Gulf microbes not as oil-hungry as suggested?

Microbes may not be degrading subsurface plumes of dispersed BP oil as quickly as federal researchers suggested and oil is settling on the Gulf seafloor from plumes treated with dispersant chemicals, researchers report in the journal Science:

A report released last week by a group of federal agencies led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration stated—without documentation—that early signs show the oil is “biodegrading quickly.” Not so in the southwest plume in late June, the WHOI researchers found. Their measurements of oxygen dissolved in seawater, which bacteria consume as they feed, showed that microbes had not appreciably degraded the oil during its first 5 days out of the well.

Despite the new findings, oceanographers don’t yet have a complete picture of subsurface oil. The mass of oil in the southwest plume surveyed in late June “doesn’t hold a candle to the plume we saw” to the southwest in May, says biogeochemist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia, Athens. And then there’s the plume to the northeast, toward the Florida panhandle. In a close-in survey, the WHOI group found it to be the lesser of the two plumes. But Joye says that at other times researchers have found the northeast plume to be five times as massive. And this week, researchers from the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg led by chemical oceanographer David Hollander announced the first observation of oil droplets from a plume settling to the bottom of the gulf. Apparently, the northeast plume was massive enough to lay down a carpet of oil droplets off of West Florida.

The implications for the Gulf food chain, and the safety of Gulf fish for human consumption, remain unclear. But the emerging picture certainly seems less rosy than early federal reports suggested.

WHO, big pharma and the flu pandemic ‘that never was’

An investigative journalist I met a few years ago was fond of saying of conflict-of-interest stories, “a noun is not a story.”

But the 2009 flu pandemic — christened “the pandemic that never was” by UK labor MP Paul Flynn — may offer a case study in why exposing such conflicts is a central mission of the fourth estate.

The World Health Organization (WHO) announced in June 2009 that “the 2009 influenza pandemic” was underway, with ominous allusions to the 1957 Asian flu pandemic that killed 4 million worldwide.

Governments fell over themselves to stockpile H1N1 vaccines and antivirals like Tamiflu and Relenza for citizens who fell ill.

But 4 million didn’t die. Fewer than 16,000 did.

That’s certainly a tragedy, but it was no global catastrophe.

And a good thing, too: by December 2009, BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal), true to its muckraking roots,  was questioning the efficacy of Tamiflu against not only H1N1 but all strains of influenza.

But the WHO’s false alarm was, for some — including, perhaps, members of WHO’s secret influenza Emergency Committee — a tremendously profitable overstatement of the threat.

An estimated $6.9 billion was spent on H1N1 vaccine purchases, for starters.

Scientists skeptical about BP oil plumes ‘vanishing’ from Gulf

Non-government scientists are expressing skepticism about reports that BP’s huge mixed plumes of oil and oil-dispersant chemicals have vanished from the Gulf, the ProPublica‘s Marian Wang reported Tuesday.

Wang’s compilation of quotes from media reports:

“These are just what we call WAGs — wild-a– guesses,” Rick Steiner a retired University of Alaska professor, told the Times.

“I’m suspect if that’s accurate or not,” Ronald Kendall, director of the Institute of Environmental and Human Health at Texas Tech University, told McClatchy Newspapers.

“There is a lot of uncertainty in these figures,” Lousiana State University professor James H. Cowan Jr. told McClatchy.

“If an academic scientist put something like this out there, it would get torpedoed into a billion pieces,” Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia, a leading scientist on this spill, told The New York Times.

“This is a shaky report. The more I read it, the less satisfied I am with the thoroughness of the presentation. … There’s some science here, but mostly, it’s spin,” Florida State University professor Ian MacDonald told The Associated Press.

Some in the scientific community did find the report plausible. Louisiana State University emeritus professor Ed Overton peer-reviewed the report and told the AP he thought it was mostly good work, though he was uncomfortable with the precise percentages about the amount of oil left in the Gulf.

Paint, bladder cancer and implausible deniability

I’ll be reporting this week at epiNewswire (epinews.com) that the IARC has concluded painting represents an occupational risk factor for bladder cancer — a particularly brutal malignancy that killed my father nearly a decade ago.

The IARC’s meta-analysis included data from 41 studies and represents more than 2,900 painters diagnosed with (or whose death certificates mentioned) bladder cancer.

