GM corn causes cancer in rats: a study in bad science

Last week a scientific paper appeared that reported that eating genetically modified (GM) corn causes cancer in rats.  Specifically, the scientists fed Roundup Ready® corn, or maize, to rats for two years, and reported that both females and males developed cancer and died at higher rates than controls.  

This is very surprising.  If GM corn causes cancer, why aren't Americans "dropping like flies," as one scientist asked?  We've been eating Monsanto's Roundup Ready® corn for over a decade, even if most of us aren't aware of it.  But our rates of cancer haven't increased more than Europeans, who eat far less GM corn.  Maybe the effect is limited to rats - in which case we should also have seen dramatic increases in cancer in lab rats.  But we haven't seen that either.

So what's wrong?  The best way to find out is to read the paper, which I did.  It turns out to be a very badly designed study, and the report itself omits many crucial details that may (and probably do) completely invalidate the findings.  The scientists leading the study have a strongly biases agenda and a conflict of interest, which they failed to reveal. I'll explain below, but meanwhile this study has already been taken up by politicians as proof (proof!) that GMO crops are harmful.  As Forbes blogger Tim Worstall explained, this paper is more politics than science.

Let's look at the study itself, which was led by Gilles-Eric Seralini (more on him below) and published last week in Food and Chemical Toxicology.  (A copy of the full paper is here.)

The authors studied 200 rats for 2 years, dividing them into 20 group of 10 rats each.  The test rats were fed a variety of diets:

1. Non-GM corn comprising 33% of the diet (this was the control group).
2. Roundup Ready corn comprising 11%, 22%, or 33% of the food.
3. Roundup Ready corn that had been treated with Roundup during cultivation.
4. Non-GM corn but with Roundup itself added to the rats' water.

So what happened?  Well, in some groups, the rats got more cancer than controls.  But not always.  In fact, the authors had to cherry-pick their own data to support their conclusions.

One major problem is that only 10% of the rats were controls - 10 male, 10 female. The study's main claim is that rates of cancer were significantly higher in the rats fed GM corn.  Martina Newell-McGloughlin from UC Davis, in an interview with Discovery News, said 

"The type of statistical analysis they used is really a type of fishing expedition.  One individual referred to it as 'fantasy statistics.' "

Another major problem is that there's no dosage effect.  In other words, if Seralini is right and GM food is bad for you, then more of it should be worse.  But the study's results actually contradict this hypothesis: rats fed the highest levels of GM corn lived longer than rats fed the lowest level.

A third problem, as Discovery News and other sources reported, is that the rats used in this study are a special laboratory strain that is highly prone to cancer.

Perhaps most damning, though, is the fact that rats fed Roundup directly had the longest survival times.  As Seralini's own Figure 1 shows, the longest-living rats in the entire study, out of all the conditions, where those that drank Roundup in their water.  These rats outlived the control rats.

Yum!  Maybe Perrier should start selling Roundup-enhanced spring water?

Seralini and colleagues struggle to explain the internal contradictions in their study.  They write, 

"Interestingly, in the groups of animals fed with the NK603 [Roundup Ready corn] without R[oundup] application, similar effects with respect to enhanced tumor incidence and mortality rates were observed."  

This tortured English is their way of admitting that rats did worse ("similar effects") when fed GM corn that was grown without Roundup.  They don't want to admit that this result contradicts their central hypothesis.

The study was designed to fail: the sample sizes (10 rats in each group) are so small that all the results are likely just due to chance, and none of the differences are meaningful.  It's exceedingly unlikely that the Roundup in the rats' water made them live longer, just as it's unlikely that Roundup Ready corn had any effect on the incidence of cancer.

I know that ad hominem attacks aren't valid, but I can't resist pointing out that Seralini's co-author, Joel de Vendomois, is a homeopath, with a "Homeopathy and Acupuncture Diploma", a double dose of quackery in a single degree.  Seralini has also published a book about the supposed dangers of GMOs, and he and de Vendomois are the lead scientists at CRIIGEN, an organization devoted to lobbying against GMOs. Of course, even if Seralini and de Vendomois are bad scientists, and even if they have a strong bias, their paper isn't necessarily wrong.  It's wrong simply because the science is wrong.

Not surprisingly, an anti-GMO group in California has gleefully embraced the claims of this dreadful paper to argue in favor of Proposition 37, a ballot initiative that will require labelling of genetically modified foods.  And Jose Bove of the European Parliament has used it to claim that all GM crops are harmful to human health.

