nanoparticles

Nanoparticles: The new One True Cause of All Disease?

oracknows — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 05:30:47 +0000

Nanoparticles: The new One True Cause of All Disease?

They're here, they're there, they're everywhere!

Sorry. I couldn't resist. I also couldn't resist revisiting the topic of nanoparticles one last time. You remember nanoparticles? They're the contaminant that poisons everything, at least if you believe two Italians, Antonietta Gatti and Stefano Montanari, who published a paper that purported to show that vaccines were hopelessly contaminated with heavy metal nanoparticles. (Hey, that would make a great name for a band.) Unfortunately for them, the study was a hopeless botch that lacked anything resembling proper controls, experimental design, replication, or statistical analysis. Montanari was not particularly happy at the criticism, which lead me to note that there was even more wrong with the paper than I had noticed before.

It also led me to discover the wild and wonderful world of nanoparticles. Actually, nanoparticles do have a lot of potential uses in medicine and are a fascinating topic in biology and medicine. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about quacks and how they view nanoparticles. Basically, quacks have latched on to nanoparticles the way they've latched on to quantum physics and epigenetics. They twist the science and, in this case, use it to "explain" all sorts of disease. They found "nanoparticles" not just in vaccines, but have been finding them in just about everything, as I discussed. So yesterday, I wondered: Just how far has nanoparticle quackery gone? Long time readers will realize that homeopaths have—hilariously—invoked nanoparticles as the mechanism by which homeopathy "works." It's become so common a trope among homeopaths that I just laugh at it now.

Here, we're talking about a different form of nanoparticle quackery. Curious, I searched several prominent quack websites and found that nanoparticles are a popular topic. I also did Before I go into that, first, let's define what nanoparticles are. Oddly enough, after two posts discussing cranks who "find" nanoparticles in everything, I never actually defined them. Basically, nanoparticles are particles that measure between 1 and 100 nanometers in size. They're subclassified by diameter and have many applications in medicine, physics, optics, and electronics. Indeed, I'm on the thesis committee of a graduate student whose PhD project involves studying a nanoparticle as a drug delivery device in cancer chemotherapeutics.

Circling back to Gatti and Montanari's paper, I can't help but point to Sayer Ji's take on it. You remember Sayer Ji, don't you? I've discussed him on numerous occasions. He's the proprietor of GreenMedInfo, a repository of quackery based on the misinterpretation of scientific papers. Not surprisingly, he was quite impressed with Gatti and Montanari's execrable paper, to the point where he wrote an article called Metal Nanoparticle Contaminated Vaccines: Why Size Matters"

A highly controversial new study on heavy metal contaminated vaccines is under fire, but its detractors fail to understand that, in nano-toxicology, size matters much more than commonly believed. Indeed, sometimes the smaller the size, the greater the toxicity.

Basically, Ji seems to think that nanoparticles invalidate Paracelsus's saying that the dose makes the poison. In essence, he seems to be arguing for a homeopathy of nanoparticles in which the smaller (and less mass) they are, the more powerfully toxic they are:

The number of particles present in each vaccine sample tested ranged from 2 to 1,821. ORAC and his colleagues argue that these are biologically insignificant quantities. I quote: “What they really found is that the amount of inorganic contamination is so low as to be biologically irrelevant. In fact, what they found is that vaccines are incredibly pure products.” I believe this perspective ignores what we now know about the dangers of nanoparticles. Contrary to popular belief, it is actually because of the exceedingly small size of these particles that they possess especially potent and complex toxicities, as well as an increased proclivity towards biopersistence. Molecular weight, therefore (i.e. "dose"), does not make the poison. In other words, as the size of a metal or toxicant decreases (and therefore its mass), the harm produced may actually increase. Not to mention, that in the age of personalized medicine and increasingly complex syndromal illness presentations, it is impossible to generalize about the “irrelevance” of an exposure.

I'm tellin' ya. It's homeopathy all over again, where the smaller the nanoparticle, the stronger its toxic effect is.

Let's dispose of the straw man here first. It's not the molecular weight that makes the poison. Remember, I was arguing that the number of particles, not the mass of the particles, was inconsequential. Indeed, I was criticized for not taking into account the possible mass. In any case, nanoparticles in no way invalidate dose-response exposures. They might have different dose-response exposures, different distributions to different fluids and organs in the body, but the dose does still make the poison. Yes, nanoparticles can exhibit cytotoxicity and genotoxicity. Yes, size does influence toxicity. However, size is just one factor. There are many others, including chemical composition, shape, surface structure, surface charge, aggregation and solubility, and the presence or absence of functional groups of other chemicals.

Not surprisingly, The Food Babe is on the case, although surprisingly she hasn't written nearly as much about nanoparticles as she has about other "chemicals":

There’s a big controversy surrounding the results of a 2012 study that found titanium dioxide in Dannon yogurt. In May, Mother Jones reported that Dannon Oikos Greek Yogurt contained the nanoparticle titanium dioxide, but have since retracted this from their article following Dannon’s claims that, “We don’t use any ingredients in Dannon plain yogurt that contain titanium dioxide. In the event we use an added color in our products we label it as an added ingredient”. I also contacted Dannon, and they confirmed this information. However, microscopic particles of titanium dioxide (nanoparticles) can be used as an artificial color to make white foods whiter and brighter. According to Friends of the Earth, there’s been “a tenfold increase in unregulated, unlabeled “nanofood” products on the American market since 2008… made by major companies including Kraft, General Mills, Hershey, Nestle, Mars, Unilever, Smucker’s and Albertsons. But due to a lack of labeling and disclosure, a far greater number of food products with undisclosed nanomaterials are likely currently on the market”. This concerns me because nanoparticles have been shown to carry risks to human health and the environment, and nanoparticles of titanium dioxide are specifically linked to gastrointestinal inflammation.

She's gloated over Dunkin Donuts removing titanium dioxide from its powdered donuts.

Meanwhile, a couple of years ago Mother Jones published a truly overblown article by Tom Philpott entitled Is Big Dairy Putting Microscopic Pieces of Metal in Your Food? Amusingly, the article has an update that "The original version of this post claimed several dairy and dairy alternative products* contained nano-particles, based on the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN)'s inventory of nanotech products. PEN has since removed all of those products from its database, claiming that the 2012 journal article on which their conclusion was based had not conclusively shown that the products contain significant amounts of nano-particles." Be that as it may, the article is laced with a considerable amount of misinformation and fear mongering about titanium dioxide. The US FDA allows food products to contain up to 1% titanium dioxide without the need to include it on the ingredient label, as long as the substance added conforms to high levels of purity. In any case, here's an explanation as to how Mother Jones got it wrong.

None of that stops people like Sayer Ji from publishing articles like Why Is The Food Industry Poisoning Us With Trillions of Nanoparticles? Basically, Ji riffs off of an in vitro cell culture study (but I repeat myself) that purported to find that titanium dioxide nanoparticles are toxic to the cells that line the human stomach. Of course, it turns out that most of the titanium dioxide particles used in food are not true nanoparticles, but consist of larger particles.

Not surprisingly, über-quack Joe Mercola:

Millions of tons of titanium dioxide are produced globally each year. It adds whiteness and brightness to products and also helps them resist discoloration. Titanium dioxide also reflects ultraviolet (UV) light, which is why it’s often used as an ingredient in sunscreens.

Most titanium dioxide (close to 70 percent) is used as a pigment in paints, but it’s also added to cosmetics, toothpastes, pharmaceuticals, paper and food.

Titanium dioxide is generally considered to be a relatively inert, safe material, but an increasing number of products are now using titanium dioxide nanoparticles, and that may change everything.

Nanoparticles are ultramicroscopic in size, making them able to readily penetrate your skin and travel to underlying blood vessels and your bloodstream.

Evidence suggests that some nanoparticles may induce toxic effects in your brain and cause nerve damage, and some may also be carcinogenic.

Of course, the data he cites is based on in vitro and animal studies.

Basically, what has happened to nanoparticles is what happens to so many scientific questions relevant to health when quacks get their hands on them. Questions about whether nanoparticles have adverse health effects are sensationalized, and then nanoparticles morph into an all-purpose toxic bogeyman that causes all manner of chronic disease, found everywhere and more toxic the smaller they are. Then, of course, there come the diagnostic tests to detect them. In that, Gatti and Montenari clearly know their audience and are ahead of their time—in quackery. I'm only surprised nanoparticle fears aren't a bigger part of American quackery and that the Food Babe hasn't made them a central part of her fear mongering. Give it time, I guess. It wouldn't surprise me if nanoparticles don't soon become the new "toxins." Alternatively, they'll become the new Morgellon's disease, with the added benefit that it requires expensive equipment, and not just a regular microscope, to detect nanoparticles. So much more profitable.

oracknows Wed, 02/08/2017 - 00:30

Categories

Physical Sciences

What a fascinating example of moving the goalposts from these people where less equals more. I wonder if Saer JI applies the same standards to their products and treatments he pushes, like coffee enemas. Of note, look for his upcoming entry in the American Loons blog. I wonder if it will feature his arrest? It looks like a DUI- he of all people should know the dose makes the poison!

http://www.sheriffleefl.org/main/index.php?r=crimeActivity/inmateDetail…

Oh shelbat! I couldn't resist. What would Mork say?

The only reason big particles are less dangerous than smaller particles is because the big particles can be filtered out. Anything that makes it through the filter and is capable of doing damage will do damage.

If I were being generous to Sayer Ji, I might say he's confusing particles taken internally with particles breathed in through the lungs. In the latter case, smaller particles can penetrate deeper into the lungs and more effectively obstruct the alveoli. That's why there are regulations on particulate emissions, and why the concentration of particulates in the air is one of the quantities you see in air quality reports. But I'm not sure Ji understands this. The particles involved are also usually bigger than nanoparticles: I've seen PM2.5 and PM20, where the numbers refer to particle size in micrometers. The biggest nanoparticles are 0.1 μm.

The biggest nanoparticles are 0.1 μm.

Do you mean .999 μm?

It appears the "smaller is worse" argument is trying to make a claim of concentration, like the difference between putting a shot of whiskey into a liter bottle of coke as opposed to a five-ounce glass worth of the same liquid. I never fully understood the basis for this ridiculous law of homeopathy, and now I do. It is even dumber now, because it implies that the toxicity of a substance is constant no matter the volume of it, as if again a single chloride atom was a condensed version of a cubic mile of the stuff.

I think Yvette at #1 is onto something. What would it take to get Gatti and Montenari to turn their equipment on Sayer Ji's products? I wonder what they'd find.

stavros@4: According to the post, nanoparticles range in size from 1 to 100 nm. 1 μm is 1000 nm.

Zach@5: No, it's even worse than that. They are arguing that potency increases as volume decreases. That substances have a minimum size (one atom or molecule) is something they ignore.

I can think of a way that a given mass of small nanoparticles might have a bigger effect than the same mass of larger nanoparticles of the same substance: if reaction rates scale with surface area, then the smaller particles will have a larger aggregate surface area and therefore react more quickly. That would work if you are going after a catalytic effect. I'm not aware of any non-catalytic reactions for which this would be true, however.

I saw that, but I disagree.

What do the call particles between 100 nm and 1000 nm?

Microparticles? when they are only fractions of one micron?

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/nanoparticle

Um. Arguing if 100 nm in diameter is a microparticle or a nanoparticle seems to be missing the point of the post. For purposes of the quackery, I really don't care about 1 nm either way; i.e, whether a nanoparticle is defined as <100nm or ≤100nm.

Big picture, people! Big picture!

Is Big Dairy Putting Microscopic Pieces of Metal in Your Food?

Another manifestation of Betteridge's Law.

I'm sorry, it just seems odd. Apparently the terms "microparticle" and "nanoparticle" both have formal IUPAC definitions but the ranges are counter-intuitive. Here they are:

Picoparticle: Not formally defined
Nanoparticle: 0 to 100 nanometers
Microparticle: 100 nanometers to 100 micrometers
Milliparticle: Not formally defined

So there is no gap between microparticles and nanoparticles, but paradoxically, a 101 nanometer particle is defined by the IUPAC as a microparticle.

Odd. Just one of those queer definitions.

One more time: I. DON'T. CARE. Sorry, but I just don't, and I view further discussion as pretty much irrelevant to the main point of the post.

There is a reason the term "picoparticle" is not defined: They don't exist. A hydrogen atom has a diameter of the order of 0.1 nm[1]. Most atoms and molecules are larger than that; complex molecules can be orders of magnitude larger. The only particles that are significantly smaller are called "subatomic" particles for a reason. Protons and neutrons have diameters of the order of 1 fm, while electrons do not, as far as is known, have any intrinsic size (though their probability distributions do, but that's getting into too much detail on a tangent).

I'll stipulate that the boundary between nanoparticle and microparticle is somewhat arbitrary, but it has to be put somewhere. And I agree with Orac that the debate about exactly where to draw that line is irrelevant to the main point of the post.

[1]Depending when you took chemistry, you may have encountered the Ångström unit. 1 Å = 0.1 nm. The unit was thus defined for exactly this reason.

Better cut this pizza into six pieces. I don't think I could eat eight pieces.

