public health
tsmith | February 23, 2010Student guest post by Liz Stepniak
In the United States, the obesity epidemic is rapidly spreading. Since 1980 the prevalence of obesity has increased over 75%. Currently, over half the population is overweight, and nearly 1 in every 3 adults is clinically obese. Research has also been proliferating, exploring a plethora of possibilities to better understand and treat this growing epidemic. One of the recent trends in obesity research has been investigating the role of the microbiota in the gut and differences in the composition of these bacteria between obese and non-obese individuals.…
tsmith | February 23, 2010Student guest post by Dayna Groskreutz
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in adults in the United States. Acute coronary syndrome (ACS) is a term which includes both heart attacks and unstable angina. ACS occurs, in part, due to atherosclerosis, or plaque accumulation leading to narrowing of the artery. Some known risk factors for atherosclerosis and ACS include smoking, family history, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. Recently, the role of inflammation in the development of atherosclerosis and ACS has been an area of intense study. Proposed causes of inflammation include…
tsmith | February 23, 2010Student guest post by Ron Bedford.
The first week of February 2010 must have been some sort of Post Polio Syndrome (PPS) week. The New York Times ran a story about PPS on February 2nd.
On the following Saturday, during the broadcast of the 2009 AKC/Eukanuba National Championship dog show, a Labrador Retriever named Benton was honored with an AKC Humane Fund Award for Canine Excellence (ACE) in the service category for his work as an assistance dog for his owner, Margo Dietrich, a polio survivor who "lives with physical limitations due to experiencing adult-onset Post Polio Syndrome".
Since…
tsmith | February 22, 2010Student guest post by Anh To.
When I found out my only non-smoking cousin had nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), I was puzzled. With all the hype about cigarette smoking associated with various kinds of cancers in the media, I did not understand why none of my smoking cousins had NPC but the one who didn't smoke did. At first, I thought it must be due to the second hand smoke. Now, I understand that the picture is very complex.
Before I go into what I have learned over the past several months, I need to make a disclaimer. I am not an expert in NPC. I am an average college student. This…
tsmith | February 22, 2010Guest post by Zainab Khan
In most western countries, germs have become synonymous with the idea of something bad that needs to be killed as quickly as possible. However, people have long been questioning the validity of these ideas; a few decades ago it was hypothesized that not enough exposure to germ can and does cause insufficient development of an individuals immune system. New studies have recently shown that this idea of getting rid of all germs, and keeping children exposure to them at an absolute minimum, may possibly cause more harm then good; over cleanliness is suspected to be…
tsmith | February 22, 2010It's that time again. I teach a class in even years on infectious causes of chronic disease, looking at the role various infections play in cancer, autoimmune disease, mental illness, and other chronic conditions. When I last taught the course in 2008, the students were assigned two writing assignments--to be posted here on the blog. Since this turned out pretty well last time, I decided to repeat the assignment this year; so over the next week or so, I will be putting up guest posts authored by students on various topics under the broad umbrella of infection and chronic disease.…
scientificactivist | January 25, 2010Clearly, I'm not the only one who thinks that the most obvious solution for health care reform is for the House to pass the Senate bill: The New York Times just published an editorial arguing the same point:
The most promising path forward would be for House Democrats to pass the Senate bill as is and send it to the president for his signature. That would allow the administration and Congress to pivot immediately to job creation and other economic issues. The Senate bill is not perfect, but it would expand coverage to 94 percent of all citizens and legal residents by 2019, reduce the deficit…
scientificactivist | January 25, 2010It's been a rocky ride this year, getting heath care bills passed in the House and the Senate. It's been just over a month since the Senate passed its bill in a dramatic Christmas Eve vote (and much longer since the House passed its version), but the fate of health care reform still appears as uncertain as ever. In particular, a surprising political setback in Massachusetts has made the already difficult Senate an almost impossibly hostile environment for reform.
The most obvious solution is for the House to pass the Senate bill without hesitation; however, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has…
scientificactivist | January 12, 2010Have you gotten your H1N1 flu shot yet? If not, it's still not too late. Due in part to the successes of the public health campaign against H1N1 influenza, people have begun adopting a rather casual attitude toward it. This is problematic, because due to an extent to initial shortages of vaccine, a very large portion of the population remains unvaccinated and susceptible to another wave of flu outbreaks. In fact, I only managed to get my H1N1 flu vaccine about a week ago, when my place of employment began offering it to workers who weren't part of the original target group.
I imagine that…
mikethemadbiologist | January 1, 2010Who coulda thunk it?
