health
gregladen | January 12, 2009A study recently published by Irva Hertz-Picciotto and Lora Delwiche of the M.I.N.D. Institute, UC Davis, addresses the question of an apparent rise in the frequency of diagnosed autism in California.
This study is quickly becoming the focus of attention as the various factions with an interest in autism square off on assessing its validity. In the mean time, the study itself is rather modest in what it attempts and what it concludes.
Let's have a look.
To date, there are three kinds of explanations given for this rise in Autism rate:
1) There is some artifact in the system such as…
gregladen | January 12, 2009California's sevenfold increase in autism cannot be explained by changes in doctors' diagnoses and most likely is due to environmental exposures, University of California scientists reported Thursday.
The scientists who authored the new study advocate a nationwide shift in autism research to focus on potential factors in the environment that babies and fetuses are exposed to, including pesticides, viruses and chemicals in household products.
Scientific American
aardvarchaeology | January 12, 2009I have just spent a week nursing my family through an onset of the flu. High fever. Bucketfuls of snotty bog roll. Headaches. Stomach aches. Rattling coughs. Shoving innumerable paracetamol suppositories where the sun don't shine. But I was unscathed myself. Dear Reader, come autumn, do what I did and take your flu shot.
I have sometimes met with incredulity, even opposition, from the district nurse when I've popped down for my annual vaccination. "You're a strong healthy young(ish) man, you don't need a flu shot!" Indeed. I do not need a flu shot to survive. But it costs only $20, takes only…
gregladen | January 7, 2009The government of Iran sucks.
Doctor Arash Alaei and Doctor Kamiar Alaei are two Iranian physicians who have reportedly been detained in Iran by Iranian authorities. The physicians, who are brothers, were apparently arrested at the end of June, 2008 and their current whereabouts are unknown. Physicians for Human Rights calls on the government of Iran to disclose their whereabouts, provide them access to lawyers and family, and either to charge them with an internationally recognized crime or release them immediately.
Doctor Arash Alaei and Doctor Kamiar Alaei have played a role in putting…
gregladen | January 4, 2009Ebola is a viral disease that only occasionally infects humans, but when it does, he fatality rate is very high. In some population, where culturally determined methods of treating the dead involve a lot of contact with bodily fluids and where people are unaware of techniques to avoid spread of infection and are otherwise at risk, a large percentage of a rural village population can become infected, and the survival rate once infected can be as low as 10%. With increased awareness of how to avoid infection and even the most basic improvements in patient care, these numbers can be much…
pontiff | December 29, 2008So I picked up Malcolm Gladwell's newest book Outliers: The Story of Success the other day, as I'm sure many of you will be doing on your next trip to the airport (where stands of Gladwell's hardcover book, marked down thirty percent, block your every exit through the already cramped airport bookstores.) Gladwell's books are fun, but I find myself often disagreeing with his analysis, so I thought it would be entertaining to take my time reading his latest and jot down my thoughts as I progress. Well "entertaining" in that "holy shit dude you are pedantic" sort of way. Note that I really do…
gregladen | December 7, 2008But almost no papers report retraction of the story following the coroner's verdict that the vaccine played no part in the death.
On Tuesday the Telegraph, the Independent, the Mirror, the Express, the Mail, and the Metro all reported that a coroner was hearing the case of a toddler who died after receiving the MMR vaccine, which the parents blamed for their loss. Toddler 'died after MMR jab' (Metro), 'Healthy' baby died after MMR jab (Independent), you know the headlines by now.
On Thursday the coroner announced his verdict: the vaccine played no part in this child's death. So far, of the…
sb admin | December 2, 2008We sometimes treat them like second-class citizens. Or do we? Certainly smokers hate it when we force them out into the cold for a butt. Here in Michigan, we're thinking about restricting smoking in a lot of public places. There benefits are supposed to accrue to three groups: the smokers themselves, their co-workers who are exposed to second-hand smoke, and the public, who pays more for health care because of smoking.
I asked a simplistic question once about whether smokers should pay higher insurance premiums, that doesn't really bring the same benefits to everyone as a more…
gregladen | November 29, 2008Vince LiCata, a biochemist at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, won this category with the help of his graduate students. The foursome danced a slow and graceful double pas de deux, representing the interaction of pairs of hemoglobin molecules from his 1990 Johns Hopkins University Ph.D. thesis, "Resolving Pathways of Functional Coupling in Human Hemoglobin Using Quantitative Low Temperature Isoelectric Focusing of Asymmetric Mutant Hybrids." To study these molecules, LiCata had to cool them down and take pictures of them, a technique that was mirrored onstage by a long-bearded Old Man…
gregladen | November 23, 2008There are a little more than 300 people in the world with the condition Laron dwarfism, a third of whom live in remote villages in Ecuador's southern Loja province.
Sufferers of Laron - believed to be caused by inbreeding - lack a hormone called Insulin-like Growth Factor 1, or IGF1.
