You ever wonder if that lineup of syrups, lozenges, and such-all at the drug store really has something to tame a cough? So do a lot of people. The Inquirer‘s Tom Avril has a consumer health story of the sort we don’t see enough. It doesn’t have the credulous tone of so much writing that blathers on about some or other therapy without offering a shred of evidence from skeptical-by-nature scientists that it might be hocum. He talks to various sources about a common ailment, touts no miracle cure or the cold-cough equivalent to a fad-diet or other empty verbiage. It turns out, says here, that while the cough is perhaps the most common ailment encountered (sniffly runny nose may exceed it) by humanity, it hasn’t gotten much research lately. But there is some, and it is interesting.

Reasons include that most ordinary coughs clear up and usually aren’t that bad in the meantime, hence don’t hold a lot of fascination for medical researchers. Plus, it can be tough to measure efficacy of an anti-cough strategy when the cough is so naturally erratic in its persistence. As Avril writes, making it even more slippery as a research topic is that people can, usually, decide to suppress a cough. Not always. I had a cough recently that lasted for weeks, a full-diaphragm explosion that rattled my airway and couldn’t be denied. But it vanished.

The gist here is that some research is underway, some new therapies may emerge, some old wives tales about what might work are being verified, and some strange treatments (aerosolized chile peppers?!) are getting a look. He cites a study indicating that plain honey, a spoonful, did more for hacking children than did a drug store cough syrup containing a time-honored ingredient (which did nothing at all).  This will be a very heavily-read story by parents in and around Philadelphia, one wagers.

- Charlie Petit

Fiber, groan...hey, heap on sugar and YUMMM!!!!

Some things that have a nice internal logic to them, data in support, and the public’s benefit topmost in mind are still so ludicrous-sounding off the top that some reporters can hardly wait to find outraged sources just to hear them cackle in derision. One need look no further for example than the opinion-piece letter to Nature from University of California, San Francisco, researchers who say processed sugar is so toxic, if one couches the definition carefully, and causing such vast harm that the feds should police its distribution. Regulate it like tobacco, or booze.Levy high taxes. Something anyway.

But first, one must recognize that a reporter and science writer, known for risk-taking themes in his writing and with a few duds (that he has not, as I recall, conceded to be duds) to his credit such as lambasting prions as myths, made the first big splash  last April: Gary Taubes in the NYTimes Magazine with the simple, “Is Sugar Toxic?”

The howling and parodies and giggling are already underway now that a significant journal has run an endorsement of Taubes’s general theme. First job is to cover the news straight.

Thus one finds :

• The San Francisco Chronicle – Erin Allday: UCSF scientists declare war on sugar in food ; She has a fine quote from one of the authors, one that’ll drive the anti nanny-state-society crowd to a frenzy: “Everyone talks about personal responsibility, and that won’t woerk here, as it won’t for any addictive substance. These are things that have to be done at a governmental level, and government has to get off its ass.” The story includes a totally non-scientific, and therefore irresistible, poll of the public’s pulse. So far, the majority says not to regulate it and a big subset agree with this variant: People should be free to poison themselves. Allday calls the cause of the news a paper in the journal, but it is clearly labeled as comment, equivalent to an op-ed piece even if it does come with footnotes.
• AFP – Time to tax sugar to combat health crisis: experts ;
• PostMedia news via Montreal Gazette -  Margaret Munro: A little sugar ‘is not a problem, but a lot kills – slowly’ ; Her first example of a suggested control: age limits to buy a Pepsi. 17 is suggested.
• Time Magazine – Bonnie Rochman: Should Sugar Be Regulated Like Alcohol and Tobacco? ;
• CBS – Lee Cowan: Regulate, tax sugar like alcohol, tobacco? ; News video embedded in piece.
• Guardian (UK) Alok Jha : Tax and regulate sugar like alcohol and tobacco, urge scientists ;
• Los Angeles Times – Karen Kaplan: Sugar can harm like alcohol and tobacco, regulate it: article says ;
• CNN – Laura Schmidt: Opinion: Why we should regulate sugar like alcohol ;

Here’s a big newsmaker, and yet one finds no press release on it from the UCSF Medical Center whence it came.

