After The Pink Goat

Yesterday, I wrote a post on the battle for the maternity leaves in the EU(http://myeuropeandream.blogspot.com). And the fierce opposition that the idea of 20 week full paid leave meets in the UK. And I couldn't but wonder, are those people blind? Or maybe stupid?
What is it about? Well, we observe growing retirement age across Europe. It makes some sense - as people live longer, they can stay active for longer. The population is aging anyway and someone has to work. So far so good. But as the article below(the second) tell us, it's not so good, at all. People really live longer, due to the improved health care, but they don't stay active for longer. A lot of the people get dementia in one form or another, some simply forget, other get Alzheimer and are of no use at all. This is a serious problem! According to the study, every third person at age 65 will develop dementia in some form! How those people are going to work until the get 67 or 70? Which is what the retirement reforms suggest. That could mean a lot for the economy, in the case where people hire workers at age more that 60 at all. We know how severe age discrimination is. Here in Bulgaria, most of the stores require girls aged less than 25. I can't even imagine what a 65 years old lady with possible dementia can work. With men, it's easier, because they can work as guards or something.
But the problem is very real - we keep the retirements age high, however we do not invest more money in preventing old age diseases, we don't invest into research that could keep old people healthy and active, we don't invest into making laws that protect old people from age discrimination on the work place, we don't stimulate the business to hire such people. And the worst of all - we don't make laws that will stimulate women and men to have babies! What we do can lead to a disaster. That is why, I'm all for both maternity and paternity leaves regulated by the law. European population is getting older and older. We have to fight this. We have to find a way to handle this, to make people have children, to make fathers more responsible, so that mothers will want to give birth.
It's easy to suppose women just want to have children and they will sacrifice everything to do that. Yes, but more and more women prefer not to do that. More and more women wait until they get 35 before starting to have children and at that age it's more risky and more costly in terms of healthcare. Why it should be like that? When it would be so easy to stimulate young parents to have children before they get in their 30s, so that both the mother and the baby will remain healthy and the population will get younger and fresher. Will it cost a lot? Sure! But as you can see the dementia crisis already cost a lot. What will happen when most of the workforce of the country get in their 60s? The country will lose 1/3d of that workforce to dementia and related diseases. We HAVE to invest in both preventing old-age diseases and stimulating the young to have babies. That's the only way to guarantee a healthy society. Not only for the UK, but for the whole Europe, because this problem is not only British. It's European. True, some countries have higher birthrates, but that's only temporary state. Under those laws, most people just prefer not to risk with a baby. Most women prefer not to. And that's bad. That's disastrous. We have to change it.
P.S. Science claims there is a way to prevent dementia to certain extent:

Learning keeps brain healthy: study

UC Irvine neurobiologists are providing the first visual evidence that learning promotes brain health - and, therefore, that mental stimulation could limit the debilitating effects of aging on memory and the mind. source

Britain ignoring its dementia crisis, Oxford study finds

Disease costs more than cancer and heart disease combined but receives a fraction of research funding

Britain's dementia crisis is worse than feared and costs Britain £23bn a year – more than cancer and heart disease combined – but receives a fraction of the funding, according to a study published today.

The number of people with dementia, at 822,000, is 17% higher than has previously been estimated and will pass the 1 million mark before 2025, the Oxford university study has found.

Researchers calculated that for every pound spent on dementia studies, £12 is spent on investigating cancer and £3 on heart disease. They said the ageing population was largely behind the rise in dementia and public attitude contributed to the relative lack of research funding.

"People do consider dementia as an inevitable part of getting old. People who reach the age of 65 have a one in three chance of having dementia before they die," said the report's author, Professor Alastair Gray of the university's Health Economics Research Centre.

The Dementia 2010 report compares the condition's overall annual cost of £23bn with £12bn for cancer care and the £8bn for heart disease.

The £23bn includes £9bn for social care, £12bn for unpaid care and £1.2bn in healthcare costs.

At £590m, cancer research funding is 12 times the £50m devoted to dementia, while heart disease receives more than three times as much. Stroke research receives less.

Each dementia patient costs the economy £27,647 each year, researchers found, nearly five times more than a cancer patient and eight times more than someone with from heart disease.

