HLLE and activated carbon?

Just got this in my email from coral magazine.
http://www.coralmagazine-us.com/content/activated-carbon-hlle-smoking-gun-found

 

Before MACNA last year, they had a guided tour through the Orlando SeaWorld facility with some of their care takers. The guy who managed the marine aquatics was mentioning something about that during the tour...that the jury was still out, but that it was looking more and more conclusive.

--AJ

 

I'm really disappointed in this work by Jay Hemdal. This study is far to assumptive, quasi-scientific, and conclusions aren't objective at all. First and foremost, the conclusion that this paper draws is causation. This is a correlative study which does show a relationship between the use of activated carbon and HLLE. In order to establish causation you must satisfy two more additional criteria; 1.) that the cause came before the effect 2.) that there are no alternative explanations. At least one of these criteria have clearly not been satisfied.
"Small amounts of water, (~3 milliliters) were transferred between all three systems on a weekly basis. The intent was to demonstrate that there were no easily communicable fish diseases present in one system and not another." This is scantly a thorough method of evaluating communicable diseases, 3ml of pelagic water? Clearly most bacteria are bethnic or at least substrate oriented, and due to the packaging inefficiency of bacteriophage a potent viral load might easily be thwarted in this scenario.
An additional violation of the illusion of biosecurity; "Thirty-five Ocean Surgeonfish, (Acanthurus bahianus) were evenly distributed among the three systems at the start of the study." These are three systems that are 120 gallons in size. Regardless of communicable diseases, hierarchical relationships within the community are likely to be particularly dynamic when you have 12 tangs in a 120 gallon aquarium.
What about this:
"Live rock was utilized as the basis for biological filtration in all three systems." This certainly doesn't give any credibility to the assumption that these were "controlled" study groups since the history and analysis of facualtative bacteria aren't addressed in light of this parameter.
Finally, the study group isn't large enough to be conclusively reliable. Not even close. In order to get confidence levels approaching the 90% range you would have to maintain 500 individuals in each group. This study is just purely offensive to people who conduct and comb through medical research day after day for years in order to come up with conclusions that merely disprove that two conditions aren't related. This study clearly doesn't follow the scientific method.

 

Hmm.
I've been doing this since 2003.
I've always had Tangs and have run carbon (various types) 24/7 since day one in the canister for my H.O.T. 250 in the display tank.
I've never had HLLE.
This has always been a theory that's been tossed around.
-Eric

 

It's unfortunate that this is probably this most comprehensive study, and most amount of work put into this problem to date. Unfortunately there are few GREAT minds working on this problem, of course due to a lack of funding. IMO, the best way you could study this is by doing multiple single fish tanks, set up the same variables, and take biopsies for cytological review, histology rarely reveals anything novel about tissues other than changes is general morphology.

Glad you all agree. And yes, please rinse your carbon on the chance that there is some type of causation, and besides, we don't want that crap in the DT anyways! lol

Good points? IDK, I think unfortunately due to the uncontrolled nature of this study, any points it made were either regurgitated from other bits of work, or deemed completely irrelevant because of the lack of diligence.