*UPDATE 1: Thank you to reader Kevin Eisenmann for the lede – there IS a Press Release from UCSF.

*UPDATE 2: In an NIH journal, Environmental Health Perspectives, writer Wendee Holtcamp has out an article that features one of the UCSF researchers, Robert H. Lustig, who wants sugar as food additive to get tight federal supervision. This story goes deeply into a lot more than mere sugar, and instead examines whether a wide range of ‘obesogens’ from natural and synthetic sources might be one reason so many Americans are overweight. Lustig is on an all-fronts campaign to try to get the needles on the scales to trend back down.

- Charlie Petit

Source: Lumosity/ http://tinyurl.com/87xe5td,

A paper in PLoS One, from researchers at Columbia University working under NIH grant, combined in at least one account with another due out from Harvard researchers, is  sending a buzz through the halls of medicine and on wires and news media as well.

The New York Times‘s Gina Kolata has it this morning it on the front page. Several other outlets, many of them international, picked it up. Her story is a superb explainer, introducing readers to the entorhinal cortex, a sub-organ where Alzheimer’s typically first becomes detectable to pathologists, and the new evidence for how it reaches the rest of the brain. Her first sentence captures the essence, declaring how it “seems to spread like an infection from brain cell to brain cell” as revealed in the two, independent studies with genetically altered mice. Kolata also is among the few, maybe she’s alone,  in having reference to a second paper with similar implications, not yet published, coming out of Harvard. She spoke with members of both teams. It might be interesting to know how she learned of the Harvard effort. Perhaps, as research groups going up an alley generally know who else is on the same trail, she simply asked the Columbia crew who else is working on it. Kolata has quotes from both members of both teams.

But you want a lede that captures the essence and potential power of the finding, as well as its challenges? Read Bloomberg‘s story from Elizabeth Lopatto. Her start: “Alzheimer’s appears to spread through the brain like poison in a river..”  Ooof. That’s a powerful image, but with just enough ambiguity that the metaphor does not battle with the study’s conclusions when expressed in plain language. Which is that if the study’s implications are correct, Alzheimer’s is not widely incipient with some regions more resistant than others. Rather, its agents move cell to cell, bringing with them all that is needed to get pernicious destruction underway.

The prime agent, as is universally reported, is an already-recognized protein associated with the disease,  called tau. The new study, or studies, find that it appears to seep along neuronal paths, synapse to synapse, forming intercellular tangles that invite further destruction by the better known neurofibrillary tangles and plaques around cells and composed of the protein beta amyloid.

The process is seen in genetically-modified mice, so far. Among things unclear in media accounts, perhaps because the researchers don’t know the answer, is whether all the tau that ultimately appears and clumps up in most of the brain’s important centers of thought and memory is manufactured in the entorhinal cortex and flows elsewhere, or alternatively its arrival triggers some change in affected cells that leads them to make more and in the form causing trouble? Does a little bit of loose tau act like a catalyst, prion-style, with a chemical cascade of tau-tangles? To fall back on the inevitable – more research is needed. More reporting, too.

Other Stories:

• Reuters – Julie Steenhuysen: Study gives new clues on how Alzheimer’s spreads;
  
• AFP: US study finds Alzheimer’s spreads like infection ;
• CBS healthpop – Ryan Jaslow: Alzheimer’s disease jumps across brain cells to spread like infection ;

No way to tell whether this news has legs for the near term, or the research will now go into a long. slow, non-newsy simmer while its implications are exploited, shown to be false, or otherwise peter out.

