health
aardvarchaeology | March 14, 2008
Locksmith Patrick Stübing and Susan Karolewski are a German couple with four children. They are also full biological siblings. "Eeeeewww", I hear you say. And I agree. Eeeeewww. But why do we feel that way?
The incest taboo is as close to a cultural universal as you can get, and is most likely genetically determined. It is counteradaptive to want to bonk your siblings, as this may lead to the accumulation of harmful recessive alleles in the offspring. But how is this implemented from a practical evolutionary perspective? Humans have no physical way of identifying their biological siblings,…
omnibrain | March 13, 2008Everyone and their mother is getting into the brain training game - researchers, the health care industry, video game companies, you name it! But... Every single one of them is a huckster trying to rip the elderly off (whether they realize it or not). Nearly every single one of these brain training systems simply takes established psychology experiments that we normally pay people to do since they are so damn boring and repackages them in a slightly glizier way to make you feel better for spending $299.95.
It is very very important to keep your brain active but there is no evidence…
gregladen | March 12, 2008There is a campaign to bring attention, of the public and of congress, to a five year long stagnation of NIH funding, which is being called a broken pipeline. NIH funding had been increased significantly prior to that, to address major shortfalls in funding for mostly medical research in key important issues. However, over the last five years, the dollar amount of funding has remained flat, not even keeping up with inflation, where it really should have increased further, even more than inflation.
This is not just belly-aching by people who would like funding. Those involved are pointing…
aardvarchaeology | March 11, 2008
An blind activist buddy of mine is on the war path. This time it's about guide dogs on Swedish Rail:
"Three years ago I got a guide dog. It turned out to be one of the best things I've ever done. Since then, my life has changed fundamentally. I exercise to an extent that I never thought possible. My physical condition has improved enormously and I feel much better to my soul. I used to avoid going out. Navigating a noisy city full of lamp posts and speeding cars was so demanding that I would avoid it completely for long periods. But since I got my dog, things have changed. It's a pleasure to…
retrospectacle | March 7, 2008
According to this life expectancy calculator, I should plan on living to 102 years old---a result of quite a lot of factors, including the fact that my family is particularly long-lived and cancer-free. Not sure I buy into these types of calculator (but they are morbid fun), but the general topic of life expectancy has been hot in the news lately. Some sources are claiming that the upward-creeping life expectancy that developed nations have been enjoying for decades might come to a screeching halt, or even worse, begin to decline. The subject of much finger-pointing is, unsurprisingly,…
gregladen | March 6, 2008Late last month, I put up a quick post, New-generation antidepressants do not produce clinically significant improvements in depression, that addressed a PLoS published metastudy of interest.
I was careful to use the phrasing from the paper as the title of my post, and to provide only the author's summary, because I knew this was a tricky issue. I could have read the paper carefully and reported my opinion on it along side the information from the paper (a practice known as "blogging on peer reviewed research), but I did not have the time or interest to do so, yet I knew many of you would…
gregladen | March 6, 2008A public service announcement for those of you living in or passing through Nevada:
Vegas Clinic May Have Sickened Thousands from PhysOrg.com
(AP) -- Nearly 40,000 people learned this week that a trip to the doctor may have made them sick. In a type of scandal more often associated with Third World countries, a Las Vegas clinic was found to be reusing syringes and vials of medication for nearly four years. The shoddy practices may have led to an outbreak of the potentially fatal hepatitis C virus and exposed patients to HIV, too.
[...]
gregladen | March 5, 2008Given two pills, one that costs ten cents and the other that cost $2.50, with both being simple sugar pills with no possible medical benefit, the more expensive pill works better to ameliorate certain conditions. I'm sure that the pharmaceutical companies will like this!
Durham, NC -- A 10-cent pill doesn't kill pain as well as a $2.50 pill, even when they are identical placebos, according to a provocative study by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University.
"Physicians want to think it's the medicine and not their enthusiasm about a particular drug that makes a drug more…
gregladen | March 5, 2008In 1986, 22-year-old Boston Celtics forward Len Bias died of a cocaine overdose. This week, DrugMonkey argued that Bias' death--as opposed to educational programs like DARE--was the major reason why self-reported rates of cocaine use by 20-year-olds dropped from 20% in the mid-1980s to 7% in the early 1990s.
