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Measles And Fatal Encephalitis: The Anti-Vax Movement Before COVID-19 Was Still Dangerous

Posted by on Jan 30, 2023 in Immunology | Comments Off on Measles And Fatal Encephalitis: The Anti-Vax Movement Before COVID-19 Was Still Dangerous

Despite apparent beliefs on social media today, the modern anti-vaccine movement did not begin with the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021. For decades prior to that, wealthy elites who believed that supplements and organic food were medicine led the world in denying their children vaccines.

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Measles And Fatal Encephalitis: The Anti-Vax Movement Before COVID-19 Was Still Dangerous

Posted by on Jan 30, 2023 in Immunology | Comments Off on Measles And Fatal Encephalitis: The Anti-Vax Movement Before COVID-19 Was Still Dangerous

Despite apparent beliefs on social media today, the modern anti-vaccine movement did not begin with the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021. For decades prior to that, wealthy elites who believed that supplements and organic food were medicine led the world in denying their children vaccines.

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CBD Has Broken Desire For Clinton-Era Free Passes Of Supplements By FDA

Posted by on Jan 26, 2023 in Pharmacology | Comments Off on CBD Has Broken Desire For Clinton-Era Free Passes Of Supplements By FDA

IN 1994, President Bill Clinton and Senator Tom Harkin set off a supplement boom - by decreeing that supplements could be exempt from real FDA oversight as long as they didn't claim to cure cancer or kill anyone (which companies in that market continued to do anyway) and placed in small print that their supernatural claims were not validated by FDA.

That, plus wasting taxpayer money at the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine(1) that could have gone to real research created a boom, to where woo and mysticism that claims it is sticking it to Big Pharma is a $40 billion per year industry.

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Epidemiologist Claims Bacon Causes Type 2 Diabetes

Posted by on Jan 23, 2023 in Public Health | Comments Off on Epidemiologist Claims Bacon Causes Type 2 Diabetes

Do you believe bacon causes diabetes? Cancer? If not, you may be an apostate in 2023, when we've just exited a period during which any skepticism of epidemiology(1) is met with the 2020s equivalent of 'Do you even Science, Bro?'

There is just one problem. Epidemiology isn't science. It is instead, in the best circumstance, a statistical effort to point scientists in the right direction. That is not the same thing, and in the worst circumstance it can be a weapon for social engineering, as epidemiologists placed within the International Agency for Research on Cancer to get classifications on products for trial lawyers showed.

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Decaf Coffee Using Biology Instead Of Chemicals – Which Science Will Activists Hate More?

Posted by on Jan 18, 2023 in Chemistry | Comments Off on Decaf Coffee Using Biology Instead Of Chemicals – Which Science Will Activists Hate More?

Coffee of any kind requires beans and those beans contain caffeine. If you don't want caffeine your choice to remove it is a chemical or...a chemical. Yes, I know some companies claim they use only water but they really use water and “supercritical carbon dioxide”, which is like claiming the chemical that creates banana flavor is different if it's grown in nature or in a building, despite being identical.

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Less Air Pollution Has Meant More Fertilizer In Farming

Posted by on Jan 11, 2023 in Atmospheric | Comments Off on Less Air Pollution Has Meant More Fertilizer In Farming

You wouldn't know it from listening to epidemiologists inside EPA or local weather personalities, but American air quality is better than it's been in 150 years. So clean they had to define "clean" down and start touting small micron particulate matter (PM2.5) one quarter the size of real smog, so small you need an electron microscope to see it, as a concern.

Well, it isn't. No one has ever died from PM2.5 and asthmatics are at greater risk in the perfume section of Macy's, regardless of hyperbolic air quality maps that routinely show red and orange despite much of the US having the same air quality as untouched sections of Siberia.

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A Sign The Pandemic May Be Over: Media Tout Study Claiming Nutrasweet Gave A Mouse Anxiety

Posted by on Jan 9, 2023 in Chemistry | Comments Off on A Sign The Pandemic May Be Over: Media Tout Study Claiming Nutrasweet Gave A Mouse Anxiety

Things are getting back to normal because even though activist journalists are now covering a Tripledemic of COVID-19, flu, and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) they have also found time to promote a story that claims a zero-calorie sweetener, asparatame, common in products like Diet Coke, Crystal Light, whatever causes anxiety. 

That's right, media have taken time from writing about something that may be important for the public to write about a paper claiming that aspartame gives mice anxiety.

We must be safe when we're back to covering mouse studies about safe products.

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EU COST Action Hopes To Replace Impossible Standards With Risk-Based Meat Inspection

Posted by on Jan 4, 2023 in Public Health | Comments Off on EU COST Action Hopes To Replace Impossible Standards With Risk-Based Meat Inspection

Vegetables have had a lot of foodborne outbreak scandals, but two times since the 1980s they have also impacted meat in a big way. 

Mad Cow disease in 1986 and Listeria in 2019 killed people. Mad Cow disease was due to poor quality control and a lack of coherent meat-chain understanding - the annual Burns Supper is coming up but you still can't buy haggis from Scotland - while more recent Listeria was just sloppy controls. Those can happen anywhere in the food chain but there may be ways to reduce the risk without making the perfect the enemy of the good. 

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Activism Or Outreach – A Call For New Ways To Communicate Climate Change

Posted by on Jan 3, 2023 in Science History | Comments Off on Activism Or Outreach – A Call For New Ways To Communicate Climate Change

Critics of scientists and science writers who speak plainly usually note it is better to be more neutral in tone, informational - 'show them some slides.'

Yet very little actually gets done that way. A few places can stay in existence writing 'the universe is mysterious' articles but environmentalists know how to move the needle, financially, politically, and cultural. And it is not by being informational. Though their work is often hyperbole and misinformation around a kernel of scientific truth, they see positive results as the goal, not science.

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The Renewable Energy Paradox – When Everyone Gets It No One Will

Posted by on Dec 28, 2022 in Energy | Comments Off on The Renewable Energy Paradox – When Everyone Gets It No One Will

Unlike US environmentalists, Belgian greens didn't flip and suddenly regard hydropower as a bad thing, they regard it as a viable part of their renewable energy strategy. All options are on the table, 50 percent of their electricity is even nuclear.  That's smart, nuclear is 2 times the energy capacity of natural gas and obviously an order of magnitude greater and more reliable than wind and solar.

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