j7uy5 | April 21, 2007Maybe
I will turn on the TV next week:
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
href="http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003574260">'Devastating'
Moyers Probe of Press and Iraq Coming
By Greg Mitchell
April 19, 2007
NEW YORK (Commentary) The most powerful indictment of the news media
for falling down in its duties in the run-up to the war in Iraq will
appear next Wednesday, a 90-minute PBS broadcast called "Buying the
War," which marks the return of "Bill Moyers Journal." E&P was
sent a preview DVD and a draft transcript for the…
j7uy5 | April 20, 2007If,
after reading my earlier posts this week, you are thinking that strange
things happen in the pharmaceutical market, you are right.
But strange things happen in the stock market too.
A pharmaceutical company,
rel="tag">Amgen, just saw the price of its stock
shares jump by 3.9%. The reason: they released a study that
shows that their drug,
rel="tag">Aranesp, is no more dangerous than
placebo! Hurray! Our drug does not kill patients!
The oddity of this has been
href="http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-amgen20apr20,1,2635142.story?coll=la-headlines-business">noticed…
j7uy5 | April 20, 2007If
you have glanced at this blog over the past week, you've noticed that I
wrote three posts about the opportunity -- and the pressing need -- for
reform at the FDA. Mike the Mad Biologist had an interesting
take on this, from an entirely different perspective:
href="http://scienceblogs.com/mikethemadbiologist/2007/04/e_coli_conservatives_e_coli_li.php">E.
coli Conservatives, E. coli Liberals, and the FDA.
His post is more amusing than mine were. Perhaps you were
wondering why I would put up three boring posts in a row. I
don't usually do that. Or at least I hope I don't.
Here is…
j7uy5 | April 19, 2007"My
job is a job to make decisions. I'm a decision -- if the job
description were, what do you do -- it's decision-maker. And I make a
lot of big ones, and I make a lot of little ones."
href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/04/20070419-3.html">source
j7uy5 | April 18, 2007
href="http://www.salon.com/ent/audiofile/?last_story=/ent/audiofile/2007/04/19/patti_smith/">This
is my second music-related post in one week.
Salon has
an
href="http://www.salon.com/ent/audiofile/?last_story=/ent/audiofile/2007/04/19/patti_smith/">article
with podcast, with
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patti_Smith">Patti Smith.
The occasion is the forthcoming release of her new album,
href="http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/03/29/075948.php">Twelve.
The interview is not so much about the album; it's more about
her political views, and a little bit of rock and…
j7uy5 | April 18, 2007
Add this to the list of environmental worries: The generation
of electricity is a highly water-intensive process. It takes
three times as much water to produce the electricity needed for a home,
than the water used in that home.
href="http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0417/p01s02-wogi.html">Trade-off
looms for arid US regions: water or power?
Water consumed by electric utilities could account for up to 60 percent
of all nonfarm water used in the US by 2030.
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Albuquerque, N.M. - The
drive to build more power plants for a growing nation – as…
j7uy5 | April 18, 2007The
first two posts in this series are
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/04/things_that_affect_you_pdufa_a.php">here
and
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/04/things_that_affect_you_pdufa_a_1.php">here.
The final editorial in the NEJM's three-part series on FDA reform takes
it's title from a line in the Institute of Medicine report:
href="http://www.iom.edu/CMS/3793/26341.aspx">The Future of
Drug Safety: "This [is] a golden moment of opportunity to
improve fundamentally the way FDA regulation
considers and responds to the evolving understanding…
j7uy5 | April 17, 2007
href="http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17617">
Dust
Dampens Hurricane Formation
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
I'm hardly an expert, but it appears that there is some evidence that
the amount of dust in the air over the Atlantic is a factor in
determining the severity of the hurricane season. More dust =
less ocean warming. Like so many things, this is hypothetical:
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Using dust observations
collected by the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA’s
Aura satellite, they found that the Sahara…
j7uy5 | April 17, 2007Nightmares
are a terrible problem for many persons with posttraumatic stress
disorder. Not only that, but they can be difficult to treat.
Lately, the LA Times has taken to emailing me a summary of some of
their Science & Medicine headlines. I'm not sure why;
maybe the LA Times thinks the mighty prowess of ScienceBlogs will save
them from a corporate takeover somehow.
