Wiltshire Gazette & Herald…

When I am visiting my parents in Wiltshire, my main regional paper is the Wiltshire Gazette & Herald. There are other more local ones but this is the one that we have always taken. When I was very young I used to scour its pages for crimes or mysteries in my nearby villages that I could solve. I was a keen private detective but never got the big break that my fledgling agency deserved; I neither found nor solved a single mystery! This is when I began to suspect that not all of Enid Blyton’s output was entirely factual.

Yesterday’s WG&H had two articles that attracted my attention. They both involved local people offering care and medical attention to people in less developed parts of the world. The first is about a woman working to vaccinate people against yellow fever in the Sudan. The second is about an acupuncturist going to Burma.

A local woman is working for DFID (Department for International Development) as part of their program to vaccinate two million people in Darfur against yellow fever. The disease has killed 168 people in Darfur in the last two months. If the outbreak takes hold it can spread incredibly quickly and the consequences can be very severe.

Yellow fever is caused by a type of virus called a flavivirus. It is spread by female mosquitoes. They can pick the disease up from monkeys in jungle areas and then pass it on to humans who will become a source of the disease for other mosquitoes. Humans cannot pass it on to one another without the mosquitoes acting as a vector. The virus infects liver cells and causes headaches, a high temperature, vomiting and a yellowing of the skin known as jaundice. About 15% of those infected go on to have more severe symptoms such as kidney failure or bleeding from the eyes, mouth and nose. Roughly 8% of people infected with the virus die as a result. There is no anti-viral treatment that can be given but it is possible to manage the symptoms so that the body can fight off the infection itself.

A single dose of the yellow fever vaccine offers protection against the disease for at least 10 years. A vaccine introduces a non-disease causing virus into the system so that the body can prepare antibodies to fight the disease if it ever encounters an active form of the virus. The yellow fever vaccine is called a live attenuated vaccine which means it contains live but harmless versions of the virus that multiply within the body. The vaccine is about 95% effective over 10 years dropping to about 80% over thirty years.

You can read about what the Government is doing to help the people of the Sudan in this press release.

The second news item concerns a local woman who has practised acupuncture for 26 years going to Burma to work in the Watchet Hospital for a couple of weeks. She has previously been to Gaza where she was part of a group treating “hundreds of citizens and refugees who had suffered from the physical and emotional effects of trauma and war”. On her website she says that most of her patients were suffering from stress related conditions. I imagine that those “citizens and refugees” suffering from shrapnel or bullet wounds were not rushed for emergency acupuncture.

Acupuncture is a form of alternative medicine that originated in either India or China. Like many alternative forms of medicine it claims to be able to treat just about any medical complaint. It does this by unblocking the flow of chi (or qi – the life force) that travels through the meridians of the body. This unblocking is achieved by carefully inserting needles into key points about the body. The needles are not pushed in far, just enough to stay in on their own.

Millions of people worldwide use acupuncture and there are thousands of medical studies to show that people feel better after treatment. The problem sceptics have with it is that it works just as well when the needles are put in the “wrong” places as it does when they are put in the correct places. When careful trials are constructed, sham acupuncture (acupuncture designed to be wrong or ineffective) produces the same level of patient satisfaction as the real thing. This strongly suggests that the effects are down to conditioning and the placebo effect rather than to the flow of life force. There is no independent evidence for the existence of qi, chi or life force, which also rather casts doubt on acupuncture.

You can read a report of her work in Gaza from this extract from the Journal of Chinese Medicine. There is a long article explaining the difficulties in studying acupuncture at the Skeptics’ Dictionary.

Questions…

1. What is the name given to the medicines designed to treat diseases caused by bacteria?
2. Name a disease caused by a bacterium.
3. Name a disease other than yellow fever caused by a virus.
4. What job do the kidneys do in the human body?
5. How can you tell that a mosquito is an insect?
6. What did I mean when I described the mosquitoes as being “vectors”?