Abel Pharmboy is the nom de plume of an academic researcher and educator who took his PhD in Pharmacology and Therapeutics and BS in Toxicology. He writes on natural product drugs and dietary supplements, academic career development, medical journalism and, occasionally, making and listening to music and, with the help of his colleague, Erleichda, wine appreciation.
Please read the DISCLAIMER for details on the blog's intended audience, advertising and comment policy, and how not to use the information presented herein.
The region of southern Colorado on either side of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains is quite special to the Pharmboy family. The high plains to the east and San Luis Valley to the west are sparsely populated, stunningly beautiful with a veritable mine of geological treasures, and are unlikely to be built up in the PharmKid's lifetime. In fact, most counties down there have fewer people now than they did in 1900.
It is also rugged and you can easily die out there. Which gets you in touch with what matters.
Bighorn sheep and West Spanish Peak outside of La Veta, Colorado, about 60 miles east of Alamosa
For the blogeratti, the most informative blog I've discovered about the San Luis Valley is SLV Dweller. However, I still haven't found a dedicated blog for the east side, but Sangres.com has the most comprehensive information available for the Scenic Highway of Legends area.
So, you can see why I might enjoy paying attention to news out yonder. Plus, stories that emanate from out there often have an interesting science slant, suitable for consumption by ScienceBlogs readers.
In March and April 2008, 442 people in the town of Alamosa, Colorado (2008 pop. 8,745), were sickened with Salmonella bacteria that was traced to the municipal water supply. Epidemiological estimates are that over 1,300 residents may have been striken. One death was reported. The story made national US news back then and we posted some details back then. I wrote then that "like many bacteria that enjoy the gastrointestinal tract, Salmonella causes diarrhea but can be fatal in small children, the elderly population, or anyone else with a compromised immune system."
Alamosa's water supply system had in the process of being upgraded, in part due to new state controls on arsenic content, but it was still operated under a water disinfection waiver from the state. Over 100 Colorado municipalities were absolved from chlorination requirements especially, in the case of Alamosa, where the water source came from deep artesian sources and would be unlikely to be contaminated like lake or stream sources. However, according to Kyle Clark at 9News in Denver, 76 of these waivers have been revoked.
In a report released last week, state officials have formally cited animal waste contamination in a deteriorating concrete storage tank as the likely cause. Seems that the inside area stays at about 65-75°F year-round. Alamosa is often the nation's icebox (it's 7°F/-14°C as I write) and all manner of birds and mammals take refuge wherever they can. The USGS National Wildlife Health Center describes that Salmonella is frequently shed in the feces of such animals and is often a cause of avian transmission at birdfeeders. (I also noted a couple of years ago that pet turtles are often the source of domestic Salmonella infections in kids.)
David Olinger in The Denver Postwrote that the Alamosa outbreak resulted from a "'perfect storm' of woes."
Two weeks ago, Canadian Skeptics United published on their Skeptic North site a piece by an Ontario pharmacist criticizing a proposal by the province to grant limited prescribing rights to naturopaths. The essay, which was reprinted in the National Post on Tuesday, outlines the intellectual and practical conundrum presented by allowing those with education that diverges from science-based practices to prescribe drugs.
The naturopath lobby has come out in force and appears to be relatively unopposed in the 54 comments that follow, primarily because the NP closes comments 24 hours after online posting. Therefore, those with a more rational and considered viewpoint based in facts have been locked out from commenting. This is quite disappointing to me personally and professionally because of the wildly emotional appeals, strawman arguments, and smears and attacks on the author himself without, of course, addressing his well-founded criticism of the prescribing proposal before the provincial government. At the Skeptic North post, the piece even drew a naturopath who equated the criticism of his/her field with the Nazis and Mussolini. However, ad hominem attacks, especially Godwin's Law, are quite common when one's stance is flawed.
