Monthly Archives: July 2007

Free at last!

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A lesson for us all: when reason and logic don’t work, try bribery. After eight years in prison, the medics being held in Libya for allegedly infecting more than 400 children with HIV are free.

But their freedom has been bought rather than won, with the US and Europe helping to pay off the affected families and promising Libya millions, if not billions, of dollars in aid and debt forgiveness.

Many expected the five Bulgarian nurses and Palestinian doctor to be freed five years ago, when expert virologists Luc Montagnier and Vittorio Colizzi submitted a report showing that the children had become infected before the medics ever set foot in Libya, and that the infections were almost certainly the result of poor hospital hygiene rather than sinister acts.

But the court threw out the report and refused to accept further international evidence, relying instead on a flimsy Libyan document that researchers say contained “a shocking lack of evidence” to slap the accused with a death sentence.

Just as children who misbehave shouldn’t be given treats, Libya shouldn’t be rewarded for acting up. With lives hanging in the balance, the international community couldn’t afford the diplomatic version of tough love. But now that the medics are on friendly soil, I think we should stop dangling cupcakes.

Uploaded on behalf of Cassandra Willyard, Nature Medicine’s news intern

In China, dinosaurs, dragons — and death

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Why is it that the most bizarre — and disturbing — science stories always come from Asia, usually China or India? (I can say that, I’m from India).

I live about three blocks from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which has some of the most stunning displays anywhere of dinosaur fossils. People come from all over the world to gawk at these wonders.

In China’s Henan province, it seems, I could have bought dinosaur bones for a mere 50 cents per kilogram.

For at least the last 20 years, villagers in China have apparently been grinding up precious dinosaur bones and boiling them in soup to treat dizziness, leg cramps and such or making a paste and applying them to fractures. One local had collected up to 8,000 kilos of bones, according to the BBC.

The villagers did this because they believed that the bones were from dragons that could fly in the sky and had special powers, according to Dong Zhiming of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

**

On a far more serious and horrible note, China has executed its former Food and Administration chief, who had been made the scapegoat for all its recent problems with the regulation of food and drugs. The Associated Press led its story on this saying it was “the strongest signal yet from Beijing that it is serious about tackling its product safety crisis.”

I’m sorry, what??

How is rushing to execute one man, who became a convenient symbol for everything that ails China’s regulatory system, an indication that the country is serious about fixing its problems?

Although many versions of this story included the offensive phrase, (The Guradian, the NYT) some papers at least (The Independent) edited it out. China may blunder in its rush to fix its image, but we should be demanding an actual clean up of the system, not this tyrannical turn of events, as proof of its intentions.

The lead made me do it

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Yesterday’s Washington Post ran an article that I found really provocative, linking the drop in crime in recent decades to… um, lead poisoning.

The general idea is that children who are exposed to lead are more prone to committing violent crime as adolescents presenting, according to the article, “a unifying new neurochemical theory for fluctuations in the crime rate.”

Sounds really good. Too good, in fact. I’m wary of “unifying theories” with such sweeping implications.

There is apparently a lot of literature linking lead exposure to aggressive behavior. But it’s a big step from that to linking crime rates across the world to lead levels.

The article is based on the work of economist Rick Nevin, who looked at nine countries with different abortion rates, police strategies, demographics and economic conditions and found that up to 90% of the variation in violent crime in these countries could be explained by lead.

In the U.S., for example, children were exposed to lead — in household paint at the turn of the 20th century and in gasoline fumes after World War II — and in each case, violent crime peaked roughly 20 years later. Much of the lead in gasoline was eliminated by the mid-1980s explaining, according to Nevin, the drop in crime in the 1990s (what do you have to say that, Rudy Giuliani?), and because this had the biggest impact on inner-city neighborhoods, Nevin says, violent crime in those neighborhoods has declined faster than the overall crime rate.

I know the writer, Shankar Vedantam, and deeply respect his journalistic abilities, so I’m sure he checked out the credibility of this research. But I would have felt better if pretty much the only other expert quoted in the article hadn’t been the editor of the journal, Environmental Research, in which Nevin has published most of his work. The article says Nevin’s work, and the other research that supports this hypothesis, hasn’t received much attention. If it’s good science, why ever not??