public health
terrasig | March 9, 2009
I'm very proud today to see one of my formative professors, Dr Fulton Crews, quoted extensively in a USAToday article on a new, web-based alcohol awareness initiative, "Rethinking Drinking," from NIH's National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) Division of Treatment and Recovery Research.
While many associate heavy drinking with liver problems, it can also increase the risk for heart disease, sleep disorders, depression, stroke and stomach bleeding. Consumed during pregnancy, it can cause fetal brain damage, says Fulton Crews, director of the Bowles Center for Alcohol…
j7uy5 | March 3, 2009At first I was happy to see some good news on the Internet, a
refreshing break from the avalanche of bad stuff rolling down every
peak.
href="http://www.boston.com/news/health/articles/2009/03/02/fewer_children_have_high_lead_levels/">Fewer
children have high lead levels
Associated Press / March 2, 2009
CHICAGO - In a stunning improvement in children's health, far fewer
children have high lead levels than 20 years ago, according to new
government research.
Federal researchers credited the improvement on aggressive efforts to
reduce children's exposure to lead in old house paint, soil…
mikethemadbiologist | March 2, 2009A recent article that examined the relationship between antibiotic use and antibiotic resistance in Finland made me realize one very sad fact: what is easy to do in Finland is nearly impossible in the U.S. because we lack a national healthcare system (note: I'm not talking about how healthcare is paid for which is an argument about reimbursement, but a uniform system of record keeping and informatics protocols).
Consider this from the introduction (italics mine; citations removed for clarity):
According to current Finnish care recommendations, the first-line antimicrobial agents for the…
j7uy5 | February 25, 2009When Bush announced the Global and Perpetual War on Terror, and shifted
funding away from environmental, worker, and consumer safety functions,
I speculated that "the terrorists" would not have to do anything to
kill us: our own corporations would do the job for them. This has
turned out to be the case, many times, and here is yet another
example:
Feds searching for CEO in case of tainted syringes
February 24, 2009, 11:46 p.m.
The Associated Press
RALEIGH, N.C. - For months, prosecutors say, technicians in
the gloom of a run-down North Carolina plant prepared life-sustaining
syringes and…
mikethemadbiologist | February 24, 2009Digby makes a very good point about the real world effects of conservative propaganda:
I'm convinced that one of the mistakes we've made over the years is not telling enough stories of real people who were affected by the conservative movement's deregulation fervor. When they can keep it all abstract and clean it sounds great. It's not so impressive when you see the human results of their "ideology."
With that in mind, consider Senator Orrin Hatch's (R-Wackaloon) claim that Utah doesn't need the stimulus money ("Utah is going to get by fine whether we get that money or not.") in light of what…
mikethemadbiologist | February 19, 2009Patients without healthcare make bad self-diagnoses. I'm shocked.
The NY Times has a heartbreaking story about people under 30 who can't afford healthcare. It's pretty horrific: juvenile diabetics who have to switch from insulin pumps to injections (which lowers blood sugar control), a woman who went to the emergency room for 46 hours and wound up owing the equivalent of a year of college tuition, and so on (that I can say "and so on", and you can probably come up with your own examples is indictment enough). But this gobsmacked me:
Ms. Polec's roommate, Fara D'Aguiar, 26, treated her…
scientificactivist | February 18, 2009An article in today's New York Times profiles the trials and tribulations of young twenty-somethings who lack health insurance. For some it's out of hubris, but for most it's because they fall through the cracks--paid enough that they don't qualify for public health care but still lacking the means to afford health insurance of their own. It's pretty sad, and it's a stupid result of America's wacky health care system (a system around which many high hopes have been pinned to President Obama to effect some real change).
As stupid as this situation is, though, it pales in comparison to the…
scientificactivist | February 16, 2009As part of the stimulus package passed by Congress last Friday (H.R. 1: American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009), the US will be ramping up efforts to encourage evidence-based medicine. This is a very good thing.
Specifically (from The New York Times):
The $787 billion economic stimulus bill approved by Congress will, for the first time, provide substantial amounts of money for the federal government to compare the effectiveness of different treatments for the same illness.
Under the legislation, researchers will receive $1.1 billion to compare drugs, medical devices, surgery and…
j7uy5 | February 10, 2009The new Congress and new Administration passed a law already. It
was barely notied by the media. It is a reauthorization and
expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program
(SCHIP). Given the expected resistance to major changes in
health care, it was astonishingly easy for Congress and the President
to get this done.
Details are in an open-access article in NEJM:
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMp0900461">Expanding
Coverage for Children -- The Democrats' Power and SCHIP Reauthorization
John K. Iglehart
NEJM February 4, 2009
(doi:10.1056/NEJMp0900461)…
tsmith | February 8, 2009Last fall, I wrote about a new research paper which tried to replicate some of Andrew Wakefield's original results, which not only claimed a correlation between MMR vaccination and autism, but also the presence of measles virus in intestinal tissue. Wakefield had suggested that an inappropriate response to the presence of measles virus in this tissue may trigger conditions such as bowel disease and autism. The more recent study was unable to replicate any of Wakefield's findings--not surprising, since so many papers in the last decade have found no connection between vaccination and autism…
mikethemadbiologist | February 6, 2009Via Greg Sargent, we learn that Blue Dog Democrat Senator Ben Nelson is still a repulsive person.
