Friday, September 22, 2011
Here we go again. Last week during a debate of Republican presidential
candidates, Representative Michele Bachmann characterized human papilloma
virus (HPV) vaccine as "a potentially dangerous drug," and linked its
effect to "mental retardation." There is no medical support for her wildly
irresponsible remarks; the HPV vaccine prevents cervical cancer, and an
editorial in Nature calls on Bachmann to retract her words, but I don't
think she reads Nature. The 1998 claim of British researcher Andrew
Wakefield that the common MMR vaccine causes autism set off a revival of
the anti-vaccination movement, and a corresponding rise in measles cases.
In 2009, however, Wakefield was found to have altered patients records to
support his claim http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN11/wn010711.html
. Barred from the practice medicine in the UK, Wakefield now operates an
autism clinic in Austin, Texas. He doesn't have a US medical license, but
such formalities don't much matter in Texas. Rick Perry, the Governor of
Texas, differs with Bachmann on HPV, having attempted to mandate the use of
the HPV vaccine for 11 and 12-year-old schoolgirls as the Center for
Disease Control recommends, which may have something to do with the fact
that Merck, the only maker of HPV vaccine, is a major contributor to
Perry's campaign.
The hot new place for young women to tuck their cell phones is inside their
bra. They set the ring on "vibrate," creating an erogenous tingle when a
call comes in. Devra Davis, author of "Disconnect," a book about the
alleged dangers of cell-phone radiation, worries that the women are being
set up for breast cancer. Microwave radiation, Davis says, "seeps directly
into the soft fatty tissue of the breast." What does it do there? As
Albert Einstein explained in 1905, the photon energy is given by the
frequency times Planck's constant. That's plenty of energy to excite
molecular vibrations, which heats tissue, but it's only one millionth of
the ionization threshold energy, so radiation is not a cancer threat.
Meanwhile in Washington, DC, a Wireless Safety Summit in a couple of weeks
will focus on legislation to block smart meters, which is a totally dumb
idea.
It was a page-one science story in major papers around the world: neutrinos
beamedd from Geneva were detected 454 miles away in Italy in less time than
light would take to make the same trip. Everyone was excited, except the
physicists. Interviewed by the Washington Post, Drew Baden, chair of the
U. Maryland Physics Department, called the result, "a flying carpet," not
to be taken very seriously without strong independent confirmation, and
maybe not then. The goal of physics is to identify natural laws that
govern the universe. Einstein's 1905 explanation of the photoelectric
effect, for example, casts strong (overwhelming?) doubt on epidemiological
evidence that purports to show that cell phone radiation is linked to
cancer.
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