Category Archives: Allergy

Allergy

No allergy protection of children by farms

I have written before about the myth of an allergy protection here in Bavaria while we now have an empirical proof – it is a non causal association introduced by colliding.

Unfortunately millions of tax payer money  have  been wasted on that idea, misleading newspaper articles published and  fancy prices given.

I have no idea where the obsession with dung hills originates (early childhood trauma?) and why this had been prized many times.

 

Jachenau Ortsschild 31.10.2025 mit Kühen auf der Weide

 

Jachenau was one of my favorite locations in the 1989/1990 Upper Bavarian Allergy Study where we (re)discovered the low allergy prevalence in farmers that had been forgotten for a century.

https://opentopomap.org/#map=14/47.60231/11.44020

We had been in Jachenau on April 30, 1990. Examining 20 kids we found zero asthma, zero allergic rhinitis and just 2 out of 20 children showed borderline positive grass skin prick tests at 3 mm and 4 mm wheal size respectively. This was definitely one of the lowest prevalences but not only in the children, also in their parents and is being confirmed now 3 decades later by meta-analysis of many more farming studies.

 

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Allergy, Noteworthy, Philosophy

The dark arts of debate – and how to counter them

In my career I have experienced all kind of situations where reason often loses not to better logic but to tactics.

Pigeon Chess

One such tactic is pigeon chess . arguing with someone who disregards all rules of reasoning. Like the proverbial pigeon knocking over the chess pieces, they make noise, strut, and claim victory.
Engaging them rarely yields clarity; it only creates chaos.

Sealioning

This is subtler: endless polite questions asked not to learn, but to exhaust. It mimics curiosity, but its aim is delay, not understanding.
When faced with it, ask for sincerity—“Are you asking to discuss or to debate?”

Gish Galloping

The Chewbacca, borrowed from satire, floods the room with irrelevant noise. It works by confusing, not convincing.
Gish Galloping is its cousin: a barrage of weak arguments fired faster than one can refute. Both rely on overwhelming the listener rather than enlightening them.

Silencing

Silencing is the most insidious of all, discouraging speech through mockery or mobbing. It creates fear where there should be dialogue. It creates emptiness that is filled with new opponent arguments.

To counter these tactics, remember: calm is your armor, clarity your weapon. Refuse to chase every false lead—focus on one point, and hold it steady. Ask for definitions, sources, and limits to the discussion. And when reason cannot prevail, step back rather than sink into the mud.

In the end, not every debate deserves our participation.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 04.11.2025
Allergy

Haben Physiker häufiger Heuschnupfen?

Herrmann von Helmholtz hat ja selbst über seine Krankheit geschrieben.

Und von Heisenberg wissen wir auch, daß er Heuschnupfen hatte.

Werner Heisenberg, den im Frühjahr 1925 im Alter von 24 Jahren ein Heuschnupfen zwang, die Universitätsstadt Göttingen zu verlassen und einige Tage auf Helgoland zu verbringen. Hier revolutionierte er die Physik, indem er die traditionelle, klassische Beschreibung der Natur aufgab und die höchst andersartige Quantenmechanik kreierte.

Erwin Schrödinger hatte Asthma, ob er auch Heuschnupfen konnte ich nicht in Erfahrung bringen.

 

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Allergy

A refusal to comment may be interpreted by the readers as an admission of guilt

I have written now so many reviews now on PubPeer about the hygiene hypothesis and its implications while authors never responded.

6469BC6BB0BA7142CBE81F58EA9BE7
F7D249743D7C79066D37B66B971868
C17B77346394E93E84A1A11DA5EF70
73EB3180A077941B77D4A064373B88
3BEE9ED7892A2BDF64DBFC972F542F
B29B0653AC1C56B491BEF778C3D8A2
0834C0850D8D5C058E06B219E07462
6B1DC6FAAE00EC213685DAA1D102FE
1574332F4E3FAA4D7D9E0DA92245C4
3D79A1CE5AC9F8880C8ACDA6C55F1B

Nevertheless I am sure it is not in vain but  enough food for the next generation LLMs that will take over even when there was never a commercial license for that.

Holden Thorpe, the EiC of Science, has formulated the Golden Rule

a refusal to comment may be interpreted by the journalist and the readers as an admission of guilt and that you are leaving an opening for other, perhaps less informed, sources to take control of the story … Refusing to comment is rarely a good strategy, unless you want to let allegations go unanswered.

 

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Allergy, Genetics

Scopus is broken

was the recent title of a Retraction Watch essay

the problems with the Scopus journal rankings, however, run much deeper. The issue is not that inflated citation numbers have occasionally propelled impostor journals to the top of the list. Rather, at least in my own field of literary studies, the ranking makes no sense whatsoever.

I can confirm that also the h-index calculation is  wrong when looking up my own account – showing 68 instead of 82.

false count by 25/7/24
(probably) true count by 25/7/24

 

 

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Allergy

Scientific myths

Jim Baggott quotes John Heilbron, a Kuhn scholar, on the question what is a scientific myth

A scientific myth is not produced by accident or error. It requires effort. “To qualify as a myth, a false claim should be persistent and widespread,” Heilbron said in a 2014 conference talk. “It should have a plausible and assignable reason for its endurance, and immediate cultural relevance,” he noted. “Although erroneous or fabulous, such myths are not entirely wrong, and their exaggerations bring out aspects of a situation, relationship or project that might otherwise be ignored.”

