revere | September 27, 2008So here's my problem. I think this is satire. So I think it's funny (your mileage may differ, of course). On the other hand, this could really be a conservative website. Then it's just more of the last eight years. Not so funny. Is Art imitating Life or is Life imitating Art? You decide:
revere | September 27, 2008The Chinese food adulteration scandal is spreading. I'm calling it a food adulteration scandal because it's not just milk any more. Products with milk derived ingredients are also suspect:
Seven instant coffee and milk tea products made in China are being recalled in the U.S. because of possible contamination with melamine, as health fears increased worldwide over the safety of Chinese dairy exports.
The Mr. Brown brand mixes are being recalled by King Car Food Industrial Co., based in Taiwan, and were made by China's Shandong Duqing Inc., the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said today in a…
revere | September 26, 2008I don't know how many of these you received yesterday, but here's one more:
Dear American:
I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.
I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.
I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as…
revere | September 26, 2008The Chinese food contamination scandal continues to widen. The European Union (EU) is now banning imports of all Chinese baby foods that contain milk. The problem is the presence of melamine, a cheap chemical used to make plastics that looks like protein in the screening assays used to see if food products meet standards for protein content. It was added by unscrupulous Chinese pet food manufacturers a year ago, resulting in the illness and deaths of thousands of cats and dogs in the US and Canada. The thinking is that melamine combines with cyanuric acid in urine to produce lattice crystals…
revere | September 25, 2008Leaving aside the absolute disingenuousness of John McCain's claim he is elevating the financial crisis to a non-partisan issue by plopping the Presidential race into the middle of the negotiations in Washington, it wouldn't seem that the whole thing needs that much thought -- at least from his engagingly simplistic point of view. After all, his solution to the millenium old Gordian Knot that Iraq's Sunnis and Shias have entangled themselves in is to tell each side to "":
For all the national attention surrounding John McCain's two highly anticipated, protest-ridden commencement speeches in…
revere | September 25, 2008Like a lot of other research scientists supported by NIH I got an email yesterday from NIH Director Elias Zerhouni announcing his intention to leave his position "to devote much of my attention to writing." At least it wasn't the hackneyed "to spend more time with my family." While Zerhouni won't actually leave until the end of next month, the federal health research establishment is essentially leaderless, awaiting the next administration. The main public health institute within the NIH system, the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) has been under "Acting" (although…
revere | September 24, 2008By now we all know that Governor Palin, possibly a future President if things work out badly, as recently as this year didn't know what the Vice President did, probably because constitutionally Vice Presidents don't do that much. It's also been widely reported that she charged the citizens of Alaska travel per diems while she was at home in Wasilla, since Wasilla wasn't her official duty station (which was at the capitol in Juneau). But it took Scott Lilly, writing at Politico.com, to do the math:
The Washington Post recently reported that, in her first 19 months as governor, Palin billed the…
revere | September 24, 2008We don't post much about clinical topics here, mainly because we haven't done much practice since our medical training days. I'm primarily a researcher and professor. But every once in a while I see papers on subjects that strike a nostalgic chord from those days and yesterday was one of those once-in-a-whiles. This was a report of a paper (DOI: 10.3748/wjg.14.5282) about what we used to call "gall balls in the gall bag," that is, gall bladder disease from gallstones. My medical school was located at a gigantic hospital with a very famous surgical program. And the chief surgeon there was most…
revere | September 23, 2008"The fish love to be around those rigs!"
He looks like somebody's crazy uncle. Except that he wants to be Uncle Sam.
revere | September 23, 2008I was born by Caesarian section at a time when this method of delivery was fairly rare (too long ago to even mention). The reason was placenta praevia. Both my children were C-section births, too, both for good medical reasons. My daughter has now had two C-section deliveries. These data might lead some to think that C-section deliveries is hereditary but not so, unless you consider national residence to be heriditary (which it is but in a non-biological sense). I say this because the overall rate of Caesarian section deliveries is not astoundingly high (more than 25% of all live births in 12…
revere | September 22, 2008Good news. Governor Palin's "road to nowhere" has just opened and now you can take it there. If that's your destination:
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's transportation department has completed a $25 million gravel road leading to the site of a bridge that Palin, as John McCain's vice presidential candidate, now boasts that she stopped, so as to save taxpayers money. The road was built with federal tax dollars.
