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terrasig | December 27, 2006A week after my colleague Orac posts on the conundrum of bringing religion into medicine, Michael Conlon reports on a nurse's book about how religious and cultural influences can compromise medical care:
Any nurse can walk into a bad situation. The one Luanne Linnard-Palmer can't forget came as she readied a little boy for a blood transfusion only to be told by his mother "You know you're damning his soul to hell!"
The child's mother was a Jehovah's Witness, a faith that rejects blood transfusions. Her son had sickle cell anemia and had become extremely weak.
"It blew me away," Linnard-Palmer…
terrasig | December 18, 2006Wasn't able to get off an original post today so I'll direct Terra Sig readers to an excellent interview written by Carl Zimmer. As Carl writes,
Discover chose Jay Keasling as their scientist of the year and asked me to interview him. Keasling, who directs the Berkeley Center for Synthetic Biology, is trying to get either E. coli or yeast to crank out a powerful malaria drug normally only made by the sweet wormwood plant. I had already been getting familiar with Keasling's work, since it is a great example of the sort of work that's being done on E coli, the subject of my book. So it was a…
terrasig | December 14, 2006Tara at Aetiology just posted a few minutes ago that today's New England Journal of Medicine has published a free-access, Perspective article on the case of the Tripoli Six, who awaiting their 19 December sentencing.
terrasig | October 18, 2006SAHA, or suberoylanilide hydroxamic acid, was recently granted orphan drug approval by the US FDA for skin lesions resulting from cutaneous T-cell lymphoma.
SAHA (vorinostat, Zolinza) will be marketed by Merck as they acquired in 2004 Aton Pharma, who had been developing the compound. (This free Nature Biotechnology article, while dated, gives background on the acquisition and the then-development of other similar compounds.) Merck's press release is farily detailed and available in PDF format.
I'm somewhat surprised that more has not been made of this approval since histone deacetylase…
terrasig | October 16, 2006Please alert your diabetic friends, family, colleagues, and students as to this alert from the US FDA:
LifeScan and FDA notified healthcare professionals and the public of counterfeit blood glucose test strips being sold in the United States for use with various models of the One Touch Brand Blood Glucose Monitors used by people with diabetes to measure their blood glucose. The counterfeit test strips potentially could give incorrect blood glucose values--either too high or too low--which might result in a patient taking either too much or too little insulin and lead to serious injury or…
goodmath | September 20, 2006Over in my post accepting my victory as the biggest geek on ScienceBlogs, an interesting discussion about beginners learning to program got started in the comments. It was triggered by someone mentioning David Brin's article in Salon about how terrible it is that computers no longer come with basic. The discussion was interesting; I think it's interesting enough to justify a top-level post.
A few days ago in Salon, David Brin published an article (no link, because Salon is a pay-site), lamenting the fact that computers no longer come with BASIC interpreters, and how that was going to wreck…
terrasig | June 13, 2006From USA Today, some interesting and sad news:
When a teenager in Jan Sigerson's office mentioned a "pharm party" in February, Sigerson thought the youth was talking about a keg party out on a farm.
"Pharm," it turned out, was short for pharmaceuticals, such as the powerful painkillers Vicodin and OxyContin. Sigerson, program director for Journeys, a teen drug treatment program in Omaha, soon learned that area youths were organizing parties to down fistfuls of prescription drugs.
I am now officially old. I thought I'd never say, "I remember when..."
Well, I remember when drinking PBR as a…
sb admin | June 9, 2006No surprise here: a highly-regarded climatologist declares that the Bush administration is "muzzling government scientists" and covering up the facts about global warming.
Warren Washington, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, said that Bush appointees are suppressing information about climate change, restricting journalists' access to federal scientists and rewriting agency news releases to stress global warming uncertainties.
"The news media is not getting the full story, especially from government scientists," Washington told about 160 people…