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John Cuthber

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Posts posted by John Cuthber

    4 hours ago, CharonY said:

    The cheapest non-alcoholic drink to produce is arguably bottled water. Everything else is an additive.

    That's a good order of magnitude or two more expensive than tap water.
    A friend of mine who used to work in a  pub was always pleased to see people drinking cola in his bar.
    It had a mark-up of essentially 100 %.
    The brewery supplied CO2 for dispensing beer, so he didn't pay for that. The price of tap water is quoted in pennies per ton.
    The flavouring syrup  cost a few pence. He sold the drink for a few pounds.
    I think he worked out the most expensive bit was paying someone to wash the glass afterwards.
     

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    3 hours ago, Alfred001 said:

    We don't need to know exactly how large it is, knowing that it is smaller than 1 in 100 000 would probably be sufficient.

    OK

    Let's start there because we agree about it.
    If the risk is low enough, it's not worth worrying about.

    Why?
    Do you accept that essentially, it's "too small to worry about" because it's "too small to make any (noticeable) difference"?

    Well, we have been using the stuff for over half a century.

    And nobody noticed the difference.
    Even though we have systems in place to check, nobody noticed.


     

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    "Is it permissible to use infinity, which is not defined in physics, to assume the impossibility of traveling at the speed of light?!"
    Yes, particularly if you use a reductio ad absurdum argument.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

    It is absurd to imagine that something with a non-zero rest-mass  could get to the speed of light because it would take an infinite amount of energy to do so.

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    30 minutes ago, Alfred001 said:

    I don't understand what statistical power has to do with what I said.

    I'm sorry; I thought I had made it clear.
    For any set of experiments, statistical power is finite.
     

     

    31 minutes ago, Alfred001 said:

    But don't you understand that you don't have to find it? If you have 100,000 subjects and you don't find an increase in cancer risk then you can say that, if an effect exists, it is smaller than 1 in 100,000 getting cancer.

    I understand that.
    How did you come to the conclusion that such a test has not been done?
    You are the one saying we need more testing; You are also the one saying that we don't need to find the problem

    Come back when you have finished arguing with yourself.
     

     

    32 minutes ago, Alfred001 said:

    . It would not be expensive because it would not be a trial, but an observational study.

    As I said, are you offering to pay for it?
    But. more importantly, what do you think this is?

     

    On 7/14/2023 at 8:38 AM, John Cuthber said:

    The carcinogenicity (and other  risks) of metronidazole are still under investigation- as are those with any other drugs in medical use.

    https://yellowcard.mhra.gov.uk/

     

     

    34 minutes ago, Alfred001 said:

    OMG, of course it would change clinical practice. If we found out that the risk was higher than the cancer risk conferred by H pylori we would use a different antibiotic to treat the infection. That's the whole point. Again, I've already explained this at least twice.

    AFAICT you have yet to explain why you think we do not already know that the risk from H pylori is greater than that from the drug.
    Do you realise that neither estimate of probability needs to be very precise?

     

     

    37 minutes ago, Alfred001 said:

    - we don't know what the cancer risk associated with metronidazole is.

    We know that it is small. (Because, if it was high, it would be noticeable- e.g via the yellow card scheme or through American ambulance chasing lawyers As wiki points out "In 2020, it was the 222nd most commonly prescribed medication in the United States, with more than 2 million prescriptions.".)

    And that's all we actually ned to know.

    This is exactly what statistical power has to do with it.
    We did tests. They were not powerful enough to be sure of the outcome; they never can be.
    But they were good enough to know that the cure was better than the disease.

     

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    30 minutes ago, netzao said:

    How do you determine the purity of Sodium Hypochlorite ?

    Iodometric titration, but I can't see how that's relevant.
     

     

    31 minutes ago, netzao said:

    Is there something to look for or is all Sodium Hypochlorite the same ?

    It's a chemical.
    It is always the same.



    Fundamentally, the material you posted the data for is just bleach.
    I think the amine oxide is there as a surfactant/ thickener.
    The other alkalies are there because hypochlorite is more stable in alkaline solution.

    What are you trying to achieve?
     

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    12 hours ago, Alfred001 said:

    I guess we would need to do a systematic review of the literature to really know which direction the evidence is pointing to.

    There are two problems with that.
    The first is that's not how testing works.
    If you are lucky, it goes like this:
    A study of a hundred patients would probably tell you about an effect that happened in 10% of them, but might miss an effect that happened in 1% of them.
    If you raise the sample size to a million, you will almost certainly spot any side effect that happens in 0.01% of teh population.

    So, at best, if you have a big enough cohort, you can detect an adverse effect that is very rare.
    But if the effect is rare enough, you may never be able to get a large enough test pool.

    If you are unlucky, you find something like this; the drug raises the lifetime cancer risk from about 30% (or whatever it is) to 30.1%.
    You need a huge, well designed study to find an effect like that. Such trials are expensive

    And here's the big problem with your suggestion.

    What do you do with the result?

    The people prescribing metronidazole know it's associated with a small risk of harm from cancer.
    But they are  using it to treat a condition with a relatively large risk of harm.

    Actually putting a number on the first risk- say it's a 0.1234% higher relative risk- does not change clinical practice.

    So you would end up spending a lot of money to confirm something which the doctors already know, and already act on.

    Now, if you personally are a billionaire and want to waste your money on such a programme, that's your choice.
    But I suspect the rest of us would prefer the healthcare industry to spend its limited resources on things where the outcome will actually make a difference.

    Don't you agree?

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    18 hours ago, Photon Guy said:

    . Today, with all the scientific discoveries we made since, we know that if you're bitten by a radioactive spider...

    Actually, we now know that all spiders are radioactive.

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    On 7/13/2023 at 1:55 AM, iNow said:

    These generational caches of information and behavioral narratives like “don’t poke the bee hive” and “avoid eating that mushroom” and “it’s better not to fornicate on ant hills” were sung to each other in songs around campfires.

    We still do sometimes; it's very effective.

     

    2

    On 7/8/2023 at 5:13 PM, John Cuthber said:

    Alcohol, sunlight, silica and the fumes from diesel engines are known human carcinogens.
    Do you suggest that we ban them?

    Or do you think we should consider the benefits as well?

    I should have mentioned x-rays too.

    The carcinogenicity (and other  risks) of metronidazole are still under investigation- as are those with any other drugs in medical use.

    https://yellowcard.mhra.gov.uk/


     

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    3 hours ago, Photon Guy said:

    With the hydrogen that's left, how hard would it be to get it to bond with the oxygen that is readily available in the Earth's atmosphere

    250px-Hindenburg_disaster.jpg     Very easy.

    A can of compressed hydrogen with a catalyst would be a better weapon than a water supply.

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    ·

    Edited by John Cuthber

    Fat cows bend in angles.
    The one I learned for the lanthanides would no longer be considered acceptable in polite conversation.
    Incidentally, "tetrel" is a new one for me. When was that coined?
    That means we have the noble gases, the alkali metals, the halogens, the alkaline earths, the chalcogens, the pnictogens , the tetrels and "the boron group"

    The trivalent ones need better PR.

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    41 minutes ago, TheVat said:

    ESL

    English as a second language?

    There is no such thing as "American English". There is English; and there are mistakes.
    :-)
    I suspect that a large part of the actual answer to the original question
     

      

    7 hours ago, Genady said:

    ...why so many native English speakers so often misuse words like their/ there/ they're? 



    is a fall in the expenditure on education.

    4 hours ago, Externet said:

    NO, languages do not evolve. 

    Yes they do.

    It means "change" not "improve"

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