OT:Flu Jab

What I find most interesting about that article is mention of the "UK Biobank" (NB the paper linked to in the article has yet to be peer reviewed). I had never heard of this, and a bit of internet searching made me pleased I'd never been asked to take part.

At least, I don't /think/ I'm taking part. With parties like NHS Digital involved (remember the "care.data" fiasco?) you can never tell who has been accessing your personal health data.

I thought they were all outside Aldi these days in their BMWs...

Part of my brothers PhD was into the effect of timing on adminstration of medications. Seems that there's a genetic component - part of the same reason why some drugs work for some and not others (and possibly why some drugs stop working).

Odd, considering anyone who even mentioned bioryhtyms 30 years ago would not have been taken seriously. Just goes to show.

My wife and I are in the scheme. The aims seemed fairly laudable to me when we signed up. What's bothering you about it?

I used to have a way of determining someone's position in a calculator ... (30+ years ago) where you put subtracted your birth date from the current date and it gave you your age in days and by dividing by 23,

If someone was having a particularly bad time (in particular), it seemed more often than not that all three of their biorhythms were in a lul?

Available on an app or online of course now. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

I'm not saying that the "bioryhthms" of the 70s weren't a crock. They probably were. However science seems particularly susceptible to the baby/ bathwater paradigm ...

Wway be in the origins of medicine was the idea that each persons malady was unique to that person - balance of humors and all that nonsense.

Then we get modern medicine where we discover diseases and tissues and systems and throw away that medieval nonsense.

Then researchers start looking at gene/drug interactions and discover that people have an individual drug reaction profile based in genetics. In effect taking us back to the starting proposition that we all suffer individually.

Similarly, when SWMBO was pregnant with our lad she suffered terrible heartburn. Old wives tale was that indicates a baby with a lot of hair - which indeed our lad had. It's only subsequently that research has shown the hormone for hair growth also causes the muscles of the oesauphagus (sp) to loosen .... and it passes the placental barrier.

The idea of biorhythms was always silly as it assumed they all started at birth and were not affected by life events. And there was no evidence they meant anything.

But as noted, that attitude meant a lot of research wasn't done for a long time.

And now we discover that cells *do* have rhythms.

last years flue jab didn't work for me and a lot of other people....

How do you know? You could have got it twice if you had not received the jab. There are different variants of flu.

What flu ?.

There are some farmers who only plough at night to avoid 'waking up' weed seeds. Mostly the organic nutters I believe.

The flu jab protects against the strain(s) of flu they predict will be around when they manufacture it. And that is to an extent a guess.

There is no jab that can protect from all types of flu, since new strains develop all the time.

....bur are they synchronised ?

I expect some plough at night for other reasons, too, like that there's a lot to plough between now and when teh next storm arrives which would make it too wet to plough. Or that's the only time the machine is available.

Rather than dismissing them out of hand, why not do a little *science* first (if you can).

Part of the problem in trying to assess these sorts of claims (as the late and already missed James Randi found out) is to nail the claims to the wall *before* you invest any resousrces. Otherwise you will spend a lot of time and effort disproving <whatever> only to be told at the enf "Ah, but we weren't claiming that at the start".

Has anyone tried an experiment where a field is divided into two (ideally by separate alternating strips) and ploughing one set in day, one set at night and seeing if there is any appreciable difference ?

Just for the hard of thinking, I'm not claiming anything one way or the other.

However, one thing I know is that plants that use the length of day to determine when to flower can be upset by as little as 3 or four minutes of light in their dark period. It's a curse of cannabis growers. A light leak leading to delayed or compromised flowering.

Dunno - research is suggesting a whole spectrum of varying cycles, AIUI.

Also - especially in long established practices, it's not unusual that the practicioner has no idea why they do what they do. "It's what we've always done". A lot of old trades like that are very conservative.

It isn't feasible for anyone to test every hypothesis that comes along with proper scientific rigour. Luckily, many hypotheses can be dismissed with reasonable certainty without science. The weapons are (a) common sense (b) any specialist knowledge you might have (c) consideration of veracity: does the proponent have an axe to grind; are they a known nutter, etc (d) consensus: if the vast majority of those who have been able to do tests don't accept it, that fact weighs against it.

In the 'seeds' example, if it made any difference all farmers would do it.

Bill

The scheme may be laudable, but so was care.data (

To be fair, UK Biobank appears to be much better in informing possible volunteers as to what it is doing and how, but I wonder if most of them really understand what it is saying. I looked at the "Participant Invitation Leaflet" and "Further information leaflet" (why is that dated earlier than the PIL?) at

There also seems to be a rather naive attitude towards how good their security is: "Computer security systems are in place to block unauthorised access (for example, by ?hackers?) to the study computers that hold personal information. In particular, UK Biobank?s computers are protected against direct contact from other computers and the internet by special ?firewall? software (as used in commercial banks). Also, the level of access that is allowed to staff within UK Biobank is controlled by unique user names and passwords, and restricted on the basis of their need to carry out particular duties."

Commercial bank security?

I also wonder how good the anonymisation of data is. I do nope it is not pseudoanonymised, as the lack of security of that in the past has been pointed out.