Throughput: Excited Delirium Edition

[ThTh1] One of the things I’ve developed a keen interest in is forensic junk science. In their quest to find proof that everyone the police accused is guilty, unethical or incompetent scientists have developed a slew of disciplines — voice analysis, bite mark analysis, tool mark analysis, touch DNA — that are questionable at best and outright pseudoscience at worst.

I’ve talked before about the sterling work Radley Balko has done exposing some of this garbage. A few years ago, he wrote about the “excited delirium” diagnosis that has been used to explain why people die in police custody.

Over the last month or so, he’s published three long but must-read substack posts responding to the increasing efforts to exonerate Derek Chauvin of culpability in George Floyd’s death. That link is to part three, but it links parts one and two. In part one, he talked about how Chauvin’s pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck, contrary to the claims of his defenders, was not “standard practice” and was, in fact, known to be extremely dangerous. Positional asphyxiation is something most of us don’t think about unless we are Victorian-Era chimney sweeps, but it is a very real and very terrifying thing. In the second part, he goes into detail on the autopsy and why it does not indicate Floyd died of a heart attack brought on by obesity and drug use.

The third part steps back a bit and talks about how the retconning of Floyd’s death is being used to stymie attempts at policing reform and specifically about how it is being used to quash efforts to put forensic science on a more independent and, well, science-based footing. The whole thing is worth the read but I want to particularly focus, as I have before, on “excited delirium”.

In the context of in-custody deaths, positional asphyxia occurs when a police restraint either cuts off airways, or compresses the diaphragm in a way that only allows for shallow breathing. This inhibits the ability to both take in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide, both of which can be fatal. Positional asphyxia is preventable — it is up to police departments to train officers on how to avoid it.

Excited delirium, on the other hand, posits that some people just spontaneously die during intense, high-stress interactions with police, through no fault of law enforcement. It’s also highly dubious and not supported by any major medical organization.

Over the last several decades, there’s been a concerted effort to pressure medical examiners to diagnose excited delirium when the real cause of death was positional asphyxia. This not only exonerates cops who kill, it encourages police practices that will lead to more deaths.

…

The origin of excited delirium is shonky and steeped in bigotry. But it doesn’t involve police or police restraint. The condition was first described in the mid-1980s by Miami medical examiner Charles Wetli after a wave of black sex workers were found dead under mysterious circumstances. Because some of the women had cocaine in their system, Wetli theorized that there must be something about the physiology of black women that causes them to spontaneously die after mixing cocaine with sex.

Despite the absurdity of Wetli’s theory, it precluded homicide as a manner of death, which made it much more difficult for police to investigate the possible murders. It wasn’t until a victim was found in a similar state as the other bodies, but had no cocaine in her system, that the city’s chief medical examiner reviewed the doctor’s work in the other cases. He found evidence of asphyxiation that Wetli had overlooked. Police eventually arrested a serial killer named Charles Henry Williams for the murders. Williams is now believed to have killed at least 32 black women through asphyxiation.

Excited delirium has now been pushed for nearly forty years as a way to explain “mysterious” deaths that either happen in police custody or which the police are uninterested in investigating. It has been particularly been pushed by Axon International, manufacturer of the Taser, as an alternative explanation for why people sometimes die when subjected to a “non-lethal” tasering.

There is way too much in Radley’s article to sum up. It really is a “you should read the whole thing” thing even if it’s very very long. But my take from it, as a scientist, is fury. I understand why police and a big business might want scientists to tell them what they’re doing is fine. What I can not countenance is doctors, clinicians and scientists who are willing to do it, even as the evidence against their claims continues to pile up. If you’re going to dedicate your career toward telling the powerful what they want to hear, that’s fine. But don’t call yourself a scientist.

[ThTh2] There was a time when a cystic fibrosis diagnosis was a death sentence. Then it wasn’t quite a death sentence, but was a sentence to a lifetime of suffering and an early demise. But thanks to a recent breakthrough, a three-drug cocktail is making cystic fibrosis completely survivable. For most patients, the regimen completely clears out the lungs with manageable side effects. For some, this has effectively ended decades of drawn-out, painful only partially effective treatment. The treatment is so effective that the Make-A-Wish Foundation will no longer automatically enroll kids who are diagnosed with it.

It is not, however, cheap. A year’s supply of the drugs cost $300,000. Treating everyone who has it would cost $100 a year for every man, woman and child in the country. And the prevalence may go up a bit as people who used to die in childhood go on to have full lives and children of their own. But now that the drug insists, progress can hopefully be made toward lowering the cost and making it more generally available.

We live in an age of scientific miracles, especially on the biotech front. I encourage you to read some first-hand accounts of what this means to folks with CF. It will make your office dusty.

[ThTh3] You may have heard that the infamous Stanley cups have some lead in them. Is this a problem? Not really. It’s a tiny amount used to seal the base and never interacts with the contents.

[ThTh4] Neil Degrasse Tyson weighed in on the science of Dune and got it at least partly wrong. Here’s a thread going through the physics of sand, the concept of “booming” sand and what vibration does to sand. You can also check out videos of sand turning liquid when exposed to the right airflow or vibration.

Basically, sand is weird. This is why some people hate it. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets … wait a minute.

[ThTh5] A massive study of 20 million people concludes that not only did the vaccines not cause heart problems in people who took them, it prevented by preventing severe COVID infections, which can damage the heart much more than the vaccines can.

[ThTh6] Ten years ago, a meteor streaked across the sky. This is a routine event, but seismologists detected a vibration almost simultaneous with it. A later ocean expedition found metal fragments at the bottom of the ocean, leading theoretical physicist Avi Loeb to claim that the 2014 meteor was interstellar in nature and possibly a crashing alien spaceship that they had now recovered debris from.

Well, it now looks like the seismic signal was … a passing truck.

[ThTh6] As we learn more about the variety of planets out there, we’re starting to ask questions that were once reserved exclusively for science fiction. In this case, a James Blish story called “surface tension” which speculated on a civilization that evolved underwater and was trying to build a rocket to break out of their body of water and get to other bodies. But now we think ocean worlds may actually be a thing and the challenge of an advanced species to escape both the confinement of the ocean and the confinement of gravity may be very real.

[ThTh7] There are things electric engines are very good at. Moving a giant hummer is not one of them.

[ThTh8] I dread to think what scientists in the year 11,724 would make of my diet:

What can your chewing gum reveal about you?@AlexDainis breaks down a recent study where researchers unearthed astonishing facts about ancient diets and oral hygiene by looking at the DNA on a 9,700 year old piece of gum!#Science #DNA #Genetics pic.twitter.com/sEPFTwIpKX

— Museum of Science (@museumofscience) February 29, 2024

[ThTh9] So what has JWST been up to? Oh, just unveiling a star formation region in a nearby galaxy. NGC~604 is in the triangulum galaxy and, in a telescope, just looks like a slightly fuzzy star.

[ThTh10] I praised the Odysseus mission a few weeks ago. Well, shortly after that, the spacecraft turned out to have landed on its side and didn’t fulfill all its mission goals. The reason? Cost-cutting that could have uncovered the problem during testing. While it’s frustrating that this happened, I think those gloating on the success of NASA vs. private space need to think a bit about motes in eyes and so forth. Space is extremely unforgiving of error and hubris. We need to remember that no matter who is paying the bills.

In the meantime, check out the comparison of the Mars landers over the decades:

Spacecraft on Mars, a comparison

[📹deepspacecourier]pic.twitter.com/iCtM04jq1N

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) February 28, 2024