The most ridiculous health claims of 2015
'Tis the season to reflect on the year that was. So to celebrate, I took a look at the most wildly off-base health claims of 2015.All well and good, except that this is the same Julia Belluz who has been a poodle of lying anti-vaping lunatics and junk scientists for most of the past twelve months.
A new @NEJM paper finds e-cigarettes may expose users to more formaldehyde than conventional cigs http://t.co/Tm1mRxB8GN #vaping
— Julia Belluz (@juliaoftoronto) January 22, 2015
Incredibly, that pile of steaming garbage about e-cigs - easily debunked here and here - did not feature in Julia's festive round-up.
Also not in Julia's list is the utter nonsense spouted in 2015 by Californian anti-nicotine moon-howlers using taxpayers' money, probably because Julia thought it all quite believable.
On Sunday, California's public health department went live with an awareness campaign about e-cigarettes on a new website, Still Blowing Smoke. By the time of their official launch on Monday, vaping advocates were already on the offensive with a nearly identical site: Not Blowing Smoke.Quite right too, because the California website is a quite astounding collection of half-truths and downright lies. Far from being a problem, the reactive website set up by way of retaliation was providing a public service not supplied by the Californian state.
But then, Julia is the kind of hack who believes that evidence-free bullshit should never be challenged. Even going so far as to conflate quoting of verifiable research on the relative safety of e-cigs with actions of the tobacco industry 50 years ago. No, really!
For public health workers, the quick counterattack is reminiscent of early fights over cigarettes.
"The California health department’s Twitter and Facebook pages are clogged with [messages from vaping advocates]," said Stanton Glantz, a University of California, San Francisco–based professor and longtime tobacco-control advocate who has been watching the campaign and counterattacks unfold this week. "It’s making it hard for them to communicate with anybody."Yes, Julia actually cited Glantz, purveyor of some of the biggest health bullshit of the past year. What's more ...
Martin McKee, one of the Lancet authors and a professor of public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said that whenever he or his research students write anything that's critical of e-cigarettes, they become the subject of "very abusive" attacks.Yup, McKee too. Such is Julia's keen sense for scientific inaccuracy, she has written a piece about daft health claims in 2015 while parroting some of the most mendacious the world has seen ... and referencing the deeply compromised and anti-scientific charlatans - including incompetent prejudiced CMOs - who have spread them.
Also not on Julia's list of absurd health claims is the utter garbage about e-cigs potentially causing 'Popcorn Lung' pumped out by Harvard in early December. Most probably because Julia was conned into reporting on it as plausible.
So do e-cigarettes cause popcorn lung?
We don't know that yet, in part because there have been no published long-term studies on e-cigarette users.No, Julia, but considering the entire premise is so wrong as to be simply impossible, shouldn't you - a "health reporter" and "evidence enthusiast" who wishes to "bring science and sense to news about medicine" - have smelt a rat?
And considering these examples above are making you look like a weapons grade gullible tool, why would you not add at least one of them to your list of the most ridiculous health claims of 2015?
Agenda or embarrassment, I expect, you decide. Either way, an article ridiculing the year's absurd health claims, written by someone who has spent 2015 faithfully acting as a useful idiot by spreading absurd health claims herself, is quite a laughable novelty.
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