Monbiot on university funding

Further to a recent blog post (scroll down for the relevant quote), this article from George Monbiot has popped up in the Guardian concerning the ability of corporations to fund university research.

Many of the comments on this piece, seem to miss his point, accusing Monbiot of wanting to live in a cave because he doesn't like Shell, whereas the argument seems to be more about whether corporate funding comes with strings attached. Not just Shell: the argument extends to any other industry that finances university education.

His point that universities don't accept tobacco funding is pertinent too: he cannot persuade universities to explain the difference between Shell and Philip Morris. The general public seems to be expected to accept that only big tobacco unduly influences government and so only big tobacco must be maligned – because its products are evil. The other industries produce stuff that is good for us like oil, pharmaceuticals, fertilisers and armaments, and it doesn't matter how much influence they purchase. The idea that tobacco companies can assist in funding cancer cures, for example, or even sponsor football, is seen as completely off the wall. It is absurd that tobacco must bear the cross of big, bad capital when there are so many companies out there, involved in activities that endanger life.

I think Monbiot is quite right to ask the question why some companies are supposedly beyond suspicion when it comes to funding higher education, especially when these companies yield so much financial clout. It's not that I don't believe some corporate higher education funding isn't inevitable, but it's quite wrong to make out that there is an issue of competing interests and apply it to tobacco and no other industry. In fact this kind of thing is a sop to anti-capitalist sentiment, allowing people to believe that they are censoring powerful industries that like to purchase government loyalty, while ignoring the fact that by and large most corporations can do whatever they like.

Issues that have aroused student protests at universities include: Newcastle students and Adidas; University of Zurich and Union Bank of Switzerland; Leeds and Swansea Universities and BAe; Oxford University and Lockheed Martin on Campaign Against the Arms Trade website; Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen and Eden Springs.

Where but California ... staying in a hotel that provides smoking rooms can seriously damage your health

A new study warns non-smokers off using hotels that provide smoking rooms. Go for hotels that don't provide smoking rooms, because otherwise your health will be at risk.

Non-smokers should give hotels that allow smoking in certain rooms a wide berth, say the authors, and instead choose completely smoke free hotels.

The researchers analysed the surfaces and air quality of rooms for evidence of tobacco smoke pollution (nicotine and 3EP), known as third hand smoke, in a random sample of budget to mid-range hotels in San Diego, California.

The smoke gets into non-smoking rooms (self-closing fire doors notwithstanding) and of course hallways. They even tested the non-smoking guests.

Thanks to the BMJ blog for this live-saving information.

Plain packaging in an independent Scotland?

Handwringing has occurred at the failure of the Queen to announce that Her Majesty's government was about to force tobacco into plain packaging. Here's an example, provided by the Telegraph, in which a vast quantity of medics berate the government over the omission and hammer home the notion that health is key to government policy:

The health of the people is surely the highest purpose of government, so it is chilling to hear that the Coalition does not consider the prevention of ill health and premature mortality to be part of its role

I suppose that is what you would expect doctors to say, and as it happens I agree that a Conservative government would prioritise corporate interests over public health more than I would like. But as it happens, I don't happen to believe that plain packaging is a policy that has any particular merit – the evidence for it has been collated entirely by people employed specifically as tobacco control advocates and suffers disastrously from a lack of objectivity. Government sources know that most people start smoking before they can buy tobacco legally, indeed it is only a matter of years since the legal age of purchasing tobacco was raised, and smokers generally tell you that they were given cigarettes by friends before they could purchase legally.

Even if plain packaging were guaranteed to bring down smoking rates, I wouldn't necessarily consider it health priority, as there are so many other environmental health problems including everything from general aerial pollution, to mineral depletion in the soil.  

But we were talking about Scotland. Personally I have made no final decision on this issue. A Herald leader characterises the Queen's Speech as led by UKIP: it excludes legislation to allow gay marriage, and commitments on foreign aid. Some of its points are well made, for example will restrictions on immigration involve GPs and landlords being responsible for vetting their patients or tenants? However it refers to plain packaging as 'progressive' and looks forward to 'going our own way' on plain packaging and minimum pricing, playing right into the hands of those who ridicule the outcome of a Yes vote on the Scottish referendum as the beginning of a thousand year rule for Eck.

There are too many doubters about the wisdom of Scottish independence for this to be a likely political outcome. The Scottish Socialists also support independence, and it is very unlikely that people who have been persuaded into voting for independence, their own warts-and-all goverment rather than the mess (devolution) that we currently have, will be content with a one-party state, whatever the SNP expects at present.

