public health
j7uy5 | August 28, 2007
Google News no longer indexes ScienceBlogs, but they continue to link
to drivel like this, from the Wall Street Journal:
href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118800560693308626.html?mod=googlenews_wsj">Lone
Star Spending Spree
By MARY KATHERINE STOUT
August 25, 2007; Page A6
Austin, Texas
Give George W. Bush credit. He's drawn a lot of criticism for not doing
more to control federal spending over the past six years. But he is now
deep into a spending fight against a sacred liberal program. And he
isn't backing away.
In recent weeks, Mr. Bush has confronted Congress over the…
mikethemadbiologist | August 25, 2007ScienceBlogling Tara of Aetiology has co-authored a PLoS Biology article about HIV denialism and the internets. Go read it. The HIV denialists are clogging up the internet tubes...
j7uy5 | August 24, 2007Health care is shaping up to be one of the big issues in the
upcoming elections. No big surprise there, it was a highly
-ranked issue in the last election, too. It's just that last
time, voters failed to see how health care is more likely than
terrorism to affect their health.
Perhaps this time around, people will have a more rational perspective.
In an effort to keep our perceptions in such a rational perspective,
the American Medical Association is starting a massive advertising
campaign. The gist of the message is that they want health
insurance for all.
At first glance, that…
tsmith | August 24, 2007...and that's not just a comment on the weather here. The past few days have been packed. In addition to the work stuff, I've been gearing up for classes next week and getting my kids off to their new school year (and my son in kindergarten). It's always nice when hard work pays off, but it would be even nicer if it didn't all pay off in the same week. But of course, when it rains, it pours. In addition to the publicity for the HIV article, a Reuters story on my Streptococcus suis talk in Wisconsin came out earlier this week, and was mentioned in the ProMed email alerts yesterday:…
mikethemadbiologist | August 24, 2007This post by ScienceBlogling revere about the horrendous human cost of influenza is getting some serious exposure. This gives me an excuse to mention something I haven't in a long time:
Stop worrying about avian influenza. Get serious about 'ordinary' influenza.
Why? Last year, 'ordinary' influenza killed roughly 36,000 U.S. residents. That's about equal to breast cancer which kills 40,000 annually. Before the polio vaccine, the polio virus killed 3,000 people annually, and, even if you adjust for population increases, that number would be roughly 9,000 in today's terms. HIV/AIDS kills…
mikethemadbiologist | August 23, 2007Forget smoking cessation. This is a patch everyone can use. From the August 10 edition of ScripNews (subscription only):
Iomai's traveller's diarrhoea vaccine patch shows promise
Iomai's investigational vaccine patch for traveller's diarrhoea has shown positive Phase II results in volunteers travelling to Mexico and Guatemala. If approved, it would become the first vaccine approved in the US for traveller's diarrhoea, says the company.
The patch is designed to treat traveller's diarrhoea associated with enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC), which is responsible for most cases of the…
mikethemadbiologist | August 23, 2007Maha does a great job of getting at the underlying issues in the Bush adminstration's opposition to expanding the S-CHIP children's health insurance program:
The most legitimate question that we have to ask, seems to me, is why is there government? In particular, what is representative, republican government good for? Do people really elect representatives to Congress so that their needs can be ignored in favor of special interests? Is the Constitution really all about limiting the power of people to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the…
tsmith | August 22, 2007Seems like just yesterday that I was watching (from afar) Ewen head off to grad school in journalism. Well, now he's making a splash in the latest issue of Nature, with a story on the potential for a dengue vaccine, and why there may be more of a market for it currently--largely because it's becoming a disease of the wealthy. Check out his Nature article, and read more over at Complex Medium.
j7uy5 | August 22, 2007In 2005, there was a plague. It started
inadvertently, as
most do, but spread rapidly, resulting in many deaths.
Officials scrambled to find a solution. Eventually
it was contained.
The plague was caused by a miscoded spell (
href="http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/gadgets/index.blog?entry_id=1230071">Corrupted
Blood), in the massively-multiplayer
online role-playing game (
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMORPG" rel="tag">MMORPG),
href="http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/index.xml">World of
Warcraft. The people who died were not
real people. Nonetheless, it may be that the…
tsmith | August 21, 2007Since there are already several threads on HIV running, and I'm loathe to have another, I'll post this up for consumption but leave the comments for one of the other threads. While I was in New York over the weekend, PLoS Medicine published an article authored by myself and Steven Novella (also of the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe): HIV Denial in the Internet Era.
mikethemadbiologist | August 21, 2007The Massachusetts Public Health Association released a statement in July about the new budget for the Department of Public Health (pdf). You'll notice that most budget items increase:
The legislature and Governor Patrick have approved $548.7 million for the Department of Public Health (DPH) in the Fiscal Year 2008 budget. This is $74.4 million (16 percent) higher than the basic FY07 DPH budget passed by the legislature a year ago. It is $31.6 million (6 percent) higher than the total currently available for FY07, including supplemental funding that was approved for use in FY07.
