Water water everywhere

Via Les the Stupid Evil Bastard, another article debunking the myth that people are chronically dehydrated and need to drink at least eight glasses of water a day.

Myths have consequences, and this myth leads to an absolutely enormous market in bottled water: $7.7 billion in the USA in 2002. In Australia, consumers bought 520 million litres in 2004, and at a growth rate of 20%, that's probably passed a billion litres this year. The water has to come from somewhere: often it's merely tap water stuck in a fancy bottle, but it's often shipped great distances, increasing the environmental harm done by the manufacture of all those billions of one-use-only throw-away plastic bottles. And it frequently doesn't make economic sense either: the water companies have enough muscle to distort the market. For example, in the middle of a long-lasting drought in Victoria, a subsidiary of Coca-Cola has a permit to buy aquifer water at one quarter of one percent of the market rate for water: $2.40 per megalitre, compared to $960 per megalitre for tap water.

The Sydney Morning Herald wrote:

The 750ml size remained the same - people want a big drink these days. And as many people say they find it hard to drink the recommended two litres of water a day, Frucor brought in flavoured - but still colourless - waters to relieve the monotony.

Here's a hint folks: if your body is telling you "No more water please!", that's a sign that you should stop.

On a related note, with Australia in a state of essentially permanent drought, a British House of Commons report on the state of water treatment in Australia makes fascinating reading.

Navy wren dead on floor

Accidents will happen. People can die from undiagnosed illnesses due to no fault of anyone. But in the case of Royal Navy Lieutenant Emma Douglas, there's a big question over responsibility for her death.

Douglas was an undiagnosed diabetic. After being ill for a week and vomiting blood, the medical officer on board the HMS Cornwall pronounced her fit for duty and sent her back to her cabin. A day later she collapsed with stomach cramps. But that's not why there's a question mark over her death: Douglas had not previously shown any of the symptoms of diabetes. But four days after being passed as fit for duty, and three days after collapsing with stomach cramps, Douglas was found collapsed on the floor of her cabin half naked. The duty watch sailor who found her described her as having "laboured breathing" to the officer of the day. Despite being known as a light drinker, her shipmates assumed she was drunk, and nobody checked on her for 24 hours -- by which time she was dead from diabetic keto-acidosis.

What I'd like to know is: is it normal for Royal Navy sailors who are vomiting blood to be pronounced fit for duty? Is it common practice for sailors supposed to be on duty to get drunk, and having drunk themselves into unconsciousness, are they normally left for 24 hours sprawled where they lie?

I think it says a lot about the British Navy culture that a sailor found unconscious on the floor is assumed to be drunk rather than sick.

The dissolute doctor

I stumbled across a blog -- alas, no longer being maintained -- from a British doctor, "Venial Sinner", who writes about the daily traumas of being a doctor in the British hospital system. Not a lot of humour there, except perhaps the gallows variety, but he writes good blog.

There's his frustration at seeing the only chance of identifying a mysterious disease disappear because of the interference of ignorant, judgmental, self-appointed god-botherers:

We have a single lead: an area of infective looking tissue on CT which we could biopsy and culture. Sharon cannot consent to the procedure; she does not currently have the capacity. In the morning, we spoke to her mother who agreed that the biopsy should go ahead all the same and that she would consent to this in place of her daughter (as the law allows).

That was the morning. By the afternoon everything had changed. Sharon's mother had some news. She had gone to the church and spoken with the Elders. The Elders has listened to the story, considered, and pronounced their verdict. Sharon had had no brain infection. God punishes those who live dissolute lives and Sharon had taken drugs. God does not like drugs. His punishment had been severe but he had heard the prayers of Sharon's mother and, being a good and merciful old chap, he had relented. Sharon would recover and all would be well. There was no infection and, ergo, there need be no biopsy. Sharon's mother, a devout Christian, swallowed it whole. She withdrew her consent for the biopsy immediately.

There's his example of how modern medicine can utterly fail to cure patients, and in fact make their life even more miserable and the common problem of patients with medically unexplained symptoms.

On learning that the new Polish government was cracking down on homosexuals, and that the Party Boss had declared that "The affirmation of homosexuality will lead to the downfall of civilization. We can't agree to it.", Venial Sinner remarked:

Downfall of civilisation, you say? Goodness, sounds bad. Who’d have thought it? You start off by letting two men hold hands in the street and before you know it the whole of mankind is poised to plunge backwards into benighted barbarity.

