STUDY: MICE ARE NOT HUMANS

After years of having mouse/skin cancer models shoved down the American public’s throat by dermatologists, compelling new data from the Dutch equivalent of the NIH finally and permanently blows the lid off the flawed assumption that humans and rodents are medically related in all areas.

Close your eyes and say these three words, slowly and methodically – then visualize each in your mind’s eye:  orange, giraffe, and Saccharin. If you are like most people in this country, the first two will evoke bland, innocuous thoughts of a tangy-sweet fruit and the goofy-looking, long-necked mascot of a toy store chain. The third, however, usually induces a response of, “Oh, that’s bad for you” or “Oh, cancer-causing.” This generalistic, negative image of an artificial sweetener that has, in fact, been used safely in foods for nearly 100 years is the result of one of the first major mass media scares in modern times, which began in the late 1970s.  

TV networks and national newspapers were delighted to see how easy it was to frighten the hell out of people at little or no expense, but were ultimately surprised to witness the resultant escalation that culminated in the U.S. Congress voting for a ban of over-the-counter use of Saccharin altogether. The result was billions of dollars lost to the economy and thousands of American jobs done away with, all because of a single, flawed Canadian study that overdosed male rats with a highly potent, pure form of the material to achieve a desired result: bladder cancer.  And of course it shouldn’t go unmentioned that this forced outcome also happened to make a name for the testing laboratory among foodstuff researchers and regulators.

For nearly 20 years, and in stark contrast to virtually every other country in the world, Saccharin languished in the no-man’s land of controlled or prohibited substances, along with folic acid dietary supplements and Minoxidyl (a prostate cancer drug used in the hair growth ingredient in Rogaine), both of which had been vilified by dubious, unchecked “mouse studies,” but later exonerated after extensive and costly studies on humans turned up no deleterious effects.  Emboldened by this wave of revisionist science, a group of independent researchers who reviewed the original Saccharin study in 1999 found it to be completely flawed and forced the government’s National Toxicology Program to remove the sweetener from its list of Known Human Carcinogens.  

Dermatologists have used “Mouse Models” to attack indoor tanning equipment as a cause of melanoma and other skin cancers for the better part of a decade. When Dr. Annemarie Sleijffers (pronounced “sly-fers”) of the Dutch National Institute of Public Health and the Environment noticed that UVB-irradiated mouse skin reacted in a completely different manner than that of living human skin during the conduct of a study on Hepatitis B vaccinations, her published results shocked the rank and file of dogmatic, non-scientist MDs, and at the same time brought forth “See-I-told-you-so” from the PhDs at FDA, SUNARC and numerous research universities around the world. Her paper, entitled simply, “Mice are not Humans” appeared in JAMA and on many medical websites on September 19th.

Are we Americans simply a herd of gullible sots who blithely allow themselves to be led about by our collective noses, like so many sheep being driven by the Collies and Rottweilers of Madison Avenue?  Well, in view of such phenomena as the Vitamin D deficiency-induced Rickets epidemic stemming potentially from the AAD’s skin cancer campaign, it seems as if we have been just that. Thankfully, with the advent of competing 24-hour news channels and a proliferation of journalistic watchdog organizations created in the wake of numerous “Chicken Little” scandals, things are changing. Inaccurate or false reporting from media outlets are themselves more and more becoming news, which has many unjustly maligned industries, politicians and celebrities sighing with relief. Perhaps, one day, we will again be able to open a New York Times or turn on CBS and rely, unquestioningly, on the information presented to us therein. In the interim, however, it seems prudent that we remain skeptical, and look for the works of such pioneers of truth as Dr. Sleijffers.