I think Yvette at #1 is onto something. What would it take to get Gatti and Montenari to turn their equipment on Sayer Ji’s products? I wonder what they’d find.

This sounds an awful lot more like Fucklesworth than Prof. Reiss.

Big picture, people! Big picture!

Tiny little pictures are more effective. I read it somewhere.
If 1 pcture = 1000 words, 1 word is a milipicture.

What if other woo-meisters with their own pet hobbyhorses to ride latch on to nano particles as a means to fill in the gaps in their so-called theories?

I can see it now....

nano particles comprise the building blocks of Morgellons
and Chem trails

Nano particles accompany toxins in foods and vaccines to clog up the tubes in the brain or CV system causing illness

Nano particles excite genetic material in GMO products so that they cross the gap into humans' genome more easily

Meat and milk products are totally made up of nano particles that's why they're so bad

Nano particles feed Candida and other parasites

high quality supplements act as a nano particle sponge so that they are absorbed before they do their dastardly deeds

NANO PARTICLES CAUSE GLYCATION

I could write all day but I won't.

nano particles comprise the building blocks of Morgellons
and Chem trails

They're way ahead of you. Gatti and Montanari already blame nanoparticles for Morgellons. :-)

Even in deepest outer space it's estimated there is 1 hydrogen atom per cubic centimeter, so even the best vacuum known (deep outer space) will have contamination.

Be that as it may but I haven't been hearing much about Morgellons lately.

Maybe Mark Hyman can work them into his sludge/ rust/ etc.theory of illness.

If 1 pcture = 1000 words, 1 word is a milipicture.

An old academic joke proposes an SI unit of beauty, the millihelen, defined as the amount of beauty required to launch one ship.

They’re way ahead of you. Gatti and Montanari already blame nanoparticles for Morgellons. ?

You have fallen into error there, inconceivable though that seems. Gatti and Montanari conclude that Morgellons are psychogenic and of "self-induced nature":
"Our results prove the self-introduction under the epidermis of environmental filaments" [i.e. dog hairs and carpet fluff from around the house].

The hilarity comes in when they preen themselves about being pioneers in clinical research -- "For the first time in the literature..."; "up to now, no investigative science-based
evidence about the psychogenesis of the Morgellons
has been provided".
It must have taken a great deal of selective inattention to avoid all the previous analyses of putative Morgellons fibres.

There is a limit of pigment particle size below which the particles fail to perform. If colored pigments are ground too fine, which would certainly include anything below 100 nm, they no longer appear colored. Putting "nanoparticles" of titanium dioxide into food products would simply be wasting money, since it is rather expensive as a filler and would do nothing to enhance apparent whiteness. Nanoparticulate titanium dioxide, within a limited size range, is useful in sunblocks because it doesn't reflect visible light but does reflect ultraviolet, and sensible people object to ultraviolation. A couple of papers I found say that there is no evidence of titanium dioxide penetrating beyond the stratum corneum, though one suggested evaluation needs to be made on skin that is already sunburned.

So are nanoparticles somehow strung together to form fibres for Morgellons Streptonanogunk spp.? - though that still wouldn't make them marcoscopic - maybe Streptostaphylonanogunk spp.. Creationists may object on the grounds of it being too much like having a tornado assemble an airplane from the heaps in a junkyard.

HDB @25

Yes, they may have figured out Morgellons, but what is their position on chemtrails?

Well, we already know that nanoparticles cause Morgellons.

"The FDA approved nano-virile protein bacteria eaters that work on deli meats and other ready-to-eat foods in August, 2006. Food manufacturers started spraying this new nantechnology viruses on meats and vegetables in August 2006."

http://www.dldewey.com/morgel.htm

"... as the size of a metal or toxicant decreases (and therefore its mass), the harm produced may actually increase."

Oh dear.

Nanoparticles have significantly greater surface to volume ratios than larger molecules. Which would facilitate chemical diffusion. Which could be helpful or harmful. Which must be determined on a case-by-case basis. There is no reason to believe that nanoparticles are inherently safe or inherently toxic.

The evidence is that TiO2 is safe.

http://www.nanopartikel.info/en/nanoinfo/materials/titanium-dioxide/ove…

So are nanoparticles somehow strung together to form fibres for Morgellons Streptonanogunk spp.? – though that still wouldn’t make them marcoscopic

Several years ago I did a plant tour at a company in my state which does exactly this with carbon nanotubes--their end product is (possibly was; this was a startup and I'm not sure they still exist) textiles, and at the time they had a contract with the Department of Defense, which has an obvious interest in the bullet-stopping capabilities of the product, which is lighter than a comparably effective thickness of Kevlar.

So it's not impossible to do what you are suggesting. But it probably requires conditions that do not occur in nature (at least on planet Earth). I think the more relevant objections is that Morgellons has not been shown (outside of the woo-sphere) to actually exist.

Lest anyone think the idea of toxic nanoparticles stands in contradiction to homeopathy's claim of curative nanoparticles – I did think this on first read here. But then I realized, no, what seoparates the nano-toxins from the nano-cures is the transformation of the water in the solution via succusion. No shaking –> sickness and death. EXPERT shaking – the gift of health. That 'homepathic' OTC stuff, that's just a shake-down. Probably poison you. That's why your friendly neighborhood homeo gets the big bucks.

Whoa! Calm down. You were right. Your definition complies with the IUPAC.

But now everyone here knows a trivial little fact.

The worst kind of nanoparticle is the sort that causes continuous damage to cells and is persistent in the body, like, say, maybe plutonium dust. But even if they found plutonium nanoparticles as much as these other heavy metal contaminants they claim to have found, I doubt even that would be a truly serious source of concern. I likely get more radiation damage from the radioactive potassium present in the bananas I eat every morning.

"An old academic joke proposes an SI unit of beauty, the millihelen, defined as the amount of beauty required to launch one ship."

Since beauty is in the eye of the beholder just imagine the possibilities of recruiting some especially optimistic (or near sighted) beholders. This is a very promising development for carbon free marine transportation.

Yes, they may have figured out Morgellons, but what is their position on chemtrails?
See here:
http://www.tankerenemy.it/2013/06/montanari-vai-avanti-tu-che-mi-vien-d…
Montanari agrees that chemtrails Are A Thing (he can see them himself!) but refuses to speculate about their composition, for he is An Scientist.

Le scie chimiche le vedo anch'io. Anch'io mi sono preoccupato: non sono aerei normali ma io di mestiere faccio lo scienziato, piaccia o no la cosa, quindi io sono costretto a basarmi sui fatti.

an SI unit of beauty, the millihelen, defined as the amount of beauty required to launch one ship.

Bah! An elementary mistake, using metric scales with Troy units.:)

gaist @#35:

VERY well done, madame or sir, as the case may be.

fusilier
James 2:24

OK the article is about nanoparticle woo, I get it. But can you explain to me why on Earth I would ever willingly put white paint pigment in my food? "Food-grade TiO2 impairs intestinal and systemic immune homeostasis, initiates preneoplastic lesions and promotes aberrant crypt development in the rat colon."

Making food more appealing with paint pigment.... really? I already eat too much, I don't need any incentive to eat more food.

To me, this is an example of the market driving itself to stupid outcomes, and if the food coloring industry gets attacked by woo merchants, .... can I watch? . Please? Maybe sell tickets?

I’m tellin’ ya. It’s homeopathy all over again, where the smaller the nanoparticle, the stronger its toxic effect is.

Nicely written, Orac. I strongly agree: small size does not exempt a poison from dose. It can change the behavior of the poison, but not remove dose dependence.

The great problem with nanoparticle woo is that there are small objects of submicron scale no matter where you look in our world. Showing the existence of such particles is easy; ascribing biological effects to this existence is not so easy. That they are present under a microscope may not mean anything at all.

@SteveP: one chemical that I study is a food coloring called often Yellow dye #6 (or Sunset Yellow FCF). It was, at least until recently, one of the colorings that makes Taco Bell nacho sauce orange. This type of molecule can self-assemble into linear aggregates that are maybe tens of nanometers long which are able to form liquid crystals when dissolved in water at high enough concentration. The system is fascinating and pretty much harmless --and really quite pretty: Google "Sunset Yellow liquid crystal" to see what I mean. People are panickedly removing it from everything because it's man made. As if nature doesn't make molecules with these kinds of behaviors too: the sunset yellow liquid crystal is similar in architecture to a liquid crystal made by DNA. I should probably be trying to scare people with the fact that Yellow Dye #5, from Mountain Dew, also can make liquid crystals... if I point out enough examples, maybe the kooks will stop eating altogether and stop annoying the rest of us.

Dear god, there are molecules that form nanoparticles in my food!

A review paper (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4703119/pdf/nihms748093.pdf) on nanoparticle toxicity states:

“Particle size and surface area are crucial material characteristics from a toxicological point of view, as interactions between nanomaterials and biological organisms typically take place at the surface of the NP. As the particles’ size decreases, the surface area exponentially increases and a greater proportion of the particles’ atoms or molecules will be displayed on the surface rather than within the bulk of the material. Thus, the nanomaterial surface becomes more reactive toward itself or surrounding biological components with decreasing size, and the potential catalytic surface for chemical reactions increases.”
AND
“The nature of the interface between nanomaterials and biological systems affects the in vivo biocompatibility and toxicity of NPs.”
AND
“Particle shapes and aspect ratios are two additional key factors that determine the toxicity of NPs. Nanomaterials can have very different shapes including fibers, spheres, tubes, rings, and planes.”
AND
“Surface charge also plays a role in toxicity, as it influences the adsorption of ions and biomolecules that may change organism or cellular responses toward particles.”
NPs = nanoparticles

Something is wrong with that link. Here is a working link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4703119/

I really want to see a public debate between these guys and the pro-nanoparticle homeopaths.

The air quality community has been interested in particles emitted by diesel trucks for more than a decade. Since the larger particles are a few microns across (and referred to as PM2.5 and PM10 for example), the much smaller particles were referred to as ultrafine particles. They are the particles that range up to 100 nm in diameter. Measurements along a busy freeway populated by a large number of diesel trucks showed that ultrafine particles were present at about one-third million per cubic centimeter. If you happen to be following directly behind a truck, you are getting a dose of ultrafine particles. The air quality people also measure things like elemental carbon, which is their term for the particles that are mainly carbon, and were found to be present in quantities of several micrograms per cubic meter. The UF particles also include structures that are more complex chemically than the elemental carbon particles, containing more complex organic oxidation products. The UF particles tend to aggregate fairly quickly, resulting in a substantial fall off in numbers within a few hundred yards of the freeway. The UF particles have been associated with increased emergency room visits for heart problems, among other things. As noted by another commenter, ultrafine particles can pass the filtration mechanisms in the airways and penetrate more deeply. Some have been seen inside of cells.

Needless to say, there is all the difference in the world between inhaling diesel exhaust for several hours a day vs. getting a tetanus shot. I mention this story because it was a major issue in the communities surrounding the port of Los Angeles a few years ago (ships put out a lot of diesel exhaust), and resulted in some serious research being done by the folks up at USC.

More briefly, there is a legitimate subject involving nanoparticle pollution in the air, not to be confused with the quackery described in this post.

By the way, it is possible to reduce nanoparticle pollution from trucks using filtration methods, and the Swiss have done a lot to clean up their fleets.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1352231002003540

Orac,
I agree with you that nanoparticle hysteria, along with Morgellon’s hysteria, are bad things. But I strongly resist the tactic of trying to win over uneducated consumers by belittling them, and I criticise we of the science tribe for our failure to have compassion for others. .

The woo merchants are eating our lunch again. Why? Well, the woo merchants, first of all, are able to connect with their audience, their market. Why? Because they are able to convince their “target” audience that they are on their side. What do we science jerks do? We belittle them. We tell them we are smarter than they are. We hope that they stop eating and die. How well is that working, folks? Are you winning more and more people over to the side of science every day? No? Gee, I wonder why.

... pro-nanoparticle homeopaths.

As far as I can tell, a homeopathic "nanoparticle" would have to be smaller than a single molecule, or the ions thereof, of the starting substance, yet somehow maintain the physiological properties of the substance. I'm quite baffled as to how that is supposed to come about.

What do we science jerks do? We belittle them. We tell them we are smarter than they are. We hope that they stop eating and die. How well is that working, folks?

If only there were some way that SteveP could start up his own "blog" where he could address the daily influx of stupidity in a more appropriate tone. Alas, the technology is not available.

@SteveP:

If you think I'm doing it so very wrong, you are perfectly welcome, as herr doktor bimler points out, to start your own blog and show us exactly how it's done. In fact, please do. I challenge you. Show me how to do it better.

I suspect that you'll find that it's very easy to snipe from the sidelines but not so easy to actually do it.

Morgellon's looks pretty nasty. What the actual fuck is coming out of that leaf bug??

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9aqscH07BM

Also, I don't understand why you guys are having trouble with understanding the "smaller is worse" argument.

Let me put it simply. The average human cannot swallow an ordinary bowling ball. Shrink it though, eventually it's small enough to eat. Eventually it's small enough to slip through our GI lining and enter our circulation, causing untold damage to our organs, like so many organic bowling pins.

