Monthly Archives: April 2003

JAMA Study: Atkins Works by Restricting Calories

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A meta-analysis of dietary studies published this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that low-carbohydrate diets cause some people to lose weight through the most boring diet technique of all — calorie restriction.

The JAMA article looked at 100 studies of low-carbohydrate diets involving a total of 3,268 people. The review of those studies conclude,

There is insufficient evidence to make recommendations for or against the use of low-carbohydrate diets, particularly among participants older than age 50 years, for use longer than 90 days, or for diets of 20 g/d or less of carbohydrates. Among the published studies, participant weight loss while using low-carbohydrate diets was principally associated with decreased caloric intake and increased diet duration but not with reduced carbohydrate content.

This is consistent with a 2001 review of over 200 dietary studies published in the Journal of the American Dietary Association. That study found that calorie consumption rather than dietary composition was the biggest predictor of BMI (that study, in fact, found significantly lower BMIs for people on a high carbohydrate diet as opposed to those on a low carb diet).

Sources:

Popular diets: correlation to health, nutrition, and obesity. Kennedy ET, Bowman SA, Spence JT, Freedman M, King J., J Am Diet Assoc 2001 Apr;101(4):411-20.

Study says calories count more than carbs in diets. Todd Ackerman, Houston Chronicle, April 9, 2003.

Calories still count in weight-loss game, studies find. Kim Severson, San Francisco Chronicle, April 9, 2003.

Efficacy and safety of low-carbohydrate diets: a systematic review. Bravata DM, Sanders L, Huang J, Krumholz HM, Olkin I, Gardner CD, Bravata DM, JAMA 2003 Apr 9;289(14):1837-50.

If It Squeaks Like a Duck . . .

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An animal rights extremist in Santa Cruz, California wanted to make his point about animal cruelty and defaced signs put up by a sorority advertising an upcoming duck event. The vandal scrawled “animal cruelty” across the signs and crossed out a word and wrote “tortures” over it. So what sort of vile event did the fraternity have planned? A rubber duck race.

Janice Allegrie of Omega Nu told the Santa Cruz Sentinel, “They are cute, but they’re rubber.”

Omega Nu has run its Duck Derby over the last 13 year sand raised hundreds of thousands of dollars that largely benefit local public and private agencies.

(Then again, if a rubber duck can squeak, isn’t that proof enough that it feels pain just like you and I?)

Source:

Zealot acts to halt abuse . . . of rubber ducks. Donna Jones, Santa Cruz Sentinel, April 12, 2003.

Use of Live Animals In Medical Schools Continues to Decline

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A study recently published in Academic Medicine found that the number of medical schools using dogs in classroom training continues to decline as does the number of schools using any live animals in laboratory training.

The survey of medical schools found that just 32 percent still used live animals in laboratory training of 2001. That’s down from 73 percent in 1985.

There are several reasons for the decline including pressure from animal rights activists, the fact that live animals are expensive to use, and alternatives to live animals have made significant progress over the last 20 years.

But can a medical student receive all the training he needs from non-animal alternatives? Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center physiology professor says no,

The experience [of training with a live animal] cannot be substituted by any computer simulation. Can a computer simulate how much pressure to put on a bleeding artery? Can it help you understand pain and evaluate the level of anesthesia needed?

Dr. Lawrence Hansen, co-author of the study, argues that the value of the live animal has to be weighed against the costs, including the welfare of the animal,

Does the dog have any value at all? If the dog was a block of wood, I’d say go ahead and do this. But we have to do a cost-benefit analysis. It’s a lifetime of caging, followed by vivisection, and then euthanasia. And that’s a high ethical cost for the dog to pay

Hansen is the spokesman for Doctors Against Dog Labs, a group that wants an end to the use of dogs in medical training. In essay at that group’s web site, Hansen writes,

When I compare dog and human brains the similarities far outnumber the differences. It’s true dogs have smaller frontal lobes, which explains their lack of inhibition (e.g., butt sniffing) and unfortunately also accounts for their poor judgment in relying on the kindness of humans. But the very similarities that make dogs “good models” for human physiology and pharmacology labs are good reasons why we shouldn’t be killing creatures so like ourselves.

Because dogs and humans are more alike than different we should treat dogs more like we would want to be treated ourselves. During a particularly awful moment in his tragedy, King Lear despairs, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods! They kill us for their sport!” Well, that may or may not be true of the gods or of God, but to dogs we humans are gods. We made them what they are through millennia of selective breeding until they became the perfect companion animal — loyal, loving, devoted. They only want to please us. It is a betrayal of trust and of the bond between men and dogs to so casually kill them for minuscule educational benefit. We can and should choose to be merciful gods, unlike those tormenting Lear for sport, or boys pulling the wings off flies.

