health
esiegel | April 21, 2013"Fluoridation is the single most important commitment a community can make to the oral health of its children and to future generations." -C. Everett Koop
Most weekends, I take on a lighter topic, as a way of taking a break from the deep physics, astronomy, and science we share during the week. But every once in a while, there's an important story that needs to be told. This weekend, I invite you to enjoy Tony Rice's rendition of a fabulous Gordon Lightfoot story song,
Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
One of the most contentious issues going on in my city -- Portland, OR -- right now, is our…
esiegel | March 20, 2013"Scientific discovery and scientific knowledge have been achieved only by those who have gone in pursuit of it without any practical purpose whatsoever in view." -Max Planck
Tomorrow morning, at 8 AM my time, the press conference that cosmologists have spent the past decade waiting for will finally happen, and the Planck satellite -- the most powerful satellite ever to measure the leftover radiation from the Big Bang -- will finally unveil its results about the origin and composition of the Universe.
Image credit: ESA / LFI and HFI Consortia.
They've figured out how to subtract the…
denialism | February 28, 2013Diet seems to be all over the New York Times this week, with an oversell of the benefits of the Mediterranean diet, and now Mark Bittman, everyone's favorite food scold, declaring sugar is the culprit for rising diabetes. His article is based on this interesting new article in PLoS One and begins with this wildly-inaccurate summary:
Sugar is indeed toxic. It may not be the only problem with the Standard American Diet, but it’s fast becoming clear that it’s the major one.
A study published in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal PLoS One links increased consumption of sugar with increased rates…
gregladen | February 28, 2013We were talking about River Blindness.
Trigger Warning: The video below is not for general consumption. Having said that you may want to watch it. The first part depicts the reactions of a handful of celebrities watching a series of shots depicting seven different related tropical diseases, and I must say, having seen all of these diseases in person (and having treated some of them, and had mild versions of a couple myself) that these particular videos show the worst side of it. But still, a very large number of people (according to the source of the video, about a billion) have some form…
gregladen | February 25, 2013River blindness, also called Onchocerciasis, is the result of the infection of several different eye tissues by the nematode Onchocerca volvulus. The bacterium Wolbachia pipientis lives symbiotically in the gut of the nematode, and escapes the small roundworm to cause an inflammatory response in human tissues, which results in damage to the tissue. These infections can occur in a number of different human tissues causing a variety of effects, but when the eye tissues are involved, the result can be river blindness. It is endemic and widespread in several areas of Africa, as well as more…
dr. dolittle | January 29, 2013
You may recall a prior blog entry about a new experimental treatment for bone cancer in dogs. Researchers are increasingly studying canine cancer and discovering that it is caused by some of the same genetic mutations that cause cancer in humans.
Shown in the image above is Jasper, a 7-year old dog that has lymphoma, cancer of the immune system (white blood cells) that is similar to non-Hodgkin lymphoma that afflicts people. Researchers are hoping that studying the DNA of dogs with cancer may lead to treatments for not only dogs, but also people. The first national canine tumor bank,…
dr. dolittle | January 23, 2013
Figure 1 from Pérez-Rodríguez L et al., 2013.
A new study shows that the feather pattern on the chests of some birds (i.e. the bib) may be an outward sign of how healthy the bird is. The pattern the study refers to is called a fractal dimension, which is used to describe the complexity of the pattern (see image above). Researchers, Pérez-Rodríguez et al., discovered that red-legged partridges (Alectoris rufa) who were well-fed had more complex patterns than those who were food-restricted. Moreover, food-restricted animals weighed 13% less and had weaker immune systems.
Source:
Pérez-…
aardvarchaeology | January 3, 2013The Swedish Skeptics have announced their annual awards for 2012. Both the Enlightener award and the Deceiver award are given to the editorial staff of programmes on Swedish national radio.
Medierna is a weekly media criticism show. They roast journalists in an excellently skeptical fashion and have during the year touched upon mistreatment of subjects such as climatology, alternative medicine and vaccination.
Nyhetsguiden is a daily news analysis show. In April and May they ran several anecdote-based antivaccine stories about the ongoing effort to vaccinate prepubescent girls against the…
dr. dolittle | September 28, 2012You might be familiar with tissue regeneration in amphibians and reptiles where limbs can be fully regenerated following an injury. Until now, tissue regeneration following a wound was thought to be limited in mammals (ex: deer shed and regrow their antlers annually; some mice can regrow the tips of their fingers).
Researchers discovered that African spiny mice are able to regrow skin, complete with hair follicles, after an injury. We are not talking about simple wound healing, but actual skin regeneration without scarring. Researchers suspect this unique ability may have evolved to help them…
gregladen | August 22, 2012The State Fair is about to start up here in Minnesota, and the top epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota has very clearly stated that the swine should be excluded this year in order to avoid swine to human transmission of a flu virus that has been showing up in increasing numbers lately. I’ve blogged about this before, and here is an update with new numbers. Also, I’ll address a few questions I’ve heard asked.
How many people have been affected with the new Influenza A (H3N2) Variant Viruses (“H3N2v”)?