Products that exist naturally, in nature, contain no bowling balls large or small, unlike vaccines.

@Bob#47:

Certainly smaller can be worse, but the whole point that Orac and others is trying to make is that ancient Paracelsian maxim: The dose makes the poison. To use your bowling ball analogy, a nanometre-sized bowling ball would eventually be destroyed by the body’s defences. But many billions of them could potentially cause more damage before the body’s defences can take care of it. The same is true of even something as toxic as methylmercury. A few molecules of that aren’t going to kill you. You’ll live to a ripe old age before that much causes harm. Billions upon billions of molecules in the body though are a major cause of concern.

It’s not like these are the self-replicating nanobots of science fiction (but then again maybe these aren’t so science fiction: some real-world examples of “self-replicating nanobots” are called “viruses” and “bacteria”) that a very few could potentially exponentially replicate itself into harmful quantities.

@Bob (~#47),

It is well known that the size of an entity can convey a different message.

For example, the size of the letters in a word can convey a different message.

The word "Bob" vs. "BOB" is a classic example.

Phonetically the words are identical but the size of the letters are dissimilar causing confusion and possibly an emotional misinterpretation.

Therefore, you are correct in your bowling ball analogy in that size can affect processing.

Products that exist naturally, in nature, contain no bowling balls large or small, unlike vaccines.

Oh for those prelapsarian days before human technology invented bush-fires, and meteor dust, and volcanic eruptions, and desert dust-storms, and sea-spray evaporation, and other sources of nanoparticles.

Nanoparticles: The new One True Cause of All Disease?

I just got a note shoved under my door. The line above is typed at the top of the sheet. Halfway down the page is a big scrawled "No!" The signature looks kind of ghostly (if that makes any sense; I don't know how else to describe it). I think the first name is Hilda, but the second character looks kind of like a "u" and the last name is Clunk?? Right at the bottom of the page is a little cartoon of some vermiform thing that looks like it's being hit by a lightning bolt. The paper smells kind of musty. It's all really weird.

Did it have a religious new-age graphic design suggestive of the Watchtower pamphlet that Jehova's Witnesses kill trees to annoy people with?

I criticise we of the science tribe for our failure to have compassion for others.

TINW. HTH. HAND.

Go away Travis (Bardiac).

And Bardiac is Travis J Schwochert of 239 S Church St, Endeavor, WI 53930

Just so you know

HDB

Montanari agrees that chemtrails Are A Thing (he can see them himself!) but refuses to speculate about their composition, for he is An Scientist.

Translation - He has not found a way to monetize them. Someone should send him a sample of jet fuel.

LOL! Did you see the add in the adspace on this website?

The Haver CPA: particle analyzer

I don't want an instrument called "Haver". I can imagine the digital readout constantly fluctuating (+-+-+-+).

Might as well call it The Equivocator T200.

The Contraindicator 3C42: mass spectrometer.

In another timely development, Hyderabad's finest illiterate wazzocks at "Scientific Federation" are currently spamming all and sundry with invitations to their latest round of mockademic scamferences, including Nanotechnology 2017:

On behalf of Organizing Committee, we would like to solicit your gracious presence as a speaker at the upcoming 3rd Global Nanotechnology Congress and Expo which is going to be held during August 21-23, 2017 in Dallas, USA.

To have glance at conference, PS: http://scientificfederation.com/nanotechnology-2017/

Scientific Sessions Includes
NanomaterialsEmerging areas of materials science
...

We await a positive acknowledgement from you. I would be glad to answer your queries in this regard.
Best regards,
Reddy Sekhar
Nanotechnology-2017

This article reminds me of Dr. W. John Martin's work on "stealth" or "stealth adapted" viruses. I've searched mostly in vain for criticism of his work, which in recent years includes dozens of mutually-self-referencing papers, published in open-access journals (mostly Scientific Research Publishing), speculating about the wide-ranging implications of "KELEA" ("kinetic energy limiting electrostatic attraction"), "KELEA-activated water" (apparently not yet on the market, but he registered the trademark in 2013), and "the ACE (alternative celluar energy) pathway":
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/W_John_Martin2
http://www.scirp.org/journal/Articles.aspx?searchCode=W.+John+Martin&se…
https://trademarks.justia.com/861/08/kelea-86108890.html

ACE and KELEA, like nanoparticles, are proposed as mechanisms for homeopathy. For example, one paper is titled "Homeopathy as A Misnomer for Activation of the Alternative Cellular Energy Pathway: Evidence for the Therapeutic Benefits of Enercel in a Diverse Range of Clinical Illnesses", while a heading within another paper is titled "Homeopathy as a Misnomer for KELEA Activated Water". Surprisingly, none of these dozens of dubious papers have been retracted or publicly criticized, as far as I can tell. (I doubt they have received any peer review either.) Also surprising are his credentials, including apparently being a tenured faculty member of USC on long-term "indefinite leave" (his recent lists only an affiliation with the Institute for Progressive Medicine):
http://keck.usc.edu/faculty/w-john-martin/

The National CFIDS Foundation gives some additional background on Dr. Martin, much of it negative, but including (besides his USC affiliation):
"He was the former director of the Viral Oncology Branch of the FDA's (Federal Drug Administration) Bureau of Biologics which is the principal agency in charge of testing human vaccines. Before that, he worked at the National Cancer Institute."
However, I've been unable to verify many of its strongest claims or the identity of any of its three purported authors, so for all I can tell it may be little more than a smear.
http://www.ncf-net.org/forum/Johnmartin.html

Dr. Martin's postulated existence of KELEA and ACE apparently depends on his decades-prior work on "stealth adapted" viruses which "are not effectively recognized by the cellular immune system and, therefore, do not evoke a typical inflammatory response." His 2014 self-published (AuthorHouse) book, "Stealth Adapted Viruses; Alternative Cellular Energy (ACE) & KELEA (TM) Activated Water: A New Paradigm of Healthcare", which can be previewed on Google Books, has an overview:
https://books.google.com/books?id=vJETBAAAQBAJ

Purported evidence for stealth viruses can be found on the site, Center for Complex Infectious Diseases:
http://www.ccid.org/
http://www.ccid.org/stealth/svevidence.htm

Based on the dubious appearance of his recent publications I'm very, very skeptical. However, I'm not competent to evaluate the claims made on that site, and if his claims about accidental contamination of polio vaccines by stealth-adapted viruses have any merit, there might have been plausible reasons to supress or ignore this research, which could have contributed to his subsequent marginalization.

So I hope someone will be able and willing to shine a light on Dr. Martin and his work before KELEA-activated water finds a market and homeopathy a new "mechanism," "supported" by "studies" in dozens of "scientific journals".

This article reminds me of Dr. W. John Martin’s work on “stealth” or “stealth adapted” viruses. I’ve searched mostly in vain for criticism of his work, which in recent years includes dozens of mutually-self-referencing papers, published in open-access journals (mostly Scientific Research Publishing), speculating about the wide-ranging implications of “KELEA” (“kinetic energy limiting electrostatic attraction”), “KELEA-activated water” (apparently not yet on the market, but he registered the trademark in 2013), and “the ACE (alternative celluar energy) pathway”:

Martin also uses the MedCrave junkjournals to pimp his magical Activated Water, which evidently cures AIDS and tuberculosis:
http://medcraveonline.com/JHVRV/JHVRV-02-00061.pdf

MedCrave and SCIRP journals are both legendary for their willingness to print anything as long as the cheque clears.

So he is a neologism-spawning scammer... as for his "Center for Complex Infectious Diseases" site purporting to support his claims, I find no evidence there to evaluate, only "Buy my book!"

"Complex Infectious Diseases" - like ordinary infectious diseases with a component multiplied by i or j, depending on whether you're a engineer or a mathematician?

The Goog informs me that before W. John Martin shifted to SCIRP and MedCrave as target journsl for his crazypants emissions, "Experimental and Molecular Pathology" (an Elsevier journal) published four of them back-to-back in a 2005 issue, with the titles
Alternative cellular energy pigments mistaken for parasitic skin infestations*
Alternative cellular energy pigments from bacteria of stealth virus infected individuals
Progressive medicine
Etheric biology

Two papers in a 2003 issue:
Complex intracellular inclusions in the brain of a child with a stealth virus encephalopathy
Stealth virus culture pigments: a potential source of cellular energy

Five back-to-back in 1999 (ht_tp://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00144800/66/1 ):

Stealth Adaptation of an African Green Monkey Simian Cytomegalovirus
Bacteria-Related Sequences in a Simian Cytomegalovirus-Derived Stealth Virus Culture
Melanoma Growth Stimulatory Activity (MGSA/GRO-α) Chemokine Genes Incorporated into an African Green Monkey Simian Cytomegalovirus-Derived Stealth Virus
Stealth Virus Epidemic in the Mohave Valley: Severe Vacuolating Encephalopathy in a Child Presenting with a Behavioral Disorder

...So ostensibly mainstream journals can be just as as scammy as the clearly-predatory OA ones.
A suspicious mind would wonder whether Exp.&Mole.Pathol. included Martin as a member of its Editorial Board at the time, but Elsevier treat the journal's list of editors as just another article, that you have to pay for to read.
---------------------------------
* Morgellons!

“Complex Infectious Diseases” – like ordinary infectious diseases with a component multiplied by i or j, depending on whether you’re a engineer or a mathematician?

"Complex" in the sense that the pathogens are neither bacterial nor viral, but a hybrid of the two, for which Martin has coined the name "viteria", which sounds like a distant relative of the Adams Family.

I am glad I finally found a blog that mentions Morgellons in a term other than a disease. I do have it. And while the only effects I have are a few pesky sores that spit out an occasional Mr. Grinch looking tiny figure holding a small antenna it really doesn't bother me. Because I became aware of strange things happening all around me, mostly with dusty cob webs and moving clothing threads long before I knew what Morgellons was. I am not well educated but I am very intelligent and I know that all you have to do is open your eyes and see that what ever this living thing is it is destroying everything in comes into contact with. I personally don't think the government is responsible for it like all of the people who are suffering that are looking for a reason. My personal opinion is that they are trying to kill it with the chem-trails. But I know it is real. And I wish I never saw it. So we people of this earth are better off not knowing. We can accept an alien race may come to battle us. But some dust blowing in on the cosmic winds are a little too advanced for us to comprehend, Anyway. I hope somebody reads this and can tell me that the best minds from around the world are working on this. Whether you think I'm delusional or not it looks to me like the timeline and the aggression is this "particle" are both accelerating and the truth won't stay with us half a million or so delusional losers much longer. And for every one of us there are ten more hiding in the shadows afraid of being ridiculed. Myself? It's never been about my little friends. But I can't begin to think how it can be stopped.

A co-author of an antivax study attacks Orac for criticizing it. Hilarity ensues

oracknows — Tue, 07 Feb 2017 02:47:34 +0000

A co-author of an antivax study attacks Orac for criticizing it. Hilarity ensues

I wasn't planning on revisiting this topic, but sometimes a blogger's gotta do what a blogger's gotta do. You'll see what I mean in a minute. But before you do, I'll just provide a bit of background. Last week, I came across one of those truly awful antivaccine studies that gets the old Insolence flowing, this time a mix of the Respectful and not-so-Respectful. I'm referring, of course, to a paper that I came across as I was spending some time delving into the deeper darker parts of antivaccine social media. It was a study by Antonietta Gatti and Stefano Montanari in the International Journal of Vaccines and Vaccination entitled New Quality-Control Investigations on Vaccines: Micro- and Nanocontamination, which led to an article being circulated in antivaccine circles by the Children’s Medical Safety Research Institute (CMSRI), an group made up mainly of antivaccine cranks, in an article entitled Dirty Vaccines: New Study Reveals Prevalence of Contaminants. Suffice to say, I laid down the not-so-Respectful Insolence that this awful, awful paper deserved, and didn't plan on revisiting the topic, even though I learned some things about the authors and thought of some additional issues with the study that I hadn't thought of the first time I discussed it.

Well, leave it to one of the authors to provide me with an opportunity—nay, an obligation—to do each of those things. Let's just put it this way. One of the authors, Stefano Montanari, is not happy with me. Not at all. Even though his primary language is Italian, that didn't stop him from trying to rebut my criticisms in two languages in an entry called Sono troppo forti per me. I was amused right from the beginning:

Naively foreign to the subject, the author of the mess begins badly, showing not only that he hasn’t got the faintest notion of what is declared to be actually contained in vaccines but that he ignores even one of the basic principles of classical toxicology: the different pollutants (that the author hastens to define “harmless”) exert a mutually synergistic activity. Well: even the most culturally backward toxicologist knows that in his field hardly ever two plus two equals four but equals very often a higher number. And he knows also that the higher the number of addenda, the farther from the arithmetic sum and the less predictable is the result. When, then, Mr. Orac, whoever is hidden behind the pseudonym, thinks back of Paracelsus, he exhibits without shame his being foreign to the pathologies caused by micro- and nanoparticles.