Let's be clear about the science here.  Genetic modification of foods is a powerful technology that can be incredibly beneficial.  The recent development of salmon that can grow faster is an example: these salmon (developed by a company called AquaBounty) will make fish farming more efficient, and thereby help preserve the perilously endangered wild fish species in our oceans.  On the other hand, GM technology can be used, as Monsanto has done, simply to allow farmers to use more pesticides, which doesn't seem to benefit anyone other than the pesticide producers.  It's unfortunate that Monsanto's behavior has been used as an excuse to give all GMOs a bad name.

Now we have a bad study done by anti-GMO scientists who have allowed their political agenda to trump their scientific judgment.  What a mess.

Stabbing kids with needles: malpractice, or just a very bad idea?

Yesterday's Washington Post featured a terribly researched article titled "Kids and needles is sometimes a good match: Acupuncture can help with pain."

Imagine: a one-year-old boy arrives at an emergency room in New York at 3 a.m. with an asthma attack.  He is slow to respond to a nebulizer treatment.  Enter Dr. Stephen Cowan, who decides to use acupuncture.  That's right, he stabs a one-year-old baby with multiple needles to treat asthma.  According to Dr. Cowan, the boy "reacted calmly" and improved.  The article doesn't provide any more details.

This is appalling.  Sticking needles into a baby has never been shown to have any effectiveness at treating asthma, and we do have treatments that work.  In all likelihood, the nebulizer did work, in the case that Dr. Cowan related to the reporter, but Dr. Cowan mistakenly credits his acupuncture treatment.

Stephen Cowan is a aggressively self-promoting doctor, who claims on his website that he can treat both autism and ADHD with acupuncture and other forms of Chinese Medicine.  He also describes how he convinces children to let him stick needles into them.  He states his belief in mystical "vital energy" or qi, one of the wacky pseudoscientific notions at the core of acupuncture beliefs.  His claims are little more than a modern, mystical version of the claims made by 19th-century snake oil salesman.

The Washington Post story also revealed that Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. recently treated a 17-year-old girl with pancreatitis by stabbing needles into her stomach and other places.  There is no evidence that this works, but the girl's doctor believes it does.  The girl reportedly wasn't harmed, fortunately.

The doctor at Children's Hospital, Jennifer Anderson, is an anesthesiologist who is also an acupuncturist.  In the story, she said "I often treat patients with chronic issues" with acupuncture.  This is frightening: a doctor at a major medical center is telling children, most of whom are too young to even think of questioning the wisdom of a doctor, that sticking them with needles will help their pain.  Dr. Anderson admitted that "she often does two to three treatments a week at first on a child."  So she admits to stabbing many sharp needles into children and telling them that the treatments will help their pain.  She argues that the children report that this is "helpful."

This is perilously close to child abuse.  Children want to please adults, and if an adult tells them something is good for them, especially if an authority figure tells them, they are extremely unlikely to disagree. They'll just swallow the medicine, or endure the treatment, and then tell the adult what she wants to hear.  Dr. Anderson seems unaware of this.  And Children's National Medical Center, a generally outstanding hospital, should be seriously concerned that one of its anesthesiologists is practicing quack medicine on children, who are perhaps the most vulnerable of all patients.

Let's be clear: acupuncture is based on nonsense.  Scientists have gone to great pains to study it, and the conclusion can be stated simply: acupuncture does not work.  (And yes, I know about the latest meta-analysis claiming that acupuncture works.  Dr. Steven Novella has already explained why that analysis is "completely useless.")  If acupuncture were a drug being tested by a pharmaceutical company, it would have been abandoned long ago.  Its proponents are no better than any big pharma company that pushes a drug that it knows to be ineffective.

Acupuncture is worse than ineffective: because it's an invasive procedure, there is a small but real risk of harm.  As I wrote last year in The Atlantic, acupuncturist sometimes cause infections, which can lead to rare but serious complications.  Acupuncturists protest (often) that they use sterile needles, but this very protest reveals their ignorance: most infections are caused by bacteria already present on the skin, which enter through the puncture wound.

Parents: don't let an acupuncturist stick needles into your kids.  Read the science first, and avoid - no, run screaming from - any practitioner who claims that he can adjust the "qi" in your child.

