Editor's pick: The perils of rescuing whales
You report mass whale strandings (18 February, p 7). In the late 1980s, I headed the response to 20 to 30 pilot whales beaching in Fort Myers, Florida. We had an experienced team and a veterinary student trying to assess and evaluate animals in the shallows. We decided to try to turn them all back to sea, got them moving and went for celebratory respite at a local eatery. There, we got another call that they had beached again not too far south.
We rushed there and, although the animals were obviously not in better shape, headed them back to sea. They restranded in the Florida Keys a day later and another team was called out to deal with them.
The repeated efforts were seen as wasteful and useless, although all we intended was to learn, collect data and improve such efforts in future. At the time, I lacked the public relations savvy to navigate the acrimony I received from managers and others in the field.
I still believe we need improved data collection on the animals' health and need to develop better hypotheses about why they strand.
When cuts come back to bite the cutter
You report encouraging news about the treatment of drug-resistant tuberculosis (18 February, p 6). Here in England, over the past five years.
But has our government thought through its policy of severely restricting access to the National Health Service by “foreigners”? This could lead to TB and other infectious diseases being propagated more widely.
First class post
This is definitely not proof of intelligence!
Dan Einon questions whether a bee that plays “golf” is something to be welcomed (4 March, p 20)
Rescuing Pluto as a full-blown planet
Michael Brown attempts to impose one view of the status of Pluto as if it were fact (4 March, p 24). The planetary scientists who support Pluto's planet status are not, as he describes, “a small but vocal group”. Neither did the 2006 decision he mentions to reject Pluto retaining its planet status involve a majority of astronomers. I believe only 4 per cent of the International Astronomical Union voted, and most weren't planetary scientists, but other types of astronomer.
Brown's claim that nothing about Pluto has changed since 2006 ignores the extensive findings of the New Horizons mission, which show Pluto to be a geologically living object with windblown dunes like those on Earth and Europa; flowing glaciers not seen anywhere else in the solar system besides Earth and Mars; tectonic forces; an internal heat source; cryovolcanoes; and even a possible subsurface ocean.
We can have a scientifically consistent definition of “planet” that includes numerous subcategories to account for both varying orbital dynamics and intrinsic properties.
Was Mars elsewhere when it had water?
Chelsea Whyte discusses why water on Mars still doesn't make sense (18 February, p 25). Is it not possible that 3.5 to 4 billion years ago, when Mars was both warmer and wetter, the planet was orbiting closer to the sun?
The editor writes:
• Several readers have asked this. Mars could indeed have been closer to the sun early in its history. But it must have been in its present orbit by about 4 billion years ago, when the water-carved features formed. After that time, there aren't any plausible mechanisms to move its orbit: the solar nebula would have long cleared out and really giant impacts would have ceased.
Humility in naming the Anthropocene period
Chelsea Whyte reports evidence of a new geological period – the Anthropocene – in minerals (4 March, p 11). But the comedic writer Douglas Adams in 1980 would be marked in the geological record by a thin dark line he called the Shoe Horizon, composed of highly compressed trainers.
I fear we aren't living in a new period, but witnessing the climax of a 10,000-year event that will end the Holocene. We could justifiably name this event the Anthropic Horizon. Call the coming age, epoch or period the Anthropocene if you must, but we aren't quite there yet and shouldn't suppose that it is likely to greatly feature our species. A scintilla of humility is called for, and naming of the next age is best left to whatever conscious entity may inhabit it.
Cholesterol, statins, diet and heart health
Michael Brooks quotes me saying that muscle problems from statins are more common in real-world practice than in clinical trials (11 February, p 28). Statins do cause muscle problems and in high doses slightly increase the risk of diabetes, but do not cause liver damage, nor the many other problems attributed to them.
While aching and cramps are fairly common (perhaps found in 25 per cent of patients), weakness and wasting of muscles is not. Often these can be avoided by reducing the dose of statin and adding ezetimibe, a drug that blocks absorption of cholesterol.
It is indeed complete nonsense to say it isn't proven that lowering cholesterol with statin drugs reduces the risk of heart attacks. It is also nonsense to say that lifestyle doesn't matter. Diet can reduce fasting cholesterol levels somewhat and can reduce the risk of heart attacks. However, it is true that cholesterol-lowering drugs are required to achieve the really low levels that markedly reduce coronary risk.
But the fasting level of blood cholesterol is not what diet is really about. The fasting cholesterol level is mainly produced by the liver overnight and is like a baseline – it tells us what arteries were exposed to for the last few hours of the night.
For about 4 hours after a high-fat or high-cholesterol meal, there is a marked rise in oxidative stress and the artery lining becomes sticky, twitchy and inflamed.
Statins lower the baseline level of cholesterol, but diet determines what happens on top of that for the 16 or so non-fasting hours. Both are important. One problem with studying the link between cholesterol, heart disease and statins in the US is that people's diets are so bad it is hard to show that anything is harmful. In 2015, the American Heart Association said that 0.1 per cent of Americans eat a healthy diet, and only 8 per cent a moderately healthy one.
Fighting infection and avoiding harm
I sympathise with Jane Plumb and other parents who are confronted with an infection with Group B Strep in their newborn (Signal Boost, 18 February). I understand why they would favour the introduction of a test for the presence of Strep B in pregnant women.
But according to the UK Office for National Statistics, there were approximately 700,000 live births in the UK in 2014. Plumb says some 100 of those end fatally or in life-changing disability due to Group B Strep, or one in 7000. If a quarter of pregnant women carry the bacterium, and all those testing positive were offered treatment, almost 175,000 women and fetuses would be exposed to antibiotics they would not need, to prevent those 100 cases.
In the same issue, you report on a study hinting at long-lasting effects of antibiotics in newborn mice, including lung disease and a weakened immune system (p 20). The author of that study went on to question the blanket use of antibiotics in caesarean sections, where only about 200 must be treated to prevent one bad outcome. Considerations such as these make me oppose blanket antibiotic treatment where statistics indicate little benefit to women or babies in general.
Altruism is for life, not just that heroic dive
Your leader article on “effective altruism” quotes philosopher Peter Singer as asking, since you would naturally save a drowning child even if you were wearing expensive clothes, why you would not donate the cost of the clothes to charity (25 February, p 5). This formulation omits an all-important factor: time.
In my 71 years, I have once saved a drowning child. I was clothed at the time. My son has saved one drowning child in his 33 years and was in the water already, so there was no sartorial cost.
Saving a child when clothed is likely to be, at most, a once-in a-lifetime happening. I would suggest that someone whose total lifetime donations to charity amounted only to the cost of a set of expensive clothes would be regarded as a veritable Scrooge.
My annual donations to charity well exceed my clothes budget, but then I am not a dressy person.
Is Trump playing clever after all?
So Allen Frances thinks Donald Trump is stupid (25 February, p 24). If you read some of Trump's books you will see that his outrageous and unpredictable behaviour is a deliberate and calculated ploy to promote brand Trump and become US president.
Too little money to be worth spending on space
The UK government is offering £10 million to promote UK-based space launches (25 February, p 7)? This is a waste of money because it is ridiculously little. Compare it with the expenses bill for the House of Commons, which runs to around £100 million a year.
For the record
• Arsenic levels in water in the Quebrada Camarones region of Chile's Atacama desert per litre (25 February, p 10).
• The ways in which the masked birch caterpillar signals include drumming with its mandibles and dragging its anal “oars” (4 March, p 19).
• Nerve agent VX would better be described as the most toxic synthetic chemical known (4 March, p 6).
• Larry Weiss is chief medical officer of US start-up AOBiome (4 March, p 22).