Policy
tsmith | March 24, 2007Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection is as old as civilization. The bacterium infects approximately a third of the world's population--roughly 2 billion individuals. It's estimated that 8 million new cases are contracted each year--around a new infection every second. ~2 million individuals die as a result of TB every year. The bacterium also plays a prominent role in the history of microbiology: it was on March 24, 1882, that Robert Koch announced his discovery of the causative agent of the dread disease tuberculosis:
"If the importance of a disease for mankind is measured by the number…
tsmith | February 1, 2007I've mentioned a few times the work of Ignaz Semmelweis in preventing "childbed fever" in new mothers. To recap:
Semmelweis was a physician in Vienna in the 1840s, with an interested in "childbed fever," a leading cause of mortality in women who'd given birth. During this time, he noticed that the mortality rate from this disease in a hospital division where medical students delivered babies was 16%, while in a division where midwives delivered them was ~2%. It was also known that childbed fever was rare when women gave birth at home. Semmelweis thought there was something the med students…
tsmith | January 17, 2007Via Jonah comes this (depressing, as he notes) NY Times article on what else we could've bought with $1.2 trillion:
For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign -- a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children's lives.
Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn't use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-…
tsmith | January 5, 2007 Gina Kolata has an interesting article from Wednesday's New York Times, discussing education and longevity.
James Smith, a health economist at the RAND Corporation, has heard a variety of hypotheses about what it takes to live a long life -- money, lack of stress, a loving family, lots of friends. But he has been a skeptic.
Yes, he says, it is clear that on average some groups in every society live longer than others. The rich live longer than the poor, whites live longer than blacks in the United States. Longevity, in general, is not evenly distributed in the population. But what, he…
tsmith | December 19, 2006 Libya to execute HIV medics
(Previous posts on the topic)
A court convicted five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor Tuesday of deliberately infecting 400 children with HIV and sentenced them to death, despite scientific evidence the youngsters had the virus before the medical workers came to Libya.
The United States and Europe reacted with outrage to the verdict, which prolongs a case that has hurt Libya's ties to the West. The six co-defendants have already served seven years in jail.
The sentence brought cheers in Libya, where there is widespread public anger over the infections.…
tsmith | December 12, 2006 I've written previously about how it's a bad idea to import exotic pets, after "exotic" African species of small animals were imported into the United States and housed alongside prairie dogs that were also to be sold as pets. The African animals brought along with them their own diseases, including monkeypox, which then spread to the prairie dogs and onto humans, causing at least 80 cases of monkeypox in the U.S.
Think this is a rare event, unlikely to re-occur? Think again. The Baltimore Sun has a story on how "exotic" pets like these African rodents enter the U.S. by the millions…
tsmith | December 8, 2006As I've been busy this week, other Sciencebloggers (with Revere leading the fray and more posts here) have updated everyone on the newest developments in the case of the Tripoli Six (previous update here), the six medical workers on trial for their lives in Libya, accused of spreading HIV to more than 400 children in a hospital there. Nature's Declan Bulter broke news on a new Nature paper showing, using molecular phylogenetics, that the strains of HIV which infected the children were already circulating in the hospital prior to the medics' arrival--again, showing that these workers are…
tsmith | December 4, 2006In the comments to my Republicans want to legislate when fetuses feel pain" post, David notes:
What really gets me is if they were interested in preventing abortion, the most effective way seems to be by providing people with the tools and education to not get pregnant in the first place. If they are not willing to help prevent unwanted pregnancy, they have no moral ground to stand on when it comes to abortion, because as far as I'm concerned, they are the ones responsible for many of the unwanted pregnancies and abortions.
What good timing: Evil Monkey at Neurotopia has a post up…
tsmith | December 1, 2006 GOP wants law to define when fetuses feel pain
While they still can, House Republicans are looking at scheduling a vote next week on a fetal pain abortion bill in a parting shot at incoming majority Democrats and a last bid for loyalty from the GOP's base of social conservatives.
***
The bill, by Rep. Chris Smith, R-New Jersey, defines a 20-week-old fetus as a "pain-capable unborn child" -- a highly controversial threshold among scientists. It also directs the Health and Human Services Department to develop a brochure stating "that there is substantial evidence that the process of being…
tsmith | November 17, 2006PZ and others have already blogged about this, but since it deals with public health in a big way, I thought I'd give it a mention here as well. Seems Bush has made yet another highly questionable appointment in the Department of Health and Human Services. Shocking, I know.
The Bush administration has appointed a new chief of family-planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who worked at a Christian pregnancy-counseling organization that regards the distribution of contraceptives as "demeaning to women."
More after the jump...