Ah, yes. That didn't take long. It always amuses me when I'm attacked because I use a pseudonym, given that my real identity is one of the worst kept "secrets" in the blogosphere. I do admit that, from time to time, I've been tempted to drop the 'nym, but somehow never do. I think it's just pure cussedness. (Also, I like the Orac 'nym.) Be that as it may, these days, I like to think of the 'nym as an intelligence test. If you complain about the 'nym and are too stupid or lazy to figure out who I really am, you fail.

Be that as it may, I am not unaware of the possibility of "synergistic toxicity." However, contrary to what Montanari seems to think, it's not as common a phenomenon. More importantly, if you're going to invoke "synergistic toxicity" in the context of vaccines, it would behoove you to—oh...I don't know—actually demonstrate any toxicity first, something Montanari's paper utterly failed to do.

I also couldn't help but think that the whole part about "micro- and nanoparticles" was starting to resemble a couple of things. For one, homeopaths like to invoke "nanoparticles" to "explain" how their quackery works. They even mistake low level contamination for something functional. The other thing it reminded me of is a the obsession of a certain pathologist named Sin Lee, who is obsessed about minimal quantities of HPV DNA that he detected in Gardasil using super, super sensitive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to detect. What Montanari did is similar (finding inconsequential amounts of scary-sounding contaminants) using highly sensitive techniques and then using that finding to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Basically, Montanari's is yet another variation on the antivaccine theme of claiming that vaccines are loaded with "toxins" that cause all sorts of harm.

Montanari was also rather defensive about having published in a pay-to-publish predatory journal:

Our scam is evident when Orac reveals how, to be able to publish in the infamous newspaper, you pay money. Evidently, Mr. Orac has never published anything. Had he done that, he would know that there is NO international medical journal that does not ask for money for publication, and the figure is higher, the higher the impact factor, i.e. the grotesquely fraudulent index (see televoting) that the journal boasts.

I'd be happy to send Montanari my PubMed list. Yes, I have published. Perhaps not as much as I would have wished by this stage in my career, but it's not insubstantial. (I actually have a commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine. Perhaps Montanari has heard of it.) Yes, many journals do charge page charges to publish. That's not what I was talking about. To repeat, the journal in which Gatti and Montanari published their paper is a MedCrave journal, and MedCrave is included on Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers, basically a list of “pay to publish” open access journals who charge significant sums to authors to publish their work but whose editorial oversite and peer review are—shall we say?—lacking. MedCrave, which was founded in 2014, is thought to be a new brand created by the well-established predatory OMICS group publisher. Interestingly, if you Google "MedCrave predatory publisher," you'll find a bunch of links denying that MedCrave is a predatory publisher, all with language quirks so similar that it's pretty obvious that they're probably coming from the same source.

No, there is a difference between predatory publishers who specialize in publishing low quality papers and charging for the privilege. I suspect Montanari knows that. He's also wrong that page charges are usually higher, the higher impact the journal.

Montanari then goes on with this hilarious paragraph:

Soon after, here is the confession: Orac knows nothing of microscopy, but he knows that samples should be viewed in a vacuum. If the '"expert" had any idea of the type of microscope we use - data, however, reported in the paper - he would not have done such a comic thud. Nor would he tell that we "evaporate" vaccines, because the methodology is quite another. Even if we did, however, that would have nothing to do with the presence of pieces of lead, steel, tungsten or any other element or combination of elements that appear with evidence in the photographed particles. Then, if Mr. Orac had any specific cultural basis, he would know what is the " protein corona" and would not shoot naive nonsense in this regard. But all this is not enough and he resumes the thesis of the " homeopathic quantity " messing with chemical concepts with which, apparently, he is not familiar but which, no doubt, impress the reader he addresses. If I did not know that the thing is useless, I would invite Mr. Orac to study at least the basic principles of nano-toxicology. This for his own good. Anyway, there is no reason to worry: even tap water might contain filth and no one injecting tap water into his veins, which of course falls in Orac’s habits, ever reported any trouble. And what if the pollutants came from the needle used to transfer the vaccine to the microscope? Oh yes: what if it were so? The fact is that the needle we use is obviously the one of the syringe which contains the vaccine. And if it were the cellulose matrix which filters the sample to be dirty? It’s a pity, however, that we, as an obvious practice, regularly check all the steps including the carbon support on which we deposit the sample without ever having found pollutants. More than 40 years spent on research taught us the basics of the trade.

Montanari might forgive me if I was unclear on how he prepared the samples. The Methods section of his paper was absolutely atrocious and abominable. There was insufficient detail to figure out just what Gatti and he did. Now, maybe someone who speaks Italian can tell if the Italian version of Montanari's post makes sense, because I consider it unfair to mock the incoherence of the above paragraph if it's just due to his lack of skill with English. In any case, whether due to lack of facility with English or muddled thinking or both, Much of what he's saying there makes no sense. I'm particularly amused by his concession that he didn't use any proper controls and his attempt to reflect it back at me with a jaunty, "So what if the contaminants came from the syringe?" The "fact" is that the needle he used is obviously the one that contains the vaccine? OK. But was it a medical grade, sterile syringe, just like the kind used to inject vaccines into babies? I'd bet it wasn't. Those syringes are usually 0.5 ml or 1 ml and can't measure finely enough to accurately and reproducibly deposit 20 μl onto the filters.

I could go on, but let's just recap the various problems with this study. Nowhere do Gatti and Montanari actually measure or report the actual concentration of the metal particles that they found. I was criticized for using what one commenter viewed as too simplistic an approach to likening the concentrations to molarity, but, as I said before, bloody hell. If Gatti and Montanari don't report the actual concentrations of the "contaminants" that they found, I did the best I could with what I was given. Another problem is that many of the vaccines tested were past their expiration date. Given that vaccines have proteins in them. Over time, proteins in aqueous solution tend to degrade and precipitate out. That's part of the reason why vaccines have expiration dates. In any case, another problem with the study is that there was no attempt to quantify the "contamination" in any meaningful way that could be compared and independently evaluated, nor is there any statistical analysis. Then, of course, there is the lack of proper controls, both negative and positive. Negative controls would include things like distilled, deionized water treated the same way as the vaccines and phosphate-buffered saline, which is buffer frequently used in vaccines.

Whether or not Montanari and Gatti are experts in "nanotoxicology" or not, it's clear that Montanari has some serious pseudoscientific leanings. For instance, Gatti is the editor of a bottom-feeding MedCrave journal, Journal of Nanomedicine Research. Particularly amusing to me:

The in-vitro and in-vivo toxicological studies performed later showed controversial results, as they led to opposite results: some scientists (mostly biologists and molecular biologists) believed that nanoparticles are safe since they do not induce an immediate cell death and there is not a clear dose-response answer. Others (mainly bio-engineers, chemists, etc.) replied that they can have a potential to induce biological, maybe pathological, reactions.

Maybe, that's because biologists and molecular biologists know what is and isn't important in terms of what can and can't cause physiologically and biochemically important changes in living systems. And, of course, Gatti and Montanari find nanoparticles everywhere! For example:

Studying a civilian patient died of lymphoma at the hospital of Sarajevo when the Balkan War was already over; we found the deepest and finest contamination of his lymph nodes by 10nm-sized particles of Carbon-Lead-Chlorine-Bromine. Such a small size, morphology (spherical) and chemical composition induced us to hypothesize an exposure to an important source of high-temperature-produced soot.

They've also found nanoparticles in the blood of leukemia patients, in clots forming on filters placed in the inferior vena cava, and even bread and biscuits!

It turns out that Gatti and Montanari have their very own electron microscope. From what I can tell using Google Translate on articles written in Italian (always a dicey proposition), it began in 2006 when the University of Modena stopped them from using its electron microscope to study "toxic emissions." So someone named Beppe Grillo launched , via his blog, a fundraising effort for the purchase of an environmental scanning microscope, and €378,000 was raised to purchase the microscope. Somehow this all went bad, with Montanari now featuring a drawing of Grillo as literally a werewolf. Hilariously, under this photo, there are references further showing that Gatti and Montanari can find nanoparticles everywhere.

In any case, it degenerated into accusations that Gatti and Montanari are using their microscope in much the way that Mike Adams uses his mass spectrometer, to find contaminants in everything and as a side business. This is actually a credible charge, as a glimpse at the Nanodiagnostic, Ltd. website (Gatti and Montanari's company) shows, particularly a page on pathologies of unknown origin, which speculates that nanoparticles are cause of—you guessed it—pathologies of unknown origin. Gatti and Montanari countercharge that Grillo exploited them for political gain. Apparently lawyer and defamation suits are involved. (Hat tip: herr doktor bimler.)

In any case, Beppe Grillo is the founder of the Italian political party Five Star Movement and is quite the crank himself. He's an HIV/AIDS denialist, having called AIDS a "hoax," perpetuated by pharmaceutical companies and is a rabid antivaccine activist. You might remember Paolo Vanoli, as I've discussed him before. He has claimed that vaccines can cause homosexuality and is a member of the Five Star Movement.

Not surprisingly, Gatti and Montanari aren't without a bit of crank tendencies themselves. For instance, they've co-authored a book called Vaccini: sì o no? (Vaccines: Yes or No?) In all my years in the biz, I know right away that any book that even askes this question in the title will be full of antivaccine misinformation, and a Google Translation shows that I'm not wrong here. In their book, Gatti and Montanari include analyzes of the content of the 28 vaccines used in Italy , with photos by electron microscopy. Trully, they are a couple of one-note cranks. In the blurb they also purport to discuss correlations between vaccines and autism, the "cover-up" of negative data, "false epidemics," the "lack of studies with a control group," and a lot of other antivaccine tropes.

I'd like to conclude by thanking Montanari for giving me the opportunity to revisit their study. They're into way more pseudoscience than I thought. That's the problem with dealing with cranks from non-English-speaking countries. If you don't speak and read the language, it's pretty hard to learn a lot about them, even with the almighty Google Translate. Thankfully, I was able to find out quite a bit about Antonietta Gatti and Stefano Montanari. They'd be right at home here in the US with Mike Adams and his mass spectrometer.

oracknows Mon, 02/06/2017 - 21:47

Categories

Medicine

MedCrave, which was founded in 2014, is thought to be a new brand created by the well-established predatory OMICS group publisher.

The Wayback Machine archived two of the more instructive comment threads at Beall's blog.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160828111348/https://scholarlyoa.com/2014…
https://web.archive.org/web/20161222210911/https://scholarlyoa.com/2016…

The general consensus among his commenters was that MedCrave was probably not actually operated by OMICS, but the scammers behind it were inspired by the success of OMICS and their desire to grab some of the $$$.

Interestingly, if you Google “MedCrave predatory publisher,” you’ll find a bunch of links denying that MedCrave is a predatory publisher, all with language quirks so similar that it’s pretty obvious that they’re probably coming from the same source.

I incline to the view that those Quora threads and the related sites are satires, set up by someone who holds a grudge against MedCrave and is trying to hard to ensure that any search for “Medcrave” brings the searcher to the word “predatory”.

It would be really cool if someone put a few samples of those infamous belladonna teething gels under the microscope too. We could get an idea about variability of the composition, and how much active ingredient is there.

Vaccini: sì o no? (Vaccines: Yes or No?) In all my years in the biz, I know right away that any book that even askes this question in the title will be full of antivaccine misinformation

Betteridge's Law.

Gatti is the editor of a bottom-feeding MedCrave journal, Journal of Nanomedicine Research

To be fair, she's not the only editor there.

Her JNMR editorials give her affiliation as "Department of Nanodiagnostics, National Council of Research of Italy, Italy". This is potentially misleading. The Italian Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche has seven Dipartmenti, but none of them are "Nanodiagnostics".
https://www.cnr.it/it/dipartimenti
There are dozens of Research Institutes (including the Istituto Nanoscienze), but again, no Nanodiagnostics.

I think she means that she is loosely affiliated to NCR's Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologia dei Materiali Ceramici (ISTEC) and sometimes collaborates with researchers from there, so she has promoted her company to an actual Dipartmento.

According to the Great Gazoogle, the "Department of Nanodiagnostics, National Council of Research" has no existence outside of two MedCrave editorials.

Ah, journal bashing. I've heard quite a bit of this over the years and I always ask myself, "would this paper be any more true if it were published in Archives of Toxicology?"

To be fair about the pseodonym. I would consider it a basic courtesy not to out people with pseudonyms, unless there is cause.

The author might have refrained from looking into the nym, or indeed be aware of your name, but decided not to use it.

I think someone broke a small jar of Fendlesworth on aisle 6. Do you remember his other Scandinavian name, Lars Ørnsted?

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2016/09/05/the-marriage-of-creationis…

Above is Fendlesworth, not me. Orac, look at the IP Addresses.

I'll say a few thinsg here.
Primary is, SSDD. Google it if you don't know it.
Second, my moniker is a call sign, back from when I was SF. That makes it damnably near PII, considering various leaks and spills of national secrets. I have grave heartburn over exposing my wife, children and grandchildren to the risk of exposure and deliberate targeting by very real terrorists.
Add in doxing by antivaxxxers, with very literal threats to kill everyone within my home, then come to me, yeah, I use my old callsign.