Cheers doc, where ever you've got to.

Sicko - Moore versus the media

Mike Moore's new movie, Sicko, takes aim at the American healthcare system, and by the look of it, the entire corporate media is closing ranks to defend the rotten system. Not just the conservative wingnuts who would argue if Moore said water was wet, but the (supposedly) liberal media like CNN. And Mike is taking aim right back at them.

PZ Myers points out that the supposed "facts" argued by CNN's hired-gun doctor differed from Moore's only by trivial amounts: e.g. the claim that Moore was wrong to say that Cuba spends $251 per person per year on health care when the "correct" figure is $229.

Now, honestly, figures like $251 and $229 have utterly spurious accuracy: it is beyond credibility that the government of Cuba, or any other country, knows medical spending down to the closest dollar. (The medical budget and the actual spending are only approximately the same.) Mathematically, I'd be surprised if we could do any better than round both of them to "about $240", give or take twenty dollars.

But that's not the most important point.

The important point is that even if CNN's hired gun was right, even if Moore's figures were wrong and his were correct, the US would be spending $6000 per year per person on health care to get results barely better than Cuba was for their $230. The US rates #37 in the world for the quality of health care, compared to Cuba #39. That's the scandal, and supposedly liberal CNN is trying to whitewash that by pedantically nit-picking on a few allegedly wrong numbers, as if a difference of a few dollars was really significant.

One of the comments on PZ's blog describes Mike Moore as "a propagandist, muck raker, and rabble rouser". I knew I liked the man. When society is broken, it takes a muck raker and rabble rouser to drag the sickness into the light. Another comment pointed out that one half of the one million bankruptcies in the US in 2000 were because people couldn't pay their medical bills. I expect the figure is even higher now.

One million bankruptcies per year is a frighteningly high figure, and one which casts a completely different light on the American Dream. That's a proportion of about one bankruptcy per 300 people. By comparison, Australia's bankruptcy rate is the highest since records began, at one per 800 people.

The Peace Wager

What was the prison guard with a pyschology degree doing negotiating with the murderous head of an army of abducted children, the Lord’s Resistance Army? What do American Christian Fundamentalists, including the son of the American tele-evangalist Billy Graham, have to do with the civil wars in the Sudan and Uganda? How is this connected to the genocide in Darfur? And what does any of this have to do with the guinea-worm?

For the answers to these questions and more, see The Peace Wager in The Walrus.

Pro-Life community prefers cancer to sex

...and I smell a rat on both sides of the debate.

The Human Papilloma Virus (actually a number of different viruses) or HPV, causes genital warts and about 70% of all cases of cervical cancer. It is not fully blocked by condoms, and doesn't require full penetrative intercourse for transmission. Infection rates are very high, and while the infection rate increases with the number of sexual partners, it doesn't take many to give a very high risk: one study found that over a third of school girls who had only a single sexual partner were infected. Admittedly, they were a high-risk cohort, and that figure probably doesn't hold for the wider population. Nevertheless, the HPV virus is moderately dangerous, and really, really good at spreading, and the virus doesn't care what your morals are. The overall infection rate for the general population in the USA is probably somewhere between twenty and forty percent. (Statistics suggest that infection rates are significantly lower amongst liberal nations with a positive attitude towards sex, like Finland. I'm just saying.)

So why is the HPV vaccine controversial?

Naturally, the "Culture of Life" is up in arms against it. As Mark Kleiman from the Reality-Based Community points out, Right To Lifers have come out from under their rocks to either oppose it outright, or to defend the right of irresponsible parents to let their daughters get cancer by making the vaccine Opt In rather than Opt Out. The argument I see again and again and again is "it will reduce the consequences of having sex" -- like that's a bad thing.

Imagine the "Culture of Life" arguing against refrigerators and pasteurization, because they reduce the harmful consequences of food poisoning. Imagine they argued against seat belts and air bags and ABS braking systems, because they reduce the harmful consequences of car crashes. Wouldn't people say "Of course they reduce the consequences, that's the whole point you moron!"?

It just goes to show our crazy attitudes to sex that even the supporters of the HPV vaccine merely argue that the vaccine won't necessarily encourage women to have sex, instead of coming right out and saying that it is a good thing that it will reduce the harmful consequences of having sex.

