Seat-belts, lettuce and ancient flush toilets

The ancient Indus valley civilization used flush toilets as early as 26th Century BC. A quick peek at Wikipedia tells you that in the old times, some people believed that diseases are spread by “clouds of decomposed matter”, which is known as “miasma theory of disease” (miasma is an ancient Greek word for pollution). This cloud is detected by smelling, because it reeks. Now, human waste also reeks and this alone is a good reason to have a flush toilet at home, which could be the reason why they had them in Indus valley… However, Atharvaveda (the fourth Veda, a collection of ancient Hindu texts) already identifies the causes of disease as “living causative agents such as the yatudhānya, the kimīdi, the kṛimi and the durṇama. The atharvāns seek to kill them with a variety of drugs in order to counter the disease”. Meaning that maybe those ancient Indians were in fact closer to the germ theory of disease and had a stronger motive than smell to install flush toilets in their homes – they knew it will benefit their health. I know quoting Wikipedia (and/or Veda) is not very scientific; however I wanted to give an example of an early public health measure.

A picture of an ancient Indian toilet; found at https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYO5TcTxDTSJlmxLXUttUUtgAwHa30sBe8g1C4JDIMHvBv-M5potQO4F1meFwERDt0CuYLHGessP_KNIcsNKJOq92hz4xyqTcXK1OkZKSCYG3dW5x0jTJ2bGg0qSGKYKs_4HaWEOV7nmA/s1600-h/toilet_ancient_india.jpg

Throughout the centuries, various inventions helped humans live better and longer lives – from flush toilets to vaccinations and seat-belts. Before science, religion was a major source of influence and many early public health measures are in fact religious laws – for example, this is probably why Islam and other Middle-Eastern religions (Judaism, also early Christianity) do not allow pork. Subjective reasons aside, pork is associated with many diseases, including numerous kinds of parasites. Imagine how much worse all this can be with scarce water supplies (Middle East is dry!) and with the cleanliness standards of past centuries. In order to minimize the risk, leaders simply used religion to “spread the word”. However, with modern standards and use of refrigerators, we can safely enjoy pork pretty much whenever we want to (if we desire to do so).

Enter science. With new and better equipment, we began measuring more and more (and smaller and smaller) things and soon natural sciences like biology and chemistry took off. We discovered that indeed many “small creatures” cause diseases and found ways to fight them – from antibiotics to vaccinations we have improved our likelihood of surviving. With infectious diseases under control (in the Western world), we increased the life expectancy to around 80 years. However, this opened the door for new diseases – cancers and cardiovascular. When people stopped dying from accidents and infectious diseases, they did not change their lifestyles. In combination with living longer, this resulted in various chronic diseases that are top killers today.

The problem is that conventional methods are not effective anymore. You cannot get vaccinated for lung cancer and smoke freely for the rest of your life. You cannot eat a pill and get rid of diabetes. What we need are behavioral changes. A typical measure is increasing taxes (e.g. cigarettes and alcohol), because it is believed that it will drive the consumption down. However this measure has some ethical issues - Is it right to increase taxes? If so, how much should we raise the taxes? Will this just lead to a big black market? That’s what’s happening with cigarettes in New York.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/04/05/nyregion/yjploosies/yjploosies-articleLarge.jpg

Bans are also popular (in terms of restrictions on where you can smoke), however cigarettes are still legal. But let’s think of a world where cigarettes are illegal – would people stop smoking? While it would very much likely decrease the number of smokers, it would not erase smoking completely – cigarettes would just become an illegal drug. This means thousands of today’s average citizens would become criminals. Is this fair? What about alcohol? Prohibition has been tested, did not bring any good results, and just made some Mafioso’s rich… Another typical measure was introducing warning signs on the cigarette boxes… Did they make any difference? I actually don’t know. Did anyone measure it?