Just to remind us nothing is the last word. Other recent Alzheimer’s news samples:

• Scientific American blog – Gary Stix: Obama’s War on Alzheimer’s: Will We Be Able to Teat the Disease by 2025?; A smart look at the difference between policy goals and the scientific process.
• HealthDay – Mary Elizabeth Dallas: Same Genes Key to Early & Late-Onset Alzheimer’s ;
• Wall Street Journal – Shirley S. Wang: A New Target in Fighting Brain disease: Metals ;

Grist for the Mill: Columbia University Medical Center Press Release ; PLoS One Article ;

- Charlie Petit

A tricky story appeared in the news yesterday and this morning: The Susan G. Komen foundation has cut off funding for Planned Parenthood. The story, of course, lands right in the middle of the decades-long, highly contentious national debate over abortion. The mainstream media gave me the facts, but I couldn’t have understood the story nearly as well without help from bloggers, with their explicit, clashing points of view. On controversies like this, especially, the blogs are an essential complement to the mainstream media.

I backed into this story by first reading Barbara Feder Ostrov‘s overview in her blog for Reporting on Health. This is aimed at reporters, not general readers, but any general readers who stumble across it will get a solid introduction to the story with links to some good sources, including the AP story, which is what I clicked on first. David Crary‘s story began this way:

NEW YORK (AP) — The nation’s leading breast-cancer charity, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, is halting its partnerships with Planned Parenthood affiliates — creating a bitter rift, linked to the abortion debate, between two iconic organizations that have assisted millions of women.

The story is tricky already. Crary might have ended his lede by saying “two iconic organizations, one of which provides abortion services for the poor.” Depending upon which he uses, he risks being accused of leaning for or against Planned Parenthood’s involvement in abortion. There is probably no way out of that dilemma–he has to say something.

Crary goes on to report the alternate explanations for Komen’s decision. Planned Parenthood says the organization (formally known as Susan G. Komen For the Cure), succumbed to pressure from anti-abortion groups. Komen says it dropped funding because Planned Parenthood is under investigation by Congress. And Crary is careful to explain immediately what that “investigation” consists of–”a probe launched by a conservative Republican who was urged to act by anti-abortion groups.”

This is a solid piece, written by a skilled, veteran AP reporter. But it didn’t give me quite the feeling for the story that I got from bloggers, who have the freedom to express their opinions, speculate, and explicate. The Yahoo headline on Crary’s piece was “Cancer Charity Halts Grants to Planned Parenthood.” The headline on the Slate post by Amanda Marcotte was “Susan B. Comen’s Act of Cowardice.” Overlooking the copy-editing error (It’s Susan *G* Komen) (it was quickly corrected!), Marcotte lets you know where you’re headed before you start reading the body of the story.

Unlike Crary, she’s free to say she believes Planned Parenthood’s explanation for the withdrawal of funding. She also notes that Komen has not been terribly friendly to a lot of other fundraising organizations. On that point, she links to a December HuffingtonPost item by Laura Bassett, who reports that Komen has filed legal challenges to more than a hundred small charities that use “for the cure” in their names, including “Kites for a Cure, Par for The Cure, Surfing for a Cure and Cupcakes for a Cure.” Marcotte indicts Komen in a way that even most newspaper editorials and op-eds would shy away from.

She does, however, cross the line, in my view, when she refers to “the vast majority of American women” as examples of “the dirty fornicator.” When blogs are blunt, vulgar, and on point–they can be terrific. When they are blunt, vulgar, and add little to the story–they are just vulgar. Marcotte is trying to inhabit the voice of an abortion critic, or a rigid moralist, or something, but the line falls flat.

Bassett also wrote HuffPo’s story on the funding cutoff, focusing on its hiring of an anti-abortion advocate as vice-president. Bassett’s second graf:

Komen’s new vice president, Karen Handel, had run for governor of Georgia in 2010 on an aggressively anti-abortion and anti-Planned Parenthood platform and was endorsed by Sarah Palin because of her opposition to reproductive choice. Handel wrote in her campaign blog that she “do[es] not support the mission of Planned Parenthood.”

That’s a relevant point, and I didn’t find mention of Handel in the Yahoo version of Crary’s piece. Again, it’s a point an advocate would remember and hold in evidence, but not necessarily a point that a reporter would pick up in the rush to put out a spot story. (Bassett’s Twitter page identifies her as a “women’s rights enthusiast.”)