The expense is driven mainly by the extent of unpaid care and long-term institutional care – in contrast to cancer and heart disease, where costs are mainly taken care of by the NHS. source

Happy Baba Marta, everyone! I love this holiday and I wish you all to be white and red as martenichki and to be very happy, healthy and wealthy

Because of the beautiful bright day, this post will be all about happiness and health. These are 7 articles dedicated to that and I urge you to read them, only the 1st and the 7th are longer, the rest are just few lines long ( I shortened them a lot so please check the sources for more). But it's worthy! Enjoy!

1. The Miracle of Vitamin D: Sound Science, or Hype?
2. Zen meditation fends off pain
3. Confidence key in gauging impressions we leave
4. Powerful New 3-Minute Exercise Improves Memory and Brain Power
5. 10 Habits of Highly Effective Brains
6. Anthony Robbins' 12 Reasons People Don't Get Wealthy
7. The Super Suggestion Technique for Creating Whatever You Desire

The Miracle of Vitamin D: Sound Science, or Hype?

By TARA PARKER-POPE , February 1, 2010

Imagine a treatment that could build bones, strengthen the immune system and lower the risks of illnesses like diabetes, heart and kidney disease, high blood pressure and cancer.

Some research suggests that such a wonder treatment already exists. It’s vitamin D, a nutrient that the body makes from sunlight and that is also found in fish and fortified milk.

Yet despite the health potential of vitamin D, as many as half of all adults and children are said to have less than optimum levels and as many as 10 percent of children are highly deficient, according to a 2008 report in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

As a result, doctors are increasingly testing their patients’ vitamin D levels and prescribing daily supplements to raise them. According to the lab company Quest Diagnostics, orders for vitamin D tests surged more than 50 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, up from the same quarter a year earlier. And in 2008, consumers bought $235 million worth of vitamin D supplements, up from $40 million in 2001, according to Nutrition Business Journal.

Although numerous studies have been promising, there are scant data from randomized clinical trials. Little is known about what the ideal level of vitamin D really is, whether raising it can improve health, and what potential side effects are caused by high doses.

Dr. Manson is leading a major study over the next five years that should provide answers to these questions and more. The nationwide clinical trial is recruiting 20,000 older adults, including men 60 and older and women 65 and older, to study whether high doses of vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acids from fish-oil supplements will lower risk for heart disease and cancer. (Learn about taking part in the study at www.vitalstudy.org.)

Dr. Manson said fish-oil supplements were included in the study because they are another promising treatment that suffers from a dearth of clinical trial evidence. In addition, both vitamin D and fish oil are known to have an anti-inflammatory effect, but each works through a different pathway in the body, so there may be an added health benefit in combining them.

Vitamin D is found throughout the body and acts as a signaling mechanism to turn cells on and off. Right now, the recommended dose from food and supplements is about 400 international units a day for most people, but most experts agree that is probably too low. The Institute of Medicine is reviewing guidelines for vitamin D and is expected to raise the recommended daily dose.

Study participants will take 2,000 I.U.’s of vitamin D3, believed to be the form most easily used by the body. The study will use one-gram supplements of omega-3 fish oil, about 5 to 10 times the average daily intake.

Although consumers may be tempted to rush out and start taking 2,000 I.U.’s of vitamin D a day, doctors warn against it. Several recent studies of nutrients, including vitamins E and B, selenium and beta carotene, have proved disappointing — even suggesting that high doses do more harm than good, increasing risk for heart problems, diabetes and cancer, depending on the supplement.

People most at risk for vitamin D deficiency are older, have diabetes or kidney disease, stay indoors or have darker skin. African-American teenagers are at particularly high risk, possibly because in addition to their dark skin, they are less likely at that age to drink milk or play outside.

The ideal level isn’t known, nor is it known at what point a person is getting too much vitamin D, which can lead to kidney stones, calcification in blood vessels and other problems.

People’s vitamin D levels are influenced by whether they have light or dark skin, where they live, how much time they spend outdoors and by fish and milk consumption. To raise vitamin D without supplements, a person could increase sun exposure for 10 to 15 minutes a day. Eating more fish can help — a 3.5-ounce serving of wild fresh salmon has 600 to 1,000 I.U.’s of vitamin D — but it would take a quart of milk a day to get the recommended dose of vitamin D. source

"“…signs of toxicity can occur with ingestion of 0.5 mg/kg (20,000 IU/kg ), while the oral LD50 (the dose it takes to kill half the animals) for cholecalciferol in dogs is about 88 mg/kg, or 3,520,000 IU/kg. (An Overview of Cholecalciferol Toxicosis. The American Board of Veterinary Toxicology (ABVT). This would be equivalent to a 110-pound adult taking 176,000,000 IU or 440,000 of the 400 unit cholecalciferol capsules. Vieth reports human toxicity probably begins to occur after chronic daily consumption of approximately 40,000 IU/day (100 of the 400 IU capsules).” (Note that “chronic” in medical terms means “sustained over a period of time.”)"
See the comment on this page!