Similar case with the food industry – should we increase taxes? Introduce labels? Ban things? How much would things change? What do we even want to accomplish – what is the standard? Is it the 2000 calorie diet? But is it really all about calories and getting fat? What about getting the right nutrients like vitamins, omega-3 acids, minerals like magnesium, etc? But will the increased complexity of adding more information drive healthy behavior? And is it the same if you eat a pill of vitamin C compared to eating an orange (or a few)? Is it possible that vitamin C pills (especially non-organic ones) are like shooting at a target with a shotgun? In my last job before coming to America I was selling dietary supplements and one of our top products was organic magnesium – they idea behind is is that any non-organic form just doesn’t cut it, because our body can better absorb magnesium from organic compounds than synthetic ones…

http://leahkaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/for-photo-illustration-of-a-tomato-with-a-food-label-on-it-e6b91523468f8770_large.jpg

What I think we need is a lot of research to determine what actually does work. And not just that – you have to know your target audience. What might work for a young white girl might not work for an old black man. What needs to be determined first is who is a high-risk group anyway; you have to define your population. Then, you define exposure and disease. In the case of prevention, I guess the roles are a bit confusing, but introducing a new nutrition label could be considered exposure, and decrease in unhealthy foods bought/ordered a disease (or, better said, outcome). Then you’d want to measure (and account for) other factors: what is the population of the area (if you think in terms of a supermarket, who is the average customer)? What is the racial/ethnic structure, what are the education levels and other socio-economic factors, what are their ages, etc? Digging even deeper - where do you put the label on the box? Should it be emphasized, discreet, in color; should it have more information or just the essentials?

Then comes the measuring of outcomes, where you’d hope that more people would start eating more healthy foods. Are the nutrition labels enough? While 70% of adults might want labels to be easier to read, will they use them? Will they use them right? Will it, in the end, drive a healthier lifestyle?

http://www.iemily.com/images/foodallergy.gif

Some want to go further – I recently read about Brian Wansink, who wrote a couple of books on behavioral psychology, nutrition and marketing (and is a former Executive Director of the USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion). He also tried a couple of tricks that the junk-food industry used (better branding, better presentation (colors, placement), etc) on fruits in a school cafeteria and sure, kids ate more fruits than ever! All they did was moving the fruits from the middle of the line to the end of the line, putting them in nice bowls and adding a sign prompting the kids to take the fruit! He argues that many factors come into play when it comes to human food consumption, eyes being one of them. In fact, he won an Ig Nobel prize in 2007 for his bottomless bowl of soup – he compared how much people ate if the bowl was automatically refilling without the test subject knowing it and if the subjects ate from a normal bowl. People in the bottomless cohort ate 73% more and didn’t feel any fuller.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/Bottomless_Bowl-Wansink.jpg

In fact, he discovered many interesting things and some of them are listed in this Wikipedia article:

• Moving from a 12-inch to a 10-inch dinner plate leads people to serve and eat 22% less
• A person will eat an average of 92% of any food they serve themselves
• The average person makes an excess of 250 decisions about food each day
• Low-fat labels lead people to eat 16-23% more total calories
• The Nutritional Gatekeeper of a home influences an estimated 72% of all of the food their family eats
• Because of visual illusions, people (even Philly bartenders) pour 28% more into a short wide glasses than tall ones
• 50% of the snack food bought in bulk (such as at a warehouse club store) is eaten within six days of purchase

I believe he is one of the people in the trenches on the front-line of public health today. The industry and corporations are fighting with everything they got; they are not ashamed of aggressively advertising to kids, our most vulnerable population.

Can we do something similar for healthy foods? The question here is – who should pay for such ads? Why doesn’t healthy food industry fight back? Are they owned by the same people who own the junk-food industry?

To sum it up, we have various factors to consider when it comes to introducing sound policies. We have to find the flush toilets of today, but they are likely not in the form we have gotten used to. Yes, we can start a new revolution of nutrition labels, but will they have the desired effect? They are a necessary component – you need the information to make an informed decision – but they are not a sufficient component. In one of my previous blogs I talked about Jamie Oliver and his goal – to educate. This will become an important part of re-programming people and get them to eat more carefully. I don’t blame junk-food (or any other) industry – their goal is to sell as much as they can. Of course, I would draw the line when it comes to advertising to children, but parents play a role here as well – they sit their kids in front of the TV (or allow them to sit there), when they should be spending quality time with them.

What I think an effective policy of tomorrow will include is information (labels), education (teaching how to buy, prepare and enjoy food) and behavioral psychology. Epidemiology can play a huge, even central, role in this story, as we have to start measuring the effects of these measures. What works, what doesn’t? Are policies inter-related? As Wansink discovered, low-fat labels lead people to eat 16-23% more total calories – which means that solving one problem might just create another one (or a few), unless we keep the big picture in front of our eyes. However, easier said than done. Designing a study proved to be a complicated issue even when it comes to measuring the effect of caffeine on students' GPA. I can only imagine what it takes to build a policy that bring results.

