UK Roundup 21/10/09

UK newspapers, notably The Telegraph, are reporting the latest figures released from Allergy UK that apparently claim that 45% of the UK’s population are suffering from food intolerance of one sort or another. I checked Allergy UK’s website but couldn’t find the press release that backed up these claims so I called them and was met by a wall of vagueness. Perhaps they are just tardy in updating their website… Assuming that the release is genuine it seems an extraordinarily high figure. Unfortunately The Telegraph only features quotes from people with a vested interest in food intolerances; an author with a book on the subject, one doctor from a company that sells intolerance testing kits and another from a company making food suitable for people with intolerance. They come out with the usual claims such as ‘A big part of the problem is that we are assaulting our children with chemicals because the food that we are feeding them isn’t real anymore, it’s just a bunch of food additives, flavourings and colourings’ and ‘if people are eating foods straight out of a chemical laboratory then diabetes and obesity, heart disease and cancer will be a result of these intolerances’.

Not For Me, Thanks

Well apart from the fact that in fact everything is “chemicals” I’m pretty sure it’s quite possible to provide for your family without ‘assaulting’ your children. I’m firmly of the opinion that while there are obviously people with serious allergies, a great number (not all) of those who claim ‘intolerances’ are jumping on the bandwagon because it’s very easy to attribute various vague symptoms to food intolerance. I’ll keep an eye out to see if the Allergy UK figures are released on their site.

In other news the Pope has upset the Church of England by announcing that he will issue an apostolic constitution, a form of papal decree, that will lead to the creation of “personal ordinariates” (whatever they are) for Anglicans who convert to Rome. This effectively means that all those in the C of E who are against female priests and homosexuals can escape to Catholicism. Sound like a complete fudge to me but it’s amusing to watch the churches going at it while trying to appear pious at the same time. Meanwhile at the same time as some of the bones of St Therese are being toured around the country, no doubt performing miracles left right and centre, Jesus has appeared on a toilet wall in Glasgow.I’ll say this much for religion – it’s certainly entertaining.

UPDATE: I called Allergy UK and found one extremely woolly article on their site based entirely on anecdotal evidence. You can find it here look under ‘Stolen Lives Five’ report. There’s also a thread I started over on Bad Science here which has some interesting input. I emailed Allergy UK to see where they get their figures from but no response. I am not holding my breath.

UK Roundup 22/09/09

Two of the usual suspects Derren Brown and Richard Dawkins have been in the UK news recently, Brown for his new TV show, and Dawkins due to his support for libel law reform.

‘Mentalist’, anti-psychic and all-round showman Brown has a new series that apparently has been under development ‘for over a year’ and was promising all sorts of exciting new tricks. Two shows in and the results have been less than impressive.

Must Remember To Buy Aspirin

For his first heavily hyped episode Brown promised to predict the national lottery numbers on live TV. Unfortunately his definition of ‘predicting’ and mine seem to differ somewhat. Mine involves revealing the numbers before seeing the draw, whereas his involved picking some unseen numbers, muttering something about the BBC not allowing him to reveal them, and then revealing them after the draw, at which point they were shown to be correct to the surprise of absolutely no-one. Not only was this all a bit of a swizz, but Brown’s follow-up programme in which he promised to reveal how he had done it was a damp squib. Disappointingly, given his previously laudable anti-mumbo jumbo leanings, he chose to present a couple of scenarios to explain himself and let the viewers choose. Option one was the completely ludicrous suggestion that a group of volunteers had somehow used ‘automatic writing’ to average out the numbers using a theory called ‘the wisdom of crowds’. Total hogwash and pretty close to invoking psychic ability in my book. Option two was that he had somehow rigged the lottery draw – more believable but also pretty much out of the question. General consensus seems to point to some sort of split-screen trick in which the initial balls were switched out with the correct numbers after the draw.

The second show was even worse. Brown claimed that he would, gasp, ‘control the nation’ by means of a mysterious subliminal film. Basically it was nothing more than your bog standard stage hypnotist where some people humour the entertainer by eating an onion or whatever, except in this case all they had to do was to pretend not to be able to get out of their chairs. Some viewers played the game by phoning in to report they were stuck, until released by a special ‘relaxing’ blue film segment shown by Brown.

For all his showman bluster I’m afraid this series just hasn’t done it for Brown so far – his stunts are just too easy to rig for a TV audience (the possibility of multiple takes etc) and waffle about mysterious theories and automatic writing are a definite step in the wrong direction. However he still portrays himself as an illusionist rather than a psychic, so perhaps he’ll pull something a bit more interesting out of the bag later.