Anyway, they did report one thing that I noticed and want to pass along:
href="http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-ptsd14apr14,1,2738769.story?coll=la-news-science">
href="http://www.latimes.com/news/…
j7uy5 | April 16, 2007It is
not often that I write about music. In fact, it is not
often that I even think about music. But this little item
caught my eye, if not my ear, if only because it is perplexing to try
to imagine Balkan-Techno fusion:
href="http://www.geocities.com/emmo_dj/home.html">DJ EMMO
Biography
DJ Emmo has a Ph.D. degree in Biochemistry and Human Genetics. He is
Research Scientist in a private Biotechnology company in Ann Arbor,
Michigan, involved in discovery of new markers for Cancer Diagnostics (
href="http://www.rubicongenomics.com/">www.rubicongenomics
com). Music is his…
j7uy5 | April 15, 2007This
is a continuation of the first post,
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/04/things_that_affect_you_pdufa_a.php">Things
That Affect YOU: PDUFA and AERS. PDUFA is
the Prescription
Drug User Fee Act. AERS is the
href="http://www.fda.gov/cder/aers/default.htm">Adverse
Event Reporting System.
The PDUFA is up for review soon, as it expires in September.
If it expires, 40% of the funding for premarketing drug
approval
will disappear.
This has been covered only minimally by the mainstream media.
There is an article on Bloomberg.com (
href="http://www.bloomberg.…
j7uy5 | April 14, 2007The
href="http://content.nejm.org/" rel="tag">New England
Journal of Medicine has a set of three
early-release editorials, all pertaining to prescription drug safety,
and all openly accessible:
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMp078041">Paying
for Drug Approvals — Who's Using Whom?
Jerry Avorn, M.D.
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMp078057">Drug
Safety Reform at the FDA — Pendulum Swing or Systematic
Improvement?
Mark McClellan, M.D., Ph.D.
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMp078048…
j7uy5 | April 13, 2007This
is from Medpage Today, which often carries the same things as Medscape,
but does not require registration (hint, hint).
They report on the finding of a genetic variant that increases the risk
of obesity. the more copies of the allele, the greater the
risk. The association was found when researchers at were
looking for a genetic basis for type II diabetes mellitus.
They thought they found one, but when they controlled for
body mass, the association disappeared. So the allele is not
a direct cause of diabetes, but does increase the risk by increasing
the risk of obesity.
The article…
j7uy5 | April 13, 2007From
Reuters Health Information, via Medscape (free registration rquired):
href="http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/555126">Jeb Bush
Joins Board of Tenet Healthcare
CHICAGO (Reuters) Apr 12 - Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, brother of
U.S. President George W. Bush, will join the board of Tenet Healthcare
Corp., the biggest publicly traded hospital company said on Thursday.
The move to appoint Bush, 54, comes as Dallas-based Tenet continues its
struggle to recover from a slew of scandals and lawsuits. Last year, it
settled with the U.S. Department of Justice for $900 million…
j7uy5 | April 12, 2007From
CNN, et alia:
href="http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/04/12/white.house.email/">White
House: 'We screwed up' on deleted e-mails
POSTED: 4:35 p.m. EDT, April 12, 2007
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The White House "screwed up" by not requiring
e-mails from Republican Party and campaign accounts to be saved and is
trying to recover any documents that may have been deleted, a
spokeswoman said Thursday.
Just ask the NSA for copies. They probably have them.
j7uy5 | April 11, 2007
[Update: Retired Doc's Thoughts has a more complete review of the varied potential benefits from statins.]
This
morning, Effect Measure
href="http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2007/04/the_statin_story_continues_to.php">posted
about a retrospective study that indicates that there may be a
protective effect if statins are taken by persons with COPD (Chronic
Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.) In also appeared that statins
lowered the risk of death from pneumonia.
This is a so-called pleiotropic effect, meaning that the drug has an
effect other than that which is originally intended…
j7uy5 | April 11, 2007
href="http://www.oldamericancentury.org/index.htm">
I
thought this was kind of clever. Not sure why the
href="http://www.oldamericancentury.org/index.htm" rel="tag">Project
for the Old American Century put it up --
it is not their usual fare -- but they deserve credit for being
creative.
j7uy5 | April 10, 2007From
href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/070409-crystal-cave.html">National
Geographic:
April
9, 2007—Geologist Juan Manuel García-Ruiz
calls it "the Sistine Chapel of crystals," but Superman could call it
home.
A sort of south-of-the-border Fortress of Solitude, Mexico's Cueva de
los Cristales (Cave of Crystals) contains some of the world's largest
known natural crystals—translucent beams of gypsum as long as
36 feet (11 meters)...
Apparently
a mining operation pumped water out of a cave, and this is what they
found. The story of the discovery of the caves…
j7uy5 | April 10, 2007Here
at ScienceBlogs, and medical blogs in general, are generally
somewhat dismissive of complimentary and alternative medicine.
Every once in a while, though, something comes up that is
positive.
This is from American Family Physician, and is openly available.
href="http://www.aafp.org/afp/20070401/1027.html">Peppermint
Oil
BENJAMIN KLIGLER, M.D., M.P.H., Albert Einstein College
of
Medicine of Yeshiva University, Bronx, New York
SAPNA CHAUDHARY, D.O., Beth Israel Continuum Center for Health and
Healing, New York, New York
Peppermint leaf and peppermint oil have a long history…