Total Reductions: $80 billion
Eliminations:
Head Start, Education for the Disadvantaged, School improvement, Child Nutrition, Firefighters, Transportation Security Administration, Coast Guard, Prisons, COPS Hiring, Violence Against Women, NASA, NSF, Western Area Power Administration, CDC, Food Stamps
*****************************
Reductions:
Public Transit $3.4 billion, School Construction $60 billion
Fucking unbelievable. Intelligent Designer knows that Democrats can be pretty screwed up, but,…
mikethemadbiologist | February 4, 2009In the midst of the Conservative War on Contraception, there's a broader assault by conservatives on public health initiatives. At Salon, Alex Koppelman does a good job rebutting the conservative opposition to vaccination, infection control, and figuring out if someone has AIDS (further fisking is available from IDSA). There's no reason to repeat this fine work, but it really does highlight just how unserious movement conservatives have become.
This mindless backlash reminds me of Michael Fumento, and his opposition to influenza prevention:
In my post, I challenged him to offer alternative…
mikethemadbiologist | January 25, 2009I doubt he'll become the new director--although I think he would be a very good choice--but, until the CDC gets a new director, Richard Besser is the Acting CDC Director:
Richard Besser, who headed the CDC's public health emergency preparedness and response functions, succeeds Julie Gerberding, who stepped down with the change in administration after six years of leading the federal agency.
It wasn't clear whether Dr. Besser would be Dr. Gerberding's permanent successor. An email to CDC employees Thursday said that Dr. Besser would serve as acting director until a permanent director is named…
mikethemadbiologist | January 24, 2009
I'm kidding, but ScienceBlogling Tara Smith has co-authored a PLoS One article about the emergence of the MRSA strain ST398 in Iowan pork farms. Pig farms are a tremendous reservoir of bacteria: as far as I can tell, there are about six pigs for every person in Iowa.
MRSA ST398 a methicillin resistant S. aureus bacterium that has spread epidemic through various European animal populations (particularly pigs). It recently jumped from the animal population to the human population in Europe and has begun to establish itself there in hospitals. The last thing we want is for another MRSA…
tsmith | January 23, 2009 A little over a year ago I put a post up documenting research out of Canada which found methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in Canadian pigs. This had also been seen in Europe (with a lot of research coming out of the Netherlands). What I didn't note at the time was that we were gearing up to start some sampling of our own on area swine farms. Some of you saw that we presented the results of that research last year at ICEID and ASM; now the paper is out describing our pilot project in PLoS ONE. (Note: the paper was available earlier, but now they seem to have removed it…
ddobbs | January 21, 2009
My brother, who started his medical career as a pulmonary tech at a naval hospital and is now the medical director for the National Disaster Medical System -- a system that draws heavily on medical personnel normally employed outside government -- sent me this account of his Inauguration Day, which he spent overseeing the NDMS care of the vast crowd on the Mall.
Allen's job that day, for which he spent months preparing, was to be ready for anything from stubbed toes and headaches to widespread medical disasters of the sort best not pondered (except by disaster relief people). The day…
purepedantry | January 21, 2009Really? This is just a little creepy. A non-for-profit will help you tell your one-night-stand that you may have exposed him or her with an STI via an e-card:
Steve, a health care worker in his 30s, had been told more than once that he had been exposed to a sexually transmitted infection. So when it happened again, he was not upset -- even though this time he learned about it through an anonymous online postcard, e-mailed by a man with whom he had had sex.
"What was important was that I was being notified that there was a possibility that I may have been exposed to syphilis," said Steve,…
purepedantry | January 14, 2009The NYTimes profiles Paul Offit, author of Autism's False Prophets. Offit has been taking the anti-vaccine lobby to task over pseudoscience, and he hasn't been winning many friends in the process:
Those backing Dr. Offit say he was forced into the role. Opponents of vaccines have held rallies, appeared on talk shows like "Oprah" and "Imus in the Morning," been the heroes of made-for-TV movies and found a celebrity spokeswoman in Jenny McCarthy, the actress and former Playboy model who has an autistic son. Meanwhile, the response from public health officials has been muted and couched in dull…
mikethemadbiologist | January 11, 2009This is change I can believe in. Gerberding has been awful. Not only has morale dropped on her watch (something that I observed anecdotally, and is backed up by these reports), but she also didn't stand up for the science when that science was politically incorrect.
More from CNN:
Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will leave her post by noon on January 20, the day President-elect Barack Obama is to be sworn in to office.
In an e-mail to the staff at the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the CDC, outgoing HHS Secretary…
amillikan | January 9, 2009With rumors swirling that President-elect Barack Obama has offered CNN Chief Health Correspondent Sanjay Gupta the nomination of Surgeon General—a position that involves serving as the operational head of the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps—ScienceBloggers are divided with respect to their support. While some bloggers have described the appointment as "cool" and "a good pick," others have doubts about his qualifications.