“There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it may be good for him.”
Robert A. Heinlein
Wednesday, November 30th 2005
Uncategorized
A review of the 1918 influenza virus compared to H5N1.
A team at the CDC recreated the 1918 virus and tested it in mice for pathogenicity. Compared with contemporary human flu viruses, the 1918 virus produced nearly 40,000 times more viral particles in lung tissue. It caused severe bronchiolitis and alveolitis, pulmonary edema, and alveolar hemorrhage  just as it had in human lungs in 1918
The 1918 virus contains several amino acid changes that also are present in the current highly pathogenic H5N1 avian virus that has killed humans in the past 8 years.
I’d like to see the models of what an easily transmittable H5N1 would do in the industrialized world. I’m certainly completely off the track here, but how bad would the 1918 epidemic be with today’s public health knowledge and treatment options?
Of course there’s a great deal more of the world to be concerned about other than America and Western Europe.
A think tank in South Africa is proposing an AIDS tax to help combat the 11% infection rate in the country. A survey proposes that upwards of half of South Africa’s affluent would be willing to pay a tax to go towards helping stem the epidemic.
Tuesday, November 29th 2005
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I have this gut feeling. It’s deep. It is not that USC will lose on Saturday to cross town rival UCLA. It is more like it might happen, but not quite. Inexplicable as it may be, the feeling really is that if we’re going to lose its going to be to UCLA (no offense to Texas).
I’ve had it for weeks; since that night USC beat Notre Dame. My vision didn’t include a scare with Fresno St. but here we are having not pulled a Penn St. or LSU.
But to hear others speculate on it, against a team that needed a 21 point rally in the last 8 minutes to beat un-bowl bound Stanford. Who lost to Arizona. Arizona. Arrrrrrrizonnnnnna. Who can’t even spell defense. Well, those type of claims are only legit when they come from members of the USC family.
I’m just rambling. However, my plea to sports writers, if there’s no storyline don’t fabricate one.
*EDIT*
USC 66, UCLA 19 (2 touchdowns in garbage time)
Prediction: USC 45, Texas 28
*EDIT EDIT*
ESPN’s SportsCenter just had NCAA 06 simulate the Rose Bowl with decidely dissimiliar results to my simulation but very close to my prediction.
USC 45, Texas 27
…marveling at the human body.
The kidneys, like just about everything else in the body, really are incredible. It is incomprehensible how something as really complex and yet eloquent as this could evolve. That’s not to say it’s fun to flip endlessly through histology slides of them…
Monday, November 28th 2005
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It is always fun when, in the same day, you study the abdominal venous system, learn about the consequences of portal hypertension, and then stumble across a recent article like this. Or maybe I’m just a dork.
Beta blockers help prevent hemorrhage from existing esophageal varices but don’t apparently provide a means to limit esophageal varices, for those at risk, in the first place.
I’m still not quite sure why bleeding from these things is so difficult to stop.
On Merck’s reorganization:
[M]any observers have questioned the industry’s over-reliance on a small number of blockbuster cures to keep the money rolling in. In common with most other drug giants, Merck has seen its earnings fall over the past couple of years as the patents expired on its leading drug and the flow of new medicines from its research-and-development pipeline dried up, highlighting the drawbacks of concentrating too much effort on a limited range of cures.
and
Making cost savings now in anticipation of fewer blockbusters and falling profits in the future is sensible. Making plans for fighting or settling legal cases that could break Merck is a much tougher call. By taking a knife to the company, Mr Clark [Merck CEO] has made his mark. But he may yet be remembered as the man who brought an American giant to its knees.
Cleaning out cadaveric bowel isn’t high on the list of medical school rigths of passage and now I know why.
Huge greedy profit margins are forcing Merck to fire 11% of its workforce.
Not that Merck didn’t screw up with Vioxx, but it SHOULD be difficult (more difficult) in a court of law to prove causality between the drug and ill consequences. I’m being pessimistic, but the payouts Merck makes are going to come in numbers that defy the statistics on the probability of adverse effects from taking Vioxx.
Sunday, November 27th 2005
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Upsets
Nevada (AP: NR Coach: NR Computer: NR) over Fresno St. (AP: 16 Coach: 16 Computer: NR)
Current Standings
AP: 192 + 14 = 206
Coach: 197 + 14 = 211
Computer: 190 + 0 = 190
Only one upset, of course it practically crushes any chance of the human polls beating the computers for the season. Is it possible for the AP poll to catch the computers? Well it depends on how the polls following Saturday’s games play out.
To even have a shot, here’s the games where the difference between the computer rankings is greater than for the AP polls…
Goal: +16
South Florida over West Virginia +2
Georgia over LSU +6
Florida St. over Virginia Tech +1
Colorado over Texas +1
Total: +10
And that wouldn’t be enough as the polls sit from last week.
So, what have we learned here? That the computers, even without using margin of victory which they claim would make them even MORE accurate, is a better judge of a team’s strength and predictor of games than the human polls.
Think back to the report that revised the deaths attributable to obesity downward.
With apparently faulty information the government took action, lowered the BMI at which people are ‘fat,’ and
Seven years ago, 35 million Americans became overweight literally overnight.
America suddenly became fatter when the federal government changed the definition of overweight, based on a calculation called body mass index.
The question, addressed in the Chicago Sun Times article quoted above, becomes should so much stress be placed on lowering people’s weight as a preventitive health measure?