Naturopathy, sometimes called naturopathic medicine, is an unusual and inconsistently regulated alternative medical practice that co-opts some evidence-based medicine, often in nutrition and natural product medicines, but also subscribes to "vitalism" (vis medicatrix naturae) and makes use of homeopathic remedies that defy the rules of physics and dose-response pharmacology.
Naturopathy is, however, a warm and fuzzy term, especially when equated with "natural medicine" and the fact that people with naturopathy degrees advertise themselves with the honorific of "Dr." The increasing popularity of naturopathy is also supported by cultural influences. I've written before that many, uh, natural product enthusiasts have become interested in naturopathy following the relocation of musician Dave Matthews from Charlottesville, VA, to Seattle, WA, where his wife, Ashley Harper, earned a naturopathy degree at Bastyr University.
In addition to the description of the practice in the NP op-ed, an excellent review and critical analysis of naturopathy by Kimball C Atwood IV, MD, can be found at Medscape General Medicine. The abstract is as follows:
"Naturopathic medicine" is a recent manifestation of the field of naturopathy, a 19th-century health movement espousing "the healing power of nature." "Naturopathic physicians" now claim to be primary care physicians proficient in the practice of both "conventional" and "natural" medicine. Their training, however, amounts to a small fraction of that of medical doctors who practice primary care. An examination of their literature, moreover, reveals that it is replete with pseudoscientific, ineffective, unethical, and potentially dangerous practices. Despite this, naturopaths have achieved legal and political recognition, including licensure in 13 states and appointments to the US Medicare Coverage Advisory Committee. This dichotomy can be explained in part by erroneous representations of naturopathy offered by academic medical centers and popular medical Web sites.
Like many alternative practices, naturopathy claims to harness the body's own healing power as if differentiating that fact-based medicine does not also employ the body's capacity to heal. The very same drugs that naturopaths wish to prescribe are those which can only work because they interact with targets in the body for which our endogenous compounds already act.
It seems to me that naturopathy adopts either science-based medicine or pseudoscience depending on the venue in which it serves the organization.
By most metrics, those of us at Terra Sig World Headquarters are liberals. Nevertheless, we often enjoy reading conservative writer, attorney, and American Enterprise Institute fellow, David Frum. Perhaps I have a soft spot for him because he's Canadian and he also writes for my favorite print newsmagazine, The Week.
Well, Frum chose this week to write, "Herbal remedies need real scrutiny," at his FrumForum and the post was subsequently published as a special commentary at CNN.com. The latter version has accumulated about ten times as many comments. The thesis of his essay is that the differential regulation of drugs and dietary supplements is flawed and ends with this paragraph:
Improving and rationalizing this costly and dysfunctional system is a gigantic, maybe impossible, task. But one small reform could strike a meaningful blow for reason and cost-effectiveness: Apply the rules governing the advertising of aspirin to the advertising of oregano tablets. Repeal the DSHEA law and give the Food and Drug Administration full authority over every manufactured substance that purports to promote health or relieve illness.
DSHEA is the Dietary Supplement and Health Education Act of 1994 that governs, among other things, the claims that may be made for herbal and non-botanical products not subjected to conventional and rigorous preclinical and clinical studies.
Last Monday, Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi dropped a bombshell in his new budget proposal. From the Jackson Free Press:
In his Nov. 16 budget proposal, Barbour announced that the state was facing a $715 million budget shortfall in fiscal year 2011 and another $500 million shortage in fiscal year 2012. In addition to merging the state's HBCUs, he suggested many draconian budget cuts in response to the impending shortage.
"This budget proposes merging Mississippi Valley State and Alcorn State with Jackson State. No campus would close, but administration would be unified and significant savings achieved," Barbour said in a release, expecting $35 million in savings from the mergers. "Our historically black universities would be united into a premier university with the land-grant agriculture and technical advantages of Alcorn, MVSU's Delta campus and JSU as an emerging great urban university."
Barbour explained that the Alcorn and MVSU campuses would still continue to function, although there would be a "rationalization" of class offerings at the campuses, implying the merger would result in classes and curriculums being cut.