Would *you* do otherwise?
Especially considering men messaging me with my persona address, then explaining precisely how they'd rape my wife to death.
Yeah, it's gone *that* explicit. Worse than aL qaeda in threat land.
Do you wonder *why* I'm so hostile to them?
At least, overseas, I could just kill them. Here, at home, they have rights (OK, it's a lot more complex than that, just work with me here).

Orac has to put up with threats to his job. I'
Yve had motehrlovers tell e my own address and proclaim that they'd kill anyone in the inside of the house.
Yeah, they're real reasonable.

When are Gatti and Montanari going to publish a study on Chicken McNuggets? I'll bet the honey mustard sauce alone is chock-full of harmful nanoparticles.

Let's not bother with Fendlesworth anymore and just call him Travis Schwochert from Endeavor, WI. That's what the little wanker's name is.

Yep. Make sure to mention Fendlesworth too, though. Good for Google searches. :-)

The lack of controls alone is a death sentence for a paper like this. If you go to low enough concentrations, *everything* is contaminated, and claiming that makes your compound dangerous is meaningless without a comparison.
Hell, at my high school, we learned about detecting the uranium in our sandwiches in the first year! Didn't actually measure it of course (we had a leaky roof, not a Mass Spec), but we were still given the explanation and an explicit guarantee that *every* sandwich we had with us had a few atoms of uranium in it. I mean... this isn't expert level physics or biochemistry or anything, this is stuff a reasonably interested twelve-year old would understand.

As for our glorious host's musings on the 'nym... I'm not implying anything, but has anyone ever seen Orac and Batman in the same room?

When are Gatti and Montanari going to publish a study on Chicken McNuggets? I’ll bet the honey mustard sauce alone is chock-full of harmful nanoparticles.

They'd just be continuing what Mike Adams did:

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2013/09/03/mike-adams-puts-chicken-mc…

And what Dr. Richard deShazo did:

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2013/10/07/someone-other-than-mike-ad…

Only with an electron microscope.

"Mike Adams and his Mass Spectrometer"

"Tom Swift and his Diving Seacopter"

Work should stand on its own, but for lay people who don't understand enough about this, this additional background can help understand how unreliable these authors are.

Thank you for going through both, content and credentials.

Orac knows nothing of microscopy, but he knows that samples should be viewed in a vacuum. If the ‘”expert” had any idea of the type of microscope we use – data, however, reported in the paper – he would not have done such a comic thud. Nor would he tell that we “evaporate” vaccines, because the methodology is quite another.

Let me correct Dr. Montanari on a couple of things, OK? Aristotle was not Belgian. The central tenet of Buddhism is not "Every man for himself." And the London Underground is not a political movement. These are mistakes, Stefano. I looked them up.

If you didn't evaporate your sample before putting it in the vacuum chamber, it will be evacuated when you pump the chamber down. The liquid phase of water can't exist under the typical temperatures and pressures used for electron force microscopy.

I didn't know Grillo was an antivaxxer. I didn't really know that much at all, beyond him being something of an agitprop/buffoon.
I now know all I need to know. He's a lot worse than a mere buffoon.

When someone states in a paper When the water and saline the vaccine contains are evaporated ... I rather think they forfeit any room to complain that someone takes that to mean ... we “evaporate” vaccines ...". If ... the methodology is quite another. then it is up to the authors to resolve potential ambiguity by explaining said method, unless they are content to receive a low grade and a "please see me during office hours to discuss this" note and having their paper used as an example of what not to do in next year's class. Oh, and "saline" doesn't evaporate - you already covered what evaporates when you mentioned water.

I am glad you had a chance to revisit this article. Antivaxx research is so prone to becoming a comedy routine. Thanks for the laugh

As I think I've mentioned before, I've put quite a lot of effort into (unsuccessfully) trying to find good info on first aid for road rash when it is known that it isn't adequately cleaned at the scene and may be several hours before it gets further attention. This paper resolves the issue. Clearly administration of a goodly largesome dose of carfentanil followed with a potassium chloride chaser is warranted, since the particulates that would enter the injured party's circulation would cause all manner of debilitating horrors in the future.

I wonder if these bozos have considered the particulates that will be sewn up inside anyone who has had surgery.

Orac writes,

Also,I like the Orac nym

MJD says,

Dear Montanari,

Orac (Mr. Hyde) gets great pleasure describing what happens when scientists spit into the wind. Therefore, it's often unwise to pull on Orac's (aka. Dr. Jekyll) cape.

I've looked into the lead author Gatti. She has numerous publications on Pubmed, all regarding these micro and nanoparticles she finds using this technique. She has found "contaminants" as an explanation for Morgellons psychosis and in biscuits. She claims to have founded a new field, Nanopathology.

At first, I wanted to believe that, as a bioengineer without medical training, she was just objectively reporting on what she finds and looking for new ways to apply her technology, without having underlying biases or trying to claim any causality. Unfortunately, when diving in deeper to her publications, it's obvious to see that 1) she strongly biased that vaccines are not safe and is using the research to try and prove this, and 2) that she doesn't really know what she is talking about regarding vaccine ingredients and toxicology.

For example, in a book she published in 2015 called "Case Studies in Nanotoxicology and Particle Toxicology" she writes the following in her chapter on their findings of "contaminants" in vaccines:

"In the past thimerosal...was usually added to vaccines as a preservative. Due to its toxicity, it was replaced by aluminum hydroxide, a chemical with debatable advantages over thimerosal in terms of toxicity."

They obviously do not know what they're talking about.

You can see the chapter here:

https://books.google.com/books?id=Q-icBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA188&lpg=PA188&dq=%2…

In an interview that GreenMed published yesterday with James Lyons-Weiler (because who else would publish this guy), Gatti says:

"Aluminum is notoriously toxic. Babies are probably more likely to be affected by levels of aluminum seen in vaccine, but aluminum is unsafe in any case."

Interview here: http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/breaking-interview-lead-author-dirty-v…

Sounds like someone needs training in toxicology before posing as an expert as they have.

The central tenet of Buddhism is not “Every man for himself.”

Cleese wasn't too familiar with Theravada, I take it.

"I wonder if these bozos have considered the particulates that will be sewn up inside anyone who has had surgery."

Yes, but in that instance a person would not have the particulates injected "into his veins" as the distinguished Dr. Montanari seems to think vaccines are.

I am italian.
I feel a little fremdschamen in this moment. Or maybe not. :)

Some minor clarifications:
- Paolo Vanoli is not a member of Five Stars Movement. He is only a minor activist, maybe not more involved in the party. I don't think he has any influence, or never had;
- M5S, nevertheless, has many anti-vaxxer in it, and Montanari is a beacon for them;
- in the 2006 the Università di Modena didn't stopped Gatti e Montanari to use that microscope. It stopped them to utilize it for their company, Nanodiagnostic. Gatti continued to be a researcher in UniModena and utilize that microscope;
- the microscope bought with the fundraising is actually in Pesaro, at the Università di Urbino. And Gatti and Montanari utilize that microscope together with at least three other organization/laboratories;
- I can confirm that the italian version of Montanari's "rebuttal" is hilarious as that in english;
- last thing, Gatti e Montanari are wife and husband.

Sorry my english, too much laughing. :)

Interestingly, if you Google “MedCrave predatory publisher,” you’ll find a bunch of links denying that MedCrave is a predatory publisher

My favorite is the one called "medcravenotpredatorypublisher.podbean.com". Oh, well, that convinces me! Shame on you, Orac, if that's even your real name.

Please forgive my ignorance, but come to think of it, I'm a bit puzzled as to why these people chose to use an electron microscope in the first place.
If you want to determine what substances are present and in what amounts, shouldn't a mass spectrometer be the instrument of choice?
Using an electron microscope to identify and quantify chemical contaminants sounds an awful lot like the practice of 'live blood analysis', where quacks claim to assess someone's state of health by simply looking at a drop of blood for a minute or two (suggesting that we can simply do away with all those expensive and time-consuming lab tests)...

Then again, if all you've got is a hammer...

@Richard

This electron microscope was equipped with an electron dispersive spectroscope.

Every element emits radiation of a certain energy/wavelength (E=hv) when bombarded with x-rays. Mass spectrometry data would have been a plus though, since it is quantitaive and EDS is not.

The radiation that each particular element emits is related to the ionization energy of said element. Here is a handy chart: http://www.med.harvard.edu/jpnm/physics/refs/xrayemis.html

The K and L lines correspond to the electron shells of the elements; these are the principal quantum numbers. Each element can be positively identified because; not only does each element have a major peak, it has a minor peak as well. So even when spectral lines of two elements overlap, the secondary spectra will allow an unambiguous identification.

Bonus points for invoking the Jim Croce tagline.

Be that as it may, I am not unaware of the possibility of “synergistic toxicity.” However, contrary to what Montanari seems to think, it’s not as common a phenomenon. More importantly, if you’re going to invoke “synergistic toxicity” in the context of vaccines, it would behoove you to—oh…I don’t know—actually demonstrate any toxicity first, something Montanari’s paper utterly failed to do.

Yes, I get the impression they're using it purely as a 'but SEE it could so still be dangerous!" and anticipating that nobody's gonna notice they haven't actually demonstrated that this is in fact what is happening.

I mean, a major mark against their original paper was that they acted as if absolutely any detectable quantity was bad. No baseline comparison. In their rebuttal they not only fail to answer that criticism, they *compound their original error* by making an even more vacuous claim without any attempt to back it up.

OK, dudes, you found some aluminum. Congratulations, you get a cookie. But you haven't shown it's a dangerous concentration.

But . . . but . . . SYNERGY! Sometimes chemicals are more dangerous together than either of them individually!

Oookaaaayyy . . . so, which chemicals have a synergistic toxicity and did you find them in concentrations sufficient for that to be dangerous?

*deafening silence*

This was my favorite bit, though:

he ignores even one of the basic principles of classical toxicology: the different pollutants (that the author hastens to define “harmless”) exert a mutually synergistic activity

Seriously, how do you make a statement like that in response to a criticism that basically says you've ignored "the dose makes the poison", which is far more basic toxicology? How incompetent do they want to appear?

We all know that Orac is really Ensor hiding behind his creation.
Now to my question: I must have missed something along the way. Who or what is a Fendlesworth, or is it more correct to ask what is a Fendle's worth?
Two major search engines have given me little to go on, and a third is confusing, not to mention TL;DR.

Marcus, would EDS be able to distinguish between tungsten carbide (WC) and "pure" tungsten?

Tungsten carbide is widely used, but as far as I know, incandescent lamp filaments and TIG (tungsten, inert gas) welding electrodes are the only common uses of relatively pure tungsten. I can imagine tungsten from TIG electrodes turning up in stainless steel vessels, though the electrodes used for SS typically contain about 2% of something "exotic" like thorium, lanthanum or cerium. I'm having a hard time believing so many vaccines contain just plain tungsten.

@Marcus Ranum, #27
Ah, thank you for reducing my ignorance! But to continue my display of ignorance, is EDS not just limited to detecting elements?
If so, it would still appear that this is a mostly futile exercise when hunting contaminants and the likes, since biological activity (and thus toxicity) is almost exclusively dependent what compounds are present; information about elements that make up those compounds is nigh useless.

Side note to the above: Travis Shwochert mimicked me on "Starts with a Bang". He may try to get other commenters in trouble by doing the same.

Ol' Dave
Travis Shwochert a.k.a Fendlesworth, is a troll who has been banned numerous times for using sockpuppets. Lately he has been impersonating other regulars and even Orac.
He's reasonably competent at finding sciency things on the web and trying to use them to make his points, but almost invariably he demonstrates that he really doesn't know basics. He will tolerate being challenged briefly, but then resorts to scatology and other remarkably puerile & purulent attempts to "get" people, which around here generally fails miserably. He gets treated pretty roughly here, having earned the contempt of many.

I suspect that he is generally despised in meatspace.

Just so his name is associated with the vile comments he makes, it's spelt Travis J. Schwochert aka Fendlesworth.

Damn it, I just wrote a detailed explanation to the lady (?) who linked the mercury-lead toxicity study, but the comments have vanished so I feel kind of stupid for putting all the effort in. I get it might have been a not-antivaxx-just-worried troll, did Orac get some banhammering in or something?

...now what am I supposed to do with half a page of science explanations for beginners? I can't even doodle cyborg dinosaurs in the margins because I don't have a printer here!

If you didn’t evaporate your sample before putting it in the vacuum chamber, it will be evacuated when you pump the chamber down. The liquid phase of water can’t exist under the typical temperatures and pressures used for electron force microscopy.

Gatti and Montanari have an ESEM, an Environmental SEM, where there's a partition between the main electron-accelerating vacuum chamber and a second chamber housing the sample. A tiny hole in the partition lets the electron beam through. So the sample can be wet, under atmosphere... some air leaks through the hole into the main vacuum chamber, but the pumps maintain the vacuum, and the electron beam is attenuated, so longer exposures.

For these studies, though, the authors state that the samples were evaporated under "low vacuum".

" but the comments have vanished"

I wonder why

Richard (#34) makes the key point: so what did they really find? XDS will tell you that a sample contains carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, but won't tell you whether it's caffeine (I would say sugar, but that lacks nitrogen) or strychnine.

@Denice
Yeah, even had a whole weight comparison between babies and mice in it, it was amazing. If there's a thing that doesn't get better when you add Wolfram Alpha to it, I haven't found it yet.