The CDC reports that 12 people were known to have been affected in 2011, and 225…
dr. dolittle | August 7, 2012
Image from: Alzheimer's Association
Researchers Sanchez et al. from the Gladstone Institute, University of California San Franciso and Washington University School of Medicine discovered that an FDA-approved anti-convulsant medication used to treat epilepsy (levetiracetam) can also reverse memory loss in addition to reducing other Alzheimer's related symptoms in a mouse model of the disease.
Alzheimer's is currently the most common form of dementia (memory loss) representing 50-80% of cases. It is a disease that worsens over time. Although there are available medications to help slow the…
gregladen | July 19, 2012The Washington Post has an article out (an "exclusive") about three drugs used to treat anemia that their investigative reporting seems to show are less effective and more dangerous than people thought. Here's the dramatic intro from the WP's article:
On the day Jim Lenox got his last injection, the frail 54-year-old cancer patient was waiting to be discharged from the Baltimore Washington Medical Center.... a nurse said he needed another dose of anemia drugs.
His wife, Sherry, thought that seemed odd, because his blood readings had been close to normal, but Lenox trusted the doctors. After…
dr. dolittle | June 29, 2012Scientists have been able to keep rabbits alive for up to 15 minutes after their windpipes had been blocked by injecting microparticles (yellow in the image below) containing oxygen into their bloodstream. These microparticles are able to deliver the life-saving oxygen directly to red blood cells allowing the animals to survive with normal blood pressure and heart rates in the absence of the ability to inhale. Moreover, there was no evidence of heart, lung or liver damage from oxygen deprivation.
The problem with injecting oxygen bubbles has been coalescence of the smaller bubbles into…
aardvarchaeology | June 18, 2012Recently while reading Mats Keyet's 2000 biography of Swedish beat novelist Sture Dahlström, I came across the sad story of the Huskvarna drug. It killed Dahlström's father and many others.
In 1961 Dr. Hjorton's powder was made a prescription drug. This measure was of no great consequence anywhere except in Huskvarna, a small single-company industrial town on Lake Vättern. To Americans, it's probably mostly known for the old Husqvarna motor bike brand. In the mid-1950s the company doctor realised that Dr. Hjorton's powder was not only dependency-forming but in fact caused lethal kidney damage…
pronald | June 17, 2012F. Cunningham gave a great talk today at the ASM 2012 meeting on the discovery of provitamin A synthesis, Vitamin A deficiency and the creation of Golden Rice. Read my twitter stream here.
gregladen | May 26, 2012Timothy Caulfield's book, The Cure For Everything: Untangling Twisted Messages about Health, Fitness, and Happiness, attempts to be a corrective in the area of personal heath (as in diet and exercise) management.
From the publisher: "In The Cure for Everything, health-policy expert and fitness enthusiast Timothy Caulfield debunks the mythologies of the one-step health crazes, reveals the truths behind misleading data, and discredits the charlatans in a quest to sort out real, reliable health advice. He takes us along as he navigates the maze of facts, findings, and fears associated with…
gregladen | April 23, 2012It is not clear that Pink Slime has ever made anyone sick, but Tuna Scrapings certainly have. The difference? Chemical treatment of the former but not the latter, apparently.
The way that food is produced and processed in our industrialized society virtually grantees that much of it would be poisonous to some degree because of spoiling before it gets to our kitchens. However, the food industry has all sorts of ways of avoiding that, ranging from freezing to heating to radiation to various chemical and physical treatments. The ammonia treatment associated with the Pink Slime Maneno of…
gregladen | April 20, 2012There is a study that shows that people who sit more per day die sooner, despite other factors such as overall health. It is reported in The Atlantic and written up here.
From the study:
Prolonged sitting is considered detrimental to health, but evidence regarding the independent relationship of total sitting time with all-cause mortality is limited. This study aimed to determine the independent relationship of sitting time with all-cause mortality.
... We linked prospective questionnaire data from 222 497 individuals 45 years or older ... to mortality data ...
During 621 695 person-years…
aardvarchaeology | March 28, 2012I got a letter with criticism from a man who believes in electromagnetic hypersensitivity and thinks I should too. Most of the letter is the Galileo argument, where the letter writer refers to an anthropologist whose ideas were, in his view, once highly respected until they were taken apart by critical thinkers. I should be as critical of the current medical consensus regarding radiation phobia as these thinkers were of the anthropologist, says the letter writer, because the current medical consensus has been paid for by the telecomms industry. In other words: it's a conspiracy.
But who, then…
gregladen | March 19, 2012Of the first dozen times or so that I ever saw Joel, my then future brother in law, I think we were in a restaurant a good four or five times. This was probably just a chance event, but there were a number of dinners and one lunch with the family that Joel and Alyssa (Amanda's sister) attended. And I noticed something. Joel and Alyssa seemed to be very keen on the idea of consulting over what to eat. Many couples do this, including Amanda and me. For example, if there are two items on the menu that I know I'd be happy with, and Amanda is pretty sure about one but not the other yet wants…