The Catholic News Agency, in a short spot story, adds another piece of interesting information that I didn’t notice elsewhere, although I might have missed it. Where Bassett portrayed the investigation of Planned Parenthood as a kind of vigilante action by an individual, the Catholic News Agency wrote this:

Planned Parenthood has been the subject of a federal investigation headed by Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) since last year.  The investigation was launched after the pro-life group Americans United for Life issued a report indicating financial irregularities and involvement in assisting those involved in sex-trafficking and prostitution.

That’s what I’d feel safe in calling a radically different description of the investigation. Crary mentioned the allegations of financial abuse, but not sex-trafficking.

I’m not going to resolve that question here. The truth is out there. I mention it only to underscore my point, that the blog and online news sources are a great complement to the stalwart AP.

Sometimes blogs are not only a complement to mainstream news, but a substitute, even on a reasonably big story like this. The Washington Post, from what I can see on the website, did not do its own story; it carried the AP story. (I don’t know whether the AP story appeared in the paper.) But while it didn’t find the story important enough to assign a reporter, it did run three–three!– blog posts:

Why Komen defunded Planned Parenthood, by Sarah Kliff;

Susan G. Komen’s funding cut to Planned Parenthood only latest in string of controversies, by Elizabeth Flock;

And Planned Parenthood will recoup, but will Komen? by Melinda Henneberger.

Take your pick.

- Paul Raeburn

At the Wall Street Journal Robert Lee Hotz extols new research into brain anatomy – especially new ability to capture the physical routes of neuronal communication. One can guess what went on in the reporter’s brain when one reads an evocative passage such as this in the story:  “..all cognition emerges from the interplay of electrochemical impulses along the brain’s circuity, which can call a word to mind, apply the rules of grammar, and voice it aloud in 600 milliseconds.” What’s going on is recognition that the story is important, possession of a general idea what the science is about, and no time for years in post-doc training to really get what the heck those neurons are doing. So one winds up writing about interplays of impulses and that’s fine. What else was Hotz supposed to do?

What makes the story is the pictures anyway. If there are images like these, one just knows that experts have to be learning something from them. Good job of handling a difficult topic. With the piece is Hotz’s sure-handed explanatory video. One learns that our thoughts are racing around through a ‘connectome’ . So that’s not you talking. It’s your connectome.

- Charlie Petit

Carl Zimmer has published at least two ebooks, although I don’t know where he found the time. That’s because he seems to have made a full-time career out of studying the ebook market, the apps, the publishers, and anything else possibly related to publishing ebooks. If you are at all interested in collecting and publishing those pieces that you rescued from a defunct magazine or website, you should see what he, and co-organizer Tammy Powledge, had to say.

Their list of resources can be found here. It amounts to a semester-long course in epublishing, and you couldn’t find better teachers.

If you’d like a little lighter reading, on a very important slice of the story, check out the post by Christopher Mims at Technology Review. He writes about The Atavist, which has created an ebook publishing platform that any of us can use to publish words, pictures, sound or video as an ebook formatted for Kindle, Nook, iBooks, and multiple other formats including simply publishing on the web.

- Paul Raeburn

Here’s something to take your worries and push them aside for you during a ponder on big things that matter in an abstract sort of way. At Reuters its new, New York-based senior health & science correspondent Sharon Begley goes through a list (not hers) of deep, elegant, or beautiful explanations in the science world.  She is a big name in the business. I had reason the other day to try to reach Begley and found myself striking out. Not at Newsweek, anymore, not at the Daily Beast. Ah, an announcement at her own site, which I just found but hadn’t found a few days back, explains that she’s switched jobs.

Begley  has a long interest in the brain and mind-sciences generally, so it’s no surprise the items on the list that caught her eye are  heavy on brain and life sciences. It does include a few others. The theory or relativity is on the list, as is the theory of evolution, and some others that transcend discipline such as the theory of emergent properties.

