ScienceBlogs Channel : Medicine & Health

New Anthrax Scare in Pakistan [Dean's Corner]
Big Charity [Pharyngula]
Joe Mercola: Proof positive that quackery sells [Respectful Insolence]

New Anthrax Scare in Pakistan [Dean's Corner]

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 12:23 PM PST

Color-enhanced scanning electron micrograph shows splenic tissue from a monkey with inhalational anthrax; featured are rod-shaped bacilli (yellow) and an erythrocyte (red)
Credit: Arthur Friedlander

A university professor has allegedly mailed anthrax to the Pakistani prime minister's office in October, accoding to today's The New York Times. Could this be the beginning of a new anthrax scare? Is history repeating itself?

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Big Charity [Pharyngula]

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 10:10 AM PST

It must be tough running a charity. You've got a cause you care deeply about, and you're constantly juggling the game of having to spend money (in administration, advertising, staff) to raise money (for the cause!), and worse, of sometimes having to compromise to achieve your goals — you sometimes have to work with your enemies to get where you're going. And if you're really, really good at it, and raise lots and lots of money, it becomes easy to lose sight of the cause while becoming corporate.

So it goes with Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the $400 million/year giant pink gorilla of cancer charities, fighting for the cause of ending breast cancer. As charities go, they're reasonably efficent (about 20% of their budget is overhead, 20% goes to cancer research, and the rest goes to education and health care), and they're certainly effective — they practically own the color pink, it seems, and their little pink ribbons are ubiquitous. If you've donated money to them in the past, you should have no regrets, and you can pat yourself on the back for having done some good.

But it's time to cut the cord to this Big Charity.

Komen has lost sight of the cause, and has become more of a money-raising machine, for one thing. This is one of those awkward compromises they made to tap into corporate interests: they sold their identity and their label to anyone willing to cough up the cash. One correlation with the incidence of breast cancer is dietary fat — yet Komen went into a commercial promotion with KFC, selling big pink buckets of greasy fried chicken.

It was this national nonprofit education and advocacy organization that coined the term "pinkwashing" to describe the situation where a company purports to care about breast cancer by promoting a pink-ribboned product, but manufactures products that are linked to the disease.
This latest campaign between KFC and Komen is "simply pinkwashing at its worst," Barbara A. Brenner, JD, executive director of BCA, told Medscape Oncology. "This is just so wrong on every level. . . . This is so much more about KFC's bottom line than about curing breast cancer," she said.

This is just one example of losing sight of the goal. I would argue that in addition they've been too successful: their marketing has obscured their purpose. We're drowning in a sea of pink every time breast cancer is brought up, and the symbol of slapping a pink ribbon on something has replaced the substance of the cause. I always say that prayer is the very least you can do, but slapping a ribbon on your car is a very close runner-up.

And now, the last straw. Ultimately, breast cancer research is one part of improving women's health; if that narrow slice of concern begins to cannibalize the wider aspects of women's well-being, it does more harm than good. The Susan G. Komen Foundation has reached that point where the money-making machine is being hijacked to benefit organizations that do harm to women.

Specifically, Komen has yanked its support for breast-cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood. That's astonishing. Education and screening for breast cancer is what Komen is all about — it's what they do. It's as if I were to announce that I reject the teaching of evolution at a particular college campus because I really hate their football team (and if I had millions of dollars worth of clout). It makes no sense from the perspective of an anti-cancer charity.

It does make sense if you're a right-wing corporate entity that has funded its growth on a foundation of a universally appreciated cause, but that actually has closer ties to conservative corporate and religious interests. They aren't so much against breast cancer, as they are for protecting "good" girls, and against those fornicating sluts who get abortions, and can go ahead and die horribly. They listen more to the anti-abortion crusaders (some of whom are on their executive staff!) than to women.

So don't give to them anymore. Redirect your charitable giving to organizations that don't have a Puritanical streak, and are a bit less Republican in outlook. There is no shortage; I recommend the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, Breast Cancer Charities of America, CancerCare, and the Cancer Research Institute. So far, they all seem to be dedicated to fighting cancer and helping people, and a lot less concerned about policing people's morality to conform to that of the Religious Right.

But I don't want Susan G. Komen to go away. I think it is an excellent charity for right-wingers and Christian fundamentalists to donate to — their money will go to a cause we can all support, and it's better than filling the coffers of the Mormon or Catholic churches.

P.S. There are some very bad arguments for not donating to the Komen foundation out there, and the very worst are those that selectively cite statistics to argue that cancer research is futile. Some cancers have been refractory and have shown little progress in the last decade; others are showing significantly better statistics. But most importantly, our understanding of cancer has steadily advanced, and even where someone dies of the disease, we glean another piece of the puzzle. And of course, what do you propose to do otherwise? Nothing at all?

(Also on FtB)

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Joe Mercola: Proof positive that quackery sells [Respectful Insolence]

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 08:45 AM PST

For as many benefits as the Internet and the web have brought us in the last two decades, there are also significant downsides. I could go into all the societal changes brought about by the proliferation of this new technology, not the least of which (to me, at least) is the newfound ability of someone like me to find an audience. After all, pre-Internet and pre-blog, I could try to write books, or I could try to get onto TV and radio, but those are very difficult things to do. Over the last seven years, steadily blogging, I've built up an audience. True, compared to the "old media" and the more popular examples of the new media, this blog is the proverbial tiny voice in the wilderness. Normally, I have to actively think about people such as Dr. Oz, Oprah Winfrey, The Doctors, and that wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffingto Post, just to remind me how small my influence is when compared to the forces arrayed against science-based medicine.

It's rather depressing, though, to have it rubbed in my face from a source I didn't expect.

I'm referring to an article that appeared yesterday in Chicago Magazine entitled Dr. Mercola: Visionary or Quack? Although I agreed with much of what was in the article, which featured some familiar people trying to provide balance to Mercola's pseudoscience, I must admit that I couldn't help but find the very title of the article is annoying. Putting the word "visionary" in the same title with the word "Dr. Mercola" is profoundly offensive to anyone who values reason, science, and science-based medicine. I realize the reporter was doing nothing more than being provocative, but it sets the tone in a way that makes it sound as though there is even a controversy over what the answer to such a question is. That answer, of course, is, in my not-so-humble opinion, that Dr. Mercola is a quack. Many are the posts I've written right here on this very blog spelling out in painful detail exactly why it is that I think this is so. For one thing, Dr. Mercola is antivaccine to the core, even going so far as to team up with the antivaccine group the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) to spread its propaganda. This article actually provides a tidbit of information that I didn't know about. In fact, it's a tidbit so juicy that I'm going to mention it now, even though it doesn't show up until late in the article:

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