The hypocrisy of science

The recent bird-flu outbreak revealed once again the boundaries (and the hypocrisy) of the so-called scientific knowledge. Hundreds of birds had to be culled for fear that the disease may spread. But the point of this post is not that the birds were diseased or that one should give up eating meat. The point of this post is to show how the so-called scientific community makes clever use of words in trying to fool people.

But, first I must give you the background:
Obviously, because India is filled with so many illiterate and fearful people, and because people have a choice of eating pure vegetarian food here, as soon as the news of the bird flu spread, many people simply gave up eating chicken for a few months. Some still haven't started eating it. This bird flu thing is not supposed to infect human beings, but no one wanted to take a chance. This caused a big problem for the poultry business...one must understand that this is a very big industry in India. Some farm owners had to sell chicken at Re. 1 a kg. That was an incredible hit they were taking. Naturally, they went into top gear trying to alleviate the fear from the people's minds. I do not know if they succeeded completely or not.

Now, the real point of the post:
One fine day the newspapers were filled with how safe it is for people to eat chicken, etc. But, sample the words used in the news articles:

1. There is no known case of bird flu infecting human beings - only stray cases have been reported so far. Only 100 people have been reported to have died of this in other parts of the world. And, these were people who were in direct contact with the infected birds.
   
2. The bird flu virus has not yet mutated to start infecting human beings.
3. It has been found that the bird flu virus does not survive above 70 degrees Celcius...so chicken that is cooked well should be fine.

The first thing is that all the statements above are just nonsense...they do not present anything that is conclusive. Note the use of words like "yet" and qualitative words such as "cooked well" in the above statements. For example, do they expect people to put a thermometer inside the deepest parts of the meat to see if it has reached 70 degrees Celcius?

The second thing is that there is NO SCIENTIFIC PROOF for all these statements. The funny part is that no one is bothering to ask these people either. These are just some observations made on SOME of the samples in a laboratory environment.

Generally, medical science is always like that...if it is seen in all the samples in a laboratory, then it is true for the entire universe. Note again there is no proof...as in a mathematical sense or as it is for physical phenomena.

Yet, of course, these same people will ask for proof when ancient Indian wisdom is talked about. That is the hypocrisy.