The wonderfully-insightful Philadelphia attorney who writes the eponymous blog Field Negro first brought this story to my attention last Thursday after he was invited to attend the Minority Broadband Summit in DC, sponsored by the Alliance for Digital Equality. (btw, many thanks to Field for turning me on to the Alliance for Digital Equality in preparation for the ScienceOnline2010 session, Engaging underrepresented groups in online science media.")
The story is quite emotionally charged, especially among students at the schools potentially affected, and has drawn increasing attention over the last week. Most online accounts I have found do not buy into the "premier university" argument of Barbour's, citing instead that this merger would undermine the traditional strengths and missions of each university. Field's comment thread is now running at over 140 and contains both positive and negative comments, ranging from perceptions this move is deserved given widespread fiscal mismanagement at HBCUs to the contention that HBCUs still serve an essential purpose in educating all underrepresented minorities and that their missions would be diluted by administrative merger into predominantly-white institutions.
I recognize that some readers may not be familiar with the term, HBCU. As a white Northerner who has now spent a third of his life in the South, I had not known that historically-black colleges and universities (HBCUs) were designated by the federal government as part of the 1965 Higher Education Act as, "any historically black college or university that was established prior to 1964, whose principal mission was, and is, the education of black Americans."
There are currently 103 such institutions in the US, 41 of which are public institutions like Mississippi's. This map and list from the US Department of Education will give you a feel for the broad distribution of these institutions.
As I wrote in my post for 2008 National HBCU Week,
[T]he African American community, sometimes supported by non-black supporters, had to establish their own universities as it was recognized that education was one path to equality. In fact, while nearly all HBCUs are south of the Mason-Dixon Line, the original HBCUs were in Pennsylvania (what is now Cheyney University (1837) and Lincoln University (1854)) and Ohio (Wilberforce University (1856)) and were established by the generosity of Quaker, Episcopalian, and other abolitionist supporters.
Why specifically should ScienceBlogs readers care about HBCUs and this Mississippi story?
It's Sunday morning on the US East Coast and I really need to put the computer down to get out for a hike in the crisp, autumn air. Sunday morning is a great time to catch up on long-form writing but I won't be the one providing it for you.
Instead, I encourage you to take 15 minutes this morning to read an "old" (2005) article in Fortune magazine entitled, The Law of Unintended Consequences, by Clifton Leaf in Fortune magazine.
This article details the impact of a 1980 amendment to US patent and trademark law put forth by Senator Bob Dole and the senior Senator Bayh, Birch. The Bayh-Dole Act transferred the inventorship of discoveries from federally-funded research to the universities, institutes, or small businesses where the work was done (good overview here). Prior to 1980, the US government held the title to any discoveries made, say, with NIH funding and the vast majority of that technology languished unlicensed.
This is the reason, for example, why the co-discoverers of the anticancer drug, Taxol, never benefited financially from the work: because the discovery was made around 1970 and its mechanism of action was identified in 1977.
At the recent U2 Academic Conference, I had the opportunity to be at the local premiere of It Might Get Loud, a much-more-than documentary of the electric guitar as told through the careers of Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, U2's The Edge, and Jack White of The White Stripes and Raconteurs. For the record, I thought that White was going to be totally out of his league - while I wouldn't call him a "legend" as billed by the producers, I left being incredibly impressed with his background and breadth of abilities.
Related to the movie trailer below, I had an exchange with Toaster Sunshine, a musician and scientist who writes the blog, Mad Scientist, Jr. (Tagline: "Sticking stuff that wasn't made to be stuck to stuff to stuff that wasn't made to have stuff stuck to it.") The trailer opens and closes with Jack White constructing a primitive electric guitar with a weathered wood plank, a bottle, and some wires and such - Toaster knew exactly what it was and told me how to do it myself.
However, as a microcosm of our respective lives (Toaster is still in the lab and I am primarily at my computer), Toaster actually made the instrument yesterday.