British Health Minister believes in magic water

Well, this is one way to save money on health care.  The new British Minister of Health, Jeremy Hunt, is a firm believer in homeopathy, which treats disease using magic water solutions that contain - well, only water.

Just a few days ago, British prime minister David Cameron shuffled his cabinet, moving Hunt from Minister of Culture to his new position in charge of health.  Within hours, Tom Chivers, a science editor at the Telegraph, reported on Hunt's belief in homeopathy:

"The man put in charge of the nation's health policy is on record as supporting spending public money on magic water to cure disease." 

He went on to add:

"This is not unlike putting someone who thinks the Second World War began in 1986 in charge of the Department of Education."

Not surprisingly, Chivers' blog post was flooded with hundreds of comments, many of them from upset defenders of homeopathy.  Most of their arguments boiled down to "I think it works for me, so there."

Homeopathy is one of the most absurd, wildly implausible forms of quack medicine. I've written about it many times (for example, about the bogus flu pills sold as oscillococcinum,
about NCCAM's embarrassing funding of studies of homeopathy, and about how homeopaths offer strychnine to cure children's colds), so I'll try not to repeat myself.  Homeopathy is founded on two basic notinos, both of them dead wrong:

1. Infinitely diluted substances are more potent than substances at higher concentrations, and
2. "Like cures like," meaning that if a substance causes a symptom, you can use that substance to cure the symptom.  

Thus caffeine can be used to help you sleep, and poison ivy can cure itching.  No, I'm not making this up; homeopaths really believe this stuff.

Homeopathy is simply magical thinking.  There has never been a shred of scientific evidence to support it, and the British Medical Association declared in 2010 that homeopathy is witchcraft.  After pressure from science bloggers, NIH's NCCAM has corrected its website to state that

"it is not possible to explain in scientific terms how a remedy containing little or no active ingredient can have any effect."

But homeopaths make a lot of money selling homeopathic potions, and through clever marketing they keep themselves in business.  Now they have a new ally, the UK Minister of Health. Andy Coghlan, writing in The New Scientist, called him "the new minister for magic."  Brilliant!  As Coghlan pointed out, magic is much cheaper than real medicine:

"Think of the savings if all those expensive proven treatments and drugs are phased out, and patients are offered cheap little vials of water instead."

We're desperately looking for ways to control health care costs here in the U.S. as well.  The UK Minister of Magic may have a solution for us.  I wonder, though, if it works for muggles?

What did the ENCODE project discover about the genome? A quick shout-out.

Does top-down science work as well as bottom-up science?

This is just a quick link-over to my friends at Simply Statistics, who interviewed me on their blog (and vodcast) about the just-published set of papers on the human genome known as the ENCODE project.  Check it out here, and then follow the discussion and comments further on their follow-up post here.

UC Davis muzzles professor for speaking out about excessive PSA testing

When UC Davis announced a seminar on men's health back in October 2010, it sounded like a typical educational event.  But UC David professor Michael Wilkes investigated and learned that the seminar was primarily a sales pitch about the prostate specific antigen (PSA) test, and that its main message was that men should get tested regularly beginning at age 40.  However, the weight of scientific evidence suggests that regular PSA testing is not a good idea, and it may do more harm than good, as I wrote recently.  In a major report issued earlier this year, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommended that men should not get routine PSA screening for prostate cancer, stating explicitly that

"the benefits of PSA-based screening for prostate cancer do not outweigh the harms." 

Prof. Wilkes, an expert on prostate cancer screening, came to the same conclusion almost two years ago.  In response to the UC Davis seminar, he and USC professor Jerome Hoffman wrote an opinion article for the San Francisco Chronicle.  They made basically the same argument that the USPSTF made in their lengthy, thoroughly researched report: that the PSA test often does more harm than good.

The story would end there, if not for what UC Davis then did to Prof. Wilkes.  Within a few hours of the publication of the newspaper article, the Executive Associate Dean at the UC Davis medical school informed Wilkes that he would be punished in two ways.  First, he would lose his position in the doctoring program, and second, he would lose the funding support for a Hungarian student exchange program that he organized.  Dr. Wilkes, it is worth noting, was recruited to UC Davis from UCLA because of the innovative program in doctoring (how to be a doctor) that he developed.

Apparently the Executive Associate Dean (where do they get these titles?) was angry over what Dr. Wilkes wrote in the newspaper.  He later admitted that he read Dr. Wilkes' article just before he wrote his threatening email.  All of this is documented in a report issued this past May by the UC Davis faculty Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility (CAFR).  Many additional details were reported on UC Davis Professor Jonathan Eisen's blog in June.