Well if the trend Hansen reports on continues, it looks like he’ll get his wish.

Source:

Med Schools Are Phasing Out Use of Dogs in Training Doctors. Bruce Taylor Seeman, Newhouse News Service, April 3, 2003.

Why Not Kill Dogs? Lawrence Hansen.

UCSD’s use of live dogs in lab decried. Cheryl Clark, San Diego Union-Tribune, February 12, 2003.

South Salt Lake, Utah Settles with Animal Rights Activists

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South Salt Lake, Utah, reached a settlement agreement with the Utah Animal Rights Coalition over protests earlier this year at South Salt Lake KFC restaurants.

UARC attorney Brian Barnard filed the complaint which arose over South Salt Lake’s regulation of protests. The city requires five days notification to obtain a permit to protest — the law doesn’t include any provision at all for spontaneous protests. The city did waive the five day requirement for UARC but the permit it was finally issued said the protester could not “approach any customers who wish to enter the business premises.”

When UARC applied for a permit for a March 10 protest, the permit was denied because the group had not filed for the permit at least 5 days in advance.

The settlement between the animal rights group and the city required South Salt Lake to pay $101 in damages and agree to revise its ordinances relating to protests. The city is currently conceding changes that allow protestors to get within 5 feet of people who are not part of the protest, and would change the 5 day notification period to 3 days.

Source:

South Salt Lake Settles Suit Over Protests at KFC.

SARS, Influenza and Meat?

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Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome has been a major topic in the news recently, which means it was also an opportunity for animal rights groups and individuals to spread the usual nonsense and lies about zoonosis (diseases that humans may acquire from animals).

One of the major errors concerns the 1918 influenza pandemic. For such a major event with plenty of books, articles and web pages available, you’d think they could at least get this right, but alas, no.

Michael Greger, MD, weighed in with this bit of outdated information,

Animal agriculture is not just a public health hazard for those that consume meat. In fact, the single worst epidemic in recorded history, the 1918 influenza pandemic, has been blamed on the livestock industry. In that case, the unnatural density and proximity of ducks and pigs raised for slaughter probably led to the deaths of 20 to 40 million people. . . . All of these influenza strains seem to have arisen in the same region of southern China where intensive systems of animal agriculture have become a breeding ground for new killer viruses.

PETA chimes in claiming that,

The influenza epidemic of 1918 originated in pigs.

But these claims are completely dishonest distortions of what is known about the 1918 epidemic.

The 1918 influenza pandemic did not originate in Asia. The first known cases of the disease, in fact, occurred Kansas in May 1918. Five hundred soldiers became infected with a mysterious new disease, and 48 of them died. It is most likely the disease originated either in Europe or the United States — soldiers traveling both ways across the Atlantic would have quickly spread the virus.

Did the disease arise from animal agriculture? To answer that question, first consider one of the more astounding aspects of the 1918 influenza pandemic — we actually have samples of the disease that were preserved (in some cases because the bodies of victims were buried in places like Alaska, where the ground remained frozen) and have been partially sequenced.

As far as ducks are concerned, a study of waterfowl from the Smithsonian Institution’s collection found that this was unlikely. The Smithsonian has a huge collection of liquid-preserved waterfowl from which it extracted genetic material. The genetic material was tested for a specific gene that made the 1918 influenza strain so deadly. Researchers who studied the genetic material concluded that (emphasis added), “Comparisons of this sequence with that of the 1918 pandemic virus suggest that the pandemic viral HA gene was not derived directly from an avian source.”

But did the disease spread from pigs to humans? The short answer is that nobody knows, and that it is just as likely that the disease spread from human beings to pigs.

The 1918 strain could definitely infect both humans and pigs, but the 1918 pandemic was the first time that swine influenza was recognized as a disease — this was something entirely new for both pigs and human beings. The swine influenza was isolated in 1930 and human form of the disease in 1933, and they were similar enough for researchers to conclude that they were essentially the same virus.

Dr. Richard D. Slemons, DVM at Ohio State University, writes of the question of how the pandemic started,

Since swine flu was reported as a new disease entity in pigs in 1918, it was further believed that the agent was originally transmitted from humans to pigs and subsequently became established in pigs. Retrospective serologic investigations provided further data supporting the belief that the same agent was responsible for the 1918 influenza outbreaks in humans and pigs. However, these data did not provide insight into whether the virus went from humans to pigs or vice versa. The question as to whether the virus originated in humans or pigs, or even another species and then jumped to both pigs and humans, remains unanswered.

Why can’t groups like PETA ever get even basic facts right?

Sources:

SARS: Another deadly virus from the meat industry. Michael Greger, April 13, 2003.

