Health scares - 13 June 1997

There was a time, not many years ago, when if the New York Stock Exchange closed, say, no more than 30 points down, it was the first item on the evening news, which is commonly in all countries given over to the most dramatic or ominous event.

The other evening, at the very end of the hour’s news programme that I watch, it signed off with the passing remark that the stock market had lost that day 130 points. Not to worry, the smiling anchorman seemed to imply. Tomorrow it’s likely to go up 150. Which it did.

One of the mysteries of American life just now is the ever-soaring stock market, one of the longest bull markets grizzled veterans can remember. During the last famous one, in the 1980s, old-timers began to worry after a time, remembering how the long euphoria of the 1920s collapsed with a world-shaking bang in October 1929, heralding an enormous slump and the beginning of the Great Depression.

So when in October 1987 the market fell over 500 points, immediately the school of economists that’s suspicious of an affluent society said, “We told you so. Time for the second Great Depression.” But it didn’t happen and dedicated free market economists were quick to point out the reforms that Roosevelt initiated to save the nation from another debacle: the government’s regulation of investments; a commission to police the practices and transactions of the stock market; the government’s ensuring of even the smallest bank deposit.

Well, whether these were the causes or not, the fact is that within a year or less, the market was alive and strong again. And throughout President Clinton’s five-year reign, the economy has been (except for an early hiccough) in rude, roaring health which, of course, the President claims as his doing. Though if there’s one thing every school of economists agrees on, it’s that the presidency, any presidency, has very little to do with the state of the economy. What it does have to do with is, to be blunt, still a mystery.

I look back over the list of economists who since the award was first given in 1969 have received the Nobel Prize. They represent schools of thought, even schools of dogma as far apart as Karl Marx and Milton Friedman. If all of them now gone could be resurrected and put in a room with the living Nobelists and invited to agree on a few basic afflictions like how to cure unemployment or poverty, how to ensure prosperity, they would emerge once they were let out with battered heads and broken noses. I don’t suppose there’s a group of self-styled scientists in the world who differ more strenuously about the elementary facts of their trade.

Somehow through the successes and failures of the welfare state and the whole rocketing back and forth between too much government and too little, most people just enjoy the prosperity instead of analysing it.

I remember the glow that settled over the big and little investor, which is quite a lot of the population, in the spring of 1991 when the daily industrial average went over 3,000. Last week, it topped 7,500 – a marvel barely mentioned at the end of the news.

And what has replaced it as the dramatic or lurid or ominous starter? Well it was a refreshing, if queer, change to see the news begin the other evening with a picture of little chicks pecking away at a small pool of water. It was, the man explained, a precaution that more farmers ought to take. The chicks were drinking water treated with a salmonella vaccine. “This,” the reporter was saying, “is the season for salmonella”, and he was reminding us that their presence in what you eat can cause anything from mild gastric trouble to severe, even fatal, food poisoning.

I wonder how many thousands of people wrote in to know where those chicks were being raised and whose food producing company they’d be sold to. On second thought, it strikes me that it may have been a slack evening at that network. Salmonella is always worth a caution. There are more than 1400 species of it.

However, the reporter was also incidentally reminding me that the beginning of the summer is a favourite time for food critics and dieticians to write warning columns about good things to eat in summer and risky things to eat and drink. And sure enough, as soon as our first 90-odd degree days came sweating in this week, diet writers (who abound in America) retold once more the present state of knowledge or prejudice about what is good for you and what’s not.

I begin with polysaturated fats and the perils of cholesterol really in order to dismiss it. For well over 40 years, the American public has been warned and threatened and instructed about the two types of cholesterol; how to keep the bad type (low density lipoprotein) fairly low by avoiding animal fats and carbohydrates.

The word ‘cholesterol’ has gibbered through the land for so long that few people discuss it anymore. Everybody knows his/her count. They either lay off animal fats and carbohydrates or say the heck with it.

However, in the past 20 years or so the overall consumption of meat in this, the great beef-eating country, has gone down by about 20%, bringing wrath and the wringing of hands to the beef cattle-raising states and the feed lots of the midwest.

The hassle over the dangers of coffee has gone on so long in the face of so many conflicting studies, but the most recent ones anyway have concluded that, other things being equal, a little caffeine does nobody any harm.

Good news for tea drinkers, most of whom are unaware that tea, too, has its goodly share – about a third of that in a cup of coffee.

There’s been a scare about a new bug, new to the general public anyway, that can infect raspberries, so the raspberry growers (and I imagine the New Zealand exporters) are busy reassuring people that it was only a small crop in Guatemala that was the villain and, once spotted and the batch destroyed, no further need to worry.

There are always here in summer – as everywhere else, I suppose – cautionary pieces about (as the doctors put it) reducing alcohol intake in summer. This time, I just may not have been paying close attention, but it seems to me that the papers and the networks haven’t space for alcohol warnings. They’re stuffed every night with news and fighting round-table discussions about nicotine. The tobacco companies are really being slammed against the wall, threatened by the Food and Drug Administration with a law to regulate and eventually to eliminate the nicotine in cigarettes. If that happened, they don’t say what would happen to the addicts.

In Congressional hearings, which seem to multiply, the battle drones on as immobile as trench warfare between scientists of all sorts, proving that of course nicotine is the addictive drug; and the tobacco companies, scientists doggedly chanting “Not proven”. And every day scores more suits are being filed by people who lost a relative to lung cancer in spite of the 30-year-old practice of printing on every package horrendous warnings from the Surgeon General.

About alcohol, there is, however, startling news. Certain facts have been well established about alcohol since time began. It is a depressant, though the first fine feeling can suggest the opposite. It produces a euphoria which can give the imbiber delusions of great achievement. It induces in some people maudlin sentimentality; in others aggressiveness bordering on mayhem. It can destroy the liver.

Another quote/fact recognised by the medical faculty since Hypocrites is, as he put it, “Who could have foretold from the structure of the brain that wine could derange its functions?” Or, as any medico will tell you, alcohol destroys brain cells.

Well now comes the word from the Australian University at Canberra with the help of researchers from Sydney. A clinical study. A small sample, admittedly – 209 elderly men, all served in the Second World War, watched for nine years since 1982. Some drank very little, some moderately; 40% drank enough to warrant the tag of “problem drinkers”.

At the end, they were all given a range of neuropsychological tests to measure basic intelligence, intellectual resilience, several types of memory: visual, verbal, explicit, implicit. Each was given a computed X-ray brain scan. The result: not the tiniest sign in any of them of intellectual decline or of atrophy in the regions of the brain that have to do with thinking, memory, retaining information, perceiving, thinking – what they call “cognitive ability” as distinct from emotional awareness.

The authority that published this astonishing debunking of an old and sacred fact: the British Medical Journal.

I don’t know who, whom, the study is meant to reassure or cheer up. A doctor friend of mine looked over the Australian study and said, “Well, I’m going to cut it out, the final comment, and paste it in my big book of familiar medical quotations over what for long has been my mantra: a passionate quotation from the great, late Sir William Osler: ‘Throw all the beer and spirits into the Irish Channel and the English Channel and the North Sea for a year and people in England would be infinitely better. It would solve all the problems with which the philanthropists, the physicians and the politicians have to deal'."

Not perhaps a practical solution. They tried it in America. It obliterated the philanthropists, overburdened the physicians, corrupted the politicians, degraded the country and created a new and flourishing empire of crime.

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