The powers of a man's mind...

...are directly proportioned to the quantity of coffee he drinks
~Sir James Mackintosh

Does drinking coffee (and other caffeinated drinks) make you smarter? According to some studies, there is a connection. A couple of classmates and I have designed a study that would measure the connection between caffeine consumption and college students' GPA.

We are looking for money to conduct this study now :) Do you know anyone at Starbucks, Caribou Coffee, etc? ;)

You can find our proposed study design here:
http://washingtonmizzou.wordpress.com/2011/04/13/the-good-ol%E2%80%99-cup-of-joe%E2%80%A6-is-caffeine-helping-our-college-students/

Why don’t we ban stupidity instead?

• Guns
• Drugs
• Smoking
• CO2

What do they have in common? DANGER! We often hear how dangerous they are… Especially when we link them to irresponsible people… This makes some people think we should ban them… But the list goes on:

• Junk-food
• Sexting
• Alcohol
• Cars

You see where I’m going with this? But still, let’s keep going:

• Stairs
• Tall buildings
• Swimming
• Snakes

Well, if you didn’t get it by now, I will point it out: these things can all be harmful to us. In fact, most of them have been associated with many deaths. But most of us still have strong feelings only about some of them. Why is that? I agree, there are some strong reasons for disliking the first group and mostly weak reasons for the last group… I mean, no-one likes the idea of snake bites and drowning, but we don’t go as far as to campaign against them :) On the other hand, many feel that governments should strongly regulate the first group… Do we have double standards? One can say that guns kill more people than stairs (well, stairs don’t kill, people fall and get killed… but then again, guns actually don’t kill people either)… and then there is the second category... For example, junk-food – one of the biggest killers in the USA. Still legal! Not only that - no-one serious is trying to ban unhealthy food!

Now, before I go on talking about food, I may want to a clear the possible confusion about what sexting is: it is sending sexual messages and/or pictures with your phone… I found out about it in this NY Times article. I only included it because it is the last word I learned :) And it is, arguably, as controversial as smoking or drinking alcohol, heh... You know, kinda OK if adults do it, but totally wrong when it comes to teenagers...

Found at: http://blogs.trb.com/news/opinion/chanlowe/blog/2009/02/sexting.html

OK, let’s go back to the topic of food – one of my favorite topics :) I LOVE FOOD. Especially the good food! But there is the problem: we have good food and bad food. It is not easy to say which is which - is red meat bad? Is milk bad? Is corn bad? Is a Big-Mac bad? I’ve heard it all and I’m still not convinced… but I’m gonna keep my ears, eyes and, most importantly, my MIND open.

But there is another issue – the bottom line is that, except for some Indians (from India, not North America), no-one can survive on sunlight and water alone. WE NEED FOOD TO SURVIVE. We don’t need cigarettes, guns, drugs, cars, stairs, swimming and sexting, but we do need food. Yes, the other ones are convenient or make us feel good, but people have survived without them…

So, what we actually have are two things: (1) we need food; and (2) not all food is good food. And in addition, we have a hard time telling which food is good. And even worse, most of us agree that even the worst food can be a nice treat from time to time – which is probably why we don’t try to ban junk-food.

Well, what can we then do about it? A lot. Ms Obama is always working hard in this regard and Walmart actually responded. However, I keep wondering whether this is enough? What I miss is addressing the issue at the source – the consumer. What are we doing to change the behavior? Sure, making healthy food available at supermarkets and restaurants is important, but unless we raise the awareness among the consumers, no-one will bother with choosing the healthy option…

Found at: http://bob-brown.greensmps.org.au/node/4879

I have a confession to make (some of you know this): I smoke sometimes. I used to smoke more, now I smoke a little. You know, when I have one too many… But what I’m trying to say here is that I noticed something rather curious: when, back home, they introduced “smoking kills” labels on cigarette boxes (there were other slogans), no-one cared! And after a while, we got used to them… like ads on Facebook… it’s just a section of the screen (or your cigarette box) that your eyes don’t go to anymore…