The association between painting and bladder cancer held across genders, continents, time and study designs — seemingly compelling support for IARC’s causal inference.

Add paint to the list of exposures that may have contributed to my father’s demise: solvents he used as a Cold War electronic technician, the tobacco he consumed by the pipe and pack for 40 years, his lifelong love of alcohol in the form of red wine, the elevated arsenic levels in his town’s municipal water, the solvent and adhesive fumes he consumed leather working and gun smithing, and indulging my brief childhood obsession with model cars.

(Ironically, my father died with a cancer-free bladder. But by the time the oncologists at UC Davis Cancer Center had expertly cut and poisoned the tumors from his bladder, it had already spread to his liver, lungs and brain.)

The impossibility of knowing which combination of occupational and environmental exposures robbed my sons of the chance to know their grandfather, speaks to the central frustration of epidemiologists tackling the underlying causes of individual environmental cancer clusters.

To the delight of polluters’ defense attorneys, epidemiologists rarely enjoy the statistical power to definitively implicate a single chemical exposure in a given cancer cluster.

Most clusters occur in communities facing numerous assaults, not a lone bad actor. The failure to convincingly identify a clear cause in most clusters has fueled the CDC’s implausible dogma that clusters rarely, if ever, really exist.

Those with something to lose typically try to further complicate the statistical power problem by insisting on narrow case definitions. The U.S. Navy, for example, argued that myeloid (red blood cell) leukemias and myelodysplastic syndrome cases should not be considered in health officials’ study of the Fallon, Nevada childhood leukemia cluster (home of the Navy’s TOPGUN air base), because most case children were diagnosed with acute lymphocytic (white blood cell) leukemia. (Health officials included one case of AML in the study. Several other childhood cancers, including bone cancer, and a half-dozen teenagers diagnosed with idiopathic thrombocytopenia at the time of the leukemia cluster in tiny, rural Fallon, were excluded from the study, however.)

Of course, the seemingly clearest-cut cases rarely make it to the annals of public epidemiology. They’re locked away in court-sealed settlement papers.

I have been told about a bladder cancer cluster among five factory workers who’d shared a discrete workplace exposure to benzene, involving a inhalation of significant levels of benzene during a single day’s shift at work, when the men worked together to clean out a large chemical holding tank.

Within a decade, all five had developed transitional cell carcinoma of the bladder — the same form of bladder cancer that killed my father.

But who knows what other exposures they shared at that plant over the course of their careers.

Coffee’s cheaper: the problem with pharmaceutical brain doping

I reported bad news for brain dopers today: unless you’re a lab rat facing a particularly challenging maze, off-label ‘doping’ with modafinil, methylphenidate or other psych drugs for ‘neuroenhancement’ doesn’t likely offer additional IQ points after all.

Short-term spatial memory — unlike focus or long-term alertness — does seem to benefit from doping, though even this effect is modest. But the German government-funded studies found precious little support for most of the other, much-hyped supposed cognitive benefits of brain doping.

On the upside (I suppose) was the team’s finding that too little data exists to conclude that significant adverse health effects exist for off-label users of these drugs. So whether or not users are compromising their long-term health remains a blissful unknown for those who are determined to engage in neuro-doping.

Still, coffee’s a hell of a lot cheaper than a prescription pill habit.  So why are so many users — including a sizable proportion of scientists — convinced they benefit from ‘brain doping’?

One possible answer noted by the studies’ authors: modafinil users tend to over-estimate their cognitive abilities in post-test self assessments. The drug may boost self-confidence without elevating IQ.

Full disclosure: I reported on the study while getting a fix of my own neuroenhancement drug of choice: a red eye Americano with two shots of espresso.

See epiNewswire for the entire story.

Did oil-gobbling bacteria rid the Gulf of BP’s submarine oil plumes?

Interesting report in New Scientist this morning, suggesting massive undersea oil-and-dispersant plumes may have rather suddenly “disappeared” — and that the rapid growth of marine hydrocarbon-gobbling bacteria may be responsible:

“We can’t find oil at the surface and, as of this week, we cannot find it deep down either,” says Terry Hazen, a microbial ecologist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, whose research has focused on the area within 100 kilometres of the wellhead.