[N]utritionist Paul Ernsberger of Case Western Reserve University thinks the overweight threshold is too low.
He notes that a recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that people who had with a BMI between 25 and 30 did not experience any increased risk in mortality. If anything, they had a slightly lower chance of dying.
Ernsberger thinks the overweight cutoff should be raised to 30.
The current cutoff of 25 “sets up people for failure. The goal may be admirable, but is not realistic,” he said.
Ernsberger and other critics say researchers have a vested interest in expanding the number of people defined as overweight by setting a low BMI cutoff. The worse the problem appears, the more funding they will receive from the weight-loss industry and government.
*EDIT*
Right on cue, and thanks to Kevin, MD, The UK’s NHS is going to refuse some more elective surgeries, such as knee and hip replacements, to obese people. A Scotsman article sheds light on what it believes is the last PC discrimination, against those with ’self inflicted’ health problems.
This post was more specific at one time, criticizing a civil suit against a healthcare provider who gave discounts to the insured. However, it is a fine lead into the culture of victimhood and entitlement that surrounds worsening disrespect and annoyance of patients and pundits for the healthcare system.
Advances in technique, knowledge, and technology means I wouldn’t trust a better outcome, if I had a medical condition, at ANY point in the past compared to today. That is across the board, even the indigent.
So what are these complaints or these or these? We can do EVEN better? Certainly if not a word was written in criticism healthcare tomorrow would be better than it is today. Make no mistake, I’m not taking offense at criticism and debate. These are fine tools. However, much of the growing aggitation amongst bloggers, pundits, and columnists over costs and services in healthcare seem to be rooted in a sense of entitlement. An entitlement to what? Perfection? A “reasonable” cost for healthcare? The advances of tomorrow, today? Many of these scathing op eds are too venomous to be taken as legitimate efforts to prompt action or shed light on the situation. They’re the whines of dissappointed expectations, as if once you get a taste of how fast healthcare has improved over the past century suddenly you want more…You Give A Mouse A Cookie And He’ll Want A Glass of Milk.
Help make healthcare even better, because it can be, but every once in a while, please, for the love of God, sit back and marvel how really incredible it is that such and such a drug or such and such a surgery. Marvel that, despite the inequality you denounce, since Shaman’s provided healthcare as a community service, there has not been more parity in healthcare access between rich and poor.
Saturday, November 26th 2005
Uncategorized
From an interesting article about the median wage as a metric of growth and productivity:
So why have median wages been stagnating even though productivity began increasing in the 1990s? Two reasons: increasing labour supply, and increasing costs for benefits. While median wages have stagnated, total compensation hasn’t. In essence, workers have been consuming all of their income increases as health care.
Note my complete lack of training on this, and many other, subjects. However, the article seems to make some assumptions, and maybe these are classic macroeconomic things, that I have trouble with. There’s an assumption that increased production necessarily lead to increased median wages for growth.
This may be symantical but shouldn’t the view be more of from the other direction? Income inequality but the belief in the possibility of wage increases are necessary for increases in productivity. I guess my concern is why this post even seems to entertain the idea that decreasing income disparities has inherent benefits.
Making the country as a whole poorer in order to reduce income inequality doesn’t sound to me like a good idea. I realize that many liberal commentators claim that they can do this without sacrificing growth. But I don’t see how.
This post seems to imply IF you could reduce the inequality without making the country poorer it would be worth it. That doesn’t seem clear to me. I’m not exactly sure of the correlation between income inequality and productivity, and I’m sure there’s disagreement over this amongst economists, but there seems to be a point in which income disparity is so great it actually decreases productivity.
Maybe all this anger against healthcare costs is one representation of a decreasing belief in the American Dream; in one’s ability, through increased productivity to better one’s income. Why would this be? I’m just throwing stuff out there but people may respond better to increases in actual wage, which has failed to keep up with productivity increases apparently, rather than total compensation, including increases in healthcare spending on employees.
If this is the case then is there an argument that reducing healthcare costs –> leads to decreased spending on non-income compensation –> leads to an increase in median wages –> leads to increased productivity and better economic growth?
Even if that is the case I don’t think government has a place trying to enforce it. This may be the eventual direction the market leads healthcare, the fear is it will be such a slow reaction that the economy and people’s health will suffer through the transition, but it is still not the place of government to engage in over regulation…such efforts have ways of backfiring.
But more deeply, I don’t see either of these metrics [GDP & Median Wage] as a very good guide to policy, because I don’t believe that there is very much the government can do to influence them, for good or ill.
A study of the economic depression of file sharing music by a Harvard PhD student finds that illegal sharing harms sales of music of the most popular musicians but increases exposure and sales for less successful artists.
File sharing is reducing the probability that any act is able to sell millions of records, and if the success of the mega-star artists is what drives the investment in new acts, it might reduce the incentive to invest in new talent. This is, at its heart, an empirical question which is left to future work.
H/T to Slashdot
UCSF and UT scientists have published a report in Nature on how they’ve engineered a colony of e. coli bacteria to act as film, so that images appear on it. That is just weird.
Too much politics and college football and not enough medicine.
In any case, Power Line has led me to an interesting take on Sharon’s decision to leave the Likud party. Basically the Telegraph opinion piece claims Sharon’s efforts mimics every independence effort in the Western world. Israel is still struggling for her independence, in the same vein, as say the United States did.
As I’ve praised Sharon’s decisions in the past, all with the seeming effort to give peace a chance, I praise this one, to turn his back on the establishment, as well.