What we need is education. More in line of what Jamie Oliver was saying in the video I posted a while ago. (I highly recommend watching the whole video, but the general idea is that we need to educate our kids about healthy food, especially veggies (small children in the video did not recognize plants, not even potatoes and tomatoes!), we need to educate people to buy and prepare healthy food and start everything by putting healthy food on the menus in school cafeterias). Not only should we bring healthy food to schools, we should promote it. In fact, I believe we should promote a balanced lifestyle. Have a Big-Mac every once in a while, who cares, just make sure you eat your fruits and veggies too. And make sure they’re fresh – that leaf of lettuce in a Big-Mac does not count :) Let alone French fries. In fact, I don’t think potatoes count as vegetables anyway… When in doubt, my rule of thumb is "if it ain't green, it don't count as a vegetable" :)

Why I like the balanced lifestyle idea is that it does not create rules – it just gives you guidelines. Don’t follow diets and all that – just make sure you balance it out. And observe how your body reacts. Don’t like carrots? No problem, eat celery. Also, you can apply this logic to other healthy behaviors… Don’t like running? Try swimming or cycling!

To sum it up, I’m a firm believer that unless we make people smarter, we will continue to do stupid things. Rules, especially when detailed, can only apply for a short period of time. When the circumstances change (e.g. new technology), the old rules do not apply anymore – people find a way around them. It’s like sexting – those kids didn’t even think that they were doing something wrong – the rules they knew did not apply to sending sexy pictures! If instead someone would talk to them about issues, they would probably not do anything as stupid…

Found at: http://www.webcomicsnation.com/kevinmoore/incontempt/series.php?view=single&ID=142801

The same goes for food. We can add nutrition labels on boxes, even in restaurants. We can have the healthy section in our local super market. But unless people are aware of the problem, they will not notice the solutions around them. Without going as far as to banning unhealthy food, there is no better way to ensure people will eat better. And I guess we’d all be sad if our local supermarket could not sell our favorite cookies anymore ;)

Found at: http://usefulfunnystuff.com/page/3

You are what you eat... what about where you eat?

I am not a big carnivore, but I do like to enjoy a good piece of meat every once in a while. I try to avoid processed meat because, first of all, you cannot call that meat! At best, that used to be meat; in reality, it was mostly parts of animals no decent human being would wanna eat... so they made it into something that looks like food; something you feel comfortable putting in your mouth. Second of all, I do have a strong suspicion that humans are, by design, not carnivores. Don't get me wrong - I am by no means ready to give up meat yet, but if I do the "sin" of eating it, I prefer eating real meat. You know - if you're doing something wrong, make sure you're doing it right :D

Maybe someday I will give up meat, but I don't wanna force myself for the wrong reasons... Have you ever seen those pale lifeless people in the "healthy" part of your grocery store? Those are the people I believe are eating "healthy food" for the wrong reasons, ending up losing their health...

I was wondering if the places we choose to eat at also play a role in our health. You can see the connection: chopping meat - bacteria on knife - cutting some vegetables - eating these vegetables uncooked - bacteria infection.

Well, if you live in Columbia, Missouri, you can check how well your favorite place is doing on health: inspections: http://gocolumbiamo.com/webapps/cfforms/health/health_inspections.cfm

Now, I was lucky - my favorite places are not doing bad. But the question is: would I stop eating there if they had bad results? Or is it like the meat/no-meat dilemma (or alcohol/no-alcohol) - even if I know it's bad for health, I keep doing the unhealthy thing...

Which reminds me of this lecture...



Do you think we can address unhealthy behavior with Sinek's ideas? Are we approaching unhealthy eating habits (and other bad habits) from the wrong perspective?

.

Nipples, fashion and guns

• A study has shown that nipple piercing can lead to breast abscesses.
• No study has been conducted to establish whether nipple piercings are fashionable.
• I threw guns in the title to attract a broader segment of readers. You are not going to find anything on guns in this blog post. Nor on fashion. But some do believe that nipple piercing is a fashion statement.

I found this NY Times article that summarizes what turned out to be a part of a larger study. The study examined which risk factors are connected to the development of primary breast abscesses and subsequent recurrence. The NYT article did not mention these other factors and focused on nipple piercing, however this was the biggest contribution of this study to the world of medical science anyway. 

