Men at work
This week Iranian military officials trumpeted that they had successfully gleaned every bit of classified information from a top-secret CIA RQ-170 drone aircraft that crashed in their country a year ago. Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, Commander of the Aerospace Division for the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard, said, "All the intelligence in this drone has been completely decoded and extracted and we know each and every step it has taken.”
US intelligence officials, speaking off the record, expressed some doubt about the Iranian claims: “How can they have analyzed every step our drone has taken when our drones don’t take steps? They fly. We believe that rather than an RQ-170, they may have instead captured an AT-AT.”
Vegemite Sandwich
What’s with the sudden outpouring of pediatric research from Australia? Did Paul Hogan get an MD/PhD? The latest blockbuster study from Down Under implicates salt in the obesity epidemic. How did they do it? Let's just say I didn’t know things could get this complicated in a country where medical school cafeterias serve Foster’s Lager.
The Aussies looked at over 4200 schoolchildren aged 2-16 years, 62% of whom consumed sugar-sweetened beverages (SSB). They determined how much salt the kids ate, how much fluid they drank, and how much of that fluid came in the form of SSB. It turned out that increased salt consumption made kids thirstier, which led them to drink more sugary fluids: simple enough so far, right? But since increased consumption of SSB is correlated with overweight and obesity, and increased dietary salt is correlated with increased consumption of SSB, the authors conjecture that if kids ate less salt, they should drink fewer SSBs and therefore be less overweight. I admit the idea is intriguing, but I’m withholding judgment until the authors demonstrate that kids who down fewer Scorcher Peri Peris really drink less Solo and actually lose more weight than a wallaby on a walkabout.
Foreshortening
But wait, the Australians are not done! Dr. Brian Morris of the Sydney Medical School just published a meta-analysis that injects into the circumcision debate exactly what it needs more of: controversy. Dr. Morris and his colleagues pooled the results of 22 studies of circumcision and urinary tract infections published in the last 15 years, involving over 400,000 patients. They found that the number of circumcisions needed to prevent one urinary tract infection was around four, making circumcision a public health bonanza on a par with vaccines, clean water, and Dr. C. Everett Koop’s beard.
Criticism of Dr. Morris’s research has been cutting, uncovering methodological weaknesses, stripping away his assertions, and leaving the study exposed to attack. Among the most strident critics is Zbys Fedorowicz, director of the Bahrain branch of the UK Cochrane Centre, and also a leading figure in the organization Doctors Without Vowels (Médecins Sans Voyelles). Said Dr. Fedorowicz, "It doesn't mean to say that these guys are necessarily wrong, it's just that we don't know because the methodological approach that they used isn't thorough enough, it's not transparent, it's not reproducible and it's not clear." Other than that, he was highly complimentary.
Blemished Record
The Australians didn’t produce every significant article of the last week. No, it was the Italians, specifically the Centro Studi Gruppo Italiano Studi Epidemiologici in Dermatologia (I know it’s about skin disease, but still, doesn’t it sound sexy?) who managed to mess up my whole acne spiel. See, there’s this part where I ask the teen if she’s heard that certain foods can make acne worse, and then when she mentions pizza and chocolate I laugh reassuringly and say, no, in fact her diet has nothing to do with her skin. Except that the Italians demonstrated that drinking milk, especially skim milk, seems to worsen acne, while eating fish makes it better. Grazie mille, y’all, really. Can it get worse? Now that they’re done with that drone, I just can’t wait to see what kind of medical research comes out of Iran.
David L. Hill, M.D, FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).