Ketchikan Mayor Bob Weinstein said the 3.2-mile road will be useful for road races, hunters and possibly future development. But with no bridge to serve it, that's probably about it.
"I think…
revere | September 22, 2008Mrs. R. made the very same comment that Echidne of the Snakes did regarding John McCain's prescription of how to fix the US health care system:
Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation. (Quoted by Paul Krugman, New York Times, from McCain's article Better Health Care at Lower Cost for Every American, just published. Bad timing?)
Oh good, Mrs. R. said. Now we'll finally get socialized medicine.
I…
revere | September 21, 2008Hats off to fellow blogger Stephen Soldz and his colleagues, leaders of a coalition within the American Psychological Association that campaigned to put the APA on record declaring participation in torture interrogations at US prisons at Guantanamo Bay and similar prison camps an unethical breach of professional standards. The referendum victory (59%) comes after previous failures to ban professional complicity by APA members in interrogations where there is good reason to believe international law is being violated.
The ban means those who are American Psychological Association members can't…
revere | September 21, 2008There are creationists and creationists. One of those creationists (which one?) wants to be just a 72 year old's cardiac arrhythmia away from being President of the United States. It would be historic, although more historic for the rest of us than for the potentially almost President, Governor Sarah Palin, because her notion of the length of historical record is so much shorter. Like many Pentecostals, Governor Palin is said to be a Young Earth Creationist, someone who thinks the earth is only 7 thousand years old and that humans walked alongside dinosaurs. At least that's what one of her…
revere | September 20, 2008Listen to the person who John McCain says knows more about energy than anyone in the United States. Maybe he learned all he knows about energy from her? If so, maybe he'll explain it to the rest of us:
LOL.
revere | September 20, 2008Generals are often said to be fighting the last war and public health officials likewise are managing the last crisis. At the end of May 2007 we had the notorious flying lawyer with TB flap (see our multiple posts here), so in June 2007 CDC quietly instituted their public health version of the "No Fly" list. I guess because the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) No Fly list has been so incompetently and dangerously implemented CDC didn't want to taint their version with the same name, so they are calling it the Do Not Board (ENB) list. The DHS list is pushing a million entries. Pretty soon…
revere | September 19, 2008George Bush has consistently gone beyond his legal and constitutional authority and it appears this is still another way John McCain would like to be President McBush:
At a joint rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa Thursday, Republican John McCain slammed the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) for being "asleep at the switch" saying that if he were president, he would fire Chris Cox, the chairman of the SEC since 2005 and a former Republican congressman.
McCain said the SEC has allowed trading practices such as short selling to stay in place that turned the "markets into a casino."
"The…
revere | September 19, 2008John Conyers (D., Michigan) is a liberal Democrat. As head of the Judiciary Committee he has always carried water for the IP crowd. He's at it again. And he isn't alone. When it comes to paying off campaign contributers this is a non-partisant issue:
These sort of copyright issues cut across the partisan divide, typically aligning members of Congress from both parties from areas of the country with strong content generation industries (TV, movies, music, print). In other words, members of Congress from California, New York, and Florida (Disney) or committee chairs who get a lot of money from…
revere | September 18, 2008So with socialism Republican style (socialize the losses, privatize the profits) both Obama and McCain are saying the saw the meltdown coming. We know Barack Obama gave a prescient speech on the financial markets 6 months ago. It wasn't covered much because it wasn't a very interesting sounding topic. Now John McCain tells us he was concerned, too:
"Two years ago, I warned that the oversight of Fannie and Freddie was terrible, that we were facing a crisis because of it, or certainly serious problems," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told CBS this morning. "The influence that Fannie and Freddie had…
revere | September 18, 2008Steve Novella at Science-Based Medicine, a level headed and judicious advocate of better use of scientific evidence in clinical medicine, has written his own view of the BPA issue we covered in a post the other day. Orac pointed to it in the comments as "another take" on the issue. We aren't sure if he meant it disagreed with the view we expressed or not. For the record, we have some differences, but not on the judgment about the BPA paper. Differences about that are mainly a matter of emphasis and that's pretty subjective. "Real but small effects" may be very important but we don't know that…