When challenged about these threats, the university lawyer David Levine said, in essence, what threats?  My goodness, he said in a letter to Wilkes, I'm just giving you a few helpful facts:

"I am simply pointing out that there are numerous errors of fact in your article, that they were injurious to the University interests and reputation and thus potentially actionable under the law of defamation."

But heavens no, we're not threatening to sue you or anything like that.  Just pointing out some things that we're sure you will want to know.  The university's lawyer's explained further, in a letter to CAFR this past February, that

"The administrative action … was simply to provide information to Dr. Wilkes regarding … the potential legal exposure for broadcasting false information that is injurious to reputation."

I'm sure that Dr. Wilkes found all of this information very helpful.

This summer, the UC Davis faculty senate voted 52-0 that the university had violated Prof. Wilkes' academic freedom, and called for the university to apologize and withdraw its threats, which UC Davis has not yet done.  An academic freedom watchdog group, FIRE, wrote to UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi with the same requests.  Chancellor Katehi replied in a letter, dated July 17, that she and Provost Ralph Hexter have "assembled a small team of independent subject-matter experts" to review the case, and that they will have more to say by August 31.

What the heck do you need a committee of experts for?  Even if Prof. Wilkes' article was wrong (and it's not - he is spot-on accurate), he has every right to express his opinions.  So it doesn't really matter if PSA testing is good for you or not.  Yet after almost two years, UC Davis still has not withdrawn the threats made by its lawyers and by its Executive Associate Dean against Prof. Wilkes, and by extension against any other professor who might disagree with something the university is doing.

At this point, merely withdrawing the threats is not enough.  Chancellor Katehi should clearly and unambiguously affirm Prof. Wilkes' right to speak his mind, and she should also punish the Executive Associate Dean, the university counsel, and any other administrators who have been involved in this outrageous assault on free speech and academic freedom.  Otherwise they or others might very well just do it again, the next time they read an Op-Ed piece that annoys them.

The perfect hamburger, spoiled

20 years ago, we cooked hamburgers the way we liked them.  If you wanted your burger medium rare, well, good for you.  A thick, juicy burger, seared on the outside and just a bit pink on the inside, was the centerpiece of any good summer cookout. That was a more innocent time.

In 1993, a deadly outbreak of E. coli infections hit the northwestern U.S., sickening hundreds of people and killing four children.  The outbreak was traced to undercooked ground beef from a hamburger chain called Jack in the Box.

Fortunately, we live in a highly educated, advanced society, where the citizenry understands that its health depends on having bacteria-free food.  The unsanitary conditions that allowed E. coli to enter the food supply, including assembly-line slaughterhouse practices, were quickly halted.  New government regulations assured that any factory that shipped contaminated beef would be shut down.  Inexpensive, accurate DNA testing now detects almost all bacteria at a neglible cost.  Food-borne outbreaks of bacterial infections have been rare ever since.

Ha ha ha ha ha!  Just kidding!  Of course we can't have government regulators getting in the way of efficient food manufacturing!  Consumers ought to know that it's their fault if they get sick.  We must cook our burgers until they're as sterile as a Martian landscape.  That's simply the trade-off we must make to have such cheap food these days.

It's not that we don't check for any bacteria at all.  In fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently announced that it would begin testing beef for six different deadly strains of E. coli.  Until now, it has only tested for the O157:H7 strain, which was behind the 1993 outbreak.  I guess this is progress.  However, the USDA will not be testing for salmonella bacteria or for any other nasty microbes.

The beef industry is opposed to any efforts by the government to test its products for bacteria.  For many years now, it has been remarkably successful, through lobbying efforts in Congress and through lawsuits, at rendering the USDA powerless.  As one example: twelve years ago the USDA tried to shut down a beef plant in Texas that failed its salmonella tests.  The beef industry challenged the USDA in court and won, and the USDA still doesn't have the power to shut down a plant for salmonella contamination.

We have the technology to detect all the bacteria that keep turning up in beef and chicken.  DNA testing technology has gotten much faster, cheaper, and more accurate in the 20 years since the Jack-in-the-Box outbreak, but we still don't use it on our food.  The meat industry won't say why it opposes DNA tests for contamination, but no one knows how consumers might react if they knew how much bacteria was really in their meat.