Dawkins, meanwhile, has been campaigning to change the English libel laws which he says are biased towards the plaintiff. He has the support of England’s third party the Liberal Democrats (unfortunately numerically pretty much the equivalent of having the staunch support of ACT). Dawkins was quoted as saying that due to the current state of the law, it was very hard to publicly criticise homoeopaths and the like for fear of being sued (although Ben Goldacre seems to have done a pretty good job in his great book ‘Bad Science’). Another doctor, Simon Singh is currently fighting a case where he is being sued for suggesting chiropractors might be not quite as sincere as they make out. This is seen as a very important case in determining how far scientists and others can go in their criticism. Although any changes in the law are a long way off, any groundswell of support or general coverage of the issue is most welcome.

UK Roundup 02/09/09

The British Humanist Association has sparked a bit of controversy by attacking a creationist zoo called Noah’s Ark Farm, near Bristol. The BHA claims that the zoo misleads large numbers of visitors and wants the British and Irish Zoo Association and a number of other tourism agencies to delist them from their promotional material.

Creationism - No. Tapirs - Yes

It’s an interesting case because the zoo seems to be quite open about it’s stance and features a ‘creation research’ link prominently on it’s website, leading many to ask what the problem is. Personally, although I think the zoo’s owners are as mad as a box of frogs, I don’t really see why they can’t run their own private zoo in whatever way they see fit provided it’s quite clear to visitors what they’re in for, and as long as the government isn’t promoting it or paying for it. Hopefully people can see straight through attempts to equate creationism with science and concentrate on the animals instead. Apparently they have some nice tapirs.

Keeping on the theme of animals, a group of USA based atheists have come up with a terrific money making scheme involving post-Rapture pet care. Eternal Earth-Bound Pets offers pet care to those who believe that the worthy (ie those who believe in Jesus) will be swept up to heaven in what is commonly know as ‘The Rapture’. ‘You’ve committed your life to Jesus. You know you’re saved. But when the Rapture comes what’s to become of your loving pets who are left behind?’ the group’s website asks. Having signed up a number of certified blasphemers and sinners to act as animal minders, they are able to guarantee first rate pet care to those animals left behind post-Rapture – for a fee of course.

If you would like to cast your eyes over a truly bad piece of journalism, The Telegraph can help. This week someone called Lucy Pinney wrote a cringe-inducing article on the possibility of ‘remote viewing’ being useful in healthcare. Apart from being possibly the most credulous journalist in print, she was even criticised by her subject Andrew Usher (dean of British Institute Of Homeopathy), who took umbrage at an incorrect statement stating the NHS was investigating remote viewing. So not only does she write a piece free of any journalistic balance, she happily includes references to CIA studies on remote viewing (which found no evidence for it) as evidence, and on top of that misrepresents one of her main subjects. Way to go Lucy.

UK Roundup 6/08/09

London homeopathy purveyors Ainsworths have incurred the wrath of the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) for selling a remedy known as ‘Swine Flu Formula’. The company claims their pills ‘override the symptoms’ of Swine Flu. This is compounded by the fact that the company has a royal warrant, which means it apparently sells its goods to members of the royal family – no prizes for guessing which ones. The MHRA is investigating the company and I could find no mention of the product on their website, which is well worth looking at. What did disturb me was that you can quite happily order whichever remedy you want on their site without any sort of check, which would seem incredibly dangerous (presuming that they actually contained something other than water of course).

In light of the recent furore over the research by the Food Standards Agency stating that organic food has no better nutritional content than ‘normal’ food (see article below) the head of the Whole Foods chain here has said indeed the shops sell ‘ a bunch of junk’ (he’s American). What effect this has on sales remains to be seen.

A Degree - Why earn one when you can just make your own?

And in a shock revelation that will surprise pretty much no-one, it has been revealed that L Ron Hubbard’s claim to have been awarded a PhD was a complete fabrication. The British consulate investigated Hubbard in the 1970’s because they were concerned about the possibility of a libel case after they banned Scientologists from entering the country in 1968. Subsequent investigations found Hubbard and his cronies had created a fake entity, Sequoia University, and promptly awarded each other degrees. The ‘university’ had never been accredited by the state and it fact didn’t even have any premises. The story has made the papers now as the Times have managed to obtain classified Health Department documents under the Freedom of Information Act. No response from Tom Cruise as yet.

Some Chemicals With Your Lettuce Sir?

Organic Pig...or is it?

Here in the UK organic food has become quite a major money spinner, with most large supermarket chains offering organic options. For example if I pop into my local Sainsburys I can buy the standard issue tomato for say £1.78 per kg, or buy the organic range ones for quite a bit more. There are also shops that specialise in organic produce where I could, if was substantially richer or insane, buy a single avocado for £1.80 ($4.50).

Today the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) released a report , which took the form of a ‘systematic review of literature’, carried out by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). LSHTM’s team of researchers, reviewed all papers published over the past 50 years that related to the nutrient content and health differences between organic and conventional food. This systematic review is the most comprehensive study in this area that has been carried out to date (according to the FSA). The conclusion it reached was that “organic food is no healthier and provides no significant nutritional benefit compared with conventionally produced food “.