The matter sounded interesting so I googled the study (Google Scholar is great for searching, but to actually get my hands  mouse cursor on the study, I had to use the MU Library access to the world of article databases) and got this nicely formatted document that was easy to read. Now, sometimes you get a report that has no structure (or even worse, no pictures!) and those are not nice to read. This is not a scientific criterion, but I decided to like that study based on that :)

The second thing I liked about it was the phrase “case control study”. I did not mention this, but I was looking for a case control study because I wanted to describe the possibilities and challenges of this study design to my faithful readers. I personally like it because it is rather simple and fairly reliable.This makes it a very common study design (based on my experience...which, I admit, is not that extensive). It is especially useful when we are dealing with rare diseases and/or when diseases occur a long time after exposure - the latter part being more relevant to the study I am presenting here.

Now, many of you do not know (and quite as likely do not care) that in science, there are many kinds of studies with various pros and cons. The biggest issue in social sciences is that the most reliable study designs are often unethical to conduct on people. For example, you cannot conduct a study where you observe what happens if you deprive people of food (or access to Facebook) – it is not ethical. Yes, there a big ethical difference if you compare depriving people of food and Facebook, but the ethical dilemma is real when you try to think how far you can go. In healthcare, the matter is much worse because you may be jeopardizing your research subjects’ health (or lives!).

OK, what then are these so called “case-control studies”? As the name suggests, there are two kinds of people involved – cases (those who have the disease) and controls (those who don’t). Gordis explains that when conducting a case-control study, we start by selecting the cases and then we go about finding suitable controls. What we compare among these two groups it the exposure – did they come in contact with the risk factor. Usually, the risk factor is defined, but in the case of the breast abscess study, the researchers were looking for ANY risk factor significantly associated with the development and recurrence of primary breast abscesses (the disease). The most significant risk factors were smoking and nipple piercing (I will not go into the details about the other discoveries they made). While smoking was an expected risk factor, nipple piercing was not.

Now, I already talked about risk factors a few weeks ago, so I will just briefly explain significant associations at this point. First, significance is a statistical term which, in essence, means that something is highly likely. Not 100% sure (reality check: science is NOT 100% sure most of the time), just pretty sure. And then when I say association, I mean that there is some kind of connection between two things – it is just not sure if we can say that one thing caused the other. This is exactly the argument people that defended smoking used against smoking-restricting policies – there is a connection (association) between smoking and lung cancer, but that alone is not a 100% proof. Now, over the years, science provided good biological explanations on how smoking causes cancer (for example, the chemical compounds inside cigarettes), so many of the skeptics were silenced; but when you do not have a logical explanation for the causation, you cannot (or better said “should not”) jump to any conclusions based on case-control studies.

Soo…. Where was I? Oh, yeah, nipples. OK, how did our researchers choose the subjects for the study? The easy part was getting the cases – women with breast abscesses. Obviously they have read a book or two about epidemiology, like the one from Gordis, because they were aware of some problems associated with selection criteria. One of the biggest problems that Gordis mentions is when all the cases come from one hospital – what if the risk factor was significantly associated with that hospital? Maybe we cannot generalize our findings to other hospitals/cities/states/countries. This was exactly the case in our breast abscess study – all the cases came from the University of Iowa Hospital. However, based on the description of what precaution measures they took, I can conclude that they did a good job anyway. Out of the initial pool of 773 patients with breast abscesses, they selected the best 68 examples that were suitable for the research.

To select the controls, they chose a matching sample. Gordis calls it individual matching. It means, based on our example, that for every case they found a control that was of the same age, race and puerperal status. Not that this was the best possible scenario, but due to practical reasons, it was probably the best (they chose the controls from the same hospital as the cases). Paraphrasing Gordis: the downside is that after making these matches, they could not investigate whether age, race and puerperal status were related to breast abscesses.

After collecting data from the hospital records, they did various analyses. This also seems like a good place to mention the disadvantages of the case-control study design. I already mentioned the problems of selecting the cases and controls - we call that selection bias. There is another kind of bias called recall bias - it is when you don't really remember how often you did something (Like how many times did you drink coffee this week? How many times did you exercise this month and how intensive? Our memory is just fuzzy sometimes). I mentioned that for the breast abscess study, they collected data from medical records. You'd think that this is reliable information, right? But what if there is something missing from the records? Maybe not all doctors paid attention whether their patients had nipple piercing or not... It is really important to have these challenges in mind from the time you start designing your study. You can improve the reliability of your study a lot if you control for these disadvantages, like matching the cases and controls.