Eric Keroack, medical director for A…
tsmith | November 7, 2006Male circumcision is a difficult topic to discuss rationally. At the core, it's a medical procedure, but it's one tinged with centuries of cultural influences, and emotions tend to run high on both the pro- or anti-circumcision side of the discussion. One of the reasons that's been given in favor of circumcision is that it lowers the risk of disease, including diseases transmitted by sexual contact. However, while this data has been fairy unambiguous regarding some diseases (including the reduction in HIV transmission due to circumcision), the effect circumcision has on the spread of…
tsmith | November 2, 2006Apparently, it's just not enough for this administration to push ineffective and inaccurate abstinence-only education programs for our schoolchildren. Nope--they're also being emphasized for adults up to the age of 29, as well:
If you're single and in your 20s, the federal government wants you to steer clear of sex.
That's the new guidance for states under the Department of Health and Human Services' $50 million Abstinence Education Program. HHS officials say it's not a requirement -- just another option for states to combat what they call an alarming rise in out-of-wedlock births.
(More…
tsmith | October 25, 2006I previously blogged an editorial by NBC medical correspondent Robert Bazell, where he told scientists to "quit whining" about intelligent design and instead work on teaching "values." While I agreed with him there on the science (he made it clear he gave no respect to "intelligent design" and other types of creationism), his suggestion that teachers and scientists spend more time worrying (and teaching) about more "practical" things such as biotechnology and medical ethics was just, in my opinion, wrong. Luckily, his new editorial on alternative medicine contains no such red herrings.…
tsmith | October 24, 2006Orac has an excellent post discussing the rise in pertussis ("whooping cough") in many areas, and its correlation with easier exemption from mandatory vaccination (using a "personal belief" exemption in addition to a religious exemption, for example). I've written about pertussis previously, and a problem is that the vaccine effectiveness quickly wanes, so that adults frequently lack significant immunity. While we rarely get sick, we can be carriers of the bacterium and infect children around us. As such, new recommendations suggest that adults also should get a pertussis booster. I worry…
tsmith | October 23, 2006Apologies for the radio silence, so to speak. October has been a killer month for me and November won't be that much better, but I'll work on getting back to posting on a regular basis, including a new post for tomorrow. In the meantime, a few things to check out:
Mike on treating strep throat (which he's correct is near and dear to my heart--though not literally, thankfully, since they can cause heart disease!).
A belated Friday the 13th Tangled Bank
Last week's Grand Rounds.
tsmith | October 13, 2006Flu shots are rolling out, and there should be no shortage this year. A few new articles remind the public of the importance of these vaccinations, especially in high-risk groups (something that I touched on here regarding data showing that vaccination during pregnancy can help protect the newborn).
You can find the guidelines for target vaccination groups here. Essentially, it includes anyone immunocompromised or with conditions that make them increasingly susceptible to serious complications of influenza; those 50 years of age and older; and children from 6 months to five years old.…
tsmith | October 3, 2006I write on a somewhat regular basis on here about vaccines: new research, new shots, addressing skepticism about how well they work or if they're related to autism, etc. Recently, several vaccine stories have been in the news that I've not gotten to yet, so consider this a vaccine meta-post. More after the jump.
The first story is timely in that it discusses the influenza vaccination (and we're heading into that season). Allow me to share an anecdote first. When I was pregnant with my daughter in 1999, I was in graduate school and the lab I worked in was affiliated with a hospital. So…
tsmith | September 26, 2006I was travelling over the weekend and I'm incredibly busy up through Wednesday, so new material from me will have to wait until later in the week. In the meantime, I'll point you to a stellar post I wanted to highlight last week, from Revere on H5N1 and the evolution ov virulence, and another excellent one from Mike regarding the importance of surveillance when it comes to detecting and containing outbreaks (such as the recent O157 outbreak). He also describes a timeline for how long many of the common procedures take; quite a bit different from what you get watching CSI or similar shows…
tsmith | September 22, 2006The more I read about this, the worse it gets. In addition to the links I mentioned yesterday, Laurie Garrett mentioned she's been covering this for years. One example is this piece from this past June.
One of the newly charged Bulgarians, Smilian Tachev, an engineer, told Bulgarian journalists last month that he was originally arrested in Benghazi at the same time as the nurses and doctor, and during 174 days of captivity witnessed gruesome torture of the health care workers.
"The nurses were beaten with many-stranded wire, for a long time and painfully," Tachev said. "Then they were…
tsmith | September 19, 2006From the New York Times:
The last of the anthrax-laced letters was still making its way through the mail in late 2001 when top Bush administration officials reached an obvious conclusion: the nation desperately needed to expand its medical stockpile to prepare for another biological attack.
The result was Project BioShield, a $5.6 billion effort to exploit the country's top medical and scientific brains and fill an emergency medical cabinet with new drugs and vaccines for a host of threats. "We will rally the great promise of American science and innovation to confront the greatest danger of…