health
gregladen | July 29, 2009It is decided. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices has met, ruminated, voted, and now decrees that pregnant women, health care workers, and children over six months old will be vaccinated first. The reason we even need to worry about this is that there will not be nearly enough flu vaccine to go around in the event of a real surge in the novel swine flu.
In the US, according to MSNBC,
The government estimates that about 120 million swine flu vaccine doses will be available to the public by late October. Nearly 160 million people are in the priority groups considered most…
razib | July 27, 2009
Update: The author of the paper clears up confusions.
Update: Here's the paper. End Update
The British media is abuzz with another paper from Satoshi Kanazawa, the evolutionary psychologist who has great marketing savvy. I can't find the study online anyway, so here is the Times Online:
In a study released last week, Markus Jokela, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, found beautiful women had up to 16% more children than their plainer counterparts. He used data gathered in America, in which 1,244 women and 997 men were followed through four decades of life. Their attractiveness was…
razib | July 26, 2009Turkmenistan had a bizarre dictator as its ruler until 2006, Saparmurat Niyazov. Here's a sample of his healthcare initiatives:
So, in a frankly insane healthcare reform effort, he restricted the public's access to care by replacing up to 15,000 doctors and nurses with unqualified military conscripts. The next year, he ordered hospitals and clinics outside of the capital, Ashgabat, to close -- even though the vast proportion of Turkmenistan's population lives in rural areas. The BBC quoted him as saying, "Why do we need such hospitals? If people are ill, they can come to Ashgabat." He also…
razib | July 25, 2009Tyler Cowen linked to a Time article on the phenomenon of Southern Americans being relatively overweight vis-a-vis Americans from other regions of the country. Several reasons are offered, from the lower per capita income of Southern states, to the fact that Southern food tends to be fried and less healthful. But the article doesn't mention one very salient fact: black Americans are heavier than white Americans, and are disproportionately concentrated in Southern states. What is a regional disparity could be accounted for by underlying differences in the distribution of races.
State Health…
gregladen | July 14, 2009When Ella was three years old, she began exhibiting strange behaviors and for several days we had no clue as to their meaning. She was having difficulty with her toilet training, and we guessed that the stress was manifesting itself in what we shortly learned were partial-complex seizures. The expressions varied in the first few days, so when we attempted to describe them to the primary care physician, he was prone to agree with our assessment but asked us to come back in if the behaviors continued....
A new post by Mike at Quiche Moraine.
gregladen | July 13, 2009... or is obesity simply Yet Another Risk Factor in severity of this illness?
Probably the latter, but health officials seem interested in the developing data.
From CTV:
... in a report released Friday, health officials detailed the cases of 10 Michigan patients who were very sick from swine flu in late May and early June and ended up at a specialized hospital in Ann Arbor. Three of them died.
Nine of the 10 were either obese or extremely obese. Only three of the 10 had other health problems. Two of the three that died had no other health conditions.
This hardly settles the question of…
razib | July 12, 2009Wired has a piece up To Run Better, Start by Ditching Your Nikes, which discusses the controversy over the utility of running shoes. Of course the "support" that typical athletic shoes provide is real. when I switch to flip-flops in warm weather it takes a few days to get comfortable walking up or down hills. There is a shift in the emphasis of which tendons you have to work.
razib | July 5, 2009I notice that Fortune has a story on personal genomics up, Genetic sequencing gets personal Biotech firm Illumina will sequence your entire genetic code -- and throw in a Mac -- for $48,000:
So far, personalized genomics make up just a small fraction of Illumina's revenue. High costs keep sequencing out of reach for most people. But prices will fall substantially as the technology improves. In fact experts say costs could reach $1000 within three to five years, making more people privy to their entire genetic code.
...
One area Illumina is not diving into is sequence analysis. Instead, it is…
gregladen | June 30, 2009Acetaminophen dose recommendations will be lowered significantly by the FDA, and some products will be pulled off the market, because of concerns over liver damage. If you look up "Tylenol" on Wikipedia as I write this, you see the following:
Indeed.
From MSNBC:
Despite years of educational campaigns and other federal actions, acetaminophen remains the leading cause of liver failure in the U.S., according to the FDA.
Panelists cited FDA data indicating 60 percent of acetaminophen-related deaths are related to prescription products. Acetaminophen is also found in popular over-the-counter…
gregladen | June 29, 2009The novel swine flu has affected its one millionth American. The first death in England has been recorded (a 9 year old girl). Yesterday, the first Brazilian death was recorded. When we look at the map of the disease, note that many regions of Africa are totally devoid of cases. Just so you know ... this is not some special African immunity. This is simply because the global health network has failed Africa and we have no clue what is going on there, and never have had a clue.
