Rosemary Drisdelle's Blog
Posted by Rosemary Drisdelle
The Taser, or its simpler form the stun gun, is heralded as a non-lethal way to control a dangerous or potentially violent person, a space-age weapon that incapacitates for a brief period of time and leaves no wound. People do die after being shot with Tasers, however, and two fatalities within one week in Canada in the fall of 2007 had many Canadians wondering about the safety of these weapons.
The safety of a Taser is governed by the effects of the electrical shock that it delivers to the human body – it’s basically designed to confuse the brain and nothing more. The biological basis of this is fascinating and well understood. What goes wrong in some instances, however, is not understood, and it’s an area that’s extremely difficult to study: investigators won’t find many people with heart conditions or other medical problems who are willing to take hits from Tasers for the benefit of science. Autopsies of those who do die often don’t yield black and white results.
The Taser debate is an ethical minefield—suspending their use until more is known may well result in more deaths by traditional firearms, while continued use without sufficient knowledge is also unacceptable to many people. At the very least, no one should regard a Taser as a non-lethal weapon.
Do you think we should stop using Tasers until we know more? Start a Discussion.
Posted by Rosemary Drisdelle
Many of us think we’re doing a good thing when we buy farmed fish (and up to a third of fish sold for human consumption today is farmed)—we think we’re taking the pressure off wild fish stocks. There are objections, however, to fish farming, and they’re disturbing enough to make any environmentally conscious person wonder if we should be eating fish at all:
- Organic waste (fish wastes and excess food) from open net fish farms pollute the water locally, depleting water of oxygen and creating a dead zone under and near the farm.
- Chemicals used to treat fish diseases are released into the surrounding water, killing wild species.
- Farmed fish, often not native to the area they’re being farmed in, frequently escape into the wild.
- Crowded fish in open net farms are susceptible to diseases and sea lice, and pass them on to wild fish.
- Farmed fish are fed with wild fish—there are more wild fish consumed than farmed fish produced.
Recent data from British Columbia, Canada seems to confirm that farmed salmon are wiping out wild salmon by infesting them with sea lice. It’s time to re-evaluate fish farming.
Read about the sea louse issue in Sea Lice and Salmon
Posted by Rosemary Drisdelle
Trying to comprehend how life began is a bit like trying to imagine what’s on the other side of the edge of the universe. How can there be an edge? It’s hard to grasp that living things are a complex and marvelous product of chemical reactions. How can it be just chemistry?
Two personal revelations stand out for me. One was aided by a microscope, the other, a book. Through the microscope, I saw a ciliated respiratory epithelial cell—one of the cells that line our respiratory system like a field of little automatic brooms, sweeping debris and mucus up and out of the lungs—still busily sweeping in salty solution hours after leaving the body of the person who built it. In the book, I read that scientists believe that mitochondria—the tiny energy producing organelles inside cells—were once organisms themselves that got taken in by larger cells and didn’t die.
Astonishing! Our cells are individual life forms that can live without us as long as their needs are met, and even they have other life forms—or the descendants of other life forms—inside them, allowing them to function. We are built of innumerable individuals that function together to make an organism. It gets even stranger: DNA, the molecule directing all the functions of a cell is made up of elements that have come together through chemical reactions that have little to do with life—but resulted in life. It is, indeed, stranger and more marvelous than fiction.
See Theories of How Life Began for current scientific thought on how those chemical reactions first happened.
Also in Biology.Suite101.com:
Posted by Rosemary Drisdelle
Fluoride has been added to drinking water since the late 1940s because of evidence that communities with a higher level of natural fluoride in their water supply had a lower incidence of dental cavities (see How Fluoride Works on Teeth). Soon, most North Americans were drinking fluoridated water and some European countries adopted the practice as well. Oral products with added fluoride became the norm… and the incidence of cavities went down. People drinking well water without fluoride were advised to give children fluoride drops while their teeth were still developing.
I’ve long suspected that the whole fluoridated water thing is a bit of a lie: if ingested fluoride only affects developing teeth, what’s the point in giving it to millions of adults? If direct contact with erupted teeth has the best effect, why not just use toothpaste with fluoride and leave it at that? Others were much more outspoken one way or the other, verging, it seemed, on fanatical, but now even respected experts are speaking up about the lack of effectiveness and possible health hazards of a steady diet of fluoride.
I’m now convinced that fluoride in water is a bad idea, and I’m on the fence about other fluoridated products. Toothpaste? Maybe. Fluoride treatments at the dentist? Maybe. Mouthwash and table salt? No.
What do you think? Start a discussion.
Posted by Rosemary Drisdelle
Finally—California has banned lead bullets in condor territory: lead ammunition lying around the countryside and washing into rivers and ponds has been killing birds for decades, a shameful byproduct of the hunting enthusiast, who leaves some ammunition behind when he or she misses the target, and more in the remains of abandoned dead animals. It’s no surprise that lead kills birds and other animals—we’ve known that for quite a while. It contaminates our soil and water as well.
Recently, it’s come to light that condors are at particular risk because they are scavengers who are attracted to kills left lying in the woods. While feeding on the carrion, they ingest lead ammunition. Then they die. Condors are endangered birds, having gone extinct in the wild and only recently been reintroduced from captive breeding programs. We cannot afford to lose them this way.
The mystery is, why has it taken so long to ban lead bullets, and why does the legislation, even now, only cover territory where condors range or are likely to range in California? California’s bill AB 821 is good legislation—a good beginning—but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. There are alternatives to lead ammunition available to hunters. It’s time every hunter started using them.
