News Wrap-Week of 01/20/08

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Below are some of the most interesting news (to me at least). This section is meant just to aggregate the news, so I will try to abstain from long comments (although I predict I will not be successful all of the time).

Poor sanitation kills 5,000 children a day

A recent news item reported in various news sites including Scientific American, and Reuters, that 5,000 children die worldwide daily because they lack access to clean toilets. It is estimated that 40% of the worlds population do not have access to clean and safe toilets. According to WaterAid 1.8 million children die each year before they reach 5 years of age from diarrhea.

The Thinking Man says : If we took a portion of the money wasted in CAM (Complementary and Alternative Medicine) and invest it in this area we could be saving 5,000 children a day. Can any CAM practitioner claim the alternative medicine saves that many lives a day? On the other hand, I am sure modern medicine can make such a claim, but I must say that is just my gut feeling, I do not have any hard numbers to back that up.

Expensive wine tastes better-regardless of actual taste!

A recent study, reported at News.com and other news outlets the more wine costs the more people enjoy it, regardless of how it actually tastes. According the the News.com article:

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology and Stanford's business school have directly seen that the sensation of pleasantness that people experience when tasting wine is linked directly to its price. And that's true even when, unbeknownst to the test subjects, it's exactly the same Cabernet Sauvignon with a dramatically different price tag.

Specifically, the researchers found that with the higher priced wines, more blood and oxygen is sent to a part of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, whose activity reflects pleasure. Brain scanning using a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) showed evidence for the researchers' hypothesis that "changes in the price of a product can influence neural computations associated with experienced pleasantness," they said.

The Thinking Man says : I am not surprised. I am sure everybody has experienced this in their life. Given two items, of same quality (as far as we can detect) we have a tendency to think that the more expensive one must have something better. Somehow, thanks to ingenious marketing, we have been lead to associate high prices with quality. This study now shows that there actually is a physiological effect (increased blood/oxygen flow to the brain). That was what I find interesting. Up to today I just thought it was a purely psychological event.

Food from cloned animals seems safe for consumption

Within days from each other both the EU and the FDA have released statements saying that food from cloned animals seems to pose no special health risks. This news was reported by various websites, including Bloomberg.com, NYTimes.com and CNN.com among other.

According to the NYTimes article:

Meat and milk from cloned animals seem to pose no special health risks, said a draft report released Friday by the European Food Safety Agency. It was a first step toward the eventual sale of such products within the European Union.

“It is very unlikely that any difference exists in terms of food safety between food products originating from clones and their progeny compared with those derived from conventionally bred animals,” the report said.

It acknowledged that cloned animals were prone to more diseases than conventionally bred animals, but it added that humans would not suffer because unhealthy clones would be excluded from the food chain as is the case with conventionally bred animals.

Bloomberg reports as follows:

The EU food safety officials said studies of nutrition, toxicity, allergic reactions and environmental effects have turned up no cause for concern.

As long as unhealthy clones would be detected before reaching the market, ``the currently available data indicate that food products from clones of cattle and pigs and their progeny are as safe as food products of livestock derived by conventional breeding,'' according to the draft opinion that was requested last year by the European Commission.

CNN reports the following:

Food from healthy clones of cattle, swine and goats is as safe as food from non-cloned animals, the Food and Drug Administration said in a report released Tuesday.

"Extensive evaluation of the available data has not identified any subtle hazards that might indicate food-consumption risks in healthy clones of cattle, swine, or goats," the 968-page "final risk assessment" concluded.

"Thus, edible products from healthy clones that meet existing requirements for meat and milk in commerce pose no increased food consumption risk(s) relative to comparable products from sexually-derived animals."

But the FDA said it needs more information to determine the safety of meat and milk from cloned sheep. The FDA also concluded that food from newborn cattle clones "may pose some very limited human food consumption risk."

The Thinking Man says: A lot of people don't like what they hear. Unfortunately, there is a stigma tied into the word "clone" that goes beyond differences between "real" cattle meat and "cloned" cattle meat. There are people who are ethically opposed to any cloning. There are those who are afraid that successful animal cloning will one day lead to successful human cloning, thus they oppose it. There are those who think the creation of life is an act of God and man should not be so arrogant as to meddle in the affairs of God.

The fact of the matter is that none of us, at least in the developed countries, is consuming "natural" foods, let them be animal or plant foods. All foods have been modified endlessly through crossbreeding, fertilization and such. Cloning is simply a new way of doing business. In a day when thousands of people are dying of hunger around the world, can we really afford to cling to our childish ethical standards and oppose cloned or genetically engineered food? Furthermore, how ethical are these objections, when they are coming from someone with a full belly, who has never known what it means to have your loved ones die of hunger? I have not experienced that, but still I cannot put any moral objection I may have regarding cloning above saving (actual) human lives.

The one objection I have has to do with the decision (up to this point) that cloned foods will not need to be labeled as such. I believe that people have the right to choose if they want to consume cloned foods, regardless of their reasoning for doing so. Also, an objection to this idea has been brought that should there be a problem down the road, a recall becomes next to impossible. However, seller of non-cloned foods can choose to lable their foods as such. I suspect most of them will exercise their right, and increase the prices on the way (just like what is happening with the whole "organic" foods nonsense!)

Either way, it is kind of early to get too worked up one way or another. There will be many more studies and comments on the issue, before we have to actually worry if the canned meat we're having for dinner is a clone or not.