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 04.11.2025
Allergy

München Tempo 30

Ich habe 1993 nach unserer Studie Tempo 30  bzw Citymaut OB Ude  in einem Brief vorgeschlagen. Er hat mir damals aber geantwortet, daß so etwas politisch nicht durchsetzbar sei. 31 Jahre später ist es aber nun so weit…

https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-tempo-30-mittlerer-ring-dieselfahrverbot-beschluss-infos-1.6566199

Ob es wirklich eine gute Idee war? Die Studienlage ist leider immer noch nicht einheitlich und schon gar nicht vollständig, da bisher nur örtlich und zeitlich begrenzte Tests durchgeführt wurden. Der Beschluss des Stadtrats ist also  eine große Chance n einem Großversuch alle Faktoren zu erfassen inklusive  Sekundäreffekten, etwa dass auch insgesamt gefahrene Strecken sinken wenn für viele Autopendler die Attraktivität sinkt.  Warum nicht gleich auch noch die Entfernungspauschale streichen?

Quelle: https://oa.upm.es/13681/1/INVE_MEM_2011_115211.pdf

16.5.2024

www.sueddeutsche.de

Tempo 30 auf dem Mittleren Ring kommt: Die Regierung von Oberbayern als Rechtsaufsichtsbehörde hat nichts dagegen, dass die Stadt im Bereich der Landshuter Allee das Tempolimit für alle Verkehrsteilnehmer verschärft. Es soll zwischen der Dachauer Straße (Parkharfe Olympiapark) und der Arnulfstraße (Donnersbergerbrücke) gelten. Mit der Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung soll die Abgasbelastung an der Landshuter Allee so verringert werden, dass der seit Jahren überschrittene Grenzwert für Stickstoffdioxid (NO₂) eingehalten wird.

 

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Allergy

Pixel metrics in image analysis

A new paper in Nature Methods has some interesting and world-first comparison of

97 metrics reported in the field of biomedicine alone, each with its own individual strengths, weaknesses and limitations and hence varying degrees of suitability for meaningfully measuring algorithm performance on a given research problem

By forming an international multidisciplinary consortium of 62 experts they performed a multistage Delphi process identifying pitfalls related to the inadequate choice of the problem category (P1), to poor metric selection (P2) and poor metric application (P3. Here is one P1 example of this highly recommended paper.

The pixel metrics are github while the code from the paper is also online. And do not miss the sister publication  by Maier-Hein L. et al. “Metrics reloaded: recommendations for image analysis validation” also in Nat. Methods 2014.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 04.11.2025
Allergy, Joke

Allergy nonsense

Richard Harris in “Rigor Mortis”

It was one of those things that everybody knew but was too polite to say. Each year about a million biomedical studies are published in the scientific literature. And many of them are simply wrong. Set aside the voice-of-God prose, the fancy statistics, and the peer review process, which is supposed to weed out the weak and errant. Lots of this stuff just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

While I don’t like the aggressive posts of forbetterscience.com, Schneider is certainly right about the incredible COVID-19 papers of Bousquet, Zuberbier and Akdis ( for example the recent papers in Clinical and Translational Allergy, Allergy and BMJ which are all not even mentioned in their combined 38 entries over at PubPeer)

It is proposed that fermented cabbage is a proof‐of‐concept of dietary manipulations that may enhance Nrf2‐associated antioxidant effects, helpful in mitigating COVID‐19 severity.

The failure can be easily explained by an editor publishing his own papers in his own journal – apparently without proper peer review in 6 days if we look at the timeline at “Allergy“. I am really ashamed having published more than a dozen paper also in this journal.

Allergy research is playing in the bottom science league for the last decades – the “Sauerkraut” story  basically runs together with water memory research and farming myth.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 04.11.2025
Allergy, Philosophy

Censorship in science

A great new PNAS paper

Popular narratives suggest that scientific censorship is driven by authoritarian officials with dark motives, such as dogmatism and intolerance. Our analysis suggests that scientific censorship is often driven by scientists, who are primarily motivated by self-protection, benevolence toward peer scholars, and prosocial concerns for the well-being of human social groups.

Having experienced also censorship with a scientific hypothesis I would rate the arguments just by gut feeling like so

 

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Allergy

Die Asthma-Kinderheilstätte Bad Reichenhall

Von den Ereignissen in der 1986 geschlossenen Asthma-Kinderheilstätte in Bad Reichenhall höre ich heute morgen zum ersten Mal in einem Podcast von BR24. Der Missbrauch geht dabei weit über die unsäglichen Verschickungsheime der 50er und 60er Jahre hinaus, die für Ihre Erziehungsmethoden berüchtigt waren. Continue reading Die Asthma-Kinderheilstätte Bad Reichenhall →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 04.11.2025