But naturally, things aren't always as they seem... if you scratch beneath the surface of the HPV controversy, things become a little murkier. Yes, the wingnuts are against it for all the wrong reasons. But I wonder whether being against it is the right position to take?

Libertarian Jane Galt wonders why there is so much opposition to the vaccine. Naturally, most of the responses on her blog are from libertarians, so the arguments basically boil down to four kinds:

• "My body, you won't tell me what to do, I'll cut my daughter's nose of to spite her face if you try!"


• "Nobody tells me what I should spend my money on!"


• "If the sluts would just keep their legs closed, this wouldn't be a problem."


• Misunderstandings of the medical evidence and faulty analogies with thalidomide.

But buried within the mass of bad reasoning and emotive arguments are a few disquieting facts about the way the vaccination campaign has been handled by the pharmaceutical company behind it, Merck. The push for mass HPV vaccinations seems to have been handled with unseemly haste, given the actual risk of cervical cancer from HPV. I'm hardly one of those luddites who see thalidomide behind every medical advance, but I'd like to see a little more long-term data on the vaccine before we rush off and give it to every schoolgirl over the age of nine.

And then there is the stink of corruption: Texas governor Rick Perry (who has close ties with Merck) has pushed mandatory vaccination through under a very curious condition: under the law, the Legislature is prevented from repealing the law.

Hmmm. Something is rotten in the state of Texas. I'm in favour of vaccination, I'm even in favour of compulsory vaccination in principle (although compulsion isn't on the table here -- the "mandatory" is a poorly chosen term meaning Opt Out). But the way this is being handled just smells wrong to me.

Health care

The economist Paul Krugman has co-written an informative essay about the American health-care system: what's wrong with it, what's right with it, what needs to be done to fix it, and why no American government yet has been willing to do what needs to be done.

The bottom line is: the American system of private insurers has become a wasteful, bureaucratic jungle of paperwork, giving it virtually the least bang-for-your-buck of any industrialised nation: more costs for less treatment. It's allowed the pharmaceutical companies to rort the system blind, while both insurers and doctors burn money in unproductive paperwork.

In summary, then, the obvious way to make the US health care system more efficient is to make it more like the systems of other advanced countries, and more like the most efficient parts of our own system. That means a shift from private insurance to public insurance, and greater government involvement in the provision of health care—if not publicly run hospitals and clinics, at least a much larger government role in creating integrated record-keeping and quality control.

Krugman points out:

• Private insurers spend a lot of money trying to screen out costly customers. Systems with universal coverage avoids that cost. In 2003 the American "Medicare" system spent less than 2% of its resources on administration, compared to more than 13% for private insurers. (So much for the article of faith amongst free-market groupies that private companies are always more efficient.)


• The American system leads to a zero-sum battle between all the parties involved (insurers, patients, doctors), with "each trying to stick others with the bill." The complex administration needed to navigate this maze of policies and insurers carries both direct and opportunity costs.


• The insurers aren't the only ones to be weighed down with paperwork. Insurers impose paperwork on the health-care providers, and there is a lot of it: many estimates suggest that the total cost to the providers of meeting the insurers' demands for paperwork is several times the cost to the insurers themselves.


• Fragmenting the health system into dozens or hundreds of competing insurers means that the government loses the ability to bargain with health-care providers (especially the drug companies) for discounted prices. Most Americans pay significantly higher prices for prescription drugs than people in countries with universal coverage.


• When Taiwan swapped from a private insurance system to a public system, they ended up almost doubling the insurance coverage while still spending less overall.

Here in Australia, our Liberal government tries very hard to encourage people to have private health insurance. Given the counter-productive results of the American system, I have to question the wisdom of trying to emulate them.

The sad thing is that Krugman wrote this essay almost a year ago. Since then, little has changed: there is still no political will to fix the broken health-care system.

Right-wing morality

PZ Myers tells about a particularly nasty instance of the clash between reality and Fundamentalist so-called "morality", involving a class of very common birth defects.

About one in a thousand births in the USA involve a failure of the neural tube to close up during development. Mild cases lead to spina bifida; serious cases lead to anencephaly, where the fetus does not grow a brain [Warning: link contains graphic medical images that some people may find disturbing].