This set off something of a firestorm in the newspapers comments section which brought up some very good points.

1)Just exactly what is organic food anyway?
To me the term has always been very woolly, conjuring up visions of hardy smock-wearing individuals toiling in the fields whilst chewing on barley stalks. I assumed it meant that no ‘artificial’ pesticides or fertiliser had been used on crops and no hormones, antibiotics, moisturising cream etc administered to animals. But what is an artificial fertiliser? I can use crop rotation and plant lupins or some other nitrogen fixing plant one year to fertilise the soil, but why not just bung on some nitrogen fertiliser and grow more food crops instead? Does that make me non-organic? Which brings me onto the next point…
2)Who defines what organic food is?
Here in the UK it is in fact the European Union which has set down a Compendium of UK Organic Standards. Farmers who want to label their produce must adhere to the standards and be certified by a Government approved body such as the Soil Association. The UK Soil Association does have an attempt at defining organic on their website saying that ‘artificial chemical fertilisers are prohibited’ (so nitrogen fertiliser is out) in preference of clover crop rotation. However they also say that pesticides are ’severely restricted’ (ie not banned) although it seems OK to use copper sulphate as a fungicide.

It was interesting to see the polarising effect of this study, which divided people mainly into two camps. One side was more or less along the lines of ‘I don’t want to put chemicals into my body so therefore organic is better’ while the others were put off by the expense and lack of clarity over exactly what the supposed benefits were, assuming nutrition is not one of them. Clearly modern farming practise has greatly increased food production, which presumably is a good thing.

Unfortunately the effects of fertiliser/pesticide or agricultural practises on the environment were outside the remit of this report. I think a most people do take the overall environmental impact into consideration when buying organic and although I haven’t seen any studies it seems to me quite obvious that they can have an impact – look at the problems with the Rotorua Lakes or Mad Cow disease (BSE) for example. Certainly when it comes to animal welfare and to an extent GMO crops I would tend to be on the side of ‘organic’.
However I think the study is useful in order to show those who run a mile at the word ‘chemical’ that in fact their $2 carrot and my 20c one aren’t actually as different as they may think.

UK Roundup 27/07/09

Close Personal Friends

Uri’s Story: Uri Geller, well known source of amusement for many, has squeezed the last few drops of fame by association  out of his ‘close personal’ friendship with Michael Jackson by appearing in a documentary on the UK’s ITV channel. An almost evangelical sounding Geller waxed lyrical over his time spent with Jackson, pausing to break down in tears from time to time. He peppered his dialogue with references to ‘energy’, managed to squeeze in a reference to his attempt to help Jacksons broken foot while confessing he was ‘not a healer’ and even got in a spoon bend. Most amusing moment was when MJ left a message on Geller’s answering machine expressing his heartfelt desire to be the first pop star to moonwalk on the actual moon – at least he wasn’t a lunar conspiracy theorist. Hopefully this shoddy, hastily thrown together and frankly weird programme will be the last we hear of him for a while, although somehow I doubt it. If it’s shown in NZ I’d recommend it for amusement value only.
Hatch ‘n’ Match
The Church of England have upset almost everyone (again) by launching a new service that combines baptism and marriage in a sort of ecclesiastical buy one, get one free offer, with the aim of increasing church attendances.  Conservative christians are upset that the new scheme acts as tacit approval of sex before marriage, while most non-religious commentators found themselves unable to stop laughing.
Meanwhile the UK police force proves it is an equal opportunity employer, and sensitive to the needs of its officers by allowing pagans in the force to have their own allocated days off (summer solstice etc). Apparently there are more than 500 pagan police officers in the UK. A representative of the Police Association said “This is nothing to do with black magic, or devil worshipping.Witchcraft is not the hocus pocus, puff of smoke, turning people into frogs stuff you see on the TV.” PC Andy Pardy, of Hertfordshire Police, a Heathen who worships Norse gods, said the public had nothing to fear. Which I think we can all agree, is good news.

UK Roundup 17/07/09

In Ireland this week some labourers discovered an image of the Virgin Mary holding a baby in the remains of a tree trunk that they had just felled. The grain of the willow tree revealed by the chainsaw cut left the vague shape of Mary, enough to impress locals who immediately started a petition to turn the stump into a permanent shrine. Now these things happen every so often, and there is certainly no doubt that having a full time shrine would bring a bit of money into a fairly rural area of Limerick, which I’m sure was a consideration for some of those signing the petition.

