public health
j7uy5 | August 7, 2007The
US Army Crops of Engineers accidentally dumped hundreds of unexploded
pieces of ordnance on the beach at Surf City.
Now, they want the city to help pay for the cleanup.
"If
they're talking about getting any money out of Surf City to pay for
their mistakes, they can forget about it," Mayor Leonard T. Connors
told The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Apparently they conducted a 71 million dollar reconstruction of the
beaches, unknowingly using sand from a World War I dump site.
(
href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070806/ap_on_fe_st/odd_beach_ordnance_found;_ylt=ApKG5AWHHB5FyhKu.…
j7uy5 | August 5, 2007Unexploded
ordinance: the legacy of modern warfare.
href="http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/DD5ACEEF-42DC-4FA0-82CE-7C053457C9E1.htm">Reportedly,
Laos has the undesired distinction of harboring the most UXO's of any
country. Courtesy of Uncle Sam, of course.
It's hard to imagine they have more than Iraq, but maybe nobody has
gotten around to estimating the number in Iraq.
Anyway, in Laos, there is a UN-sponsored team clearing the ordinance.
Unfortunately, at the rate they are going, they estimate it
will take 400 years to finish the job.
Even
children are learning new…
j7uy5 | August 3, 2007I
happened to run across a couple of articles pertaining to cultural
influences on mental health. Neither presented modern
first-world culture in a positive light.
The two articles are:
href="http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/abstract/191/50/s71">Schizophrenia
outcome measures in the wider international community; and
rev="review"
href="http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/164/8/1173">A
Longitudinal Study of the Use of Mental Health Services by Persons With
Serious Mental Illness: Do Spanish-Speaking Latinos Differ From
English-Speaking Latinos and Caucasians?…
scientificactivist | August 2, 2007After the House passed its expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program on Wednesday, the Senate passed its version late Thursday. Although the House version passed along party lines, against strong Republican opposition, the Senate version enjoyed more bipartisan support, passing 68-31 (although all 31 "no" votes came from Republicans, with no Democrats voting against the measure).
scientificactivist | August 2, 2007Here's some good news from Congress, where the House of Representatives yesterday passed HR 3162, the Children's Health and Medicare Protection Act of 2007. This is the expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP or SCHIP) that I've been blogging about recently. For more information on CHIP check out these previous entries.
CHIP expires this year and Congress has now voted to renew and expand the program. The Senate is expected to vote on (and pass) its version today or tomorrow, although President Bush has absurdly and preemptively promised to veto the expansion. The…
mikethemadbiologist | August 2, 2007Well, Dobzhansky actually said, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution", but, as I've mentioned before, there's a lot to be learned from the sociopolitcal controversy surrounding evolutionary biology. Over at Pandagon, Amanda writes about Ross Douthat's ridiculous claim that those who favor legal and safe abortion are eugenicists (italics mine):
Anti-choicers who engage the "OHMIGOD EUGENICS" argument are advancing what might be the classic bad faith argument. They're not interested in stopping eugenics so much as creating a wedge issue that will cause liberals to…
mikethemadbiologist | August 2, 2007The July 28 edition of the Lancet has a superb editorial about the need for legal and safe abortion in the developing world, particularly in Latin America (I've snipped parts; italics mine):
...Irrespective of an individual's viewpoint, the debate over abortion in Latin America cannot be ignored. In Brazil, which has the world's largest Roman Catholic population, abortion is only permitted after rape or to save a mother's life. Yet every year 1·4 million women undergo the procedure, terminating one in three pregnancies. Almost 250 000 Brazilian women seek treatment in public hospitals for…
j7uy5 | July 31, 2007
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/images/Carmona-CTAGlobalHealthdraft.pdf">This
report (PDF 260KB file) is what set off the controversy over
the former Surgeon General of the United States. It is a
draft report, entitled The Surgeon General’s Call
to Action on Global Health 2006. It was written by
the former Surgeon General, Dr.
href="http://www.hhs.gov/about/bios/sg.html">Richard Carmona.
In this post, I will review the history of Dr. Carmona's service as
Surgeon General, outline the controversy, and end with a discussion of
of some recent criticism of the controversy…
mikethemadbiologist | July 31, 2007Massachusetts, which has one of the highest rates of childhood vaccination, is facing an increase in parents claiming religious exemptions from having to vaccinate their children, even though the number of kindergarteners has decreased. But these exemptions aren't actually religious at all:
Barry Taylor practices naturopathic medicine, and defends these parents' right to choose. "The truth is, it's not about their religion," Taylor said. "It's about their values. And it would be a bit of a white lie to say it's religious."
Proponents of parental choice want Massachusetts to add a…
purepedantry | July 30, 2007Aside from believing that cell phones give you cancer, many individuals report that feelings of illness around cell phones and other electromagnetic fields. This being in spite of the fact that human beings possess no sensory apparatus to detect electromagnetic waves -- unless of course you believe that an X-men-esque revolution is impending. Researchers in Britain have shown that these feelings of sickness are all in their heads:
Roughly 4% of Britons claim to be affected by radio waves from sources such as telephone transmitters and other electrical equipment.