PZ writes:

Failure of the anterior neuropore to close is even more serious. The brain fails to form. This condition is called anencephaly, and it is untreatable and lethal. If they aren't dead at birth, they might last a few days before succumbing. They have no brain. At best, they have a mass of dying, relatively undifferentiated neural tissue smeared across the floor of their incompletely formed skulls. They can't think, they can't feel, they can't respond. The real tragedy is that development can proceed surprisingly far without a brain, and these fetuses are recognizably human (here is a photo for the strong of stomach), and they can be carried fully to term.

That's the reality: anencephaleptic babies can't think or feel pain and won't survive more than a few days. But the right-wing fundamentalists in the US government have decided that the life of a literally brain-less creature, one that cannot possibly survive after birth, is more important than the health and emotional state of the mother. PZ quotes the Reality Based Community:

But the Congress had decided -- that no federal funds should be used to pay for abortions except where the life of the mother was at stake. As a result, Tricare (formerly CHAMPUS) the agency that covers military families, refused to pay the $3000 the abortion would cost.

The family sued, and a federal court ordered Tricare to pay, and the abortion went forward.

Then the Justice Department (with John Ashcroft as Attorney General) sued the family to recover the $3000, out of the sailor's pay of less than $20,000 a year.

The Justice Department just won.

and argues that:

Our guardians of purity have magnified the pain of this family and willfully and vindictively punished them for the 'crime' of a biological imperfection. I call that evil, pure and simple. There should have been no question in this case that an abortion was necessary.

I can't blame Tricare for refusing to fund the abortion in the first case -- it isn't their place to choose which laws they obey and which they don't. Nor can I fault the appeal judge's decision: it seems that the initial order for Tricare to pay for the abortion was morally right but legally wrong. But it is a horrible, bean-counting, cruel and heartless act for John Ashcroft's Justice Department to have appealed that decision, and for them to pursue the sailor to collect would be even more mean-spirited and nasty.

Autism and psychopathy

Cory Doctorow from BoingBoing discusses autism and psychopathy, and intriging research that suggests that neither of these are mental disorders as such.

The Hedgehog and the Shaman

Nanny Ogg was right: the hedgehog can never be buggered at all.

Following the advice of a traditional healer (a.k.a. witchdoctor), a Serbian man tried a rather unusual cure for premature ejaculation: having sex with a live hedgehog. Not surprisingly, he ended up rather worse for the experience, with severe lacerations in the parts one would rather there were no severe lacerations.

The Register has the full story.

Decrease in medical funding

The Scientific Activist blog details the serious decrease in American government funding for scientific research in biomedicine and medical research.

This isn't pie-in-the-sky knowledge-for-the-sake-of-it research, this is research into disease and health. The percentage of unsolicited grants which were accepted for funding has fallen from 20% in 2000 to just 9% now; renewal grants have fallen from just under 53% to just over 32%.

You can see the actual numbers here.

Heroin-chic models not wanted

A Madrid fashion show has banned underweight models:

"The restrictions could be quite a shock to the fashion world at the beginning, but I'm sure it's important as far as health is concerned," said Leonor Perez Pita, director of Madrid's show, also known as the Pasarela Cibeles.

I wonder how long this will last?

Inbreeding and polygamy

Inbreeding amongst polygamists near the Utah-Arizona border has lead to a massive increase in cases of children suffering from the extremely rare genetic disease fumarase deficiency.

The Phoenix New Times reports that reseachers discovered in the late 1990s that fumarase deficiency occurred in the greatest concentration in the world among the Fundamentalist Mormon polygamists of northern Arizona and southern Utah, and that because of inbreeding, the recessive gene responsible was rapidly spreading to the entire community.

About half of the secretive polygamist community which settled in the desert plateau near the Vermillion Cliffs in the 1930s are blood relatives of two of the founding families. With a population of about 8,000 people, there are thousands at risk of passing on the genetic disease to their offspring.

The Phoenix New Times says:

Religious leaders control all marriages in the community, and many of these relatives have married or likely will marry in the future. Some of these marriages will include parents who both are carriers of the fumarase deficiency gene, making it certain that more children will be afflicted with the disease.

"We have and will have a continual output of children with this condition," [Dr. Theodore] Tarby says.

In this isolated religious society north of the Grand Canyon, few secrets have been more closely guarded than the presence of fumarase deficiency. Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints elders, who control the community, have labored to keep the public from finding out why the disorder is manifesting. Many members of the fundamentalist community don't even know it's occurring.

