al-Qaeda has been in a rut lately. It hasn’t been able to strike the West since London, 2005. Its top dogs are pinned down by Predator drones in Pakistan, and the Pushtun are pretty much fed up with their guests.

All that leaves bin Laden and al Zawahiri trying to exploit the news rather than making it.

bin Laden’s most recent diatribe for example claims his jihad caused America’s economic collapse and that’s funny because we thought it was bad real estate bets in Las Vegas and Stockton.

And the Big O can’t win according to bin Laden, because if he pulls out of Bush War I and Bush War II, he loses militarily and if he fights on it worsens our economy.

bin Laden thought he could get his mojo back when the Israelis ransacked Gaza but that’s probably not going to work, either.

Israel’s brutal march has surely radicalized thousands more Muslims, but when they look around for someone or something to follow they see plenty of groups that have fought harder against Israel than al-Qaeda.

Hamas and Hezbollah, for example.

Foolishly, al-Qaeda dismisses these groups. They’ve participated in elections meaning they’ve put human laws above God’s. And the Hez and Hamas are Shia meaning they’re apostates.

Oh really? Even former al-Qaeda members are nailing bin Laden and al Zawahiri for these gaffes. For example, Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, an al-Qaeda founder who left the organization after a spat with Zawahiri, has launched a blistering ideological attack against al-Qaeda using a pen-name, Dr. Fadl.

The good doctor says al-Qaeda does “not offer Palestine anything except words,” and that Zawahiri is a yellow-bellied sapsucker who incites others to die for the cause while he enjoys soup with his buddies in a mountain getaway.

Graveyards and prisons overflow with jihadists, writes Dr. Fadl, but al-Qaeda leaders headed for the hills.

Scientists at UC Berkeley have found that mice with a genetically engineered defect in a fat tissue enzyme remained thin despite gorging to their heart’s content on a high-fat diet.
 
The enzyme is adipose-specific phospholipase A2 or AdPLA. It normally catalyzes a biochemical process that produces prostaglandin E2. High PGE2 levels suppress fat metabolism. The AdPLA-deficient mice had low PGE2 levels and broke down fat like crazy.
 
Kathy Jaworski and her colleagues bred mice that produced an inactive form of AdPLA and offered them and a control group a continuous, all-you-can-eat fatty-food fiesta for life.
 
The two groups ate the same amount of food, so the enzyme does not impact appetite. But by 64 weeks, the AdPLA-deficient mice weighed in at a svelte 39 grams, while controls tipped the scales at 74.
 
For kicks the scientists then repeated the experiment in leptin-deficient mice, with leptin being the hormone that tells your brain you’re full so stop eating. Leptin-deficient mice eat like pigs and put on weight faster than a sumo wrestler on the Oprah Winfrey diet.
 
Seventeen weeks after this study began, the leptin-deficient mice weighed 75 grams, whereas mice lacking both leptin and functional AdPLA weighed 35 soaking wet.
 
 “This means that local signals in fat tissue allow fat cells to regulate fuel provision for the body, which changes our fundamental understanding of how the body regulates fat breakdown,” Maryam Ahmadian, a study co-author told BurrillReports.
 
Studies of murine fat metabolism don’t always translate to the human condition, but rest assured that before long someone will take a peek at AdPLA gene expression in humans.

Oh and the AdPLA-deficient mice had significant insulin resistance and a marked increase in liver fat. Somebody needs to get on that, too.

Efficacy data on flu vaccine is decidedly mixed, surprisingly enough.

Many trials suggest it has a beneficial effect.  For example, an October, 2007 meta-analysis in NEJM pooled the results of 18 studies involving 713,872 elderly people and concluded the vaccine cut hospitalizations for flu and pneumonia by 27% while reducing all-cause death rates by 48%.

Those findings confirmed a March, 2002 analysis in which non-institutionalized elderly folks who received flu vaccine experienced 35% fewer flu-like illnesses and a 50% lower mortality risk than those who didn’t take the spike.

But many well-designed trials conclude the vaccine is ineffective. The most recent of these, published in Lancet in August, 2008 showed that flu vaccine had no impact on the risk of community-acquired pneumonia in a cohort of 4,000 elderly people.

That study confirmed a February, 2005 piece in the Archives of Internal Medicine which concluded that flu-related mortality reductions in the early 1970s were attributable to immunity acquired during the pandemic of 1968, not the vaccine.

These scientists also noted that although vaccine coverage skyrocketed from 15-20% in 1980 to 65% in 2001, there was no associated drop-off in flu-related mortality.

So what’s a mother to do, not to mention everyone else that’s supposed to queue up each fall for the jab?

Authors of the negative studies who were interviewed by Amednews say flu vaccine does work, just not all that well. (more…)