More important than Begley’s story, nicely done though it be, is her source – John Brockman, who posed the question at his Edge.com site, and posts all the answers from a dense swarm of heavy thinkers (and who credits the question, about theories, to one of our times’s big thinkers du joure, Steven Pinker). If you are unsure who John Brockman is, The Guardian‘s John Naughton just ran a profile of him under the hed the man who runs the world’s smartest website.

Brockman’s assembly of answers to the query is something to put aside for the next available, extended time for thoughtful, quiet browsing.

- Charlie Petit

Freelance writer Wendee Holtcamp – we’ve tracked several of her pieces here and have enjoyed them (examples here and here), currently has the most-read story on line at Miller-McCune Magazine. As is common in science journalism when a story takes off, it concerns something that everybody worries about: Their health and things that may threaten it. If a dreadful, high-profile disease is involved. so much the more readers. One cannot get much more insidious, mysterious, and disturbing than amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS, aka Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and other conditions that cause nerves to go progressively off line.

The story is a long and deeply-reported dive into the lab and history of a hypothesis -  it clearly and repeatedly says it is just a hypothesis – of possible metabolic derangement in human nerves due to a neurotoxin called BMAA. It is a natural product of cyanobacteria that can easily form enormous colonies (also known as blue green algae, although they are not algae) in soil, public waterways, and even reservoirs from which towns and cities draw tap water.

The merit of the story arises largely from the time she spent in the lab and company of Paul Alan Cox, the man most identified with suspicion that BMAA, an amino acid but not one of those from which DNA-ordered proteins are normally made, might bio-accumulate in some foods or even in some people.  The piece opens vividly with a visit to Yellowstone National Park and its wild, unearthly hot springs painted by sprawls of cyanobacteria. The park is not far from the Jackson Hole Laboratory where Cox, an accomplished botanist, a winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize, and a few colleagues pursue evidence that to make or break the case against BMAA.

It is no wonder this story is getting readers. While Holtcamp repeatedly assures them this is a suspected and not yet proven link, she also assembles the case for it. She describes a small but growing number of researchers looking into it, the accumulation of evidence in scientific papers, the disturbing spectre of this odd amino acid getting accidentally incorporated into human protein and causing all sorts of folding errors and other mischief. She shares her own growing worries that maybe the protein shakes she drinks are made with too much cyanobacteria. She reports that she took water from the reservoir near where she lives in Houston and mailed it to Cox for analysis. Uh oh. BMAA.

So, we have a story from a believer, or at least a strong suspecter, but an honest one. The caveats are here. It recognizes that the notion has strong critics. But there is no way to read if without concluding it is also an argument, if a subtle one, that one should worry about cyanobacteria that are nearly everywhere on Earth. One flaw in the piece is that it does not point out that if a potential cause is nearly ubiquitous, then it easily foments the common confusion of correlation with causation.

The story is new to many readers – as one gathers from the comments that accompany the story. So it ought also to have made clearer that the hypothesis has already received wide airing in popular media (it does tell them of a New Yorker Article). Holtcamp herself, one finds, has written on it before – although in a rather obscure publication, the July 2009 issue of Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine.  The photo top right is from one of Holtcamp’s blog posts, put up while she was researching the piece now at Miller-McCune. This is not some potential revelation only now emerging into the sunlight. Authorities have known about it for years.

For instance, ksjtracker posted less than a year ago on a similarly large feature story that ran in Discover Magazine, by Kathleen McAuliffe.

