In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

snip, snip...


"Real proof of harm" is in the eye of the beholder, if you're allowing
that
the mechanism may not be known. Overall, I think the FDA has it about
right.

To the degree permitted by Congressional politics.

And who do you want making those decisions, if not elected legislators?
Merck? Pfizer? Ha!

I stated no opinion, merely made an observation.


snip mucho mas



A good example is the FDA trying to deal with German beer
(unpasturized)
and especially French raw-milk cheese (ditto). The fact that ~120
million people are none the worse for it doesn't seem to matter.

If they caused an epidemic of listeriosis, like some cheese made from
unpasteurized milk did a few years ago, they'd be yanked as fast as
possible.

Drinking raw milk is one thing, eating cheese is quite another. That
was the point.

Huh? Your own example was cheese. My example was cheese. Has the pea slipped
under another shell while we weren't looking? d8-)

Well, I don't recall too many stories of French falling ill due to their
cheese. Maybe there is a vast conspiracy to hide the truth -- there
were 80 million, Frenchmen, but were now down to 60 million...


As for the rosy cheeks on those kids, vascular dilation in the cheeks is
common to people of northern European descent when they drink a lot of
alcohol. The kids were probably half in the bag. d8-)

Nah. They are German; were raised on the stuff. No effect.

I hope you're joking. It's ethnic Germanic peoples who demonstrate the most
noticable cheek-flushing effect from alcohol. They also have a strong
incidence of rosacea, possibly for similar genetic reasons.

Yes, but they are happy about it. They seem to live on the stuff. It's
something to aspire to.


More generally, we always have conflicting agendas, and one can always
accuse the proponents of the sides of bias and conflict-of-interest and
general evil. It may even be true. But this will never change, so we
have to deal with it.

That's why we have an FDA and a National Academy of Sciences who don't
run
for political office.

True, but they have their own politics. We just hope that it's neutral
with respect to the question at hand.

For the most part, these scientific bodies are made up of people whose bias
is toward evidence-based science. Political views are hard to extract from
anyone's view of the world but I don't know of any better way to do it than
the way it's being done.

Ah well my experience of scientists is that they are people too, and
they do have their politics. And academic fights can be *very* nasty.

I think it was Henry Kissinger who commented something to the effect
that academic fights are particularly nasty because so little is at
stake.


It *will* be sorted out, because there is a billion-dollar
business awaiting the evil company that figures it out. And likely
a
Nobel Prize or two.

When you figure out how it would be in the financial interest of a
company
to show that hormones in beef are bad for our health, let us know. The
opposite is true in the extreme. And that's the way the whole pharma
industry operates: there is no incentive and no money for studies that
show
a drug is bad for you. The incentive is almost exclusively to try to
show
that they're good.

No, I was talking about the whole endrocrine system involving weight
control, diabetes, estrogen, et al. There is a fortune to be made
here,
and someone will crack that nut. The motive is there.

That's why Sanofi-Aventis invested a hundred million dollars or whatever
into rimonabant. Stock analysts predicted sales of $3.5 billion/yr.
worldwide. So far, it's running around $20 million/yr. in Europe and South
America, but S-A is willing to invest millions more to get it approved in
the US, so they're following up on the studies. Their stock took a hit when
the FDA decided not to approve it yet but they aren't abandoning the drug.

We wish them luck. I've read that it on average costs ~$800 million per
approved new drug. This includes the costs of the ones that never made
it.


It is a very promising field. Think about it: You can control your weight
through diet and exercise, in most cases, or you can do it by taking a pill.
Which one is going to win, in a free market? g

But it sounds ...mumble... too easy!


And one perhaps unintended consequence is that we would find out for
sure if extra hormones in beef mattered, and why. And how.


Excuse me for trimming the rest of this message off, but I think we're
repeating ourselves. And we probably don't disagree very much, anyway.
I
recognize what you're saying about the people who keep warning that
the
sky
is falling, on this as well as many other issues. I just happen to
apply
a
different standard of proof to matters of the things we put in our
bodies.

OK. Why would bodies be different? It's the same scare tactics.

Human bodies would be different from, say, cows, because the object is to
avoid human mortality and morbidity. That's why the whole discussion
started. Tits on kids is morbidity.

The politics of scaring people is the same, and the cows are not the
guilty parties. That is my point.

Actually, you were responding to *my* point, which is that I expect more
regulatory scrutiny for things I put in my body, or anyone's body, than for
things I put in, say, the tank of my car.

OK. The point isn't that regulation is necessarily bad, it's that a lot
of what we hear is an appeal to the emotion of fear, and not to reason.


But I have to ask: Why is ice cream sales correlated with highway
accident rate? It is true; the question is why.

Do you mean by time of year? We drive more in the summertime, especially
when it's hot enough for ice cream and to go to the beach.

Bingo! It's a very good example.

But see how easy it was to connect? Med-science researchers are far better
than we laymen at recognizing coincidental correlations versus those that
have a strong chance of a causative relationship. Once they smell serious
smoke, the alarms should go off. Otherwise you're putting your life in the
hands of people who just want you to buy their drugs and then go away.

Yes, this example is chosen to be tellingly obvious in retrospect, as a
teaching device. But respected researchers are forever getting tripped
up by unexpected common variables, and it isn't always so obvious. This
is one thing discussed at length in the NY Times Magazine article I
mentioned.


Joe Gwinn