In the corrected report, the agency estimates the health risks of the laminate flooring — by irritating the ear, nose and throat — to be three-fold higher than what they suggested in the original report, published February 10.
There’s more news to report on the story of surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, who’s been dogged by allegations of misconduct.
After the Karolinska Institutet (KI) announced it would not extend his contract and that he needed to “phase out” his research by November, it has now announced it may dismiss him.
We don’t have a lot of information on a recent retraction of a 2001 paper published in a Japanese journal — just a brief and strongly worded note explaining that it follows “a strict, extensive, and judicious review.”
The paper, retracted 14 years after it was published, describes patients in Okinawa, Japan who developed severe symptoms following infection by bacteria belonging to the Aeromonas genus. One example:
The one patient was a 15-year-old high school girl student, who had been healthy in her school life, was admitted to the hospital with a sudden onset of left thigh muscle pain and swelling. She subsequently went into septic shock and died one day after admission. Pathological examination on autopsy revealed massive gas formation, skin bullas and ulcers, and extensive severe soft tissue damage throughout the body.
There’s good news and bad news in radiology research, according to a new study: The number of retractions is increasing in radiology journals, but the rate of retraction remains lower than that seen in biomedical journals outside the field of radiology.
According to the study in the American Journal of Roentgenology, between 1986 and 2001, radiology journals retracted — at the most — one paper per year, but from 2002 to 2013, at least two papers were pulled each year. Overall, roughly 11 articles are retracted out of every 100,000 articles published in radiology journals — compared to 15 out of 100,000 for biomedical journals outside radiology.
Still, writes author Andrew Rosenkrantz in “Retracted Publications Within Radiology Journals:”
A Toronto hospital network is keeping two researchers’ labs closed even after an Ontario court quashed part of a misconduct finding by the institution.
According to the Toronto Star, on February 4th the UHN notified the researchers that the sanction against them would be upheld, and it would not reopen the researchers’ labs.
A journal is retracting a paper about a heart surgery technique after discovering the researchers did not have ethics approval to perform a the procedure on 130 patients. What’s more, the local cardiac surgical society had asked the first author to stop using the method in 2004, six years before the study was complete.
When a researcher encountered two papers that suggested moonlight has biological effects — on both plants and humans — he took a second look at the data, and came to different conclusions. That was the easy part — getting the word out about his negative findings, however, was much more difficult.
When Jean-Luc Margot, a professor in the departments of Earth, Planetary & Space Sciences and Physics & Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, tried to submit his reanalysis to the journals that published the original papers, both rejected it; after multiple attempts, his work ended up in different publications.
Disagreements are common but crucial in science; like they say, friction makes fire. Journals are inherently disinterested in negative findings — but should it take more than a year, in one instance, to publish an alternative interpretation to somewhat speculative findings that, at first glance, seem difficult to believe? Especially when they contain such obvious methodological issues such as presenting only a handful of data points linking biological activity to the full moon, or ignore significant confounders?
Margot did not expect to have such a difficult experience with the journals — including Biology Letters, which published the study suggesting that a plant relied on the full moon to survive: Continue reading Why publishing negative findings is hard
An article that suggested there is no benefit to being overweight among cancer survivors – the so-called “obesity paradox” – is being retracted for plagiarizing large sections from another paper that explored the same topic in cardiovascular disease.
The journal Cancer Causes & Control pulled the 2014 article last June after determining it contained “large portions” of text from another paper in Preventive Medicine by a different set of authors, which suggested that evidence linking obesity to health benefits in cardiovascular disease may stem from a form of selection bias.
Mikovits is the author on a now-retracted Science paper suggesting a link between a virus known as XMRV and chronic fatigue syndrome, which has no known cause. She alleged that she was fired from the Whittemore-Peterson Institute for blowing the whistle on her former colleague’s activities, and that the defendants then colluded to imprison and defame her.
The court dismissed her case last Wednesday. According to the court minutes,
The editor in chief of Vaccine has removed a paper suggesting a human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine can trigger behavioral changes in mice.
The note doesn’t provide any reason for the withdrawal, although authors were told the editor asked for further review.
Two co-authors on the paper — about Gardasil, a vaccine against HPV — have previously suggested that aluminum in vaccines is linked to autism, in research a World Health Organization advisory body concluded was “seriously flawed.”
Approximately 80 million doses of Gardasil were administered in the U.S. between 2006 and 2015. Both the the WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have ruled the vaccine to be safe — the CDC, for instance, calls it “safe, effective, and recommended.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a correction notice to a report about formaldehyde in laminate flooring, saying a mistake had caused them to significantly underestimate the health risks.