SARS Epidemic Caused by Meat?. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, April 2003.

Influenza: Past Clues Guide Future Defense. PulmonaryReviews.Com, January 2002.

History, Structure, and Function of Swine Influenza Virus. Richard D. Slemons.

Seeking the 1918 Spanish Influenza Virus. Jeffery K. Taubenberger, American Society for Microbiology, July 1999.

Origin and evolution of the 1918 “Spanish” influenza virus hemagglutinin gene. Reid AH, Fanning TG, Hultin JV, Taubenberger JK, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 1999 Feb 16;96(4):1164-6.

1918 Human Influenza Epidemic No Longer Linked to Birds. Smithsonian Institution, Press Release, August 2, 2002.

Researchers Produce Clone from Dead Endangered Cattle

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Researchers at the Advanced Cell Technology in Massachusetts took a giant leap toward one of the hallmarks of science fiction depictions of genetic engineering by producing two clones from cells of a banteng that had died years earlier.

Back in the late 1970s the San Diego Zoo began preserving cell and genetic material from animals. Tissue samples from animals were stored within plastic vials and then preserved in liquid nitrogen at -196 degrees Centigrade.

One of the animals that they took tissue samples from was the banteng, a wild species of cow of which there are believed to be only 8,000 individuals in existence, and most of those at a single place — the island of Java.

The San Diego Zoo sent tissues samples from the banteng to Advanced Cell Technology which fused the genetic material from the skin of the banteng into cow eggs that had already had their own genetic material removed. Another company, Trans Ova Genetics, then implanted 30 such eggs into cows. Of the 30 implanted eggs, only two resulted in live births, and one of those animals had to be euthanized shortly after it was born.

The second animal appears to be thriving, however, and at least provides a proof of concept that this sort of thing is possible. ACT had previously used much the same procedure to clone a wild ox a few years ago, but the only live birth from that experiment died only two days later. Italian researchers in 2001 reported they had cloned an endangered wild sheep.

The major question left now is assuming the cloned banteng survives to the breeding age of six, will he be able to mate and produce offspring.

Oliver Ryder, a geneticist with the San Diego Zoo’s Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species, told Reuters that, “The fact that it can happen at all just astounds me. . . . At the time we did not know how this resource might be used, but we knew it was important to save as much information about endangered species as we could.”

Conservationists had mixed feelings about the success of the experiment, with some lamenting that it wouldn’t do much good to clone banteng if their natural habitat were not preserved as well. Karen Baragona of the World Wildlife Fund told CBS News,

If you don’t deal with protecting habitat and dealing with the root causes of endangerment, it doesn’t matter how many animals you’re able to produce in a lab and try to sort of fling back into the wild, they’re going to face the same fate as their wild counterparts.

Sources:

Scientists clone long-dead animal. CBS News, April 8, 2003.

Endangered animal clone produced. The BBC, April 9, 2003.

Cat Torturer Pleads Guilty

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Matthew Kaczorowski, 21, plead guilty earlier this month for his role in the making of a videotape showing the torture and killing of a cat.

Kaczorowski made the tape along with Jesse Power, 22, and Anthony Wennekers, 25. Power and Wennekers were arrested back in 2001 and eventually plead guilty to charges stemming from the videotape, but Kaczorowski remained a fugitive for 18 months until his arrest earlier this year.

Kaczorowski was allowed to plea to a charge of mischief. His sentencing will not take place until the appeal over Power’s sentence is resolved. Power was sentenced to just 90 days in jail and 18 months house arrest. The prosecutor is appealing that light sentence to a higher court.

Wennekers was sentenced to time served and released after 11 months in custody.

Source:

Man pleads guilty in cat torture case. Nick Pron, Toronto Star, April 10, 2003.

Australia Considers Banning Popular Animal Antibiotic

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The Australian Pesticides and Veterinary MEdicinces Authority is proposing to ban the use of the antibiotic virginiamycin for purposes of promoting growth in chickens, pigs and cattle.

Virginiamycin is added as a supplement to feed where it increases the growth of animals as well as reduces mortality. Under the proposed change in Australia, the antibiotic could be used only to treat animal disease. The Veterinary Medicines Authority’s Tim Dyke said in a prepared statement,

Since a related antibiotic is now being used in human medicine we wish to avoid any livelihood of antibiotic resistance developing and affecting people . . . Canceling its use as a growth promotant in animals is the way to do this.

Whether or not the risk is real is debatable. An article currently in press for the Journal of Risk Analysis puts the potential benefit assuming the worst case scenario at less than 1 additional life saved in both the United States and Australia over the next 5 years from a total ban.