Zen meditation fends off pain

February 24, 2010

(PhysOrg.com) -- People can reduce their sensitivity to pain by thickening their brain, according to a new study published in a special issue of the American Psychological Association journal, Emotion. Researchers from the Université de Montréal made their discovery by comparing the grey matter thickness of Zen meditators and non-meditators. They found evidence that practicing the centuries-old discipline of Zen can reinforce a central brain region (anterior cingulate) that regulates pain. source

Powerful New 3-Minute Exercise Improves Memory and Brain Power

With your feet pointing straight ahead, spread them apart about shoulder width. Grab your right earlobe with the thumb and finger of your left hand. Cross over your left arm and do the same using your right hand on the left earlobe. Then squat as fully as you can, breathing in. That's a little counter intuitive, but that's what you do. Breathe in as you squat.

Then breathe out as you stand. So the breathing needs to be synchronized with the squats. Continue this motion repetitively while holding both earlobes for three minutes.

Los Angeles physician Dr. Eric Robins says that the brain cells and neurons are energized with this simple exercise. He prescribes it to his patients and has had excellent results. One example of his is a youngster doing poorly in school. After being introduced to the exercise, that child went on to become an A student.

According to Yale neurobiologist Dr. Eugenius Ang, the earlobes grabbed are acupuncture points that stimulate neural pathways in the brain. The brain's hemispheres are in opposite sides of the earlobes. Using opposite hands for pinching the earlobes may have something to do with the way our subtle energies are arranged.

Ang showed that the results from EEG (electroencephalography) readings after doing this exercise indicate the right and left hemispheres of the brain had become synchronized. EEG readings measure the neuron firings in the brain via electrodes on the scalp, and are used to determine brain wave normalcies and abnormalities. source

Confidence key in gauging impressions we leave

February 23, 2010 By Tony Fitzpatrick

(PhysOrg.com) -- The gift of "seeing ourselves as others see us" is particularly beneficial when we judge how we’ve made a first impression - in a job interview, during a sales pitch, on a first date.

Now, psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis and Wake Forest University have tested people in first impression settings in the laboratory and have found that confidence makes all the difference in knowing whether you’ve hit a homerun or struck out.

Erika N. Carlson, Washington University doctoral candidate in psychology, her advisor Simine Vazire, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology, and Wake Forest University’s R. Michael Furr, engaged some 280 students in opposite-sex pairings from both universities in five-minute conversation after which impressions (your rating of your partner’s personality traits) and meta-perceptions (your rating of how you think your partner rated your personality traits) were recorded on 60 personality items (such as nice, funny, outgoing), which were rated on a scale from 1 to 7.

There was a twist to their study. The researchers asked a confidence question: How confident are you in your estimation of how your partner sees your personality?

“We found that people who were poor at making good meta-impressions were less confident than people who made accurate ones. So, after making a first impression, if you’re confident in your judgment, you’re likely to be right.”

The research was recently published in Social Psychological and Personality Science. source

10 Habits of Highly Effective Brains

By Alvaro Fernandez
Source: Huffington Post

1. Learn what is the "It" in "Use It or Lose It".

2. Take care of your nutrition.

3. Remember that the brain is part of the body.

4. Practice positive, future-oriented thoughts until they become your default mindset and you look forward to every new day in a constructive way.

5. Thrive on Learning and Mental Challenges.

6. We are (as far as we know) the only self-directed organisms in this planet. Aim high. (and keep learning)

7. Explore, travel.

8. Don't Outsource Your Brain. (Make your own decisions, and mistakes. And learn from them.)

9. Develop and maintain stimulating friendships.

10. Laugh. Often. source

Anthony Robbins' 12 Reasons People Don't Get Wealthy

By Anthony Robbins

According to Wallace Wattles, in his popular wealth treatise called the Science of Getting Rich, "There is a science of getting rich, and it is an exact science, like algebra or arithmetic. There are certain laws which govern the process of acquiring riches, and once these laws are learned and obeyed by anyone, that person will get rich with mathematical certainty."