A search finds several other general media stories that have run over recent years:

• Scientific American (May 28, 2010) Katie Mosse: A Batty Hypothesis on the Origins of Neurodegenerative Disease Resurfaces ;
  
• Fosters Daily Democrat (Dover, N.H., June 18, 2009 ) Leslie Modica: Willand Pond plays part in ALS study: Bacteria examined for linke to Lou Gehrig’s Disease ;
• New Scientist (Aug 2, 2004) Michael Le Page: Dietary neurotoxin linked to Alzheimer’s ;
• Medical News Today (April 10, 2005) : Cyanobacteria (“blue green algae”) produce toxin with possible connection to neurodegenerative disorders ;
• Boston Globe (Sept 14, 2009) Terry J. Allen: Did a lake trigger a deadly disease? ;

It appears there has been and continues to be enough work on this idea that sooner or later medical science will get to the bottom of it. Your tracker notices no overt assertions that crackpots are involved in the core work. And as there is no industry I’m aware of making big money that would take a hit if the hypothesis is proven, there is reason to expect we’ll see no conspiracy-paranoid element among ALS and similar disease support groups of the sort that drove the vigilante-tinged activism around vaccinations and autism. One does hope the hypothesis holds water – it’d give focus to research into therapies for several severe and near-intractable diseases.

LATE AMENDMENT: I am reminded that the spirulina and blue green supplements industries do have something to worry about if the public starts thinking their products are assocated with neurodegenerative diseases.

- Charlie Petit

This week The Atlantic, accelerating away from its old persona as a  sharp but thoughtful monthly magazine with an East Coast Ivy League ethos and into the hurry-up-and-shock-me world of on line journalism, posted a story sure to foment loud arguments. Ari LeVaux, best known as a food columnist, dives spatchel-first into nutrition science and genomics under the provocative hed, The Very Real Danger of Genetically Modified Foods.

This exploration of the benefits and, more important, non-benefits of sneaking a few extra genes into familiar farm products is a stunner. Its pivot point is a recent paper from researchers at Nanjing University in China. They reported discovery of distinctive rice micro-RNAs, small regulatory proteins akin to but different in function from messenger RNA, in the blood and tissues of people who had eaten rice. That the rice’s micro-RNAs could reach the gut and make their way more or less intact to other organs is pretty interesting. LeVaux leaps from that finding to declare, largely without endorsement by outside experts, that this means introducing foreign DNA into foods we eat – things like frog proteins expressed in bananas which I just made up as an example – carries the risk of scattering through our bodies micro-RNAs that our species does not normally encounter. Maybe they’d derange expression of our own DNA in ways that are unhealthy. We are not only eating food, the article reveals, but “information” from modified DNA. Say what?

Ingestion of unexpected micro-RNA could in some cases maybe screw something up, right? But does this equal a “very real danger” as the hed promises? One thinks, reflexively, No. That is, the harm hardly seems likely to make much if any difference in total risk, given the oodles of regular food we eat along with all the micro-RNA they must be packing. One is not even sure whether a stretch of transpecies DNA in food comes with its own platter of microRNA. Aside from that,  grains and ice cream and lots of stuff have, already and yuck, insect parts and pollen and other things in them that just got caught up in the industrial food chain. They have DNA too. Maybe we’re lousy with foreign, random micro-RNA as it is. The Atlantic story has the smell of inflammatory nonsense, but this is just intuition talking.

Fortunately (for me), your tracker need not try to sort all that out. At least one, more qualified blogger has already done that. It is a pleasure to give her a shout out.

At The Biology Files, Emily Willingham blasts away under the hed, Why did The Atlantic publish this piece trying to link miRNAs and GMOs? MicroRNAs, this biologist and writer reports, are a newly-discovered, biological wonder. And are powerful actors in metabolism. But other than that, she finds nothing in the Chinese study that supports several of  the more startling assertions in the Atlantic story. She writes that, while trying to find backing for the headline on that story, she found herself “distracted by how poorly the article presents the science itself.” Not only that, but while the article’s passages and headline deks declare that new research even sheds light on such goofiness as explaining how herbal medicines function, there is nothing in the research paper or elsewhere to explain that, she tells her readers.

It’s possible that further research into miRNA associated with GMOs will show them to pose a distinctly different sort of hazard than all the other miRNA we’ve been living with for eons. But after reading Willingham’s discourse, the odds seem long, and the case surely has not been make in the pages of The Atlantic.

A second shout out of gratitude to science writer blogger  Keith Kloor, who saw Willingham’s post and brought it to my attention. His post is at Collide-a-scape.

