Take the pressure off mums!

There is little question that while you are breast feeding (if you decide to breast feed) then some of your immunity to sniffles and so forth is passed on to the child. So there is a benefit in terms of the parent not having to deal with and worry about sniffles.

The question is whether, in countries with good hygiene and decent food, there is a significant difference to the child, whether in terms of survival or in terms of freedom from disabilities and serious disease.

A huge amount of pressure is put on educated and well off people to breast feed. The NCT classes imply that doing anything else is not normal. The breast feeding counsellors imply it is close to negligence. There is a government directive to support breast feeding and even the milk formula companies have to carry notices recommending it.

My observations suggest that those with less money or less education are not exposed to nearly as much of this propaganda. This may not be true, and the pressure may be on everyone. Certainly some or all women are made to feel as if not breast feeding is a failure to be a good mother.

Given my anecdotal experience it looks as if this pressure is unjustified. I have been asked to find out by one mother whether this is the case.

A preliminary search has turned up an epidemiological study from 2004 which suggests there is a relationship between SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) and bottle feeding. After my previous experience with the SIDS research this will need a lot of careful examination.

Almost all SIDS related behaviours are tied to lower socio-economic or socio-demographic status. Where this is the case an epidemiological study must by its nature pick up a lot of potentially false signs. At least one government/FSIDs recommendation is not supported by their research, but seems like a good recommendation to make anyway. So the question comes down to is this pressure unjustified, and if so should we take the pressure off the mums?

Rufus Evison

P.S. Manuella who requested I look into this should get all the credit.

How DNA Matching works (without the technical bits)

I have been asked about this by a number of people. The problem seems to be that everyone knows our DNA is unique (we are all individuals) and so how can we possibly have a DNA match with someone else?

The answer is that DNA testing does not examine the whole of our DNA. DNA is made up of around 220 million base pairs. If we were to compare all of these we would have a unique genetic fingerprint. INstead we compare 20 different tiny areas of the DNA and see if they match.

This is a bit like taking a physical person (also unique) and then takign a set of details about them to compare. It will quickly get rid of a large number of people who do nto match, and it might happen to be unique. How many long haired six foot blonds are there with a mole at the top of their inner thigh and two gold teeth? Probably not very many, and possibly only me.

The problem arises when you take large numbers of people as some of them will have ambiguous descriptions. The same is true with genetic matching. The bits do not necessarily match to anything obvious to look at (my gold teeth do not show up on a DNA test, so that seems fair), but might match to someone else's sequence.

Given the possibility of matches there is also a possibility of accidental matches. This is where my post about the combinatorics of the DNA database and how it leads to the probability of innocent people getting in trouble becomes important.

Rufus Evison

A successful experiment in Search Engine Optimisation

As mentioned in my frivolous blog (ReasonedFrivolity.BlogSpot.Com) I was presented with a Search Engine optimnisation challenge. I did not expect to succeed, but thought I would manage something and had to try. I did extrememly little actual Search engine optimisation and used only a few of the standard SEO tricks. After about 20 minutes I had to get on to other things. When the google alert came through saying the search engine had picked me up whilst spidering I tried a search. I was quite surprised to see I had reached position 1 in the rankings. Clearly there is very little competition for the term my colleague chose (Whisper it, "Rufus Sexgod") but as the image shows there were a few hundred other pages out there. This is particularly surprising as the other pages were all related to celebrities and so were more prominently linked to than I could manage with my own resources with little work.

All in all I am quite pleased with this as a one off bit of page promotion.

Rufus Evison
ReasonedRants.BlogSpot.Com