Category: sotto

Sotto’s scot-free (and why it’s our fault)

Katrina Stuart Santiago

Yes plagiarism might seem small and petty, it can seem like an academic thing, but it certainly isn’t moot, and I don’t know that making fun of Tito Sotto, in whatever way, will mean people taking this seriously. If at all, it reveals how we have inadvertently clouded the conversation on plagiarism with the fact of social class, i.e., pang-edukado naman ang issue na ‘yan, pang-kayo-kayo lang. Because really, who has spent time and effort talking about Sotto in light of this mistake? Who has started laughing at him, thinking jokes as weapons, too? Tayo-tayo nga.

Read on…

sotto, guts, plagiarism #RH bill

this is to respond to sotto’s claim echoing, nay, plagiarizing blogger sarah pope’s, that using birth control pills causes “severe gut dysbiosis,” that is, kills good bacteria in the gastro-intestinal tract.

According, to Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride MD, the use of the pill also causes severe gut dysbiosis. What is worse, drug induced gut imbalance is especially intractable and resistant to treatment either with probiotics or diet change. Gut imbalance brought on through use of the pill negatively impacts the ability to digest food and absorb nutrients. As a result, even if a woman eats spectacularly well during pregnancy, if she has been taking oral contraceptives for a period of time beforehand, it is highly likely that she and her baby are not reaping the full benefits of all this healthy food as the lack of beneficial flora in her gut preclude this from occurring. Pathogenic, opportunistic flora that take hold in the gut when the pill is used constantly produce toxic substances which are the by-products of their metabolism. These toxins leak into the woman’s bloodstream and they have the potential to cross the placenta. Therefore, gut dysbiosis exposes the fetus to toxins. Not well known is also the fact that use of the pill depletes zinc in the body. Zinc is called “the intelligence mineral” as it is intimately involved in mental development. 

i sent pope’s link to doc butch, an internist, and this is what he emailed back:

Strange. Googling, found an incredible dearth of studies linking oral contraceptives to gut dysbiosis, how long it takes to develop, how long it takes to resolve on discontinuance of pills. No comparative studies. Even searching studies on gut dysbiosis in infants and neonates; there’s no mention or an “also” mention of contraceptives as cause.

Food additives, steroids, psychological and physical stress, antibiotics are the main cause of intestinal dysbiosis, not Pills. Antibiotics are the most common culprit. Women, pregnant or non-pregnant, are often prescribed antibiotics. In a review article on pediatric inflammatory bowel diseases, pneumonia before the age of five and consequent frequent use of antibiotics is implicated in the dysbiosis. No studies I found implicated birth control pills as primary cause or significant contributory cause for the development of pediatric gut dysbiosis.

And as I’m getting frustrated searching for studies, here’s a little math that snuck up. About 10 million women in the U.S. and 100 million women worldwide use combination oral contraceptive pills. I bet many of them are long-term users. And many probably eventually get pregnant. But we don’t read about an epidemic of intestinal dysbiosis among women and infants.

Another piece of math. Of those more than 100 million women, 95 to 98% of them successfully use birth control. Less deaths and diseases among them, no abortions, no unwanted pregnancies. Also, for some of the 2 to 5% who get pregnant despite conscientious use of the pills, antibiotics are often implicated for decreased effectiveness of birth control pills. The same antibiotics that are one of the most common causes of gut dysbiosis.

well, no wonder sotto’s staff had to settle for the blog of a “healthy economist.”  wala kasing medical studies supporting such a claim, not on the internet anyway, which should have raised warning signals.  this is not to disparage sarah pope, who’s clearly an advocate of natasha mcbride’s alternative health ek-ek (kanya-kanyang agenda), and who was clearly plagiarized, despite sotto’s chief of staff hector villacorta’s claim to the contrary.

On the claim of Ms. Pope that the senator plagiarized her blog in his “turno en contra’’ speech last Wednesday to stress his objection to the RH bill, Villacorta said he called the office of the IPO which stated that there is no such crime as plagiarism of a blog.