It is true. Those who make wealth know that it comes about by application of simple rules and principles. Those who don't make wealth don't know about these simple things, and so they assume that wealth is a result of luck or pure chance or something just as superstitious or silly.

Anthony Robbins is one of the top success coaches in the world, having coached star sports players, heads of states and Fortune 500 executives. In his Get The Edge program, he listed down 12 specific reasons he has come to observe to be the leading causes for most people's lack of wealth. Here they are:

1. They never decide and really define, very specifically, what wealth means for them.

2. They make wealth a moving target instead of a fixed one (this is related to point one above).

3. They define it in a way that seems unreachable. You only achieve what you believe. No more, no less. So you must make it believable for you.

4. They never start.(!)

5. They never make it a must.

6. They don't have a realistic plan.

7. If they have a realistic plan, they never follow through on the plan.

8. They give responsibility to others ("experts") instead of to themselves.

9. They give up when they face challenges.

10. They fail to conduct their lives as a business; they never ensure that they make a profit year by year.

11. They allow other people's ideas to affect their decisions unreasonably.

12. They don't get quality coaching. source

The Super Suggestion Technique for Creating Whatever You Desire

By Song Chengxiang
Excerpt from: The Core Solution Special Report

Two of the most powerful strategies for changing your
Inadequate Self Image and live your fullest potential.

1. THE DAILY DECLARATION TECHNIQUE

This is similar to affirmation, but much more powerful and much more effective. Here are the steps to help you setup your own daily declarations.

STEP ONE: List every thing that you need
Suggestions:
New furniture, Bills paid ...
Write down everything you need.

STEP TWO: List every thing that you want
Suggestions:
$1,000,000 in the bank, A $500,000 house
Write down everything you want.

REMEMBER: DON’T limit yourself, write EVERYTHING that you truly want.

STEP THREE: List the personal qualities you need or want
Suggestions:
Ability to concentrate, Ability to finish what I start...
Write down every personal quality that you need or want.

STEP FOUR: Turn lists into goals
Write all your three lists in the form of goals. Here is Joe Karbo’s check list for writing goals.

1. Do you really want it?
2. Does this goal contradict any other goal I am setting?
3. Any problem with goal cooperation? (would your family be against your goals)
4. Is it positive rather than negative?
5. Is it expressed in total detail?
6. Is it realistic?
7. Is this goal high enough?
8. Am I including the personality factors necessary to goal achievement?
9. Is each goal stated as though already accomplished?

Use this checklist to help you write your goals. Your possible goals will look like this...

Tangible goal: I live in a $500,000 house.
Intangible goal: I am calm and cheerful, I share my inner peace and happiness
with others.

Then you are ready for "Daily Declaration"

Each morning:

1. Immediately upon awakening, read your list of goals as you prepared. READ ALOUD, if this is not possible, then move your lips as you read silently. This is IMPORTANT.
2. After reading each goal, pause, and visualize in your mind your goals already accomplished.

Each evening:

Just before you go to sleep, repeat the morning process.

That is all you need to do to use the daily declaration to change your self image.
As an added bonus, all the goals that you have written down for your daily declaration will come true.

CAUTIONS:
1. Don’t tell anyone about your goals. The minute you start telling others, the energy that you’ve build up is gone.
2. You must do it daily, if you miss a day, the effectiveness will drop dramatically.

2. THE SUPER SUGGESTION TECHNIQUE

A WORD OF CAUTION: The super suggestion technique can only be applied to your intangible goals, and CANNOT be applied to tangible goals. The reason is that this technique works at the lower level of consciousness, if the subconscious mind is conditioned to believe that your have already had your dream house, dream cars, etc, it will stop helping you to achieve that.

Sit in a comfortable position, scan your body from head to toe. Feel your muscles relaxing as you scan each part. As you feel yourself become quieter, and more relaxed, start count from 1 to 20. Feel yourself go deeper into the relaxed state, and once you reach 20, you will be in the state that you want to be.

That’s how you prepare yourself into the lower level of consciousness. Here are the steps for super suggestion.

1. Take one intangible goal from your daily declaration goal list. Intangible goals are those regarding to your basic personality or character qualities, such as the ability to concentrate, the ability to read faster etc. Choose ONE goal only!