Fox and her colleagues…
j7uy5 | July 26, 2007For
some reason, my Father used to say that when he made an
indisputable point of some significance. It is in the
href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=put+that+in+your+pipe+and+smoke+it"
rel="tag">Urban Dictionary in case you are curious
about the expression. It is also the title of
href="http://www.autoblog.com/2007/07/17/put-that-in-your-pipe-and-smoke-it-fords-made-of-hemp/">a
post on Autoblog about a 1941 Ford made of organic plastic,
which had been made from plant material. Apparently they now
are researching a similar idea using hemp.
href="http://blog.…
j7uy5 | July 25, 2007Infections
with
href="http://www.wpro.who.int/media_centre/fact_sheets/fs_20050802.htm"
rel="tag">Streptococcus suis
have been reported in a cluster in Viet Nam, plus one
apparently-isolated case in China. This is not the first
outbreak of the pig-borne illness. A
href="http://www.who.int/csr/don/2005_08_03/en/index.html">larger
outbreak occurred in 2005 in Sichuan, China. In
2005, there were 205 reported cases, with 36 fatalities.
Earlier, a 1998 outbreak involved 14 deaths out of 25
reported human cases. Cases have been recorded dating back to
the 1960's. No cases have been…
j7uy5 | July 23, 2007I was
reading about the
href="http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/24941.php">epidemic
of vitamin D deficiency, got curious
about albinism,
and ended up finding this picture of a white lion. It is
distributed under a
creative commons license, attribution required. The
photographer is
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Stano Novak.
The original, in much higher resolution (and not compressed
for the web) is in
href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:White_Lion.jpg"
rel="tag">Wikimedia.
This is not to be confused with the band named
href="http://www.…
j7uy5 | July 23, 2007
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/357/3/e3">
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">This image
shows what can happen to your retina from a sudden increase in venous
pressure. What could cause such a sudden increase?
Jumping straight down, followed by sudden upward
acceleration. The patient initially had 20/400 vision in the
affected eye. After surgery it stabilized at 20/25.
The image, by the way, can be viewed full-size at the
open-access NEJM article:
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/357/3/e3">Macular
Hemorrhage from Bungee Jumping.
See for…
mikethemadbiologist | July 23, 2007While lots of people swear by the power of tea, I had no idea it was seriously viewed as a something that led to urbanization. From The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson (p. 94-95):
The dramatic increase of people to populate the new urban spaces of the Industrial Age may have had one other cause: tea. The population growth during the first half of the eighteenth century neatly coincided with the mass adoption of tea as the de facto national beverage. (Imports grew from six tons at the beginning of the century to eleven thousand at the end.) A luxury good at the start of the century, tea had…
scientificactivist | July 22, 2007Today's New York Times includes a profile of drug safety advocate Dr. Steven E. Nissen by medical business writer Stephanie Saul:
His questioning of the safety of the Avandia diabetes medication in late May, for example, prompted a federal safety alert and led to a sales decline of about 30 percent for the drug, which brought in $3.2 billion for GlaxoSmithKline last year. Now, with a federal panel soon to decide whether it can remain on the market, Avandia's future is uncertain.
The drug is the latest example of why Dr. Nissen, 58, whose day job is chairman of cardiovascular medicine at the…
tsmith | July 21, 2007Scienceblogs gets another infusion of public health goodness with its latest addition, The Angry Toxicologist. It looks like a great start, with posts on vaccines and autism, restless leg syndrome and balancing your chi (quote: "Oooo, scientificy!") Welcome aboard!
j7uy5 | July 19, 2007
Back in February, I
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/02/now_what_i_thought_things_were.php">wrote
about the irony of the Bush Administration touting their
efforts to improve food and drug safety, while at the same time
planning to close 7 of the 13 FDA laboratories.
In the interim, we have had all kinds of food and drug mishaps.
The FDA did not close any labs, but they also did not say
they had canceled their plans.
The closure plans came to light in December 2006 when PEER (
href="http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=824" rel="tag">Public
Employees…
scientificactivist | July 18, 2007As I've mentioned previously, the Senate Finance Committee is considering a $35 billion expansion to the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP or CHIP), which is currently scheduled to expire in September. Incredibly enough, President Bush has already declared that he will veto such a bill. This is the same president who, just a year ago from tomorrow, used his first veto after five and a half years of office on, of all things, the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act. It appears, then, that the President will be the most significant obstacle to overcome in passing an expansion of…
tsmith | July 18, 2007The strange and tragic case of the Tripoli Six, a group of 5 Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor working in Tripoli, Libya, is finally drawing to a close. The six health workers had been found guilty of infecting up to 400 children in the hospital where they worked with HIV, and had previously been sentenced to death--even though the science had shown that the epidemic began prior to the arrival of the workers. This saga has been dragging on for the better part of a decade (Declan Butler at Nature has a very nice story here discussing the various twists and turns along the way), but…