QUES: Ben Goldacre has argued that regulators such as the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in the UK, or the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States advance the interests of the drug companies rather than the interests of the public due to revolving door exchange of employees between the regulator and the companies and friendships develop between regulator and company employees. He argues that regulators do not require that new drugs offer an improvement over what is already available, or even that they be particularly effective.

The business friendships between which parties have been praised?
What is the answer?
ANS: unanswerable
QUES: In total, 156 prisoners have been either acquitted, or received pardons or commutations on the basis of possible innocence, between 1973 to 2015. Death penalty opponents often argue that this statistic shows how perilously close states have come to undertaking wrongful executions; proponents point out that the statistic refers only to those exonerated in law, and that the truly innocent may be a smaller number. Statistics likely understate the actual problem of wrongful convictions because once an execution has occurred there is often insufficient motivation and finance to keep a case open, and it becomes unlikely at that point that the miscarriage of justice will ever be exposed.

Between 1973 and 2015, how amny prisoners were acquitted or received pardons or commutations of their death sentences due to possible innocence?
What is the answer?
ANS: 156
QUES: One way of proving that a given disease is "infectious", is to satisfy Koch's postulates (first proposed by Robert Koch), which demands that the infectious agent be identified only in patients and not in healthy controls, and that patients who contract the agent also develop the disease. These postulates were first used in the discovery that Mycobacteria species cause tuberculosis. Koch's postulates can not be applied ethically for many human diseases because they require experimental infection of a healthy individual with a pathogen produced as a pure culture. Often, even clearly infectious diseases do not meet the infectious criteria. For example, Treponema pallidum, the causative spirochete of syphilis, cannot be cultured in vitro - however the organism can be cultured in rabbit testes. It is less clear that a pure culture comes from an animal source serving as host than it is when derived from microbes derived from plate culture. Epidemiology is another important tool used to study disease in a population. For infectious diseases it helps to determine if a disease outbreak is sporadic (occasional occurrence), endemic (regular cases often occurring in a region), epidemic (an unusually high number of cases in a region), or pandemic (a global epidemic).

Why can't Koch's postulates be applied ethically for many human diseases?
What is the answer?
ANS:
because they require experimental infection of a healthy individual