2. Take one or two keywords from your goal statement that you choose. You will use the keywords instead of the whole statement while you are in the lower state of consciousness, so that you don’t have to commit the entire statement into memory.

3. Read your entire goal statement

4. Go to the lower level of consciousness using the method I just described.

5. Repeat the keywords several times.

6. Come back to the normal state by counting from 20 to 1. When you reach 1, tell yourself you feel fully awake, totally alert.

NOTE: Both daily declaration and super suggestion must be carried out each day.
Daily declaration is for both tangible goals and intangible goals. Super suggestion is
for intangible goals only. Daily declaration should be done every morning and
evening, and as many times as you want throughout the day. Super suggestion needs only be done once a day, suggested time is before lunchtime. And with super suggestion, you work on ONE goal at a time. source

Simulation of the known universe (video) - amazing video for a starter.

You all heard of "climate-gate". The scandal that emerged after someone (probably a very very well-paid one) hacked into the emails of certain top academics and published them. It turned out that those academics have manipulated data and prevented people to publish contradicting to them data trough their peer-reviewing. For most people, that meant that the whole idea of global warming is a fraud and that we all have to continue driving our SUVs and be happy. Obviously, that's nonsense. It's so damn clear that the weather is changing and it's damn clear that man-kind finally reached that density and intellectuality that enable us to affect our planet.

I don't quite understand how anyone could doubt that we have to change our life-style - it's not science, it's common sense. The consumerist model was created to accommodate US economy and create prosperity for the USA. But the situation is different today than in the 70s - today many countries that were poor before are getting richer. And of course they take the same US model and they also want to consume. But the base of this model is the abundance that out-sourcing creates - companies thrive on the cheap Asian workers and resources. What would happen if those workers are no longer cheap. And who's going to work for the rich Asian people who also want to consume. And where all those resources will come from? As we see China is already stopping the export of some substances, how far would they go? I'm sure most people can follow this line of reasoning to the obvious question. Who's going to feed and produce for us, if we continue to follow the consumerist model - consume and throw up? And how much heat and pollution the atmosphere can take before it starts being bad with us? So for me the question is not "if", but "when". Even if it's not today, it will be tomorrow - even if we're not now the major reason for the warming, we will be tomorrow, and the sooner we act the better. So I have no doubts that we have to act now and to change our life-style to something more efficient.

However, there was one more important question that "climate-gate" opened. And it was about peer-reviewing. For non-scientists or unfamiliar with the word - peer-reviewing happens when an author sends an article to a scientific journal. The journal editor will send the article to usually 2 scientists from the same field to review it (I hope I'm not wrong with the number, but I'm new to this too). Those people will communicate with the author usually anonymously and tell him/her if the article is ok to be published, if something has to be changed or if the article cannot be published in this form. It sounds clear and ideally, it ensures that the articles published in that journal will be scientifically valuable and written well. So peer-reviewing should be good.

What happens in reality? Since the reviewers are anonymous and experts from the same field , they are direct competitors and there is enormous ground for conflict of interests. In same cases, the reviewers can stall the article until they prepare similar article and publish it BEFORE the original! It has happened. I'm not saying that happens always, no! Most reviewers don't do that, since it's immoral, unethical and disgusting. Such things are never forgiven after all and the scientific community is not that big. But it can happen and has happened.

What's the even bigger threat is that some people use peer-reviewing for oppressing other scientists that disagree with them. Sometimes it's not even direct, sometimes people do that automatically from the fear that the big names in that field will get mad on them for allowing such article to be published. And the authors have not much choice - if you want to get a grant, you have to publish in famous and respected journals, famous and respected journals are reviewed by certain people, you have to "please" those people or you stay without a grant. And pleasing in science means agreeing. Or at least, disagreeing but not directly. It's almost an art - how to disagree without "offending".

As you see, it's a vicious circle. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Because this applies to fundamental science. What happens in applied science, especially medicine?! You need those article published to get the approval for your new drug. The money invested in that drug can vary and reach digits with a lot of zeros! And if all that is between you and the return of your investment are few articles in peer-reviewed journals, what you do? You find a way to get them published!!! And it's not far-fetched, AT ALL! You can see it in first article I pasted.