Finally, not all bloggers are condemning the Atlantic article. At Grist, food and ag writer Tom Laskawy, who often tosses brickbats at the food industry, welcomes it. He writes that Levaux in the Atlantic may have mixed up some of the science, but that microRNA may be an even bigger problem than Levaux realized. MicroRNA, Laskawy frets, is not merely a side effect of GMO, but is central to some of the deliberate strategies of biotech companies and their plans for new, designer food and tools to protect food from pests. “Its entirely possible,” he writes, “that microRNA meant to target a specific insect gene will also have an effect – possibly unpredictable – in humans.”

*UPDATE: This is encouraging. Again, thank you Keith Kloor (see his own update post) and others for the tips: The author of the Atlantic article has tweeted a message to critic Willingham re her analysis: “Thank you for that. And for your other comments. I’m re-writing the piece with corrections.”

- Charlie Petit

I’ve written here before about the curious case of yoga and The New York Times. The Times often seems both obsessed and confused about yoga, as I wrote in 2010 when the Times published five stories on yoga in one week.

Now the Times weighs in, in this week’s upcoming Sunday magazine, with a piece by veteran Times science writer William J. Broad entitled, “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body.” If you suspect that this story might not be fair and balanced, you are correct.

The Times could run a similar headline on almost any form of physical activity. It might commission a piece called “How Running Can Wreck Your Knees,” or “How Tennis Can Wreck Your Elbow,” or “How Moving A Refrigerator Can Crush Your Toes, Break Your Back, and Rip Your Rotator Cuff.” But the story it did was on yoga.

The piece is adapted from Broad’s new book, “The Science of Yoga: The Risks and Rewards,” to be published next month by Simon & Schuster. Compare the titles of the book and the article: A book about the risks and rewards of yoga (I haven’t seen the book) might be expected to say a lot about how it can be both harmful and helpful. The Times magazine editors, however, focused only on the risks; the excerpt says little about the rewards, except to claim that they are often overstated.

The magazine excerpt notes, in the setup near the top, that “Among devotees, from gurus to acolytes forever carrying their rolled-up mats, yoga is described as a nearly miraculous agent of renewal and healing.” That makes the criticism easy. It’s much easier to argue that yoga is not nearly miraculous than to discuss the risks and rewards, which would likely have resulted in a more accurate story.

We then hear about a yoga student who had trouble walking after remaining in a particular yoga position “for hours a day.” Well, sitting in an office chair for hours a day has adverse health consequences, too. Is Broad demolishing yoga on the basis of the experiences of a fanatic?

But wait, there’s more. Next we hear about a 28-year-old woman who had a stroke while practicing another yoga position. Frightening, right? But Broad had to reach back almost 40 years to find that example–it happened in 1973. If yoga caused one stroke in 40 years, that’s probably far fewer than occurred among people sitting in chairs during that same time.

We hear a few more extreme examples, and I begin to wonder if some Times magazine editor who thinks yoga is a superstition or faded fashion trend wants to rid the world of this scourge–and to do so by terrifying Times readers.

I do not approach this subject without biases of my own. I’ve practiced yoga for nearly a decade, at many different studios, and my experience is that most yoga teachers encourage moderation. Yoga, in my view, is neither “nearly miraculous” nor is it especially dangerous, particularly when compared to other sports. (How many of last November’s New York marathon runners found they couldn’t walk after completing the race?)

I would say the Times story is silly, but I’m afraid many readers will take it seriously and be needlessly frightened.

Can we look for a follow-up story in the Times magazine on the rewards of yoga, the other part of Broad’s book?

I’d say that’s unlikely. The Times doesn’t appear to be interested in the science of yoga. It seems to be interested in slaying a dragon.

- Paul Raeburn

Sometimes serious news comes along with a nagging distraction that puts a hitch in effort to take it soberly at face value. So here it is: Science’s editors today revealed they have withdrawn a 2009 paper on detection of a retrovirus in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome. One of the authors: Vince Lombardi. Actually one does not know his nickname, but the name is Vincent C. Lombardi. Either way one has difficulty not, briefly, smirking over the late-coach Lombardi’s little-known involvement in biomedical studies.

