The Politics of Fat: “Anti-tobacco lawyer John Banzhaf is presently building more solid test cases against food corporations for knowingly selling products that are injurious to consumers’ health. Banzhaf will send a letter to McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken this month, demanding that they label their food as containing substances that may be as addictive as nicotine.

At the same time, there is talk of imposing a ‘fat tax’ and/or forcing manufacturers to put health warnings on certain foods, similar to the warnings on tobacco products. McDonalds is apparently feeling the pressure. They have recently issued a request to their meat suppliers to reduce the quantity of antibiotics in their meat, perhaps a pre-emptive measure, intended to demonstrate concern about the health impact of their products in case of future lawsuits.” AlterNet

“The government’s roundup and detention of U.S. citizens and immigrants perceived to be Arab, South Asian, or Muslim is likely fostering discrimination and prejudice above and beyond the impact of 9-11, say social psychologists.

The violent attacks of September 11 and their aftermath have created a real-world experiment for social scientists who usually develop their theories in university labs. Their research, much of which is still in progress, shows that the more positively people feel toward their country, the more likely they are to hold anti-Arab prejudices. Taken with statistical evidence of hate crimes and job discrimination, the new research suggests that while the shock of the attacks sparked bigotry against those associated in American minds with Islam, subsequent sweeping crackdowns, such as the government roundup and detention of Muslims, are sending ‘social signals’ that are worsening the biases.” The Village Voice

“A single viral protein causes behavioural changes in mice similar to those experienced by people with mental illness, reveals a study by Japanese researchers.

The effects of the protein, produced by a common pathogen called the Borna disease virus (BDV), may help scientists understand how viruses could contribute to psychiatric disease in humans.” New Scientist

In humans, evidence of infection with BDV is found in a vastly higher proportion of severely mood-disordered individuals than healthy controls. A ‘hit’ by being infected with BDV at crucial stages of CNS development appears necessary for the behavioral consequences. BDV affects not the neurons themselves but their support cells, the glia, disruption of whose functions disturb normal neural connectivity. That being said, it is a stretch to say that the behavioral changes seen in the mice in this study, in which a gene for a BDV protein was inserted into the genome and expressed in the mice’s CNS, are an analogue of human mental illness. All that can be said is that they produce generic behavioral changes. They are not a model for any specific human psychiatric disease, which is perhaps fitting, because no one can yet figure out with which human psychiatric disease BDV is supposed to be associated.

The Bush administration acknowledged for the first time yesterday that President Bush should not have alleged in his State of the Union address in January that Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Africa to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program.

The statement was prompted by publication of a British parliamentary commission report, which raised serious questions about the reliability of British intelligence that was cited by Bush as part of his effort to convince Congress and the American people that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction program were a threat to U.S. security.” Washington Post

I never even logged the news about the British parliamentary commission report. Ho hum — the intelligence used to convince the public was unreliable. The current item, on the other hand, is noteworthy because of the underlying, arrogant assumption that the time is right to deflect further criticism by admitting the deception… a safe assumption given that the White House has surely noticed there has been not one — count ’em, not one — bit of serious political fallout from the lies.

This study is by my medical school thesis advisor who was ahead of the game when I studied with her in the early ’80’s and now, twenty years later, continues to make groundbreaking contributions in the neural basis of child developmental difficulties. Two Types of Brain Problems Are Found to Cause Dyslexia:

One group appeared to have what the researchers called a ‘predominantly genetic type’ of dyslexia.

These students had gaps in the neural circuitry that the normal readers used for the basic processing of sound and language, but had learned to enlist other parts of the brain to compensate for the difficulty. They still read slowly but can comprehend what they read.

The second group had what the researchers called a ‘more environmentally influenced’ type of dyslexia. Their brains’ system for processing sound and language was intact, but they seemed to rely more on memory than on the linguistic centers of the brain for understanding what they were reading. These students had remained persistently poor readers, scoring poorly on speed as well as comprehension.