Hazen thinks he can explain why the plumes are gone. He had previously collected water samples from inside and outside of the plumes, which he kept at 4 °C – the coldest temperature along the floor of the Gulf. Within days, he found that the microbial populations in the samples began to shift in favour of those able to break down oil. The findings tally with those of other ecologists working in the field. Hazen also found that the oil disappeared faster still in the presence of Corexit 9500A, the dispersant used by BP in the Gulf waters.

Oil-eating bacteria in the Gulf’s deeper waters may have reacted so fast thanks in part to being primed by natural oil seeps along the sea floor. All things considered, and given that oil stopped flowing two weeks ago, says Hazen, it is not surprising that the plumes are now largely gone.

Read New Scientist’s full report:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19264-gulf-oil-slick-in-disappearing-trick.html

Tracking cancers in ‘cancer alley’ may get a bit easier

The Louisiana Tumor Registry took a hell of a hit after Katrina, with hospital records lost to the storm, and administrative chaos and staffing challenges persisting years later.

Now the registry, which in theory documents every cancer diagnosis in the state, has received a seven-year, $12 million contract to remain part of the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI)’s national network of registries.

The NCI’s Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) program consists of 18 registries covering about 26 percent of the U.S. population. SEER data is the basis for national cancer rate estimates and trends, a vital tool in cancer control policy-making.

Louisiana’s registry is based at the LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans School of Public Health.

EPA announces new BP oil spill toxicity test results

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced Monday results from its second round of tests of oil-dispersant toxicity.

The agency announced in June that dispersants, including the brand used by BP to break up oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill, are minimally toxic to shrimp and fish.

Today, they announced that when combined with BP spill crude oil from the gulf, all eight dispersants tested were more toxic. But that may simply be due to the high level of toxicity of the crude oil itself.

Read more at epiNewswire.

Stigmatizing victims: the Army’s dubious new take on soldier suicides

In the face of record suicide rates last month, the Army brass is returning to a familiar, Bush-era explanation for the problem. No longer claiming soldier suicides are not a real problem or that suicide rates are driven by a bad economy, Army vice chief of staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli and other officials are telling reporters the soaring suicide rates are due to soldiers’ personality defects and “lack of discipline.”

Chiarelli knows better.

An internal Army study identified earlier this year a strong association between combat unit deployments and suicide rates, and a growing association between PTSD and suicide. The study found increasing numbers of soldiers killing themselves stateside — as officials were quick to tell the news media — but unmentioned was the study’s finding that many of those soldiers had previously attempted suicide while deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.

For a few brief months after being told in March of that association, Chiarelli stopped telling reporters there was no link between the wars and military suicide rates.

He didn’t release the study or describe its findings, mind you. (Nor was it the first Army suicide study to fall victim to MEDCOM’s instinct to put PR-minded censorship ahead of disseminating scientific research.)

Nor did Chiarelli apparently thank the study’s authors for finally identifying a concrete risk factor for soldier suicides.

Instead, Chiarelli is described the study as a “political hot potato,” according to an Army briefing memo.

Not long after that cool reception, Army epidemiologists dutifully reanalyzed their findings, using unspecified additional statistical techniques. Lo and behold: the association between combat deployments and suicide rates magically disappeared. The authors of the revised study did not report the statistical details or name the statistical tests utilized in the follow-up analysis.

Now, Chiarelli’s back to downplaying any association between combat and suicide.

His office was busy last week stigmatizing suicidal soldiers and arguing the suicide rates are driven by their “lack of discipline.”

Soldiers’ drinking and recklessness account for soaring suicide rates, he said. Commanders have failed to identify and monitor soldiers who are “prone to risk-taking,”  causing suicide rates to jump.

Some soldiers join up seeking the risk-taking of combat tours, his office told reporters — a less than subtle allusion to pre-existing personality disorders.

“We lose track of some of those high-risk soldiers,” Chiarelli told reporters Thursday.

(Expect to soon see PTSD routinely misdiagnosed as preexisting personality disorders again.)

The news media, by and large, ate that up and reported uncritically on Chiarelli’s latest “findings.”

Last year’s 160 suicides by active-duty soldiers, 146 deaths due to drug abuse and drunk driving and 1,700 attempted suicides, were due to lapses in spit-shine discipline, they dutifully reported.

But dangerous driving behavior, suicide attempts, drug abuse — these are all symptoms of PTSD and brain trauma.

Seems like that should’ve figured into the headlines last week.

The Army’s just kicking this can down the road, as they did with screening for combat vets’ brain injuries.