However it was the reaction from the church that caught my attention. Father Willie Russell, the parish priest, said: “There’s nothing there, it’s just a tree. You can’t worship a tree. A tree is a tree. A person with imagination is a person with imagination.” While Father Paul Finnerty, the spokesman for the Limerick Diocese, said: “The Church’s response to phenomena of this type is one of great scepticism. While we do not wish in any way to detract from devotion to Our Lady, we would also wish to avoid anything which might lead to superstition.” On one hand this reaction is encouraging, however a Catholic priest ‘wishing to avoid anything which encourages superstition’ strikes me as somewhat strange. Perhaps he is working from a different definition of ’superstition’ than I am.

As the 40^th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landings hits the news, so do the large numbers who believe the whole thing was some sort of cosmic hoax. It’s quite amazing that people are so willing to believe in conspiracy theories that fly in the face of such overwhelming evidence and basic common sense. Without going into the seemingly interminable arguments over whether the flag should have been waving, or the lander should have made a bigger impression etc etc it seems to me that to perpetrate such a hoax would have been a bigger achievement than actually going to the moon. The fact that the Russians didn’t immediately debunk such a cover up, and the sheer number of people who would have been in on the scheme in the US seems to me pretty conclusive, given that government ministers today can’t even claim a few extra quid on expenses without being discovered.

UK Roundup 07/07/09

Richard Dawkins managed to get on the front pages this week by helping to subsidise the UK’s first ‘Atheist Camp’ for 8-17 year old children. Created as an antidote to traditional faith based camps run by various churches and the Scouts (didn’t realise the Scouts were particularly religious but apparently they pray from time to time) the camp will teach critical thinking and evolution alongside the usual activities such as canoeing, getting sunburnt and being stung by wasps. Sounds like a great idea. In fact Dawkins hasn’t really got that much to do with it – he just put up some money to help out, but that didn’t stop the usual torrent of abuse in his direction. I imagine he’s pretty used to it by now.

In other news The Sun, that erstwhile bastion of truth and light, has surveyed 1000 of it’s readers and found that 60% of them had visited a medium, 40% believed their star signs and 90% believe in ghosts. It also said 72% believed they had psychic powers themselves. Not sure if this is depressing or just confirms my suspicions about Sun readers.

Meanwhile in Melbourne, a nightclub that has been getting a lot of bad press due to violent incidents taking place there (including two murders, brawls etc etc) has sorted out its problems by calling upon a psychic to ‘banish evil spirits’ from the venue. Apparently five separate malign forces were discovered and sent packing. Although as one wit noted in true Aussie style, they would probably be better off blacklisting all the w**nkers who go there in the first place.

UK Public 2 – 0 Homeopaths

I’ve recently come across a couple of cases here in England in which homeopathy supporters have had to make public and embarrassing climbdowns, a Good Thing in my book. The first is from last year but may not have received much coverage in NZ.

Neal’s Yard Remedies is a fairly large chain of stores selling “organic skin and body care and natural remedies” – they have 52 outlets worldwide and sell their products in many more including some of the UK’s biggest pharmacists. They are also, unsurprisingly, pretty keen on homeopathy. However perhaps not quite so keen as they used to be.

Recently it came to light that they were selling a couple of homeopathic remedies advertised as being malarial prophylactics. Now it’s one thing to claim homeopathy might cure your hay fever or stop dandruff, but it’s quite another to claim it will stop you getting malaria. Every year malaria kills over a million people and up to 500 million people are affected by it. That’s a pretty serious disease. The BBC’s ‘Inside Out’ programme took it upon themselves to investigate why Neal’s Yard were able to sell such products – the clip is below.

The best bit is at around 5 minutes in, where Susan Curtis, Neal’s Yard’s medicine director tries to justify the chain selling the anti-malaria remedies. Her reasoning is akin to the episode of The Simpsons where Lisa convinces Homer to buy a rock that wards off bears (or possibly tigers, something with big teeth and claws anyway). ‘How do I know it works’ asks Homer? ‘Well, you don’t see any bears around here do you’? Sold!

Curtis claiming that the remedies work because she used them when she went to India and didn’t get malaria is priceless. She couldn’t even say whether she was bitten by a malarial mosquito – then gets the hump and walks out of the interview. Not much of an advocate for Neal’s Yard. As a side note I’ve just been in India for six months, took absolutely no anti-malarial medication at all (perhaps foolishly) and also didn’t get malaria. I’m not sure what Curtis would make of that.

The upshot? Neal’s Yard were found to be acting illegally and were forced to remove the two remedies from their shelves, although scarily they had been available for the last twenty years!

The second case involved The University of Westminster in London being forced to scrap it’s BSc degree in Homeopathy. Now I was fairly amazed they even offered such a course but apparently they did, partly justifying it by claiming a third of teaching involved detailed biomedical studies. It attracted a fair amount of flak from others in the academic world but not enough for the course to be stopped. In fact what killed it off finally was the encouraging fact they just couldn’t get enough students signed up to justify running it. Reason for optimism indeed!