Post it again. I'd like to see that, as this ancient paper is getting quoted more and more these days.

This sounds like a trope similar to many others. I express it with the equation: quality = Q * quantity, where Q is a constant of proportionality supposedly establishing an equivalence between quality and quantity.

For instance, in sci-fi, Singularity crankery, etc. it is often believed that as computers get faster and faster with more more memory a threshold is passed and *ping* an omniscient artificial intelligence appears. Uh, no.

In Harry Potter and in much folklore you can mix a bunch of otherwise innocuous substances to synergize a potion with extraordinary effects. In reality all you get is organic sludge only a microbe could love.

"Synergistic toxicity" is another example of quality-quantity equivalence (QQE) syndrome.

in a book she published in 2015 called “Case Studies in Nanotoxicology and Particle Toxicology”

Published by Elsevier, in another attempt by that company to lower their reputation to the level of other predatory publishers.

I’m having a hard time believing so many vaccines contain just plain tungsten.

In the 2004 "vena cava filter" paper ("Detection of micro- and nano-sized biocompatible particles in the blood"), the authors report

"Generally, the particles show complex chemistries, containing also elements like gold, silver, cobalt, titanium, antimony, tungsten, wolfram, nickel, zinc, mercury and barium."

-- they think that tungsten and wolfram are different elements, oh no, scary synergy! But they avoid the solecism of the Oxford comma so I am inclined to cut them slack.

Anyway, Table 1 reports particles with element combinations like "W S O P Na Cu", "C W O S P", "Fe Cr Ni W P Cl S Al Fe Cr" and "W O S P Fe". I suppose "C W O S P" could be tungsten carbide.

The 15 filters in the 2004 paper reappear in a 2006 paper ("Retrieval Analysis of Clinical Explanted Vena Cava Filters") with 5 subsequent observations, for a total of 20.

Intriguingly, those two publications were separated by a 2005 paper ("In-vivo short- and long-term evaluation of the
interaction material-blood"), with 14 vena cava filters, all completely different from the 2004 and 2006 lists. With far more complicated chemical descriptions of the purported particles. What happened to those 14 observations? It is a mystery.

Nowhere in these three papers is there any mention of patients consenting to the use of their tissue samples. "Ethical approval" is evidently not an issue.

@Greg:
I'll rewrite it, closed the doc earlier. I didn't realize it's being quoted more often but if it's common enough a guideline of sorts might be useful. I'm not a toxicity expert, but that should just mean it's easy to understand by anyone.

@Bronze Dog
I mean the online thingamajig at http://www.wolframalpha.com/. Not sure if you meant that with 'software', I know Wolfram does a bunch of other things as well.

They’ve also found nanoparticles in the blood of leukemia patients, in clots forming on filters placed in the inferior vena cava, and even bread and biscuits!

Don't forget "fetal tissues"!
"Heavy metals nanoparticles in fetal kidney and liver tissues.".

The Abstract begins promisingly, with a reference to "engineered nanoparticles". The journal,* alas, is one of those hybrid-access affairs that charges the contributors and the readers, which is to say a write-only journal with no subscribers or even Tables of Contents.

* "Frontiers in Bioscience" from Bioscience.org, probably predatory in Beall's assessment.

I was criticized for using what one commenter viewed as too simplistic an approach to likening the concentrations to molarity, but, as I said before, bloody hell.

My apologies. I work with these things professionally and I do have to protect my science too. You can't criticize Brian Hooker of being too simplistic when outside his field of expertise and then duck the same criticism.

It’s a pity, however, that we, as an obvious practice, regularly check all the steps including the carbon support on which we deposit the sample without ever having found pollutants.

If so, that should have been a figure in the paper. Nobody knows reading your paper that you have "40 years of experience" and I would say from the lack of rigor that most would be surprised if you had three months of experience. All readers see is you overanalyzing EDS data without a separate, corroborating data stream or any typical controls and using microscope settings that are frankly reckless. What in the world does 'regularly check' mean? Do you have a control built into the method so that you can know immediately if something's wrong, or are you just dusting the scope out once every three weeks? You could have included pictures off the side of the vaccine sample drop on the filter just to show the difference, but you didn't do even that! Heck, I can't tell from your published methods whether the cellulose filter ended up in the scope or not. Do you actually not understand that EDS can't tell you what minerals you're looking at or did you just feel the compulsion to add minerals into table 2 in addition to the elements? Moreover, you can't really know the shapes of the low contrast objects you're looking at if your SEM intensity is high enough to do EDS! 30 kV... my god, biological material is basically transparent at that voltage. A huge number of the particles you reported are micron-sized, why didn't you go back and try filtering the vaccines samples containing these even once with a 0.1 um filter and then make a new examination with your scope? "Bringing a physical method to bear" my ass, you don't know what you're doing and you're making a mockery of real material scientists the world over.

Orac may not be a nanoscientist, but I certainly am, and your work stunk.

Uh oh! They've found the engineered nanoparticles we put in the chemtrails that got Trump elected. Well, too late now! We don't need the chemtrails anymore! The American people are dumb enough. We can stop.

@Greg:
Took a bit longer due to IRL getting in the way, but this was more or less what I wrote to explain the relevance of the toxicity paper for vaccine safety. Not entirely happy with it, but if you like it feel free to adapt it as needed. It could use a bit more hard data instead of estimation, but I don't have access to any scientific databases so I can't do much to handle that.

=============================

While the mercury-lead toxicity paper sounds very scary and makes some good points, it is not an indication that vaccine contamination by heavy metals is dangerous. I'll be using Mercury as the main example here, but any other compound would work as well.

First, consider that toxicity is not directly related to the amount of toxin you suffer from. Increasing the dose by ten times might turn it from completely safe to guaranteed lethal, and reducing the dose to one-tenth can turn a lethal toxin into something you'll pretty much always survive. This is even shown in the paper you linked: on page 770 they show a table with LD1, LD50 and LD99 for the base metals and the various combinations. The LD99 for mercury, lead and cadmium (i.e. pretty much guaranteed lethal levels) are only one-and-a-half to three times the LD1 concentrations (which, while not harmless, will rarely kill).
So, the paper indicates that at high doses, lowering the concentration by about a half to two-thirds might reduce the toxicity by as much as 98+ percent. Using less Mercury (or any other hazardous material) will quickly reach LD0: you'll never die from exposure at that level, but there might still be hazardous side effects. Reducing it further will make those side effects less severe or remove them altogether. And the difference between 'safe' and 'dangerous' is often very small.
The reason for this is that the body is quite good at eliminating any hazardous stuff it encounters; exposure rarely becomes dangerous until the normal ways the body deals with something can't handle it. A 'safe' level might completely tax the body's ability to handle it, but a level only slightly higher can't be handled and becomes toxic. Exceptions exist, but these are the basics.
The thing to keep in mind then is that reducing concentration only a little can make things a lot safer.

Now, we're going to compare the experiment in the linked paper to modern day vaccine concentrations.

The doses used in the experiments in the paper are measured in micromoles per kg of body weight (of the mice). Using the metal salt compositions provided in the materials section, a rough estimate gives one micromole a weight of roughly 0.2 milligram for Mercury or Lead, and 0.1 milligram for Cadmium.
Taking Mercury as the example, to get LD1 from a single vaccine would mean adding 4 micromole/kg, or 0.8 milligram Mercury per kilogram body weight (of the baby) if we go by the linked paper's numbers. Based on an average baby weight of, say, 5kg, that means we're adding a whopping four milligrams of Mercury to a vaccine, an amount enough that it's visible by eye!
We're not doing that of course, since the whole point of vaccines is to keep kids healthy.

I'm not entirely sure what the current legal maximum for total Mercury in one dose of a vaccine is, in part because different forms of Mercury, like Mercury salts, Ethyl-Mercury or Methyl-Mercury, have different toxicity and therefore different limits. That said, the old Thimerosal containing vaccines (i.e. the ones that SHOULD have Mercury in them) apparently had a maximum of 25 micrograms Mercury per dose according to http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/Vaccines/QuestionsaboutVaccin…. That's about 1500 times lower than the LD1 we estimated above, and again this is WITH Thimerosal. As I explained above, a 1500 times lower concentration will be far safer than a mere 1500 times. Modern vaccines without Thimerosal will have a fraction of that concentration, simply because there's not supposed to be any Mercury at all. I don't know of any exact numbers, but reducing it to about a hundred thousand times lower than LD1 seems like it wouldn't be excessive. If anyone's got any data to provide a more exact number, feel free to chime in. Until then, I'm going with that hundred thousand times.

Now, up to here I've only looked at one toxin at a time, so the last thing we need to address at this point is the actual combined toxicity. The mercury-lead combination was more toxic than either metal alone, as the linked paper demonstrated. However, combining those metals in a vaccine would somehow have to counteract a reduction in concentration of a hundred thousand times. In the linked paper, adding Lead made the Mercury as toxic at LD1 as though it were LD99, but keep in mind that while that's a hundredfold increase in lethality, it's also only a 75% increase in effective concentration. And that's when the Lead concentration was LD1 as well, which is again VERY high. Logically, adding less Lead will reduce its effect on Mercury as well. So even if we went with a fairly pessimistic interpretation and go with the full 75% increase in effective Mercury concentration due to Lead interaction, we'd still need to make our vaccines somewhere around sixty five thousand times more contaminated with Mercury before we gave babies enough Mercury they risk dying from the vaccine.

Now, this is obviously a very simplified explanation. I've only included one combination of heavy metals, changes in effective concentration likely aren't linear much like the dose-toxicity isn't, and the concentration of Mercury that's dangerous but not deadly is obviously going to be lower than LD1. Still, having a safety margin in the thousands should show that Mercury contamination at least is not likely to cause any real concerns, especially when compared to more mundane risks like poor storage or transportation.

I read Italian... And it's really a pity that such a number of people (calling them "scientists" would be of course out of place) with twisted ideas about what science is, can get relevance in a country that otherwise has produced fine researchers (just to name one, in this field, see Roberto Burioni). I feel like I should apologize for them...

Any case, an entry on the blog of the institution where Gatti and Montanari work reports the following papers published by the couple. I'm not capable to judge their consistency, but of course I was a little surprised...
So, serching for http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=gatti+am
seems to produce this:

- The first investigative science-based evidence of Morgellons psychogenesis. Roncati L, Gatti AM, Pusiol T, Piscioli F, Barbolini G, Maiorana A. Ultrastruct Pathol. 2016 Jun 7:1-5. [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 27269255

- A Novel Forensic Investigation Applied to Bone Remains Exhumed near to Quirra Interforce Firing Range. Roncati L, Gatti AM, Capitani F, Bonacorsi G, Barbolini G, Maiorana A. J Forensic Sci. 2016 May;61(3):858-861. doi: 10.1111/1556-4029.13016. Epub 2015 Dec 31. PMID: 27122433

- The Uncontrolled Sialylation is Related to Chemoresistant Metastatic Breast Cancer. Roncati L, Barbolini G, Gatti AM, Pusiol T, Piscioli F, Maiorana A. Pathol Oncol Res. 2016 Apr 1. [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 27037559

- Heavy Metal Bioaccumulation in an Atypical Primitive Neuroectodermal Tumor of the Abdominal Wall. Roncati L, Gatti AM, Capitani F, Barbolini G, Maiorana A, Palmieri B. Ultrastruct Pathol. 2015;39(4):286-92. PMID: 26270725

- ESEM Detection of Foreign Metallic Particles inside Ameloblastomato us Cells. Roncati L, Gatti AM, Pusiol T, Barbolini G, Maiorana A, Montanari S. Ultrastruct Pathol. 2015;39(5):329-35. doi: 10.3109/01913123.2015.1042608. Epub 2015 Jun 25. PMID: 26111111

- Review: Morphofunctiona l and biochemical markers of stress in sea urchin life stages exposed to engineered nanoparticles. Gambardella C, Ferrando S, Gatti AM, Cataldi E, Ramoino P, Aluigi MG, Faimali M, Diaspro A, Falugi C. Environ Toxicol. 2015 May 30. doi: 10.1002/tox.22159. [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 26031494

- Acquired immunodeficienc y similar to Gulf War illness in a dead former serviceman. Roncati L, Gatti AM, Pusiol T, Barbolini G, Maiorana A. J R Army Med Corps. 2015 Jun;161(2):153-5. Doi: 10.1136/jramc-2014-000345. Epub 2014 Nov 26. PMID: 25428137

- Carcinogenic potential of metal nanoparticles in BALB/3T3 cell transformation assay.
Sighinolfi GL, Artoni E, Gatti AM, Corsi L. Environ Toxicol. 2016 May;31(5):509-19. doi: 10.1002/tox.22063. Epub 2014 Oct 30. PMID: 25358123

- Toxic effects of colloidal nanosilver in zebrafish embryos. Olasagasti M, Gatti AM, Capitani F, Barranco A, Pardo MA, Escuredo K, Rainieri S. J Appl Toxicol. 2014 May;34(5):562-75. doi: 10.1002/jat.2975. Epub 2014 Jan 7. PMID: 24395442

- Effects of nanosilver exposure on cholinesterase activities, CD41, and CDF/LIF-like expression in zebrafish (Danio rerio) larvae. Myrzakhanova M, Gambardella C, Falugi C, Gatti AM, Tagliafierro G, Ramoino P, Bianchini P, Diaspro A. Biomed Res Int. 2013;2013:205183. doi:10.1155/2013/205183. Epub 2013 Aug 6. PMID: 23991412 Free PMC Article

- Developmental abnormalities and changes in cholinesterase activity in sea urchin embryos and larvae from sperm exposed to engineered nanoparticles. Gambardella C, Aluigi MG, Ferrando S, Gallus L, Ramoino P, Gatti AM, Rottigni M, Falugi C. Aquat Toxicol. 2013 Apr 15;130-131:77-85. doi: 10.1016/j.aquatox.2012.12.025. Epub 2013 Jan 16. PMID: 23376697

- Allodynic skin in post-herpetic neuralgia: histological correlates. Buonocore M, Gatti AM, Amato G, Aloisi AM, Bonezzi C. J Cell Physiol. 2012 Mar;227(3):934-8. doi: 10.1002/jcp.22804. PMID: 21503891

- Heavy metals nanoparticles in fetal kidney and liver tissues. Gatti AM, Bosco P, Rivasi F, Bianca S, Ettore G, Gaetti L, Montanari S, Bartoloni G, Gazzolo D. Front Biosci (Elite Ed). 2011 Jan 1;3:221-6. PMID: 21196301

@Viggen

Do you actually not understand that EDS can’t tell you what minerals you’re looking at or did you just feel the compulsion to add minerals into table 2 in addition to the elements?

