting:

Unequivocally, the Editor-in-Chief found no evidence of fraud or
intentional misrepresentation of the data. However, there is a
legitimate cause for concern regarding both the number of animals
in each study group and the particular strain selected. The low
number of animals had been identified as a cause for concern during
the initial review process, but the peer-review decision ultimately
weighed that the work still had merit despite this limitation. A
more in-depth look at the raw data revealed that no definitive
conclusions can be reached with this small sample size regarding
the role of either NK603 or glyphosate in regards to overall
mortality or tumor incidence. Given the known high incidence of
tumors in the Sprague-Dawley rat, normal variability cannot be
excluded as the cause of the higher mortality and incidence
observed in the treated groups. 

For his “research” Seralini selected a type of lab rat that is
well-known to
develop spontaneous tumors. One of the numerous letters to the
editor explaining the flaws in the study
concluded:

Discussion is important in science, but this publication stirred
vigorous criticism by several scientists around the world. It has
risen up great attention by the media that had no chance of getting
an external expert opinion due to unusual non-disclosure clauses.
The initial unbalanced media coverage is causing damage to an
important tool for global food security. It is also important to
avoid unnecessary distress and pain of the animals (e.g.
Directive 2010/63/EU), the experiment should not go beyond the
point required to meet the scientific objectives. I urge you to
take adequate measures to keep the high standard quality of
publications that come to your journal. This paper as it is now,
presents poor quality science and dubious ethics.

It’s good that the journal has gotten around to retracting the
study, but unfortunately it will become just another cause
celebre among conspircy minded anti-biotech activists.

Publicly launched earlier this
week, Project Tycho has
assembled data on contagious disease rates in the United States
since 1888. The non-profit effort is named after astronomer Tycho
Brahe whose careful observations enabled Johannes Kepler to figure
out the orbits of planets in our solar system. Based on the data, a
new
report in The New England Journal of Medicine
estimates that over 100 million cases of serious childhood
illnesses have been prevented in the U.S. since 1924 by vaccination
programs against polio, measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis A,
diphtheria, and pertussis (whooping cough).

The Washington Post
reported:

What emerges is a detailed picture of how 56 infectious diseases
have affected the American landscape since the late 19th century —
and what interventions have proved most effective in stopping them.
By comparing reported outbreaks of polio, smallpox and other
diseases with the dates when vaccines for each came into use,
researchers were able to document the life-saving role those drugs
played.

“We saw these very abrupt declines of incidence rates across the
country,” said lead author Willem G. van Panhuis, assistant
professor of epidemiology at the university’s Graduate School of
Public Health, known as Pitt Public Health. Ultimately, he and his
co-authors estimated that the introduction of vaccines had helped
prevent 100 million cases of serious childhood diseases, a
figure they said is worth remembering during a time when critics
have raised questions about the necessity of vaccines.

“We really hope this will ignite debate about the use of
vaccinations, and that it will provide a new piece of evidence,”
van Panhuis said. “We hope this will give this whole discussion a
new dimension.”

Although the NEJM article did not estimate the number
of deaths avoided through vaccination, the New York Times

noted:

Dr. Donald S. Burke, the dean of Pittsburgh’s graduate school of
public health and an author of the medical journal article, said
that a reasonable projection of prevented deaths based on known
mortality rates in the disease categories would be three million to
four million.

The scientists said their research should help inform the debate
on the risks and benefits of vaccinating American children.

Pointing to the research results, Dr. Burke said, “If you’re
anti-vaccine, that’s the price you pay.”

For more background on the relative safety of vaccines see my
post, “For
Pete’s Sake, Go Get Your Kids Vaccinated Already!” And until
you can control your own infectious disease vectors so that they
don’t harm anyone else, don’t bother asserting that it’s your
“right” to endanger others. See also, Harm
Principle.

With the area economy
rebounding, San Francisco is in the midst of a housing crisis as
many residents are evicted from their apartments. With rents
strictly regulated, an increasing number of San Francisco owners
are getting out of the rental business and cashing out their
properties to turn them into co-ops. Steven Greenhut argues that
rent control actually forces prices upward, especially over the
long term, by diminishing the supply of available rental
housing.

View this article.

With the area economy
rebounding, San Francisco is in the midst of a housing crisis as
many residents are evicted from their apartments. With rents
strictly regulated, an increasing number of San Francisco owners
are getting out of the rental business and cashing out their
properties to turn them into co-ops. Steven Greenhut argues that
rent control actually forces prices upward, especially over the
long term, by diminishing the supply of available rental
housing.

View this article.

When the FDA is shutting down personal genetic services such as
23andMe, it’s blocking the next great era in medical
innovation.

Click above to hear Peter Huber talk about his new book, The
Cure in the Code, and what needs to happen to create truly
personalized drugs.

Originally released on November 20, 2013. Here’s the full
writeup:

“The
search for one-dimensional, very simple correlations – one drug,
one clinical effect in all patients – is horrendously obsolete,”
says Peter
Huber, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the
author, most recently, of The
Cure in the Code: How 20th Century Law is Undermining 21st Century
Medicine.

Pharmaceuticals, Huber says, offer amazing and important ways of
improving our health and quality of life and today’s scientists and
doctors have the ability to tailor drugs to patients’ unique
genetic codes. It’s nothing less than an outrage, argues Huber,
that innovation is being blocked by the Federal Drug
Administration, which clings to an outdated one-size-fits-all drug
approval model.

Huber sat down with Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie to discuss the
future of “molecular medicine,” the FDA drug-approval process, and
how AIDS activism in the 1980s and ’90s provides a model for
disrupting the government’s refusal to allow experimentation and
innovation.

About 10 minutes.

For more of Reason‘s coverage on the FDA,
go here.

Camera by Jim Epstein and Anthony Fisher. Edited by Joshua
Swain.

Go here for more links, resources, etc.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and U.S. Rep. Trey Radel
(R-Fla.) both blame demon rum for driving them to cocaine. Writing
in Forbes, Senior Editor Jacob Sullum explains why it
would be a mistake to accept that excuse.

Read the article.