citings

From the February 1999 issue

(Page 2 of 7)

The U.N. has issued guidelines for how one might celebrate the International Year of Older Persons, whose mantra is "Towards a Society of
All Ages." Given the source, it's not surprising that the proposals lean heavily toward long, tedious meetings, preferably held in expensive settings and at taxpayer expense. Among the suggestions: Invite mayors, community leaders, writers, homemakers, and caregivers to share their views on "old age in a new age." If that doesn't move you, then try this: Convene a national conference on "agri-tools for elders."

Bone Sell

By Ryan H. Sager

Your milkman is free to exclaim that milk does a body good. But if he tells you that milk also helps prevent osteoporosis, he may soon be in trouble with the Food and Drug Administration. Under a proposed rule change, the agency could classify such a statement as a "disease claim," which can be made only about FDA-approved drugs.

Under a 1994 law, manufacturers of dietary supplements and food products are already prohibited from claiming to cure or treat a disease--defined by the FDA as "damage to an organ, part, structure, or system of the body such that it does not function properly (e.g. cardiovascular disease)."

This means that products cannot be represented as able to "cure cancer" or "treat arthritis." But manufacturers can make more general claims about health effects, as the milk example illustrates.

The FDA is now proposing to expand its "disease claim" definition to include "any deviation from the normal structure or function" of the body. The new definition is potentially limitless. As Dr. Stacey Zawel, a food safety expert with the Grocery Manufacturers of America, points out, any health claim for a product will have something to do with its effect on the body's "structure or function."

Data on Demand

By Jacob Sullum

Information may want to be free, but sometimes researchers just don't want to let it go. During the 1997 debate about the Environmental Protection Agency's new limits on airborne particles and ozone, for example, the authors of a federally funded study that was cited to support the stricter standards refused to make their raw data public. (See "Polluted Science," August/September 1997.)

In response to such stonewalling, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) inserted a little-noticed provision into the omnibus spending bill that Congress approved last fall. It says researchers who receive federal grants have to make their data available to the funding agency, which in turn must release them to anyone who files a request under the Freedom of Information Act.

Previously, federal agencies had a contractual right to obtain research data, but they were not required to exercise it. "Lack of public access to research data feeds general public mistrust of the government and undermines support for major regulatory programs," Shelby said before the bill was passed.

Some researchers worry that access to the data on which government policy is based will only magnify public mistrust. New York University environmental scientist George Thurston, who did some of the research on which the EPA relied for its revised particulate regulations, sees a danger in too much openness.

"It's the most insidious thing," Thurston told the Daily Environment Report, "because it sounds like a good thing at first blush." In an interview with Science, he predicted that "vested interests will misuse [the Shelby provision] to discredit valid research results they don't like and to harass the researchers doing the work."

Yet one man's harassment is another's vigorous criticism, long thought to be an essential element of the scientific process. "If the research is sound," University of Chicago chemist R. Stephen Berry dared suggest to Chemical & Engineering News, "then it will withstand the kind of analysis that these interests want to do."