Women's Implant Support Newsletter ~ December 30, 1999

Date: Thu, 30 Dec 1999 06:47:51 -0800

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Breast Implant Case Nearing End

Thank you Angel for sending us the info. It's greatly appreciated!

Updated 4:51 AM ET December 29, 1999

(NEW ORLEANS) -- A U-S Bankruptcy judge has ruled that Dow Corning's 113-thousand breast implant plaintiffs can sue the parent companies, Dow Chemical and Dow Corning, separately. That means 18-hundred Louisiana women who say their breast implants left them sick may see compensation soon since they already had a ruling against Dow Chemical. That 1997 court case revealed alleged evidence that Dow Chemical officials tried to hide information that the implants were unsafe.

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Study: Stroke Drugs May Help MS

Thank you Angel for sending this our way!

December 29, 1999

WASHINGTON (AP) - Experimental drugs being tested as stroke treatments may have the potential to treat multiple sclerosis, too, new research suggests. At issue is an amino acid called glutamate, which in tiny amounts is vital to brain function but in large amounts is toxic.

Strokes cause too much glutamate to leak into the brain, thus killing brain cells. Drug companies are testing medicines that aim to prevent that damage.

Now studies with mice at New York's Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Britain's Eisai London Research Laboratories suggest glutamate also is a culprit in multiple sclerosis - and the experimental stroke drugs might help.

About 1 million people around the world suffer MS, which causes recurrent muscle weakness, paralysis and other problems. It occurs when immune cells go awry and attack myelin, the insulation for nerve fibers, in the brain and spinal cord.

Immune cells release brain-damaging amounts of glutamate, said Einstein neurologist Dr. Peter Werner. That doesn't cause MS' damage but does worsen it, he said.

He induced a type of MS in mice. Half received a laboratory chemical that blocks glutamate from binding to brain cells. Those mice had less severe MS symptoms than untreated mice, and the chemical also appeared to protect myelin-producing cells from further damage, he reports in the January issue of Nature Medicine.

The laboratory chemical is not a candidate for human use, but Werner hopes to test whether experimental glutamate-inhibiting stroke drugs could produce the same effect in animals - a key step before testing could begin in MS patients.

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HOW RELIABLE IS SCIENCE INFORMATION ON THE WEB?

December 16, 1999

Nature 402, 722 (1999)

Eva S. Allen, John M. Burke, Mark E. Welch, and Loren H. Rieseberg of the Department of Biology, Indiana University, 1001 E. 3rd Street, Bloomington, Indiana 47405, USA, write that until recently, the dissemination of scientific information has largely been regulated by publishers via peer review and by librarians through their purchases of journals. With the advent of the World-Wide Web, however, these authors state that the publication of science has been democratized. Although this 'deregulation' will speed the flow of valuable information around the world, a negative side effect may be the increased exposure of students and the public to misleading or biased science, or to opinion masquerading as science. Here, the authors report on the overall reliability of websites that purvey scientific information.

The authors conclude that although the web is increasingly used as a source of scientific information, the quality of the information provided by many of the most easily accessed sites is poor. To gain an understanding of the quality of information on the web, the authors performed searches for the terms 'evolution' (EV), 'genetically modified organism' (GMO) and 'endangered species' (ES) using Northernlight.com, the search engine with the broadest reported coverage of the web1.

The first 500 websites retrieved for each topic were examined sequentially by two referees until each had independently reviewed approximately 60 sites containing information pertinent to the topic. These informative sites were scored as 'inaccurate' if they contained information that was factually incorrect, 'misleading' if they misinterpreted science or blatantly omitted facts supporting an opposing position, and 'unreferenced' if they presented information without any peer-reviewed references.

For EV, only 12% (59 of 500) of the websites examined were considered informative by both referees. For GMO and ES, 46% (64 of 140) and 28% (55 of 200) of sites, respectively, were considered informative. Of informative sites, the proportion that were judged inaccurate ranged from 10% for GMO to 34% for EV. Likewise, the proportion of informative sites scored as misleading ranged from 20% for ES to 35% for EV. A much higher proportion of sites were unreferenced (more than 48% for each category), but the presence or absence of references does not necessarily correspond with the other scores.

The authors conclude that their results indicate that science-related websites have serious liabilities. Many sites purporting to contain science are simply presentations of opinion or social commentary. And the presence of peer-reviewed citations, normally a sign of reliability, does not necessarily reflect the quality of the information presented. One promising strategy for such users is the exploitation of recently established portals that provide links to sites that have been reviewed by scientists for accuracy, relevance and currency2-4. These portals, if widely used, also offer a means of establishing peer review as the guiding principle for evaluating science on the web5.

References

1. Lawrence, S. & Giles, C. L. Nature 400, 107-109 (1999). Links

2. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

(4 October 1999). Links

3. SciCentral.

(4 October 1999). Links

4. Science NetLinks.

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