‘’There is no such thing. Blogs are public domain and government can use any information if it is for the common good,’’ Villacorta told the Manila Bulletin after checking with the IPO.

our intellectual property office should clear this up, ASAP.  surely our laws are no different from US copyright laws?

As things stand, US copyright law prohibits reuse without explicit permission for creative works until they enter the public domain – 70 years after the death of the author or 120 years after publication date if the date of death of the author is unknown.

read,too, Copyright and Public Domain.

sotto self-destructs #RH bill

the senate should shut sotto up.  he has become a national embarrassment.  not only does he plagiarize bloggers and in the next breath disparage their work, his discourse vs. the RH bill also takes the low low ground, thanks to his incompetent staff, whose asinine research (include bad writing na rin) he takes for, and peddles as, gospel truth.  and this is the last straw: the punchline kumbaga, of his turno en contra part II:

Also in a report prepared for the Royal Commission on Population in Great Britain found that the incidence of induced abortion as a percentage of all pregnancies was nine times higher for women using contraceptives than for women not using birth control.

here is the original material from The Truth Of Contraceptives blog:

In Great Britain, in 1949, a report prepared for the Royal Commission on Population found that the incidence of induced abortion as a percentage of all pregnancies was nine times higher for women using contraceptives than for women not using birth control. [emphasis mine]

note that sotto’s press release does not enclose in quotes or attribute most of the sentence that is clearly lifted, copied, from the blog.  note, too, that “in 1949” was deleted, omitted, deliberately i would think, because it would have dated the “nine times higher” stats.  but using that data at all to convince pro-RH senators that contraceptives induce abortion was the most monstrous mistake of all.

the Pill was approved only in 1960.  what contraceptives were being used in 1949?  i googled “history of birth control” (which he or his staff should have done, too) and found this blog: MedicineNet.com.

Before the Industrial Revolution, birth control devices in America relied largely on condoms for men — fashioned from linen or from animal intestines — and on douches made for and by women from common household ingredients. Abortion-inducing herbs such as savin and pennyroyal also were used, as were pessaries — substances or devices inserted into the vagina to block or kill sperm.

The invention of rubber vulcanization in 1839 soon led to the beginnings of a U.S. contraceptive industry producing condoms (now often called “rubbers”), intrauterine devices or IUDs, douching syringes, vaginal sponges, diaphragms and cervical caps (then called “womb veils”), and “male caps” that covered only the tip of the penis. British playwright and essayist George Bernard Shaw called the rubber condom the “greatest invention of the 19th century.”

When these devices were declared illegal, the flourishing trade simply began selling them as “hygiene” products. For example, vaginal sponges were sold to protect women from “germs” instead of sperm. This led to misleading if not downright fraudulent advertising. From 1930 until 1960, the most popular female contraceptive was Lysol disinfectant — advertised as a feminine hygiene product in ads featuring testimonials from prominent European “doctors.” Later investigation by the American Medical Association showed that these experts did not exist.

so there.  hindi lang outdated ang stats, ni hindi birth control pills ang salarin.  what a howler of a screw-up, mr. sotto.  on the senate floor yet.  enough is enough, mr. senators, your time is up.  pass the RH bill, now na!

*

read, too, manuel buencamino’s Sen. Sotto busted for serial plagiarism 
and sarah pope’s On Plagiarism, the Pill, and Presumptuousness 

fudging the facts: sotto’s anti-RH sob story

nakakaiyak naman talaga ang mawalan ng anak.  lalo na kung sanggol, lalo na kung ni hindi mo nahipo o nahawakan o nayakap.  masuwerte pa nga these days ang mga magulang na maysakit ang sanggol mula sa kapanganakan.  hospital nurseries are kinder, allow the parents (in sterile gowns) to touch and even hold their baby, the mother to breastfeed even, and the baby does not have to die without feeling some love, kahit kaunti, kahit paano.

but but but, the senator fudges the facts when he attributes the infant’s birth defect and short lifespan on the contraceptive pills helen was taking at the time she conceived.

