Lucia Sivilotti // Mar 3, 2008 at 7:28 am

A few facts about smallpox.
Alas it is untrue that smallpox was eliminated by sanitation. Smallpox is like flu, it spreads by the respiratory route- basically you get infected if you breathe near a sick person (who shed virus as they cough and from their skin sores). You can be as clean as you like and live in the most wonderful airy and healthy environment - that does not change your likelihood of coming down with the disease if you are exposed.
Equally, being malnourished or unfit certainly doesn’t help anyone faced with a serious disease, infectious or otherwise, but being healthy and well-fed does not save you from dying of smallpox if you catch it. It is not a disease that spares the prince and kills the pauper, as demonstrated by the numbers the disease killed in the royal families of early modern Europe (see
Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History by Donald R. Hopkins, University of Chicago Press 1985)

If sanitation worked, you would expect smallpox to spread less and/or to be less lethal in very recent times (say 1960’s Europe) than in the Victorian era, or in the poorer countries. This is not true: in twentieth-century Europe, each case of smallpox infected on average between 3.5 and 5 people (Gani & Leach, Nature 414, 748). You may be interested to know that in 1970 in a German hospital (pretty sanitary places, believe me), a smallpox patient with a cough, although isolated in a single room, infected persons on 3 floors see refs in http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/281/22/2127. This sort of infectiousness is enough to produce nasty epidemics.

So what about the smallpox eradication project? Are you suggesting that it worked by improving sanitation in the Third World rather than by vaccination? That beggars belief.
Take India: in 1974 there were 188,003 cases. In January 1975 there were 1010 and in March, 84. The last case there was in May 1975 (numbers from Hugh Pennington’s Smallpox Scares, London Review of Books, available free at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n17/penn01_.html
Was that the sudden onset of sanitation? Were the poor of India suddenly well fed and properly housed? If only!

Of course, smallpox vaccine is probably the least safe of all vaccines- but average mortality is 30% for variola major, and no antiviral substances have yet proved effective for the treatment of smallpox (see JAMA http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/281/22/2127) so if we were again faced with this disease, we’d be back to vaccines, believe me.

Neither hormesis nor epitaxy have any relevance whatsoever to homeopathic dilution. One doesn’t even need a science A level to see that - let alone a grasp of “cutting edge” science.

No experiments have ever shown a difference between plain water and magic homeopathic water (at least not in a way that supports the claims of homeopathy). Poorly controlled, executed and interpreted experiments do not show anything.

In fact the clownish attempts by some homeopathy ‘researchers’ (believers would be a better term) to reproduce Benveniste’s results have provided us with a lesson in how not to do science:

http://xrl.us/bbjvd (science)
http://xrl.us/bbjvf (cargo cult science)

“Naturally flat earthers like yourselves are always going to try and ‘dilute’ the message and destroy”

Actually I’m a hollow earther, and thanks to the diffeomorphism invariance of GR, I need not be ashamed of it!

This as you said applies in small doses, not non-existant doses.

This is not Quantum Mechanics which you explictley quoted as supporting homeopathic theory

“EPITAXIS; This phenomenon is used in the industrial manufacture of semiconductors for microprocessors. Epitaxy refers to the transfer of structural information from one substance to another, which can happen at the interface between the two substances. This transfer of structure information can remain after the original substance has disappeared from the system.”

Again measureable amounts of both substances are involved. Epitaxis involves a chemical reaction that causes crystals of one substance to grow on another. What this means that part of a substance reacts out and transfer to another.

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epitaxis for examples of some of the chemical reactions involved.

For example if you eat something, your body breaks it down into other substances. Some of these are used by your body, others are excreted. The original food no longer exists. But in all cases there is measureable amounts of any substance to start with, and to finish with.

If the chemicals used in micro-processor manufacture such as gallium nitride, where diluted to 30C then you would not be able to make any processors at all.

Again this is not Quantum Mechanics which you said supported homeopathic theory.

“How about the experiments using the light emission spectrum (Raman and Ultra-Violet-Visible spectroscopy) of homeopathic water vs normal water have shown that homeopathically prepared water has a different molecular structure than normal water.”

I can’t find any references to these, but as your comments about Ben Goldacre show, you are not above making thing up and telling outright lies.

“There’s Benveniste of course (a man definitely not after your own hearts being a maverick and all) . I believe his results on Avogadro’s number have been replicated elsewhere. This despite the scandalous James Randi leading him to an early grave.”

So no Homeopathy did him no good either. But being funded by Big Quacka, what do you expect?

“You see real cutting edge science is proving the efficacy of Homeopathic dilution.”

No it isn’t.

“Naturally flat earthers like yourselves are always going to try and ‘dilute’ the message and destroy but then again who remembers the flat earthers?”

You remember them.

In January a Homeopath told me that if I gave a homeopathic remedy to someone it wouldn’t work because I am not a “trained homeopath”. How can water do this?

A basic studying of the graphs even a 5 year old could grasp is the decline since immunisation mirrors the expected decline you would expect. It’s a no brainer.

Immunisation; The greatest experimentation ever conducted on our species and there have been ZERO trials done that compare with the unvaccinated. Human guinea pigs experimented on by demented scientists with no morality. How can any of you allopathic quacks claim to have erradicated these diseases when the evidence proves how ludicrous a claim that is? Incredible.

Regarding cutting edge science confirming the veracity of homeopathy.

HORMESIS; In the field of toxicology this well known and documented phenomenon details how a substance showing hormesis has the property that it has the opposite effect in small doses, than in large doses.

EPITAXIS; This phenomenon is used in the industrial manufacture of semiconductors for microprocessors. Epitaxy refers to the transfer of structural information from one substance to another, which can happen at the interface between the two substances. This transfer of structure information can remain after the original substance has disappeared from the system.

How about the experiments using the light emission spectrum (Raman and Ultra-Violet-Visible spectroscopy) of homeopathic water vs normal water have shown that homeopathically prepared water has a different molecular structure than normal water.

There’s Benveniste of course (a man definitely not after your own hearts being a maverick and all) . I believe his results on Avogadro’s number have been replicated elsewhere. This despite the scandalous James Randi leading him to an early grave.

You see real cutting edge science is proving the efficacy of Homeopathic dilution. Naturally flat earthers like yourselves are always going to try and ‘dilute’ the message and destroy but then again who remembers the flat earthers?

As regards Quantum Mechanics (not physics), it actually shows that the claims for homeopathy do not exist.

Heh! There certainly would be a lot of devastation if quantum physics and relativity were ever shown to fail to conform to the world described in your average A level physics textbook as rudely as homeopathic dilution does.

If you homeopaths are looking for some ‘theory’ sufficiently unconstrained by reality that it can be used to back up your absurd nonsense, try the Occult and Witchcraft sections of your library. You won’t find what you’re looking for in modern physics.

I don’t expect an answer naturally because the explanation is just too hard to stomach for the medical profession. It’s the skeleton in the cupboard and it’s not going away.