Go here to express your opinion.
gregladen | March 2, 2008Common Sense Tells us to try this drug:
Thank You British NHS. We needed th is.
gregladen | March 1, 2008Interesting editorial in PLoS Genetics:
Reports that the Bush administration has expressed an interest in closing the Guantanamo Bay detainee facility in Cuba [1], colloquially known in the US as "Gitmo," could stimulate a new chapter in US foreign policy. By converting Gitmo into a biomedical research institute dedicated to combating the diseases of poverty in the Western Hemisphere, we can tap into a little known, but highly effective tradition of vaccine diplomacy that we first began 50 years ago at the height of the Cold War [2],[3].
In the 1950s, polio epidemics were ravaging the major…
gregladen | March 1, 2008The flu is caused by the influenza virus, of which there are several types. H1N1 is known as the "Spanish Flu," H2N2 as the "Asian Flu" and so on. These funny letters and numbers refer to specific genotypes. The H1N1 is the version of the flu that caused the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and 1919, which was responsible for the death of between 50 and 100 million people.
Considering that the difference between a bird or pig flu that may be hanging around in the background and a human pandemic causing flu can be a few dozen changes in the genome, understanding the evolutionary patterns…
gregladen | February 29, 2008are here:
HIV infection at Wissen schafft Kommunikatioin
Other cellular stuff (an oldie but a goodie) at WeiterGen!
gregladen | February 29, 2008At this moment, there is a guy laid up in the hospital in Vegas with ricin poisoning. A stash of ricin has been found in his hotel room/apartment. His dog is dead (not sure why but probably due to lack of water and food) and a couple of other pets are either dead or not doing well (details are blurry).
Details, sketchy as they are, here.
So what is ricin?
Ricin is an extract from castor beans (Ricinus communis). The lethal dose is as little as 0.2 miligrams. That is an amount somewhat smaller than a house fly.
Some creative uses of ricin include the following, cribbed from…
gregladen | February 28, 2008Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) is caused by a coronavirus that is now believed to have originated in bats. In 2004, thousands of palm civets (a cat like carnivore) were killed off in China because it was believed that they were the main reservoir of this disease. Ooops.
It appears now that the civets had contracted the disease from humans, rather than the other way around.
Nearly a thousand people among the 8,000 or so infected died during that outbreak, and no human infections are known since early 2004.
A number of different researchers who have been looking at the source…
gregladen | February 28, 2008Or is it just that they are more often recognized. Or more sensationally reported. A recent study suggests that "emerging" diseases such as HIV, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), West Nile virus and Ebola are more common.
By analyzing 335 incidents of previous disease emergence beginning in 1940, the study has determined that zoonoses - diseases that originate in animals - are the current and most important threat in causing new diseases to emerge. And most of these, including SARS and the Ebola virus, originated in wildlife. Antibiotic drug resistance has been cited as another…
gregladen | February 27, 2008You have probably heard that the current flu vaccine matches the current flue strains in the US very poorly, perhaps at about a 40 percent rate. Flu and the vaccine mismatch is a post at Effect Measure that will update you on this important issue. This is especially important because you need to understand what vaccines do, how they work and how they don't work.
The simultaneous news of widespread flu and the mismatch of two components of this year's seasonal vaccine (see here and here) seem to have synergized. That's not so good in the view of many flu experts, who believe (correctly) that…
gregladen | February 27, 2008In this open access publication in PLoS it is
...suggest that, compared with placebo, the new-generation antidepressants do not produce clinically significant improvements in depression in patients who initially have moderate or even very severe depression, but show significant effects only in the most severely depressed patients. The findings also show that the effect for these patients seems to be due to decreased responsiveness to placebo, rather than increased responsiveness to medication. Given these results, the researchers conclude that there is little reason to prescribe new-…
gregladen | February 26, 2008So a few weeks ago, we were over at Amy and Danny's for dinner, and somehow Lipitor came up (no, it had nothing to do with the dinner Amy was cooking!). Anyway, Amy said "Why is Jarvick a good person to promote a drug. I mean, that heart didn't work, right?"
Hmm.... Good point, I thought.
And now, today's news makes it all the more interesting...
WASHINGTON -- Pfizer Inc said on Monday it was voluntarily withdrawing advertising for its Lipitor cholesterol drug featuring Dr. Robert Jarvik, inventor of the Jarvik artificial heart, because its ads led to "misimpressions."
The ads involving…