Doubts about the paper have circulated almost since it was published. Those who follow medical news closely, especially the grassroots patients advocacy wing, know about the background. In a statement over the name of editor-in-chief Bruce Alberts, the journal says it has “lost confidence” in the original report due to poor quality control in key aspects of the reported research, and failure of other groups to replicate the finding of elevated xenotropic murine leukemia virus in people with the condition.

The paper ran in October, 2009, with Lombardi the lead author in a group at the Whittemore Peters Institute in Reno, Nevada.

Some outlets already have stories up. Several note that the affair is not simple. Retraction by the journal came despite objection by some of the authors. The events leading up to it have already had surprising consequences, including the arrest of one author, since fired by the institute, who refused to sign the retraction and is being sued by her former employer for alleged coverup of data:

• AP – Malcolm Ritter: Study linking virus and chronic fatigue retracted ;
  
• Medpage Today – John Gever: Journal Retracts Paper Linking Mouse Virus to CFS;
• Wall St. Journal – Katherine Hobson: Science Retracts Paper on XMRV-Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Link
• Bloomberg-Business Week – Elizabeth Lopatto: Science Journal Retracts Paper Linking Fatigue and Virus ;
• ScienceInsider – Jon Cohen: In a Rare Move, Science Without Authors’ Consent Retracts Paper That Ties Mouse Virus to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome ; Also see, Civil Court Rules Against Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Researcher ;
• Ars Technica – John Timmer: Paper linking XMRV to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome finally retracted ;

The events public history was recounted in Science in September by  Cohen and Martin Enserink;

- Charlie Petit

Marshall Allen at ProPublica has written a heartbreaking story about a woman whose husband died suddenly and mysteriously in a hospital. An autopsy failed to determine the cause of death, and the case has been tied up in litigation for years.

It’s a good story, but what I’m interested in here is an innovation that ProPublica developed for this story–something called Explore Sources. It allows a reader to click on any highlighted portion of the story to see a small pop-up with the original document that supports that highlighted section.

For example, Allen writes, near the top of the story, “…at about 5 a.m., a phlebotomist entered Jerry’s room to draw blood and found him lying across the bottom of his bed…” If you read the story with “Explore Sources” turned off, you don’t see anything unusual. But if you go to the top of the story and click “Explore Sources: ON,” you see yellow highlights throughout the story. In this sentence, the words “found him” are highlighted. Click on them, and you see a pop-up with an excerpt from a legal document with testimony about how the body was found.

Further, if you click on the pop-up, you go to the entire legal document. Or you can simply close it and keep reading.

Al Shaw, a ProPublica applications developer, explains on ProPublica’s Nerd Blog how he did it. Allen had uploaded 64 documents that he used for the story to DocumentCloud, where they could be annotated and accessed online. He annotated the sections he was using, and was able to link them to appropriate parts of the story. This involved a lot of programming and the cooperation of DocumentCloud (another innovation you should take a look at).

Explore Sources is a fascinating experiment, and I’m all for experiments. But I’m not sure Allen and Shaw have hit on the right formula yet. Reading the story, I felt a bit like a fact-checker. I trust that ProPublica does a good job of checking facts, and I’m not sure I need to see the original source for everything in the story. If I were a competing news organization trying to match the story, this would be a huge help. But I don’t think that’s what ProPublica had in mind. And much the same kind of thing is done with links, although, as ProPublica points out, links take readers away from the story.

I would like to have Explore Sources for what I think are questionable stories, but the writers of such stories are not likely to be eager to show where they got their “facts.”

But Allen and Shaw are on to something here. I’d love to see them try it with a story that relies on scientific documents, of the kind that many of us deal in every day. And I’d like to see them make Explore Sources available to others, if that’s technically possible without a lot of programming.

I consider Explore Sources to be a work in progress. And I’m eager to see where it leads.

- Paul Raeburn