Research uncovered during an investigation by Channel 4's More4 News suggests this is the reason for their longevity and apparent immunity to cancer. In ordinary humans, too much of the hormone can lead a person to develop breast, prostate or bowel cancers at an early age.
I have not yet located the peer…
gregladen | November 14, 2008 Maize weevil, Sitophilus zeamais [usda] ... or the corn rust or the corn root cutter or whatever pathogen that comes along that cannot be fought off with a cleverly concocted combination of chemicals. This is because all we eat is corn, or so it seems.
In a paper just published in PNAS, scientists use stable isotopes to estimate the contribution of corn to the standard American diet of meat and fries from fast food. They sampled a disgustingly large number of not so happy meals from Burger King, McDonald's, and Wendy's and used this form of analysis to determine that a very large…
gregladen | November 13, 2008Imagine that you are a bad guy running from the law, and the sheriff is about to catch up to you. If you want, you can be Butch Cassidy or the Sundance Kid or any other charismatic bad guy. Or maybe you're a wizard in Harry Potter and Dementors are about to catch up to you.
But then, just as the sheriff, or the Dementor, or whatever, catches up, you wave a magic wand and instead of killing or capturing you, your nemesis transforms into a big tent inside of which you can hide. And the tent is made out of food that you can eat.
This, metaphorically (and thus not exactly accurate, but…
gregladen | November 12, 2008It is hard to kill fungus. Well, not really. They can't handle being burned and chlorine does them in and lots of other chemicals are bad for hem. But when a fungus infects a person ... like with Aspergillos, an infection with Aspergillus in the lungs, fungi are tricky. To kill an infectious agent, one typically poisons it somehow, but to ingest, inject, inhale, or even topically apply a chemical may also affect the person. The reason it is relatively easy to kill an infecting bacterium than it is to kill an infecting fungus is, in part, because fungi are phylogenetically more closely…
gregladen | October 4, 2008Did you click this?
It turns out that this is about "extremely drug resistant TB."
James Nachtwey draws our attention to "a drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis that's touching off a global medical crisis."
Here's the web site.
aardvarchaeology | October 4, 2008
I'm 36 and still as skinny as in my teens (BMI 20). Why is that, I have wondered. I have a desk job, I eat every three waking hours, I drink sweet tea and snack on cookies, I do no sports outside the marital bedroom, I scoff at gyms and jogging. Contributing factors to my skinny-assedness are skinny ancestors, no snacking between 3-hour meals and no alcohol. But I recently realised what's probably the capping factor depriving me of the beginning paunch that my contemporaries sport.
I cycle to work.
From my home to my dad's house where me and my books occupy one of the guest rooms, it's 2.6…
grrlscientist | September 12, 2008tags: Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE, mad cow disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, CJD, pathogenic mutation, prion protein gene
Image: Orphaned.
Mad Cow Disease, technically known as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), is one of a group of transmissible diseases that destroy brain tissue, collectively known as Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSEs). TSEs are an unknown agent(s) that act by damaging the structure of brain proteins known as "prions" (PREE ons). In turn, these damaged prion proteins damage other normal prions and together, they build up to collectively…
omnibrain | September 11, 2008Let me first start by saying that if your doctor tells you that praying is your last hope of your loved ones survival GET A NEW DOCTOR. Now that I've said that let me show you part of this ridiculous article from CNN's medical correspondent, who is clearly in the wrong specialty of journalism (don't they have a religion or faith section?!)
Christopher was just a few days old and had a rare blood infection and fungal meningitis, a brain infection.
"I could tell in their eyes they had no hope for my son," Gorman said. "They told me to prepare for his death. They told me he might not make it…
gregladen | September 11, 2008 One of the earliest preserved and apparently still funcitonal condoms.
Liberal (as in liberal philosophy) policies such as family planning and feminism, universal health care, support of and respect for scientific research, universal and high quality education, and the rejection -- even within a relatively conservative society -- of conservative beliefs as well as personal and institutional level selfish behaivor should be among the primary values of any country that wishes to succeed in the basic objectives of the pursuit of happiness and freedom. According to this graph:
But this…
gregladen | September 2, 2008How do athletes in Olympic level endurance competition do it?
From the abstract of a paper -- How Do Humans Control Physiological Strain during Strenuous Endurance Exercise?:
To evaluate the physiologic strain during competitions ranging from 5-100 km, we evaluated heart rate (HR) records of competitive runners (n = 211). We found evidence that:
1) physiologic strain (% of maximum HR (%HRmax)) increased in proportional manner relative to distance completed, and was regulated by variations in running pace;
2) the %HRmax achieved decreased with relative distance;
3) slower runners had…
aardvarchaeology | August 11, 2008
Jeff Medkeff's friend, co-blogging under the pen-name Iatros Polygenos ("mongrel doctor" if my Greek serves me), offers a detailed account of our friend's last days. Turns out that Jeff died during a trip to England where he was having a blast, visiting Darwin's home, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich and other great sites! I'm very grateful to learn that Jeff died swiftly in the middle of having fun, not after weeks of wasting away in bed.