The USDA does test for E. coli O157:H7.  In the first half of this year, it tested 6,427 beef samples.  Out of those, 470 (7%) tested positive, which is pretty startling, considering that this is just one strain out of six known to be deadly to humans, and considering that we've known about this one since 1993.

(Chicken, by the way, has similar problems, with most raw chicken (organic or not) being contaminated by salmonella or campylobacter bacteria.  It helps that no one likes chicken cooked rare.)

Where does all this bacteria comes from, anyway? You may already know the answer: poo.  Beef and chicken production facilities aren't very good at keeping the (ahem) waste material separated from the meat.  Changing the way our beef is produced would cost more, undoubtedly. But is it unreasonable to ask a food producer to deliver safe food?

Luckily, if you cook meat long enough, it can't hurt you.  It might not taste as good, but hey, we all make compromises.  So broil those burgers through and through, and if they're a bit dry, well, that's what ketchup is for.

Anti-vaccination propagandists help create the worst whooping cough epidemic in 70 years

The great northwest of the U.S. is known for its natural beauty.  It's also a high-tech region with a highly educated public - not exactly the kind of place one would expect to fall for the anti-science rhetoric of the anti-vaccine movement.

But it has.  The anti-vaxxers have convinced a frighteningly high number of parents in Washington State to withhold vaccines from their children.  A story in The Seattle Times last year reported that 

"Washington [state] parents are choosing not to vaccinate their kindergartners at a rate higher than anywhere else in the country."  

This despite the fact that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (formed by the founder of Microsoft, which is headquartered in Seattle) is one of the world's leading sponsors of vaccine research.  

When the vaccination rates drop, everyone becomes more vulnerable to infectious diseases.  When more than 90% of the population is vaccinated, we have "herd immunity" - this means the disease can't spread because there aren't enough susceptible people in the community.  So the high rate of vaccine refusal in Washington makes it easier for whooping cough (and other diseases) to spread.

The media has been complicit in spreading some of the anti-vaccine misinformation.  Sometimes it comes straight from the media itself, such as the credulous, anti-science, anti-vax CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson. Other times it comes from talk shows, magazines, or even airline advertisements that provide a platform for anti-vax celebrity doctors such as Jay Gordon (who gained fame as Jenny McCarthy's son's doctor) and "Dr. Bob" Sears, who has published his own "alternative" vaccine schedule in a book filled with anti-vaccine nonsense.  These characters continue to claim, at every chance they get, that vaccines cause autism (as Gordon has said, repeatedly), or that they cause other harms, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  They use their medical degrees and their faux concern "for the children" to frighten parents into keeping their kids unvaccinated.

And now we learn that the U.S. is in the midst of the worst whooping cough epidemic in 70 years.  One of the most hard-hit states is Washington, which the CDC just announced (on 20 July) has suffered 2,520 cases so far this year, a 1300% increase over last year.  This is the highest number of cases reported in Washington since 1942.  This plot of the number of cases this year compared to last year shows the dramatic rise in infections:

The figure above shows the number of confirmed and probable pertussis cases reported, by week of onset in Washington, during January 1, 2011-June 16, 2012.  Source: Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Making things worse, it seems, is an increase in cases among children aged 13-14.  Children get a booster shot at age 11-12, but the new outbreak indicates that the effectiveness of the booster may not last very long.  The dramatic increase in whooping cough this year also suggests that the bacterium that causes it, Bordetella pertussis, is mutating to make the vaccine less effective.  Nevertheless, the CDC emphasizes: 

"Vaccination continues to be the single most effective strategy to reduce morbidity and mortality caused by pertussis. Vaccination of pregnant women and contacts of infants is recommended to protect infants too young to be vaccinated."

This good advice is seriously undermined when misinformed doctors such as "Dr. Bob" Sears directly advise pregnant women not to get the whooping cough vaccine, as he did in the Huffington Post. (Hint: it's a good rule to be very skeptical of celebrity doctors who go by their first name.)

I should also point out that whooping cough is a national problem, not just Washington State's.  The U.S. has had over 17,000 cases this year, putting it on track for the worst year since 1959.  The highest rate of infection in the nation is in Wisconsin (which has also been hit hard by anti-vaccine effects), followed by Washington and Montana. 10 deaths have been reported, mostly in infants who were too young to be vaccinated.  For all this, we can thank the anti-vaccination movement.