In the second article, you can see how a drug company wanted to sue a scientist for contradicting them in public!!! Can you imagine this at all? Does this sound right? Could the fear such legal actions induce in scientists leads to a safe drug? I believe not. And I think this is outrageous! Each and every person should be entitled to an opinion. Even if it's not well justified, that's a common right. And every scientist should be free to express disagreement with a theory or a statement, even if it's not completely backed up and polished. After all, was it backed up, that scientist wouldn't "express an opinion", but s/he would go directly to court or safety authorities and ask for legal actions against that product. But everyone has the right of opinion! And any country that allows companies to threaten scientists this way is doomed to catastrophes. I mean, if everyone is too scared to announce their fears or discoveries in public, how do you ensure that a product is safe. Because the scientists in the safety authorities are the same scientists! Obviously, this is wrong and dangerous path to walk.

Why I write this? Because I'm afraid that the public mistrust in science will continue to grow. And I'm convinced that we have to stop that in time. The scientists are not better persons, they are just the same persons as anyone else - there are good people, there are bad people. That's why, there is a need for regulations that makes sure that science is responsible and transparent. And that's not a contradiction to what I discussed so far. I believe the one of the main problems is in peer-reviewing. I think that if reviewers are known to everyone and there are clear deadlines for the reviews and probably guidelines for them, everything will go much more smoothly. After all, you are reviewing a scientific paper, you have to stand behind your reviews and not be ashamed by them. You're not doing something wrong, you're improving the article and working for the science. And if you're doing something bad, you have to be held responsible for that.

And of course second part, I think the government should be very strict in any interference in science by corporations. What I mean? It's clear that corporations that do science will do science. But they will do it behind their "walls". When this science gets out of those walls, it should be public and the process of confirming that science should be free of interferences. That would mean, you cannot review a paper that contradicts to certain statements if you got paid for something by the company that defends that statement. It's a clear conflict of interests and it should be avoided.

And then, the public can trust the scientists again. Maybe there are other things to be done, but that's at least the beginning. And note, I shared some of those thoughts in a blog post on climate-gate in New Scientists and what happened? That opinion NEVER appeared! That's what I call censure and that's what people in that business fear. That the immense conflict of interests will be made public. But I believe that it will become much more public if we don't act NOW and we don't change the status-quo. Things can change and they can change for the better. It's up to us to do it. And if we don't, people will stop trusting science and when they do - there won't be money for us. And then, there will be no scientists. And I think, that would be very bad for the world. So why wait for that, let's change it while we can. Let's restore public trust and respect in science.

The third article is a rare good news and victory - finally the access to scientific journals become almost open. And this is fair, because if public money pay for your research then the public has the right to access this research freely. So, this is really a good news. Even if so far, it's applied only for health articles. I hope that the NSF will join that soon enough - after authors get so little out of publishing, it's non-sense to claim it's crucial for the field. It simply is not. It's inertia that serves publishers, but it would eventually stop. After all, why buying any journal when everything is available in "arxiv.org"?! No?

• Quoth Elsevier: "Whoops, I did it again." (Six times, actually)
• US drug firm drops libel action against scientist
• Publishers and consumers of scientific journals reach consensus on 'open access'

Quoth Elsevier: "Whoops, I did it again." (Six times, actually)

Posted on: May 11, 2009 3:00 PM, by Orac

Whoops, Elsevier did it again. Six times:

Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did not disclose sponsorship, the company has admitted.

Elsevier is conducting an "internal review" of its publishing practices after allegations came to light that the company produced a pharmaceutical company-funded publication in the early 2000s without disclosing that the "journal" was corporate sponsored.

The allegations involve the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, a publication paid for by pharmaceutical company Merck that amounted to a compendium of reprinted scientific articles and one-source reviews, most of which presented data favorable to Merck's products. The Scientist obtained two 2003 issues of the journal -- which bore the imprint of Elsevier's Excerpta Medica -- neither of which carried a statement obviating Merck's sponsorship of the publication.

So far this appears to have occurred only in Australia--that we know of. I still can't help but wonder whether other divisions of Elsevier other than the the one in Australia have engaged in this deceptive practice. Once again, I can't emphasize just how bad this looks for Elsevier. We expect drug companies to do whatever they can to try to sell their products. It's what they do. It's in their nature. However, a publishing house that publishes peer-reviewed scientific literature is expected, well, to publish peer-reviewed scientific literature. Such behavior as that of Elsevier risks turning its journals into advertising arms of the pharmaceutical companies. source

Publishers and consumers of scientific journals reach consensus on 'open access'