makati medical center could prove to the fact na wala silang makita na dahilan na nagkaganoon ang bata kundi dahil nagkocontraceptives yung asawa ko. nabuntis pa rin kahit gumagamit ng contraceptives, that’s why i know. hindi trabaho ito sa akin, personalan ito. …. sabi ng makati medical center namatay dahil sa paggamit ng misis ko ng contraceptives. even her doctor admits to that fact. dra. enverga santos. he was born and died with a weak heart.

methinks the senator is being cavalier with the truth, or what’s fact and what’s not (i wonder what else he might be lying about).  i doubt very strongly that dr. carmen enverga-santos ever admitted to such a thing.  she was my mother’s obstetrician who delivered me in 1949 (she and my parents were friends in medical school), and later she was my ob-gynecologist, too, and my aunts’ and sisters’ and cousins’ and a niece’s, from the 1950s through the ’90s until she retired.  we were all spacing our kids using birth control pills she started prescribing in the ’60s, and none of us had any problems whatsoever.  if she knew there was any danger from the pill, would she have continued to prescribe it for us after helen’s case?

enverga-santos was a highly respected ob-gyn in her time.  i cannot imagine her, or any credible ob-gyn, or the makati medical center, “admitting to the fact” that the cause of the birth defect and death was, unequivocally and categorically, the birth control pills.  the Pill, since its approval by the FDA in may 1960, is “among one of the most carefully studied medications in U.S. history.”  any such danger, any clinically proven connection between the pill and birth defects, would have immediately brought about its absolute withdrawal from the market by the FDA.  read Common Pill Myths.

shared sotto’s sob story with my doctor brother butch and this is what he had to say:

It’s a bit of a stretch, blaming the pills for that. Any details on how long she continued on the pills after conception? Were there problems with other pregnancies? Any medical conditions the mother was being treated for? Too many other causes of birth problems: infections, drugs, smoking, alcohol, etc. When did Enverga give that opinion?

And we always want to point at something recognizable, always looking for answers, but often, it’s unanswerable, buried deep down in the weird complexities of life, the fears, paranoias, dys-emotions that rule some lives, that eventually manifest themselves as physical maladies and defects.

Here’s more on the subject from Mayo Clinic and from the Honor Society of Nursing.

shared sotto’s sob story, too, with my nurse sister nancy, convent bred but pro-RH, who was also under the care of enverga-santos through 3 pregnancies and deliveries:

it was also the good doctor who prescribed the birth control pills i took after giving birth to our first child in 1965. the same birth control pills allowed me to properly space my next 2 pregnancies.

combined (estrogen/progestin) oral contraceptive pills are highly effective when taken religiously at the same hour each day. if one or more tablets are forgotten for more than 12 hours, contraceptive protection is reduced. the rate of effectiveness of birth control pills is dependent on how consistently and correctly it is taken. not to belabor the issue, pero malamang di tama ang inom ni helen.

in a tv interview soon after his tearjerker of a speech, the senator admitted that the real bottom line for him is that he is against the so many billions that will be spent on pills and condoms to be given away for free, money that, all anti-RH people say, the government doesn’t have or, if it can be had, could be used for more urgent needs.  here’s the response to that of Mulat Pinoy, a population awareness initiative supported by the Probe Media Foundation, Inc. and the Philippine Center for Population and Development:

Investing in family planning services will save several billion pesos, which can be used for critical social services.

The latest US and Philippine research show that governments annually spend a minimum of Php 5.5 billion in healthcare costs to address unintended pregnancies and their complications.

By contrast, only Php 2.0-3.5 billion annually is needed to fund a comprehensive range of voluntary family planning services for the entire country, which also results in a more sustainable population to provide for.

so there.  pass the RH bill, now na!  and let’s not vote ever again for, let’s campaign vigorously against, any and all legislators (or their wives husbands brothers sisters sons daughters nieces nephews) who say no to reproductive health.  they can found their own churches instead and still get rich, like brother mike, praise the lord.