I will now summarize their findings about how smoking and nipple piercing are associated with abscesses. The univariate analysis showed that the odds ratio for smokers getting the abscess was 8. In English, this means that the odds for smokers getting an abscess are 8 times higher than the odds for non-smokers. For nipple piercing, the odds ratio was 10.2.

When I reached this point in the study, I began thinking about the habits of people who are inclined to get their nipples pierced. I may sound judgmental, but don’t you find it that someone who get’s their nipples pierced (you know the rebellious type) is also more likely to smoke? What if nipple piercing is associated with smoking (or, better said, both can be related to rebellious behavior), wouldn’t that discredit the idea that nipple piercing causes abscesses? This is a good example of a confounding factor – a factor that may cause an association that is not meaningful.

In order to control for these confounding factors between the risk factors themselves, they performed a multivariate analysis. Now, this does not mean that there can be no confounding factors, but it does give more reliable results. After this analysis, the results were a bit different – while smoking was still significantly associated with all kinds of abscesses (odds ratio in this case lowered to 6.15), nipple piercing only remained linked to subareolar abscesses (odds ratio: 20.26; smoking odds ratio for subareolar abscesses was 11.49).

What this study successfully accomplished was that it confirmed what other studies have found – that smoking is associated with breast abscesses; but more importantly, it discovered that so is nipple piercing. They have found numerous biological explanations that support the causation, however they do not go on to claim that there is one. Rather, they suggest further research be done, but also that doctors might want to start warning their patients about the possible threats of nipple piercing. The researchers also reflect on the study design, explaining that there are limitations connected with a retrospective case-control study and that their matching was not perfect.

All this makes me believe that this study was a good one and more importantly, a responsible one when it came to making conclusions. I also find the NY Times article to responsibly point out the new discovery – the danger of nipple piercing; however they could have mentioned at least the smoking part too.

Now, these findings will not affect me much – I never considered nipple piercing and I don’t think I’m facing the risk of breast abscesses anyway, but I think it is important to raise awareness of such issues, especially among the female population. In moments of youthful indiscretion, an argument like this one could prevent a girl or two from doing something she would eventually regret.

Just wanted to share this inspired talk

New iPhone app - cooking with your mobile phone

Let's get some things straight first:

• One, you may be wondering what does an iPhone app have to do with epidemiology? Nothing really ;)
• Two, there is no such app, I just wanted to increase the number of Apple-fans in my reading community :P
• Three, can you actually cook with your phone?

A few years ago, a now-famous hoax appeared online, claiming that you can cook an egg by placing it between two active mobile phones (or cell phones, as known in some countries). That myth was eventually proven as false, but many people "bought it" initially. Actually, the way this information spread (like any internet phenomenon - "like a virus") would probably interest many epidemiologists, hehe.

But there is another thing I noticed - we are still not sure whether mobile phone exposure is dangerous to our health or not. Not long ago, my friends and I actually tried making pop-corn using 5 phones, but failed. In fact, we used 3 or 4 iPhones, so a theory would be that an iPhone is just too weak to make a corn pop :) I concluded that there is no need for anyone to make an app that would even attempt cooking food :P

Anyway, to come to the real point of this post: some serious people (a.k.a. scientists), lead by Dr. Volkow, actually tried measuring the effect of mobile phones on our brain. You can read about it in this NY Times article.

In short, they found out that mobile phone use does cause changes in brain activity. No cause to panic - they do not know what these changes mean really, but it is important to understand that mobile phone use does something to our brain, not "nothing" as believed until know by some. The big difference is that previous studies were usually observational, but this one was randomized.

I also like that they do not jump to any conclusions - they suggest that this research only shows potential areas of further research. In fact, they also predicted possible therapeutic uses of mobile phones!

But I keep wondering what all these wireless devices in our environment mean for our health... If we are indeed just pulsating strings, couldn't your home wi-fi (or any wireless technology) change something? You know, maybe through some sort of resonance... Or your mobile phone that you keep a few inches from every part of your brain while talking? Maybe we don't even have the technology that can measure what we are doing to ourselves...

Yeah, well, I love the convenience of modern technology, so I'm gonna keep using it :) I always say that if we want to live in fear of technology and what it can do to us, we might as well go back to living in caves... Not that I propose mindless use of anything - we have to stay alert; but it is more likely that the stress of living in fear will kill you sooner than that what you fear ;)

And if I'm wrong? Well, evolution will take care of that :)