The first story is reported by Harriet Hall, “a retired family physician who writes about pseudoscience and questionable medical practices”. Harriet devotes her 11 July comment to What the Health, a successful documentary, released on March 16, 2017. The documentary claims to provide the evidence that meat and dairy food are responsible for most “modern” deadly diseases, and that all health agencies and scientists know this truth, but they conceal it because they are on the Big Food and Big Pharma’s payroll. The audience of the documentary had a sudden and unexpected spike last June, after it was added to Netflix, as showed by Google trends. After carefully reviewing the movie, Harriet Hall concludes “The “What the Health” movie is not a balanced documentary, but an alarmist, biased polemic. It cherry-picks scientific studies, exaggerates, makes claims that are untrue, relies on testimonials and interviews with questionable “experts,” and fails to put the evidence into perspective. It presents no evidence to support the claim that a vegan diet can prevent and cure all the major diseases. It is simply not a reliable source of health information”. Notwithstanding Harriet’s efforts, it is easy to predict that many people all around the world will continue watching this movie, finding in it the evidence that eating meat and dairy causes cancer and chronic diseases.
The second story is reported by Jonathan A. Eisen, professor at the Genome Center of UC Davis, California. Jonathan wrote a nice post instigated by the echo raised by a paper published on June 28 on Psychosomatic Medicine, a leading, peer-reviewed, journal, which has been the official journal of the American Psychosomatic Society since 1939. The paper, a bit pompously entitled “Brain structure and response to emotional stimuli as related to gut microbial profiles in healthy women”, claims to demonstrate that there is a causal association between gut bacteria and emotion, which is a misleading statement, because – argues Jonathan – the paper only shows a statistical correlation between some gut microbiome patterns and some behavioral traits. Not only “behavioral traits” are not emotions (in case, they are just indirect signs of emotions), but turning a correlation into a causal relationship is a fallacy known since Aristotle's time. Eisen comments, “it could be that people with different thought patterns eat differently. Or people with different thought patterns exercise differently. Or just about anything.” Yet, the findings of this paper have been overemphasized by media, e.g., the Huffington Post had the headline “Your Gut Bacteria Really Do Affect Your Emotions”; Science Alert, “Human Emotions Really Are Affected by Gut Bacteria, New Study Suggests”; the Daily Mail, “Gut feelings are real: Some people have stomach bacteria that makes them more anxious and stressed, study shows”; Forbes, “The Fascinating Connections Between Gut Bacteria, Weight and Mood”. The study was promoted by UCLA, the University of California, Los Angeles, whose annual economic impact totals the equivalent of one percent of the entire California economy. Purposely, Dr. Eisen investigated about recent UCLA press releases, and he discovered that, on June 29, the University Press Office released a statement, claiming that a UCLA team has “identified gut microbiota that interact with brain regions associated with mood and behavior”. Jonathan concludes that the source of misinformation was that press release. Well done, but he mercifully omits to add that the first author, Dr. Kirsten Tillisch, received funding from Danone Research, the research branch of the famous world food company; also his main co-author, Dr. Emeran Mayer, was on the advisory boards for yogurt product company Dannon and its parent company Danone. Moreover, 3 other persons of the team were employed by Danone Research; while another researcher was employed by Symrise Group, a German multinational providing “fragrances, flavors, active ingredients (…) for the (…) food, beverage and pet food and baby food industries”. Since 2014, Symrise AG has made massive investments on the probiotic market acquiring two leading companies, the French Dianafood and the Swedish Probi. Finally, the whole study was partly supported by grants from Danone Research. It is difficult to avoid the unpleasant impression that movies such as “What the Health” are not totally groundless. To be sure, they are misleading people about their health, which is a lot worse than covertly advertising probiotic products, which is not that horrible crime. The UCLA team just marketed its findings and, incidentally, also yogurt consumption. Yet, there are reasons not to be happy with such a way to inform the public, notably in a moment in which we need to strengthen public trust in science.
The third story has received for now less press coverage, although it is by far the most important. In early July, a group of Canadian virologists from the University of Alberta announced to have recreated an extinct horsepox virus using synthetic DNA strands. Horsepox viruses are not dangerous for humans, but the research demonstrates that in principle all types of pox viruses could be generated in the same way, including the lethal smallpox. The novelty is not in the technical procedure, because since 2002, we know that it is possible to assemble pox viruses from scratch, rather it is in the demonstration that this could be done by a “small scientific team with little specialized knowledge half a year and cost about $100,000”, purchasing DNA available on the market, and without asking for (or by-passing) any authorization or security clearance. This dreadful news passed nearly unnoticed, without anyone - either scientists, regulatory authorities, public health agencies, scientific journals, general press, or social media – realizing the enormity of the event. With the laudable exception of HuffPost UK, and a couple of online scientific magazines, this news was completely ignored. Yet, this is still half story, the second half is that this news was not at all new. Actually, Canadian virologists had already presented their findings in November 2016, at the WHO Advisory Committee on Variola Virus Research meeting in Geneva, and a report from that meeting has been available on WHO's website since May 2017. When researchers tried to draw WHO's attention on their experiment, “the first response was, ‘Well let's have another committee to review it,’ and then there was another committee, and then there was another committee that reviewed that committee” tells David Evans, the Canadian team leader, who eventually comments "It became a little bit ludicrous”. Almost in the same period, (on March 2, 2017), Tonix, a pharma company which collaborated with the University of Alberta in this study, announced the “successful synthesis of a potential smallpox-preventing vaccine. This vaccine candidate, TNX-801, is a live form of horsepox virus (HPXV)”. Reading their press release, it was evident that the horsepox virus was recreated from scratch in a quite trivial way. Yet, the story still got unnoticed. Evans also sent the draft paper describing the study to the Canadian Public Health Agency, as well as to the Food Inspection Agency, only getting the staggering, candid, answer that “these things potentially fall under export legislation”. The whole chronicle was finally reported by the July 6 issue of Science, which was the sole media, and prominent scientific journal, which gave to this story the relevance that it deserves. Thus a happy end? Almost. Actually, as Caroline Ash, an editor at Science, honestly admits, the paper of the Canadian team was initially submitted also to Science, which rejected it, because it did not offer “a sufficient gain of novel biological knowledge to offset the significant administrative burden the manuscript represents in terms of dual-use research of concern”, an answer which is a terrific example of bureaucratic miscommunication.
These three parallel stories - the fortune of a pseudoscientific documentary; an oversold study, covertly promoting yogurt consumption; an unnoticed research, showing how it could be easy today to recreate a deadly virus - illustrate quite well the subtleties of today science communication. It's just a shame that most media, including social media, didn't realise it, getting instead trapped into the bubble of the anti vax quarrel.
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