Interestingly, virginiamycin and similar drugs have already been banned in the European Union and there is some evidence that it led to a decrease in animal welfare and an increase in the use of other antibiotics. A study by the International Federation for Animal Health — which represents companies that manufacture vaccines, antibiotics and other animal health products found that,

The diminution [of the antibiotics banned by the EU] has, however, been at the cost of a deterioration in animal welfare. There have been reports of increased morbidity and mortality, for example among young pigs, mostly associated with enteric infections, in Denmark, and in poultry, again associated with enteritis, in France. This has driven, at least in part, a substantial increase in the use of therapeutic antibiotics in Europe – in Denmark from an overall 48 tonnes in 1986 to 94 tonnes in 2001. The main antibiotics involved in this increase have been tetracycline, mostly used in pigs, whose usage increased from 12.9 to 27.9 tonnes (a 106% increase), macrolides and lincosamides (7.6 to 14.3 tonnes, 88%), and aminoglycosides (7.1 to 11.9 tonnes, 68%). This has occurred despite attempts to improve other critical aspects of animal husbandry to make up for the loss of the growth promoters. Experience in Sweden suggest that this may eventually be partially effective but with an increased financial burden, but it is far from clear that this will apply to the whole of Europe where conditions are different from those of Scandinavia.

Pfizer, which manufactures virginiamycin unsuccessfully sued to have the European Union ban overturned. The EU ban was denounced as “contrary to scientific evidence” by a member of its own Scientific Committee for Animal Nutrition which in 1998 examined a Denmark study on the risks of virginiamycin and found it wanting.

Sources:

Outcome of discussions #14. Scientific Committee on Animal Nutrition, July 10, 1998.

NOAH regrets antibiotic ban. National Office of Animal Health, 1998.

The European ban on growth-promoting antibiotics and its consequences for animal and human health. International Federation for Animal Health, November 2002

Ban planned for animal antibiotic. AAP, April 6, 2003.

Animal Rights Activists Target Bullfighting in Barcelona

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The World Society for the Protection of Animals and Spain’s Animal Rights Defense Association are targeting Barcelona to convince the city to outlaw bullfight ahead of the 2004 Universal Forum of Culture which Barcelona will host.

The two groups commissioned a survey which found that 63 percent of respondents in Barcelona wanted an end to bullfighting. An earlier study commissioned by the two groups of attitudes about bullfighting in Catalonia as a whole found 94 percent of respondents favored outlawing bullfighting (neither survey is available online, however, so it’s not known exactly what questions the survey asked).

Manuel Cases of the Animal Rights Defense Association told Australian newspaper The Age,

At the end of the 19th century there were three bullrings in Barcelona, now there is just one left. That has bullfights on Sunday from May to October but mostly for people who come in tourist buses from the Costa Brava.

Philip Lymbery of the World Society for the Protection of Animals said in a press release,

Bullfighting is abhorrent to many people internationally. This new survey shows that the majority of people in Barcelona agree that bullfighting has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with cruelty. It is ironic then, that a city that allows over 100 bulls to be ritually tortured and killed as entertainment annually will next year host the Universal Forum of Culture. We therefore urge Barcelona to ban bullfighting and thereby avoid tainting the spirit of this international cultural event.

Catalonia’s animal welfare law forbids the fighting of animals but specifically exempts bullfights that take place on public holidays.

Bullfighting is popular in Spain in general, but not in the Catalonia region. According to the World Society for the Protection of Animals, for example, only about 100 bulls are killed annually in bullfights in Barcelona. This out of an estimated 20,000+ bulls killed annually in bullfights throughout the country.

Sources:

Survey reveals Spanish opposition to bullfighting in Barcelona. Press Release, World Society for the Protection of Animals, April 4, 2003.

Majority of people in Catalonia, Spain, opposed to bullfighting, according to a new survey released today. Press Release, World Society for the Protection of Animals, March 22, 2002.

Dolly to Go on Display

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Dolly, the world’s first cloned mammal, will go on display at the Royal Edinburgh this month as part of an exhibit celebrating the 50th anniversary of Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA and return again in September as part of a permanent display at the museum.

Dolly was born on July 5, 1996 and euthanized 6 years later after it was discovered that she suffered from a progressive lung disease. National Museums of Scotland director Dr. Gordon Rintoul told the BBC,

Dolly is a striking reminder of Scotland’s record of scientific achievement and her contribution can now be recognized for many centuries to come.

. . .

She will prove an important focus for future new science displays in the Royal Museum.

Dr. Ian Wilmot, who lead the team that cloned Dolly, said,

She will go on reminding people of the fact that scientific progress was made in Edinburgh which is making people think very differently about this aspect of biology.

It’s stimulating people to do research which one day will help to provide cells needed to treat very unpleasant human diseases.

Source:

Dolly goes on display. The BBC, April 9, 2003.