There are two frustrating attitudes held by a fair number of antibiotic resistance/infectious disease specialists about MRSA (methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus). First, some argue that we really shouldn't be focusing on MRSA, since it's already evolved--the cat is out of the bag. Never mind that this particular cat kills more people annually in the U.S. than AIDS. While we obviously can't prevent the evolution of MRSA (that's already happened), we can contain the problem: we would rather have one percent of all staph infections be MRSA, rather than the…
j7uy5 | December 22, 2009One of the more enlightening and worrisome articles I read recently was
href="http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2008/11/24/081124ta_talk_surowiecki">The
Perils of Efficiency, by James Surowiecki. The article
was a discussion of the practical effects of the mathematical concept,
that you can only optimize one variable in an complex system. So
if you optimize for lowest cost per unit of production, you have to
sacrifice something else. One of the things you sacrifice, is
resilience.
Most managers of systems with a supply chain have adopted what is
called just-in-time supply. …
terrasig | December 17, 2009
If you think that the H1N1 pandemic is slowing down and have grown complacent with vaccination now that vaccines are more widely available, please learn something from last night's tragic loss of local college student from Rhode Island, Lillian Chason:
A University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill student, who friends said was battling complications from the H1N1 virus, died Wednesday evening, according to UNC Hospitals and a Facebook post made by her father.
Freshman Lillian Chason had been in critical condition at UNC Hospitals for weeks. Friends told WRAL News on Tuesday that she started…
milhayser | December 16, 2009
With medical marijuana now legal in thirteen states, and President Obama's Attorney General advising Feds not to waste resources on users in compliance with state law, the tide of tetrahydrocannabinol seems to be on the rise. On The Scientific Activist, Nick Anthis reports that the American Medical Association has recently altered its view of the drug, calling for a revised federal classification and more research into its potential medical benefits. PalMD for one will wait and see, writing that "the available clinical data do not give a doctor a clear way to evaluate the risk/benefit…
j7uy5 | December 14, 2009I couldn't resist that title, but I must admit it isn't mine; the
author's post is
href="http://pasadenasubrosa.typepad.com/pasadena_sub_rosa/2009/12/let-them-eat-antipsychotics.html">here.
This is about the NYT article about the finding that children on
Medicaid are more likely to be prescribed antipsychotic medication,
compared to those with private insurance. The obvious correlation
is that children with Medicaid are from poor families, whereas those
with private insurance are from families that have more
resources.
It is one of those studies that documents an evocative finding…
mikethemadbiologist | December 7, 2009
This is not a needle exchange program center
(from here)
I've written before about the needle exchange legislation which is very good...in an imaginary world lacking parks, schools, and other places where children congregate. From Maine, we find out what this legislation really means:
Such a position could conceivably pave the way for additional federal money for needle exchange -- with one catch. Bill McColl is the political director at AIDS Action in Washington D.C., who's been following the needle exchange debate in Congress. "They did accept an amendment that would ban the use of…
terrasig | December 4, 2009Earlier this week, I saw one of the best treatments of a misinterpreted story that has me thinking about how all news outlets should report in vitro laboratory studies.
Only thing is that it didn't come from a news outlet.
It came instead from a brainwashing site run by those medical socialist types - I am, of course, speaking of the UK National Health Service and their excellent patient education website, NHS Choices.
You may recall reading in the popular dead-tree or online press that investigators from New York Medical College in Valhalla published in British Journal of Urology…
mikethemadbiologist | December 3, 2009It's between fifteen to twenty one cents of every dollar spent by hospitals. A recent study examined the costs of antibiotic resistant infections in hospitals. The main finding (italics mine):
The total attributable hospital and societal cost ranges for ARI in the expanded sample were as follows: hospital, $3.4-$5.4 million; mortality, $7.0-$9.2 million; lost productivity, $162,624-$322,707; and total, $10.7-$15.0 million. The total medical cost, if distributed to all sample patients, added $2512-$3929 (16.8%-26.3%) to the mean unadjusted hospital cost for all sample patients.
(An aside:…
milhayser | December 2, 2009
In the nearly thirty years since AIDS was first diagnosed, the disease has killed tens of millions of people, and more than 33 million are currently infected with HIV worldwide. Although recent UN reports show the number of new infections is falling, AIDS remains a major global issue. So take some time today for a retroviral education on ERV. New vaccine research suggests that inoculating cells with a gene that produces a protein found in HIV's envelope can "prime" the immune system to start recognizing the invader. Refuting bigots, ERV also says that "HIV/AIDS research does not only…
mikethemadbiologist | November 24, 2009From the NY Times, the blame game begins:
At a hearing before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, representatives of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security argued that they were right not to put immune-boosting adjuvants in the vaccine even though that could have quadrupled the number of doses available now, and that they were also right to leave decisions about allocating vaccine up to local health departments instead of trying to micromanage them from Atlanta or…
terrasig | November 19, 2009No matter how early I wake up, it's always five hours later in the UK and I'm overwhelmed by the thought that I'm already behind (I won't even get into the feeling I have when I think of our Australian readers).
So when I start the day reading my Twitter stream, it's usually populated by midday news from England. I follow the NHS - National Health Service - "one of the largest publicly funded health services in the world," and their superb health information site, NHS Choices.
This morning I saw this tweet about the launch of their new sexual health site:
@NHSChoices Our new sexual health…