Letters to the Editor
danstr
Published Letters: 254 Editor's Choice: 61
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Pale skin is a fascinating evolutionary story.......
[Read the article: Are veils bad for your health?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]At the end of the Ice Age, our dark-skinned ancestors moved north into Europe, and found that the pigmentation which was nice to have in lower latitudes was a serious problem with less sunlight. In particular, darker-skinned girls would develop rickets from vitamin D deficiency, their bones would be misshapen, and they would be unable to have babies. This led to a very rapid, ferocious forced evolution, quickly selecting for lighter skin, until we had Scandinavians.
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Ok, now that the initial posting flurry has died down,
[Read the article: Does plastic make us fat?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I thought I'd put in my two cents' worth as an epidemiologist. The plastics story is interesting, although of course there is a problem of thinking temporal correlation means causation, as well as the problem of population exposures being implicated in population disease (ie., the plastics-exposed people may not be the ones getting fat). This http://depts.washington.edu/eqhlth/pages/academic_resources/causal.html
gives a good, succinct overview.
Regarding the public health view of obesity, there is a much more fundamental problem. Speaking as a population medical researcher, we don't know what causes obesity. The primary reason we don't know is that we think we do know. What we think we know is that energy imbalance is the problem - too much intake, not enough output - eating too much, not exercising enough. This idea that we know already what the problem is gets in the way of objective research. So when research does happen, it either begins from that mindset or isn't etiologic at all but rather focuses on treatments or interventions that assume a priori that the problem is energy imbalance. Hence our understanding of the problem, especially of morbid obesity, is making no progress.
As a side note, we have much the same problem with breast cancer. It's a disease of a female organ, therefore it must be a female hormonal problem. Almost all breast cancer research for the three or four decades has started with that basic assumption, and, as with obesity, our understanding of the etiology of breast cancer is very limited. What if obesity or breast cancer have an infectious component to the risk? We'd never know, because we don't even think to look, and even if we wanted to, a grant proposal to the NIH to fund the study would have a very tough time getting funded.
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You mean you would find this odd in the US?
[Read the article: Women fight to lose their rights]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Right off the top of my head, without a mental Google at all, Phyllis Schlafly leaps to mind.
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Ahhh, the irony......
[Read the article: No populism, please]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]the democrats, of course, won't go on Fox.
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Glenn, the story you wrote was interesting
[Read the article: A new low of mindlessness for our media]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]albeit not surprising....what I'm curious about is the story you didn't write. To quote: "Even though I write frequently about how broken and corrupt our establishment media is, witnessing these two war lovers -- supporters of the invasion, advocates of the Surge, comrades of Fred Kagan -- mindlessly depicted all day yesterday by media mouthpieces as the opposite of what they are was really quite startling."
I would really like to read how and why this happened - how it was orchestrated, by whom, for what reason. Would this be possible to dig out?
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Butbutbutbut......
[Read the article: It's a world of constant surprises]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]he's just now realized this? Where was he in 2001?
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Don't give Rove too much credit for orginating
[Read the article: Karl Rove in 2008]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]the current fashion in Republican political campaigning. Credit the father of it all, Lee Atwater, who came up with, among other things, the southern strategy. His proteges, Rove among them, truly are ubiquitous.
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How to get that across to them?
[Read the article: Why is the Democratic Congress so unpopular?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Are the democrats in Congress so isolated, or so tone-deaf, that they do not hear people saying this? Or are they so devoted to the conventional wisdom? Seriously, why do they not hear this, and what can we do to hit them over the head with it?
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"These planes just fly themselves."
[Read the article: Ask the Pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]That's a line towards the end of a flick I borrowed recently, "Executive Decision". The poor slob flying the 747 had to take the controls after the pilots were killed, and his experience consisted of being about to solo in a single engine prop place. He tried a landing at Kennedy, came in way too fast and aborted, didn't want to try to circle around again, then spotted Parris Field, his home base where he's landed his little school plane numerous times. Excellent, home ground! So he lands the 747 there, with expected disastrous results to the plane and field but no injuries to anyone, and at the end of the landing, comments with heavy irony to Halle Barry who is sitting next to him in total terror about how these things practically fly themselves. I enjoyed the much more realistic take on the old 'passenger with a little experience takes over the controls' gimmick.
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Andrew, I'd be interested in your take on
[Read the article: Bush's New Deal on housing]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]this column in today's LA Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-viles4sep04,0,7874701.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail
which gets more at on-the-street opinion on the housing bubble pop. We in LA have certainly gotten roundly tired of flippers and similar such people. I've always had friends who would buy houses in which they would live while fixing them up and resell in a year or three for a nice gain, but nothing like what LA has undergone from 2003-6. Peter Viles catches a broadly felt sentiment. Certainly in my position, where I'm expanding a department of research scientists, the housing prices are the main barrier to new hires from anywhere except other very pricey markets. The problem is even worse if the candidate has school-age children and is at a junior level. I would love to see housing prices come down to match incomes more closely.
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Speaking to the topic of fertility techniques,
[Read the article: It's a girl ... please]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I do not see why this is suddenly news. I worked as a grad student in the early 80s on a research project (unrelated to this topic) with, among others, Dave Luthy, who even then was doing quite well using a sperm sorting technique for sex selection. And I'm a little suprised no ethicist weighed in on this - one would expect Art Kaplan at least, to offer a word or two. He seems to like hot topics.
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Those are really, really small numbers. statistically speaking.
[Read the article: Girls' suicide rates soar]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Without digging into the data, I would bet they cannot rule out chance variation - the phrasing would be something like "the rate change did not reach statistical significance".