For the hackerspace, I send out a lot of emails. Most of them get ignored, but some of them stick. One of the ones that got a reply was a request to tour a museum collection of rare and antique musical instruments that the university's music school owns. In one of the conversations we had with the outreach director of the collection, we decided that co-hosting an educational event that melds technology and music into a workshop for kids and their parents. This is what is referred to as a Make and Take, participants register, pay a fee for parts, come and get taught how to make stuff, and then get to take it home with them afterwards.
In September we posted "M.D. Anderson name misused in Evolv nutraceutical water advertising," detailing the not-exactly-truthful claim by a multilevel marketing company that their bottled water product was "tested" by one of North America's premier teaching and research hospitals.
A flurry of search engine hits to this post raised my attention to the fact that the The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center has now initiated legal action against the makers of Evolv. Cameron Langford at Courthouse News Servicereports:
Two companies are pushing bottled tap water with false claims that it's endorsed by the MD Anderson Cancer Center, the University of Texas says in Federal Court. The UT says HealtH20 Products and Evolvehealth sell the bogus water it as "Evolv," claiming it is infused with an "Archaea Active formula." [. . .]
[. . .] "Specifically, defendants are misleading consumers and cancer patients into believing that UT's MD Anderson conducted extensive testing of the main formula in the Evolv product, known as 'Archaea Active," the UT says.
"Defendants' misuse of the MD Anderson marks creates, at a minimum, a likelihood that cancer patients and consumers will falsely believe that defendants' products is sponsored or endorsed by UT's MD Anderson, when in fact, MD Anderson does not endorse or recommend the use of the defendants' product."
Natural products researchers, including yours truly, are used to supplement companies misrepresenting our published papers in their advertising literature. There's not much we can do as individuals when our work is cited on a webpage.
However, there's a much more serious issue going on in this case: according to the official complaint filed against the companies by the Board of Regents of The University of Texas System (PDF here from Courthouse News) M.D. Anderson and The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center are registered US trademarks.
Denise Gellene in the New York Times is reporting this morning that Scottish physician, Sir John Crofton, passed away on 3 November at age 97.
Crofton is best known for implementing a combination drug regimen to treat tuberculosis, the insidious lung infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis which decimated the US early last century and still kills 2 million a year worldwide. The concept of using drug combinations to increase individual drug potency and slow the emergence of resistance is now a mainstay of therapeutic approaches for cancer, HIV, and other infectious diseases.
Gellene reports that Crofton first investigated streptomycin for TB shortly after the drug's discovery and isolation at Rutgers by Selman Waksman and his then-graduate student, Albert Schatz. Waksman was sole winner of the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, with the oversight of Schatz ranked by Scientific American among the top 10 Nobel snubs.
Crofton's original 1950 letter to the British Medical Journal on use of intermittent doses of streptomycin can be seen in this PDF.
Incidentally, the revered German physician, Robert Koch, was awarded the 1905 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of M. tuberculosis. His medical microbiology criteria, known as Koch's Postulates, became the rubric for establishing causation of an infectious agent.
No matter how early I wake up, it's always five hours later in the UK and I'm overwhelmed by the thought that I'm already behind (I won't even get into the feeling I have when I think of our Australian readers).
Beyond the simple fact that the NHS exists because the UK has held since 1948 that every person deserves a basic level of state-supported health care, could you imagine what it would take for such a site to be sponsored by a US health agency? Supported with tax dollars? Can you imagine the wrangling of politicians, the religious right, and all manner of people ranting about government-sanctioned sex - and information for the young people???
So at the risk of being deemed a socialist, let me applaud the NHS for what is a truly terrific and straight-talking resource. What I've seen of the rest of the site is pretty fantastic as well.
You don't have to be British to get a lot of great take-home information for yourself and for your kids.
Bighorn sheep and West Spanish Peak outside of La Veta, Colorado, about 60 miles east of Alamosa