Cheap shot, and not in the least bit true.

It’s obvious that the vast majority of these aren’t minerals, and the few that are, are just coincidences. Taking a line from Table 2:

SBa, FeCu, SiAl, FeSi, CaMgSi, AlCaSi, Ti, Au, SCa, SiAlFeSnCuCrZn, CaAlSi
This is just a compact notation describing the relevant EDS peaks with a special consideration for heavy elements and aluminum; these are obviously not chemical formulas. Notice that they didn’t include oxygen or subscripts as any attempt to “mineralize” the data would require.

Take SiAl, this is almost a mineral and just needs oxygen and subscripts. It’s obvious that this is just a nonformal way of summarizing the data. The commas separate the elements from each spectrograph. The only one that I saw after a quick glance that was actually a mineral was BaS.

Signor Montanari is rather churlish. He had to pay for publication but not for the peer review here being supplied. He should be grateful to have all his many and serious mistakes brought to his attention, so as not to repeat them in future.

Blockquote fail. I will repost for clarity.

@Viggen

Do you actually not understand that EDS can’t tell you what minerals you’re looking at or did you just feel the compulsion to add minerals into table 2 in addition to the elements?

Cheap shot, and not in the least bit true.

It’s obvious that the vast majority of these aren’t minerals, and the few that are, are just coincidences. Taking a line from Table 2:

herr docktor:

In the 2004 “vena cava filter” paper (“Detection of micro- and nano-sized biocompatible particles in the blood”), the authors report

“Generally, the particles show complex chemistries, containing also elements like gold, silver, cobalt, titanium, antimony, tungsten, wolfram, nickel, zinc, mercury and barium.”

— they think that tungsten and wolfram are different elements, oh no, scary synergy!

Oh my gosh, that is absolutely priceless! Talk about hanging one's ignorance out in the air. "Wolfram" is, of course, why tungsten's atomic symbol is "W"; I could understand not knowing that etymology, but using both words and not realizing they are the same thing in different languages beggars belief. How did they get to a level of expertise that gave them access to this equipment without having a reasonable familiarity with the periodic table?

How did they get to a level of expertise that gave them access to this equipment without having a reasonable familiarity with the periodic table?

As well as Gatti and Montanari, there are two or three names that sometimes appear as authors and are sometimes just acknowledged "for technical assistance". It is amost as if someone else is doing the laboratory work.

Calli Arcale @54

How did they get to a level of expertise that gave them access to this equipment without having a reasonable familiarity with the periodic table?

They probably think the periodic table is something that is used for tracking menstrual cycles.

Every time I see something like this, I'm always reminded of the Thomas Dolby song "She Blinded Me With Science".

Unfortunately, the "common clay" out there just don't have the time or the inclination to see through this baloney.

Thanks Orac. You're doing very important work.

"Heavy metals nanoparticles in fetal kidney and liver tissues."
I had only read the abstract and it didn’t mention the size of the particles.

That information does not appear in the paper.

I should explain that "Frontiers of Bioscience" does not follow a conventional publishing model. There is no Editorial Board. The idea is that people contact them, offering to edit a Special Issue; it is then the responsibility of that pop-up editor to recruit contributors who are willing to pay the publication costs, and to supervise the process of peer-review. The role of the publisher is to sit back and collect payments from those rare people who want to read a paper or special issue. You might think that this sounds like a vanity press but I could not possibly comment.

Anyway, the paper is about fetuses from 20-23-week abortions, i.e. late-second-trimester. Which is not something any mother undergoes from choice. We are assured that the mothers all signed consent for the use of the fetal bodies. All the same it seems rather cavalier and body-snatchy to be intruding on someone's grief to obtain human remains for slicing and dicing, as part of a vague political-agenda-motivated fishing expedition.

So these are late abortions, presumably for medical reasons; "neural-tube defects" in half the cases (which could be anything from spina bidifa to acephaly), but also, I guess, chromosomal abnormalities. We need details to make sense of this. We are promised details -- "Table 1 shows the list of the analyzed cases" -- but the actual Table 1 is completely different! A table got lost. This can happen to anyone, it is what peer revieweers are supposed to prevent.

Medical details are important because one discovery that exercised the authors was the presence of calcium-phosphorus-iron inclusions in the liver and kidney samples... clearly xenobiotic in nature and proving "a different origin of the pollutants". Meanwhile in the real world, fetal liver calcifications are not uncommon -- "Studies have suggested association of calcifications with infection [9,11,12], circulatory compromise [2,13], and chromosomal abnormalities [2,4–6,8,9,14]"

Then a closing section of the paper divulges the fact that "iii) all fetuses were dead at abortion procedure in absence of any respiratory activity." Wait, what? This is kind of relevant information, which really warrants more prominence. What did they die of? "Respiratory activity", are there no fetal heart monitors in Italy? How long had they been dead, were they known to be non-viable at the time that the procedure was approved? Perhaps all this information was present in the non-existent Table 1.

The whole paper is ethically weird and intellectually squalid.

As far as I knew I was the only 'J' around these parts, and the one at 59 isn't me (13, 46 and 50 is me). On the one hand I feel honored I'm noticeable enough to impersonate, on the other hand...

...really? Doesn't this bozo have better things to do?

MA@59. Cheap shot. I love it.

@ Militant Agnostic:

ha ha.

I should explain that “Frontiers of Bioscience” does not follow a conventional publishing model. There is no Editorial Board. The idea is that people contact them, offering to edit a Special Issue; it is then the responsibility of that pop-up editor to recruit contributors who are willing to pay the publication costs, and to supervise the process of peer-review. The role of the publisher is to sit back and collect payments from those rare people who want to read a paper or special issue. You might think that this sounds like a vanity press but I could not possibly comment.

This sounds worse than a vanity press to me, because it involves a collaborator who should know better (the "guest editor").

One of the forms of spam I sometimes see in my inbox is invitations to guest edit an issue of some such journal (not this specific one, but others with titles having some plausible connection to my actual area of expertise). I've been treating such requests the way I treat spam generally. It seems my instinct to treat these e-mails as spam is correct.

In other anti-vax news...

Katie Wright ( AoA today) is bemoaning the fact that public complainers... I MEAN.. AFFECTED parties

won't be able to speak at IACC meetings in the future
( except for one )

Now I wonder what- or who- led to that change in policy?

trying to rebut my criticisms in two languages in an entry called Sono troppo forti per me.

In the unlikely event of people tiring of Stefano Montanari's combatative and self-aggrandising activities on his own blog, may I suggest that they turn their translation devices to "Vita al Microscopio"?
http://www.vitalmicroscopio.net/

In which a Roberta Doricchi repeatedly interviews Gatti, and more often Montanari, asking them sock-puppety leading questions -- "Tell the readers about your latest discoveries!" "I hear you were showered with honours at a recent mockademic scamference?" "Why is the gubblement wasting money on these other research ventures like 'autism and genetics' when it should be investing in your own vital research?"

It is embarrassing to look at and I feel sad.

I didn’t know Grillo was an antivaxxer.

Grillo belongs to the "My son is autistic, yet my sperm was perfect, therefore VACCINESDIDIT" subtype of antivaxxer.

@Denice - in other other anti-vax news, Jake has taken to changing my username to "Brian Deer" if I comment on his blog.
:-)

I am an Italian MD with the Chair of Microbiology at the Università San Raffaele Medical School, Milan.

Since last May I engaged myself in divulgation of a correct information about vaccines, mainly with my Facebook page. Two days ago I was giving a speech in a school and I show some internet pages saying insane things about vaccines; one of them features the statements of Vanoli about omosexuality and vaccination.

Well, I said "there is even a guy saying this" when I saw a hand raising from the audience saying "that's me". Vanoli was in the audience! He is real! You can not imagine what he started to say. He was almost kicked out of the conference room by the audience.

Regarding Montanari, you will see in your site that I am one of his favourite targets: he accuses me of not being a scientist (I have a decent publication track in my field) but at the same time he offered me to co-write a book on HPV vaccination.

Congratulations for this nice blog, keep up the good work.

Just how stupid do homeopaths think we are?

oracknows — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 03:35:02 +0000

Just how stupid do homeopaths think we are?

I realize that I've said it many times before, but it bears repeating. Homeopathy is the perfect quackery. The reason that homeopathy is so perfect as a form of quackery is because it is quite literally nothing. On second thought, I suppose that it's not exactly nothing. It is, after all, water or whatever other diluent that homeopaths use (usually ethanol). However, thanks to some basic laws of physics and chemistry and a little thing known as Avagadro's number, any homeopathic dilution greater than 12C (twelve serial 100-fold dilutions) is incredibly unlikely to contain even a single molecule of starting compound. That unlikeliness reaches truly astonishing levels as we reach the common homeopathic dilution of 30C, which is the equivalent of a 10⁶⁰-fold dilution. Given that that little thing known as Avagadro's number, which describes how many molecules of a compound are in a mole, is only approximately 6 x 10²³, a 30C dilution is on the order of 10³⁶- to 10³⁷-fold higher than Avagadro's number. Even assuming that a homeopath started with a mole of remedy before diluting (unlikely, given the high molecular weight of most of the organic compounds that can serve as homeopathic remedies), the odds that a single molecule could remain behind after the serial dilution and succussion process is infinitesimal. Appropriately enough, the "law" in homeopathy that states that diluting a remedy will make it stronger is the law of infinitesimals.

It is also the reason that homeopathy is nothing.

Homeopaths have known these facts for many decades. Anyone who is any sort of a scientist or has an understanding of science, when confronted with these simple, well-established physical laws, might—just might—start to rethink his belief in something that is so utterly implausible from a scientific standpoint. Indeed, homeopathy is about as close to impossible as anything I can imagine, because for it to "work" multiple well-established laws of physics and chemistry would have to be not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong. Yet, as Richard Dawkins famously put it, undeterred, homeopaths bravely paddle up the river of pseudoscience and invent explanations to "explain" how homeopathy could work, the most famous of which is the so-called "memory of water," in which the water in the homeopathic remedy remembers all the good bits meant to heal but, as Tim Minchin so famously put it, somehow forgets all the poo that's been in it. Homeopathy is truly magical thinking, which is why I love to use it as an illustrative example of quackery. Not only is it magical thinking, but because it is nothing but water, it's a very useful educational example for placebo effects and the general types of fallacious arguments quacks and pseudoscientists make. Apparently it's time for another one.

Not too long ago, I wrote about the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), specifically how until fairly recently it would fund studies of the ridiculously implausible treatment modality that is homeopathy. I even looked at a couple of these studies to see if they had yielded anything of value. Not surprisingly, they did not, other than some unbelievably awful papers published mostly in bottom-feeding alt-med journals. The principal investigator (PI) of the grants in question, it turns out, is a woman named Iris Bell, who, it further turns out, is faculty at the University of Arizona, home to that godfather of "integrating" quackery into real medicine (i.e., "integrative medicine"), Andrew Weil. Now, it just so happens that I've found a "review" article on homeopathy written by this very same person, published in BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine a little more than a month ago and entitled A model for homeopathic remedy effects: low dose nanoparticles, allostatic cross-adaptation, and time-dependent sensitization in a complex adaptive system. Truly, this is an apologetic for homeopathy that could have been written by Dana Ullman or Lionel Milgrom, and it's appearing in what is turning into one of the foremost journals of quackademic medicine.