The two groups of poor readers were from similar socioeconomic backgrounds and had comparable reading skills when they began school, according to the study, which was published this month in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

But there were two differences: the students who compensated for their problems tended to have higher overall levels of learning abilities, and the students whose problems persisted were twice as likely to attend what the researchers called disadvantaged schools. NY Times

The central, and surprising finding here, is that the neural systems that subsume reading ability are intact in those with the persistently poorest reading performance. This is, essentially, an example of this society’s over-medicalization of social problems, leading to the misdirection of resources. Those with neurally based, probably genetically mediated, dyslexia will recruit compensatory brain circuitry to compensate for the deficits. Their brains will light up differently than a non-dyslexic’s on functional MRI scanning (fMRI) during reading tasks, and they will process more slowly, but they can read and comprehend, probably needing very little intervention. On the other hand, the persistently poor readers (my guess is that these are those most likely to be labelled as “dyslexics” in the classroom) might not properly deserve to be labelled with a medical diagnosis improperly imputing a neurological basis to their difficulties. Their brain lights up the same as a ‘normal’ reader’s on fMRI. They appear to have suffered for the lack of stimulation of their reading skills and the educational resources to compensate for lacking that headstart. The overreliance on memory — in other words, rote processes — is not the pathology, but the attempted compensation. If you lack the skills to figure out a new word, all you can do is try to recognize it from a repertoire of previously memorized ones. Unfortunately, the challenges of anything but simple children’s books swamp the capacity to read by rote.

In essence, most of the weighty reading problems in our society should probably not be called dyslexia in the medical, DSM-IV sense, although I suppose we might return to the literal meaning of the words, “impaired reading,” without implication of neurological deficit attached. While the study is extremely valuable, it is arguably one that points to the obsolescence of its own methods. Instead of throwing diagnostic labels, neurological consultations and fMRIs at these children, we should be throwing early intervention and other educational resources at disadvantaged children in whose social niches reading is undervalued and which are second-tier participants in society because of their seriously limited literacy skills.

Of course, equally or more absurd, even if the implications of Shaywitz’s study are taken to heart, and we stop diagnosing them as “dyslexics”, anyone who can’t attend to and comprehend the information presented to them in school these days for whatever reason gets diagnosed with “attention deficit disorder” instead (or in addition to dyslexia) and has stimulants thrown at them. Don’t get me started commenting on this harebrained craze.

Of course, learning can be neurochemically enhanced (New Scientist), but does that mean it should be?

Their Own Mental Health: “…(T)he medical profession, (15) authors contend in a recent article in The Journal of the American Medical Association, has been slow to accept that depression and other mental disorders are illnesses like any other, at least when they occur in its own members.

Many doctors fail to seek treatment for psychiatric conditions out of fear that doing so will damage their careers. And those who do get treatment can suffer very real professional penalties…

In the journal article, (the authors) , who gathered last October to discuss doctors’ mental health at a workshop convened by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, noted that the profession’s sluggishness in addressing the issue stands in contrast to its involvement in other public health problems.” NY Times

Neat segue to: Artist, Heal Thyself (and Then Everybody Else) NY Times

or just stupider? Boston Globe

Photojournalists Eye the War: “View hundreds of photos of the Iraq war and listen to 24 photojournalists describe the events.” Washington Post

What historian Charles G. Sellers said about Polk’s determination to go to war with Mexico remains true today: ‘The sobering fact is that. . . our representative institutions seem incapable of restraining a determined President from an unwisely aggressive foreign policy.’ — Joan Hoff, Research Professor of History at Montana State University and author of Nixon Reconsidered, Progressive Review

“The world is mourning the death of N!xau, southern Africa’s shy Khoisan (Bushman)….

N!xau, the star of the block-buster The Gods must be Crazy and the sequel, will be buried on July 12 in a tiny cemetery of his people at Tsumkwe in northern Namibia, where they live in the veld. He was found dead after going to look for wood.” News24, South Africa