The state of Arizona is contributing to the secrecy. The state Department of Health Services and the Department of Economic Security have been quietly providing services to assist the children and families of fumarase victims for more than 15 years. Both DHS and DES officials refused repeated requests from New Times to document the type and cost of services the state is providing to treat fumarase deficiency. The agencies claim that federal health laws prohibit them from releasing records or allowing their authorities to comment on the situation.

The effects of the disease are terrible. There is no cure, and no way to treat the disease, merely to try to fix some of the symptoms. Victims suffer from a range of ailments, including physical deformities, failure to grow normally, lack of muscle control and inability to walk or even to sit upright, epileptic fits, severe speech impediments and brain damage. Victims essentially require full-time attention just to survive.

The leaders must also understand the ethical considerations of continuing behavior, [Dr. Kirk A. Aleck] says, that is bringing children into the world who suffer tragic deformities.

"They have the authoritarian structure necessary to keep this from happening, but I don't think they have the advanced thinking," Aleck says.

"Advanced thinking"? It is hardly rocket science to realise that if you love your children and want what is best for them, you will do whatever you can to stop them from being born with a horrible genetic disease that condemns them to a short, painful life. Perhaps what Dr. Aleck was thinking was, these Fundamentalists have the authoritarian structure necessary to keep it from happening, but not the common human decency.

Which, of course, is far from common.

Not surprisingly, where you have suffering, you have people using "divine revelation" to decide matters:

The ultimate decision on marriages rests with FLDS Prophet Warren Jeffs. And Jeffs so far has shown no indication that he is concerned about the increasing prevalence of fumarase deficiency children in the community, former FLDS member Isaac Wyler says.

Even if a genetic screening test were available, Wyler says, Jeffs would have to be cautious about how he allowed it to be implemented. If the FLDS faithful believed that Jeffs was relying on science to determine marriages rather than divine revelation from God, he could lose control of the church.

"Warren has to be really careful that he doesn't lose his position as a god to these people," Wyler says.

[...]

Warren Jeffs, like Joseph Smith before him, has emphasized the importance of obedience among members of the church. Jeffs is following a long-established practice -- started by Smith 170 years ago -- of excommunicating those who do not strictly adhere to church leaders' commands.

"The 'gene' that Warren is really selecting for," Wyler says, "is the 'obedience gene.'

"Joseph Smith was also selecting for the 'obedience gene.' He was kicking people out, too, who weren't obedient.

"I hate to talk like this about my own genealogy," Wyler says, "but, literally, they are keeping all the breeding stock -- the women, the [strictly faithful] men -- and weeding out the disobedient men."

The ultimate goal of the breeding program, Wyler says, is to create the perfect race.

This is what happens when you allow folk-stories of "blood" to determine your actions. We don't see farmers breeding sicker and sicker cattle or sheep, convinced that if only they keep "purifying the bloodline" they will magically become perfect. No, for that sort of stupidity, you need folklore, religion and superstition.

(Note: Warren Jeffs, one of the FBI's ten most wanted, was recently arrested after a routine traffic stop.)

Some perspective on sports doping

Freakonomics has reprinted a letter to the editor of Sports Illustrated magazine which is worth repeating.

The letter is from Brandon Gaut of Irvine, California.

As a scientist and a sports fan, I believe the current doping scandals compromise science as much as sports. The tests are performed by entities motivated by and funded to achieve the goal of detecting cheaters; their objectivity is suspect. Also, it is a scientific fact that there will be positive tests even when there are no cheaters. From my perspective, the puzzle is not the occasional prositive test, but why there aren't a great many more. The system is broken, and I fear it is not always due to cheating athletes.

I must admit I don't understand the obsession with banning "performance-enhancing drugs". All of sports training is designed to enhance performance, and none of it is particularly natural. Whether it is intensive training, dietary supplements or "approved" drugs (antibiotics, pain-killers, medicines of many varieties), none of it is especially natural, and all of it takes a great toll on the athlete's body.

I don't see that anaerobic steroids and other banned drugs are any worse for the athlete, nor cheating. We don't try to distinguish between natural athletes and "unnatural" athletes. All athletes are allowed to exercise and train hard, which is a pretty unnatural thing to do. They pump their bodies full of "permitted" chemicals, including antibiotics, painkillers and other drugs, as well as other chemicals such as vitamins, minerals and "nutritional supplements". They eat carefully tailored food combinations. There is nothing natural about "loading up on carbs". Why are hormones and steroids treated differently?