The central thesis of the paper, which I've discussed in detail in the context of analyzing another paper making the same claim, is the concept that homeopathy works through "nanoparticles." Of course, like so many things that quacks appropriate for themselves, like quantum theory and epigenetics, nanoparticles are a real phenomenon with many therapeutic promises. Unfortunately, the versions of nanoparticles described by Bell are related to real nanoparticles as scientists currently understand them only by coincidence. So, as you will soon see, what we have here is an NIH-funded investigator (funded through NCCAM) teaming up with Mary Koithan to write a mass of pseudoscience defending homeopathy and proposing a mechanism by which it might work. Think on that a moment as I delve into the actual paper. In fact, even though this paper is open-source (which means that you can read the entire thing for yourself), I think I'll nonetheless lay down the abstract, because it is truly a thing of quackademic beauty:

Background
This paper proposes a novel model for homeopathic remedy action on living systems. Research indicates that homeopathic remedies (a) contain measurable source and silica nanoparticles heterogeneously dispersed in colloidal solution; (b) act by modulating biological function of the allostatic stress response network (c) evoke biphasic actions on living systems via organism-dependent adaptive and endogenously amplified effects; (d) improve systemic resilience.

Discussion
The proposed active components of homeopathic remedies are nanoparticles of source substance in water-based colloidal solution, not bulk-form drugs. Nanoparticles have unique biological and physico-chemical properties, including increased catalytic reactivity, protein and DNA adsorption, bioavailability, dose-sparing, electromagnetic, and quantum effects different from bulk-form materials. Trituration and/or liquid succussions during classical remedy preparation create “top-down” nanostructures. Plants can biosynthesize remedytemplated silica nanostructures. Nanoparticles stimulate hormesis, a beneficial low-dose adaptive response. Homeopathic remedies prescribed in low doses spaced intermittently over time act as biological signals that stimulate the organism’s allostatic biological stress response network, evoking nonlinear modulatory, self-organizing change. Potential mechanisms include time-dependent sensitization (TDS), a type of adaptive plasticity/metaplasticity involving progressive amplification of host responses, which reverse direction and oscillate at physiological limits. To mobilize hormesis and TDS, the remedy must be appraised as a salient, but low level, novel threat, stressor, or homeostatic disruption for the whole organism. Silica nanoparticles adsorb remedy source and amplify effects. Properly-timed remedy dosing elicits disease-primed compensatory reversal in direction of maladaptive dynamics of the allostatic network, thus promoting resilience and recovery from disease.

Summary
Homeopathic remedies are proposed as source nanoparticles that mobilize hormesis and time-dependent sensitization via non-pharmacological effects on specific biological adaptive and amplification mechanisms. The nanoparticle nature of remedies would distinguish them from conventional bulk drugs in structure, morphology, and functional properties. Outcomes would depend upon the ability of the organism to respond to the remedy as a novel stressor or heterotypic biological threat, initiating reversals of cumulative, cross-adapted biological maladaptations underlying disease in the allostatic stress response network. Systemic resilience would improve. This model provides a foundation for theory-driven research on the role of nanomaterials in living systems, mechanisms of homeopathic remedy actions and translational uses in nanomedicine.

Ah, I do so love me some good technobabble, and the above is some of the best, as I said before, on par with Lionel Milgrom's quantum homeopathy or his visualization of quantum entanglement at a macroscopic level between practitioner, remedy, and patient. (Never mind that quantum entanglement doesn't work that way. Never let reality or science get in the way of brilliant-sounding science-y blather that impresses the rubes.)

Let's deconstruct a bit, shall we? First, Bell is saying that "research indicates" that there are measurable source and silica nanoparticles in homeopathic remedies. Hmmmm. I wonder where silica nanoparticles could come from, if in fact they have actually been detected in homeopathic remedies. It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that most homeopathic dilutions are made in glass vials, could it? Perish the thought! In any case, if you delve into the introduction, which says essentially the same thing as the abstract, only longer and with a lot of nonsensical references, you'll find that one of the references that purports to claim that there are "nanoparticles" in homeopathic remedies is the very same paper that our very own Harriet discussed. personally, even though the paper is two years old, I can't resist taking a crack at it myself, because it is such an incredible joke that it has to be seen.

The article to which I'm referring was an article by Prashant Satish Chikramane and his colleagues at Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, India. Entitled Extreme homeopathic dilutions retain starting materials: A nanoparticulate perspective. Basically, the investigators...well, this post is already going to be fairly long; so let's just cut to my previous analysis of this particular woo-tastic bit of pseudoscientific nonsense masquerading as a scientific study and leave it at that. It's hard to believe that it's been two years. It's less difficult to believe that homeopaths didn't adequately control for contaminants and in essence labeled those contaminants as "evidence" that homeopathy works!

Be that as it may, I must give Iris Bell credit. She is imaginative. Of course, although imagination is a good thing in science, there is a difference between imagination and just making stuff up, and Bell's review article definitely falls into the latter category. Given that she is a homeopath, this is perhaps not surprising. What helped me get through her article was to view it as a work of fiction, in which the wildest flight of fancy wins, particularly if one can put a nice homeopathic science-y sounding sheen on it, which Bell does with aplomb. What you need to know to understand why homeopaths have latched on to nanoparticles is that (1) even homeopaths know that physics and chemistry as we understand them render homeopathy physically impossible and (2) they need to change the game if they are to put a chink in the dam of science holding back their river of woo. In other words, having conceded that those nasty reductionist scientists are right when they point out that homeopathy is water and cannot work they way homeopaths claim, homeopaths need to reclaim plausibility, no matter how much they have to abuse other sciences to do it.

For example, after pointing out that under "conventional" science homeopathy is impossible, Bell then opines:

These points are seemingly valid, if the underlying assumptions are valid – i.e., that homeopathic medicines are ordinary, dissolved and diluted bulk-form chemical drugs in true solution that could only act pharmacologically [47] with linear dose–response relationships. However, the trituration and succussion procedures in classical homeopathic remedy preparation may actually be crude manual methods that generate “top down” nanoparticles of source material. Nanoparticles range in size from 1 nanometer (nm) on a side up to 1000 nm or more, though much nanoscience research focuses on special acquired properties of small nanoparticles below 100 nm [48]. Trituration with mortar and pestle is a manual method for mechanical grinding or milling, similar to ball milling used in modern nanotechnology [49,50]. Like modern nanotechnology methods of microfluidization [51,52], sonication [53,54], and vortexing [55], manual succussions introduce intense turbulence, particle collisions, and shear forces into solution that break off smaller and smaller particles of remedy source material as well as silica from the walls of the glass containers or vials [1]. The combined impact of these mechanical nanosizing procedures [54] would be to modify the properties of the remedy [26,30,32], generating remedy source nanoparticles [2,3], as well as silica crystals and amorphous nanoparticles [3,4,32].

Got that? According to Bell, all that grinding and succussion generates nanoparticles, and these nanoparticles do things. All sorts of things. Magical things. Like homeopathy things. They can even emit electrical signals! Oh, wait. The paper Bell cites to justify that claim is the infamous paper by Nobel Laureate Luc Montagnier, who, unfortunately, appears to have fallen prey to the Nobel Disease and become a crank. Indeed, that particular paper was roundly criticized (including, of course, by me) for its poor methodology and conclusions not supported by its data, and these days Montagnier is subjecting autistic children to long term antibiotic treatment and appearing at quack conferences like Autism One, along with women who think that giving autistic children bleach enemas is a good way to treat autism. In other words, as sad as it makes me to say it, Montagnier is no longer a good scientist, and I wouldn't trust anything he publishes these days any more than I trust what Dana Ullman publishes—or, for that matter, Iris Bell.

Let's take a look at the four parts of Bell's model. Here's the first part:

Homeopathic remedies are highly reactive source and/or remedy-modified silica (or polymer) nanoparticles, not bulk-form drugs [2,3];

This is utter nonsense, as I explained when I discussed one of the papers used to support this assertion. These "nanoparticles" are almost certainly nothing more than contaminants and show no real evidence of being "highly-reactive" or "remedy-modified." More importantly, they show no evidence of actually doing anything therapeutic.

Next up:

Remedy nanoparticles stimulate a complex adaptive response in the organism that begins in the allostatic stress response network, with cascading indirect consequences over time across the entire self-organizing organism. The homeopathic simillimum (clinically optimal) remedy nanoparticles [16] serve as low level, but highly salient novel stressors, i.e., specific biological signals for the overall organism [9];

Boiled down to its essence, this says something along the lines of: Like, the human body is really complicated, you know? And these nanoparticles do something just as complicated, you know? It's so complicated that we don't know what it is and can't prove that it happens. But it sure is fun to speculate!

Then we have:

The adaptive plasticity processes that underlie the direction and magnitude of remedy effects on living systems involve nonlinear physiological phenomena such as hormesis, cross-adaptation, time-dependent sensitization and cross-sensitization/oscillation. As a low intensity stressor, remedy nanoparticles stimulate changes in the opposite direction to those of the higher intensity stressors that fostered the original development of disease [16,97,98]. The disease-related maladaptations prime the system [10,39]. Then the correct remedy in low dose elicits reversal of direction of the maladapted responses.

Did I say that the human body was complicated? I'll say it again. It's really, really complicated, and these homeopathic nanoparticles do things even more complicated than what I said before. For example, they don't even do normal dose-response curves; they're more powerful at lower doses, just like Hahnemann said! And they oscillate. Or something. Disease maladaptations (nice word, eh?) get the system ready for these wondrous particles, which can then reverse the maladaptation. All of this is a bit odd, though, given that homeopathy is explicitly designed to treat symptoms, not the underlying cause. After all, the very principle of "like cures like" is based on symptoms, not biology.

None of which stops Bell from writing:

The adaptive changes that the remedy evokes ultimately strengthen systemic resilience. The successfully treated individual can resist and rebound from subsequent challenges from higher intensity homeostatic disruptors of the organism as a complex network, at global and local levels of organizational scale [22].

Damn, I wish I could write word salad this tasty. As I read this passage, I started to wonder whether I was the victim of a Sokal-style hoax here or whether Bell wrote her paper the way that David Bowie used to like to write songs: By cutting up newspaper and magazine articles and randomly splicing the words back together. In this case, it seems as though Bell cut up a bunch of nanoparticle papers and some homeopathy literature and then threw them together to produce much of this paper.

Here's what I mean. This whole paper sounds very impressive, but when you analyze individual passages you quickly realize that it means nothing. It's a whole lot of blatant speculation. Now, blatant speculation in science is not necessarily a bad thing, but only when it is at least somewhat plausible and, more importantly, when its limitations are clearly acknowledged. None of this applies here. Bell claims that homeopathic remedies are an example of hormesis, which is ridiculous. She goes on at length about the phenomenon of cross-adaptation, in which widely different stressors can affect the same intermediary pathway, blithely asserting that homeopathic remedies work through cross-sensitization without presenting any convincing evidence that this is so. She does the same thing for other phenomenon, in which homeopathic remedies apparently exhibit metaplasticity and time-dependent sensitization, which Bell uses as a rationale for why "pulsing" homeopathic remedies is a good idea, concluding that these remedies somehow "strengthen systemic resilience," whatever that means. It sounds all too much like the generic quack claim of being able to "boost the immune system."

Perhaps the most hilarious part of the entire article is Table 1: Parallels between homeopathic and modern scientific research literatures. Examples include comparisons of the "homeopathic literature" and real science, with the real science being tortured into agreeing with the homeopathic literature. For instance, one of items states that disease is the "dynamic mistunement" of the living system (i.e., life force). In the real scientific literature, according to Bell, disease is "the current manifestation of failure to adapt or compensate for allostatic overload from convergence of biological, chemical, physical, and psychological stressors on the nonlinear adaptive stress response network, which is embedded within the larger complex network of the overall organism." I get it! they're totally the same! Hahnemann apparently foresaw scientific developments over two hundred years into the future!

I'll conclude with this comparison. From the homeopathic literature:

Higher potencies (more dilution and succussion steps) have longer lasting effects on living systems [243] (succussion involves intense mechanical shaking of the solution by pounding the glass container against a hard elastic surface).

Now from the real scientific literature:

Succussion, like modern microfluidization techniques [51], introduces cycles of fluid acceleration and turbulence with repeated changes in the direction of flow, producing the potential for particle collision and shear forces to break off smaller and smaller particles. These procedures, while different from each other and from sonication as a technique for agitating solutions and producing nanoparticles, share the ability to create nanobubbles and shear forces. Nanoparticle research suggests that there are nonlinear relationships between the number of microfluidization cycles or sonication time and variations in the sizes, morphologies, and physico-chemical properties of the “same” bulk-form material substance [52,53,244].

Again, can't you see how they're totally the same? No? Neither can I.

In the end, it's depressing in the extreme to realize that Iris Bell is not only a homeopath, but she's faculty at the University of Arizona and has been an NCCAM-funded researcher. In fact, she still is an NIH-funded researcher. She currently is still the PI on a training grant held by the University of Arizona to teach woo to medical trainees. It's your tax dollars at work, and Iris Bell, mistress of homeopathy, is just the woman to put them to work funding the teaching of quackery.

Note: Even Orac needs some downtime over the weekend just completed a rare winter vacation right. So if this post looks a bit “familiar,” oh, well. It should probably be the last one for a while.

oracknows Sun, 12/16/2012 - 22:35