A new wrinkle in the process for North Americans, possibly with parallels elsewhere, is the summer camp…
aardvarchaeology | June 24, 2009Strong black tea is my drug of choice. But I got fed up with caffeine addiction a few years back and started to limit my intake. Currently I'm at 1.5 litres every second day, which means that my system is used to going without caffeine for over 40 hours at a time -- counted from afternoon tea on a Monday to morning tea on a Wednesday for instance. This regimen works out to an average daily intake of 190 milligrams of caffeine. Coffee has about 1.7 times the caffeine in strong black tea, which in turn has 2.7 times the caffeine in Coke. But I never have coffee and very rarely any caffeinated…
grrlscientist | June 24, 2009tags: medicine, surgery, robots, Catherine Mohr, TEDTalks, streaming video
In this video, surgeon and inventor Catherine Mohr tours the history of surgery (and its pre-painkiller, pre-antiseptic past), then demonstrates some of the newest tools for surgery through tiny incisions, performed using nimble robot hands. Fascinating -- and very graphic. This is an inspiring presentation, but she neglected to mention all the other people who contribute to this technology, from engineers and computer designers to scientists. [21:28]
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and…
razib | June 23, 2009Obesity May Have Offered Edge Over TB:
Over the course of human evolution, people with excess stores of fat have been more likely to survive famines, many scientists believe, living on to pass their genes to the next generation.
But these days, obesity is thought to be harmful, leading to chronic inflammation and metabolic disorders that set the stage for heart disease. So what went awry? When did excess fat stop being a protective mechanism that assured survival and instead become a liability?
A provocative new hypothesis suggests that in some people, fat not only stores energy but also revs…
gregladen | June 18, 2009People like to help pregnant women.
On buses it is routine to give up one's seat for a pregnant woman. In Boston, drivers try less hard to run over pregnant women in crosswalks. And so on. But sometimes good intentions can lead to bad advice.
First, I'd like to point out that there is reasonably good evidence that obesity has negative health effects, and obesity in relationship to pregnancy is probably worse. So women who are planning on getting pregnant should probably trim down a bit if they need to. Also, exercise is good for many many reasons, so women who are planning on getting…
gregladen | June 16, 2009Here is the Guinea Worm Movie, and for more information and additional links, click here.
Minor Africa Story hidden below the fold.
A small Jimmy Carter story: A friend of mine got a job, while in his first or second year of graduate school, as in intern for the State Department. Since he was studying Africa, he got sent to Uganda where, one would think, an inexperienced intern would be at the bottom of the pecking order.
And he was at the bottom of the pecking order, but he was also at the top. For whatever reason, the Ambassador and all the other people who were under the Ambassador…
razib | June 16, 2009Alcohol's Good for You? Some Scientists Doubt It:
For some scientists, the question will not go away. No study, these critics say, has ever proved a causal relationship between moderate drinking and lower risk of death -- only that the two often go together. It may be that moderate drinking is just something healthy people tend to do, not something that makes people healthy.
"The moderate drinkers tend to do everything right -- they exercise, they don't smoke, they eat right and they drink moderately," said Kaye Middleton Fillmore, a retired sociologist from the University of California, San…
gregladen | June 14, 2009Republicans in congress bought and paid for by Big Pharma and the other nefarious elements of the health care industry are going to kill any attempts at reform.
Unless....
The same kind of organization at the grass roots level that put Obama in office is marshaled to force congress to do the right thing. This won't be easy.
Stand with Obama: Support a Public Health Insurance Option
On Wednesday, President Obama reaffirmed his support for a public health insurance option--the key piece of health care reform that will provide coverage for all Americans and help bring costs down.
But as the…
esiegel | June 13, 2009We've got a lot going on here in America these days, with towering unemployment, a dying manufacturing industry, huge environmental problems, and the tense fight for all sorts of rights and freedoms, such as GLBT equality and abortion rights. But there are two things that I'd like to remind you of this weekend. First off, not only are there other places far worse off then America, but we really have no idea what's even going on there. As Manu Chao sings below (in Arabic), people don't know (or even care) about what's going on in Algeria (English lyrics here).
But the song -- Denia -- is both…
gregladen | June 11, 2009The long-awaited pandemic announcement is scientific confirmation that a new flu virus has emerged and is quickly circling the globe. WHO will now ask drugmakers to speed up production of a swine flu vaccine. The declaration will also prompt governments to devote more money toward efforts to contain the virus.
This means that the alert level is going to Level Six.
Ominously, WHO chief Dr. Margaret Chan said: "The world is moving into the early days of its first influenza pandemic in the 21st century, ... The (swine flu) virus is now unstoppable."
We are warned that a second wave of the flu…