It is a double standard for sports administrators to allow athletes to eat protein supplements to put on more muscle mass, but not natural hormones that assist in growing muscles. I don't believe the excuse that it is because of the side-effects. If they were genuinely worried about the health of the athlete, they wouldn't allow them to become athletes in the first place. The high-intensity training and competition they go through not only leads to serious, permanent, mechanical damage to joints, but it also seriously weakens the immune system. Elite athletes might be able to push their bodies further, faster and harder than ordinary folks, but they aren't healthier. Sport is about performance, not health.

But all that is by-the-by. Even if we decide that "drugs are bad, m'kay?" and ban anabolic steroids and others, it is important to remember that the drug testing labs are highly motivated to detect cheats, and there will always be false positives. Claims of drug cheating should always be taken with a grain of salt.

[Update, 2 Sep 2007: fixed a silly typo/thinko where I wrote "anaerobic" instead of anabolic. Drugs for athletes who don't breathe perhaps?]

Nicotine update

Earlier, I wrote about claims that tobacco companies were deliberately increasing the amount of nicotine in brands that were purchased by teenagers.

Further information adds an element of doubt to the story. At the very least, the story isn't as cut-and-dried as I first thought.

Tobacco companies increasing nicotine for kids

A new study reported by the Boston Globe has found that tobacco companies have been slowly and quietly increasing the amount of nicotine in cigarettes, particularly the brands smoked by children.

Between 1998 and 2004, the amount of nicotine per cigarette had increased in 92 of 116 cigarette brands. 52 of those brands had increased by more than 10%.

Nicotine, apart from being quite poisonous, is the major addictive component of cigarettes.

The amount of nicotine in Marlboro products, the brand of choice of two-thirds of high school smokers, had increased by 12%.

I'm in favour of liberalising drug laws, but one factor which gives me pause is the behaviour of the tobacco companies. We've seen how the tobacco companies covered-up evidence that their products were toxic, deliberately marketed their drug to children, filled their products with toxic fillers to make them burn faster, and other immoral, anti-social acts. If and when the so-called "hard" drugs are legalised, what will prevent the suppliers from acting with reckless disregard for people's well-being, as the tobacco companies do?

Donor wants her kidney back

WARNING: satire alert.

LarkNews tells the tale of an organ donor who wants her kidney back:

Aleta Smith, who donated her kidney to a 20-year-old college student last year, wants it back now that the student has changed religions.

Smith, a self-described "on-fire Christian," gave her kidney to Hannah Felks, a Lutheran and regular Christian camp counselor, last year after seeing Felks on the local news.

[...]

"I feel helpless," she says. "Part of my body, my DNA, is stuck inside a person who's going to hell."

Smith suffers nightmares of her former organ filtering "strange Asian teas, pig blood and witch doctor brews in Africa," she says. She wonders if the Lord really wanted her to donate the kidney, or if she acted on a "triple-espresso high" she had that morning. She is also concerned that when her body is resurrected, it might be incomplete.

Is cleanliness bad for you?

Intriguing research that suggests that living in an environment which is too clean and hygienic may be a cause of allergies and auto-immune diseases.

CBC reports:

A comparison of rats living in the wild and the lab lends support to the idea that an overly hygienic environment can lead to allergies and autoimmune diseases.

According to the "hygiene hypothesis," exposure early in life to infections from household dust, germy siblings or surfaces may reduce the risk of developing disease in adulthood.
[...]
Industrialized societies that emphasize hygiene have higher rates of allergy, asthma and autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis compared to the developing world.

I think it is time to stop wiping everything down with disinfectant.

The Great and Arbitrary Abortionist in the Sky

PZ Myers of Pharyngula discusses the Great and Arbitrary Abortionist in the Sky:

...the rhythm method kills more embryos than contraceptives. It's straightforward: by avoiding sex during the prime time for ovulation and fertilization, there's a greater likelihood of fertilization occurring when the egg is past its sell-by date--it's increasing the chance of spontaneous abortion and birth defects. The paper is all speculative and philosophical about it all, but there are actually some suggestive epidemiological data that suggest it is true. A study by Jongbloet describes a doubling of the frequency of Down Syndrome in young Catholic mothers.

Myers also quotes some figures for the yearly numbers of live births, spontaneous abortions ("miscarriages") and clinical abortions, and reaches the conclusion that God causes nearly twice as many abortions as all the abortionists in the world combined.