Plain packaging is supported by Cancer Research UK, which is a fanatically anti-tobacco organisation. Its Tobacco Action Group, which funds research into tobacco and cancer, will generally only fund research that finds tobacco responsible for most cancer and supports further restrictions. Such prejudicial conditions are anathema to real scientific investigation and I would not want it to be the basis of policy in Scotland under any circumstances, whether independent or not. The whole tobacco control agenda is pushed by ASH Scotland, an organisation that gets minimal private funding: this does not speak for its popularity.

Those pushing for independence should realise that they have to fight the impression created by the media that they want independence inside a yellow packet adorned with Alex Salmond's picture. He is no more responsible for the popularity of Scottish independence than 'pretty packaging' is responsible for the young taking up smoking. A Yes vote can only occur if the result is expected to improve genuine public participation.

Until I've read more I will still be neutral on this issue. Tobacco control is what we are up against, because it is designed by a global health body that is directed by pharmaceutical interests rather than real health needs.

Abertay academic against nannying: Newsnight Scotland interview

Watch this televised interview between Dr Stuart Waiton, against nannying, and Dr Andrew Fraser and Laura Williamson in favour of what they term a caring society that is willing to help people reduce their smoking and drinking.

It's always interesting to see health medics, who claim a political consensus in favour of their view, weigh in on their opponents and characterise them as rather irresponsible, selfish individuals who believe in pleasing only themselves. They claim to care for the children and society at large more than these un-community-minded free-market maniacs.

From what I know of Dr Stuart Waiton, he is no more a free-market maniac than I am. He quite reasonably rejects the notion that the health professionals hold a monopoly of wisdom about people's decisions, and rightly derides their eagerness to help people make the 'right choices'. There is an assumption that the patrician middle class has all the right answers, and anyone who disagrees puts himself (or herself) automatically in the wrong.

The two pro-establishment doctors sow the seeds of their undoing by claiming that a quarter of Scots smoke (9.29), and that people in poorer districts benefited less from the smoking ban than people in more affluent districts (10.40). Both statements reiterate the failure of tobacco control to achieve its stated aims. The smoking rate has not changed significantly since the smoking ban was introduced, the same figures (one in four Scots smoke, smoking kills 13,000 a year) have been trotted out since the millenium: a rapidly escalating tobacco control budget has done nothing to reduce the smoking rate or the alleged death rate.

Dr Williamson goes to far as to say that '[Dr Waiton's] argument for a minimal state would be okay if everybody had the same degree of freedom', but social inequalities lead to health inequalities, which it is the government's duty to correct. 'People need help, and what the government is trying to do is create this level playing field.'

She argues in favour of a system which she must acknowledge is not working. She knows the smoking ban hasn't really helped narrow the health inequalities gap. Intervention is needed to prevent 'the chronic diseases that result from smoking, obesity, alcohol consumption'.

Missing from their argument is any glimmer of interest in the socio-economic condition of patients whose interests they claim to be helping. Dr Fraser says that people know the answers but don't make the right decisions, and yet stops himself short of saying 'We love coercion'. If it is part of their faith that economic wellbeing improves health outcomes, that is where their efforts at 'levelling the playing field' should be addressed, instead of working to create countless new offences, which adversely affect people's prospects when they fall foul of the law.

More importantly, where did this idea come from that chronic diseases result only from lifestyle choices? Is it that the mega corporations are too important to politicians for their activities to be attacked on the grounds of environmental and public health damage? Note that Dr Williamson refers only to the budgets of tobacco and alcohol industries: not about the budgets of any other kind of industry, although these other industries must be even more powerful if they can avoid the government and medical establishment's hit list. Everyone knows people who have died early in spite of doing all the right things with their health: non-smokers, non-drinkers, joggers, you name it. No one is safe. [Late edit: more on this here: How working kills smokers: 'There is no question that smoking contributes to poor health. But to claim that smoking is the primary cause of preventable death and disease is one of the greatest scams in modern history.' H/tip Freedom2Choose newsletter, April 2013.]

The doctors wind up stating that we should look to a fair Scotland where we care about each other and community. And on the face of it, what's not to like? Only that the politicians and the medical establishment do far too little to campaign against economic hardship, which they know to militate against 'healthy choices', and place too much emphasis on lifestyle factors when explaining how people get ill.