Here's a list…
scientificactivist | August 21, 2007Although the expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP or CHIP) passed in both the House and the Senate earlier this month, the Bush Administration has once again decided that it prefers to preempt the Democratic process. President Bush had already promised to veto the legislation before it had even come up for a vote, but now it seems that the Administration can't even wait for the two chambers of Congress to reconcile their versions of the bill and has instead decided to carry out its agenda uninhibited while Congress is on recess.
Last Friday, the Director of the…
mikethemadbiologist | August 20, 2007...to me. Or at least, to the residents of my congressional district. MoveOn.org has a district-by-district list of what your congressional district's contribution to the Iraqi War and Occupation could have bought instead. For me, a resident of Massachusetts' Eight District:
*The cost to Massachusetts taxpayers alone is $12.89 billion.
*Taxpayers in the 8th congressional district are paying $998 million for the Iraq war.
What Citizens of Massachusetts's 8th District Could Have Gotten Instead:
· Health care coverage for 290,837 people--or 363,877 kids, or
· Head Start for 118,751…
j7uy5 | August 17, 2007How refreshing: a Presidential appointee speaks out
unequivocally
against Administration policy. This is from a Medscape
News article (free registration), which is from
Reuters Heath Information. The report quotes a professor of
Immunology who is on the
href="http://deainfo.nci.nih.gov/ADVISORY/pcp/pcpchr.htm">President's
Cancer Panel at the
rel="tag">National Cancer Institute.
href="http://www.mdanderson.org/departments/immunology/print.cfm?displayPrint=1&id=6BA754F9-6AD2-4220-93954E0F8682EE69&method=displayfull&pn=082E88E7-B295-43D1-94D38FA20872EC4E&PrintPage=…
mikethemadbiologist | August 16, 2007The CDC's journal Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report (MMWR)--there's something to leave on your coffee table--says that roughly 43% of 9th - 12th graders have had a drink of alcohol in the last 30 days, according to a 2005 study. And Nebraskans are weird:
Apparently, Nebraskan kids like their beer. Interestingly, race/ethnicity didn't influence the type of booze or the frequency of boozing in any consistent fashion (groups might differ within a particular state, but there were no obvious national trends). The whole study is here.
tsmith | August 16, 2007A reader pointed this out to me awhile back, and it's just too absurd not to mention. You may or may not be familiar with Gary Null. He's a self-proclaimed "natural living" guru, and the writer/director of the recent HIV denial documentary, AIDS Inc.:
AIDS, Inc. is a film about the multi-billion dollar AIDS industry, and how it profits from continuing fears and misconceptions about the disease....Could it be that after so many years of research, and so much money being spent, that the entire orthodox medical establishment has been wrong about AIDS, or even worse, has sought to profit on a…
tsmith | August 13, 2007There have been some interesting updates in the field of HIV politics and denial recently. First, after having several months of moving forward with a real plan to combat AIDS in South Africa, the deputy minister of health, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, has been fired. For those who follow this area, Madlala-Routledge stepped into the limelight when she took over for her boss, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, while she had surgery. Tshabalala-Msimang, you may recall, is the one who sided with President Thabo Mbeki regarding causes of AIDS (and cures for it), advocating treatments such as a recipe of…
j7uy5 | August 9, 2007When
unemployment is high, there is more penetrating trauma (bullets,
knives). When employment is high, there is more blunt trauma
(automobile crashes).
href="http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Health/2007/08/09/unemployment_predicts_hospital_trauma/5157/">Unemployment
predicts hospital trauma
Published: Aug. 9, 2007 at 9:48 PM
NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 9 (UPI) -- A University of Tennessee study found a
link between unemployment rates and a type of trauma seen in hospital
emergency rooms in pre-Katrina New Orleans.
Atul Madan of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center and
colleagues…
mikethemadbiologist | August 8, 2007
MRSA is coming! Run for your lives!
....this little piggy had MRSA up its nose. A recent study from the Netherlands found that 39% of slaughtered pigs carried MRSA. This is particularly surprising since MRSA rates in hospitals in the Netherlands are remarkably low. Even in the U.S., the commensal MRSA frequency in humans is around 1.5%. What's up with the piggies? Here's the abstract; some additional comments afterwards:
Recently methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) was isolated from pigs and pig farmers in The Netherlands. In order to assess the dissemination of MRSA…
j7uy5 | August 7, 2007The
problem, specifically, is that patients with insurance
have higher copays and deductibles. According to an article
on Medscape (free registration required):
href="http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/560983">U.S.
Hospitals Struggle Over Who Can Afford to Pay
By Kim Dixon
CHICAGO (Reuters Life!) Aug 06 - For-profit hospitals, which are
blaming unpaid medical bills for tamping down profits, are struggling
with a simple question: Which patients have the ability to pay their
hospital bills? ...
HMA and LifePoint Hospitals are among the major chains that posted
falling profits in…