The autism epidemic: what the World Health Organisation could usefully do for developed countries

This post is really a bit of an aside. On an alternative health site I read this piece on autism and the research into its causes. I am no more an expert on autism than on smoking, but find it hard to be persuaded that autism is a genetic disorder.

It is important to point out that there seems to be no consensus about what autism is:

Autism is a complex disability resulting in brain damage, gastrointestinal damage, sleep disorders, food sensitivities, epilepsy, immune dysfunction, self destructive behaviour patterns, repetitive behaviour, communication deficits and unresponsiveness to other people. It was first written about in a case study in 1943 by Dr Leo Kanner, who described 11 children with a condition that had never before been observed.

Autism might be described as a range of problems and indeed autism is also termed 'autism spectrum disorders'. The Gaia health piece points to a recorded incidences of one autism per fifty children and compares it to a 1970 figure of one in 14,875 recorded in Wisconsin in 1970. This is a stupendous rise and it seems feeble to say that it can be accounted for by different or better diagnostic techniques.

I am not disputing for a minute that the medical profession has been all too willing to describe ordinary behaviour as a medical condition and profit from treating it, but that's not what is at issue here. However it is true that like other behavioural conditions there is no single medical test that can confirm autism, and no doubt agreement on the extent of autism would be easier if there was such a test.

Autism is controversially attributed to the combined MMR vaccine. The reason for this is the numbers of parents who have observed their children's reaction to taking the vaccine, and also the difference in the children's developmental progress before and after taking the vaccine. Reports describe how children usually between one and two years old have variously lost eye contact, vocabulary, motor skills, appetite and sociability, and otherwise regressed from up to two weeks following their shots. The phenomenon is known as late onset autism, and has aroused concern because the timescales appear in many, many cases to indicate that a specific event has created this regression, rather than that the child has simply failed to develop at all. Various kinds of ill health and discomfort accompany the regression, and occasionally a child dies.

Faced with official blank looks, denials and assurances that vaccines are safe (in spite of mercury being a major ingredient of preservatives in the vaccines) people all over the world have researched what has caused their children's devastating and exhausting condition, and they have compared notes. That is why they know that so many of them have experienced a common pattern.  Some accounts are here, recorded in a 214-page document (Parents' Voice), which is still open for further additions. Short accounts of parent's experiences, several accounts per page, make sad reading: how do parents deal with such injuries to their children?

Many of the parents concerned did not know there had ever been a link between MMR and autism. Now, thanks to the Dr Wakefield controversy and the efforts of other campaigners  the issue is alive, but the medical establishment has still not acknowledged a link between autism and MMR – as the Gaia health piece states, research funds have been diverted to exploring autism and genetics.

My take is as follows: the single measles vaccine in the UK should not have been scrapped; and the testimony of parents whose children have been made ill should be taken properly into consideration. Efforts should be made to count the cases of late onset autism, and to investigate links with vaccines. If it is true that late onset autism accounts for anything resembling the incidences reported in the Gaia piece, this indeed amounts to an epidemic. There is no natural reason that a non-infectious condition should affect 300 times more people than it did less than two generations ago.

The World Health Organisation, if it wants to pay attention to the needs of developed countries, should look on autism as a crisis that dwarfs the smoking issue.
WHO got it wrong when they made tobacco the subject of the made the first global multilateral treaty – the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control – as if there is no such thing as infectious disease or malnutrition any more. Tobacco is an easy target when they develop a prohibitionist model that sends prices up, especially during a period of international austerity when demand for tobacco is unlikely to weaken. It gives the WHO something to preach about without really having to address what makes people ill.

If its mission were truly health and looking after the children, it would investigate this awful phenomenon. But perhaps the relationship of the WHO with health is, shall we say, 'complicated', like that of the US Center for Disease Control:

According to the CDC, the origin of this epidemic is a mystery. However the agency regularly takes great pains to point out through various discredited studies that it is not caused by vaccines. It also maintains that this disorder, which it terms behavioural, is genetic in origin. While examining the veracity of these claims, it would be prudent to point out that the mandate of the CDC is to ensure that all children follow the vaccine schedule. It thus suffers from a conflict of interest when it says anything about vaccines, as even a hint that vaccines are unsafe goes against its mandate.

If medical authorities are too bound up with a pro-vaccine mandate, how can any research they undertake be credible? Can the World Health Organisation arrange for the credible investigation of this issue? Is the World Health Organisation an authority that can deal with epidemics like autism, or just a ladder of opportunity for bureaucrats?