"If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them."
Issac Asimov
Sunday, April 30th 2006
Avian Flu
A movie-of-the-week (MOW) as a public service announcement is ridiculous.
“We feel we’re providing a level of awareness and we’ve gone to great effort to make sure the film is accurate,” co-producer Judith Verno said. “We’ve included a lot of information we believe people need to know.”
“We had wonderful consultants who were actually ahead of the [bird-flu] curve,” Kerew said. “The way the disease popped up in China, then moved to Turkey and Africa, were things we already knew about.”
This is irresponsible and inflamitory and the previews for the movie only heighten my feelings. Its written by Ron McGee (”Atomic Twister” is another of his ‘real world’ disaster pieces) so you can start questioning Fatal Contact’s accuracy without even watching it.
Part of the irresponsibility lays with the worst case scenario approach and passing it off as education. But such a scenario even from the mouth’s of the most extreme alarmist is a far fetched one.
The threat of H5N1 is overstated. It is a media darling and they can’t report anything but the worst.
“It is impossible to predict whether we’re going to have an H5N1 pandemic and, if so, how severe it’s going to be,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told HealthDay.
Fauci had earlier told the Associated Press that he thought it “very unlikely that there is going to be the type of situation [here that] we see everywhere, from Nigeria to Indonesia.”
That sentiment was echoed by Dr. Julie Gerberding, head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Speaking to attendees at a recent meeting in Tacoma, Wash., she said “there is no evidence it will be the next pandemic.”
If you must watch it airs on ABC May 9th.
Chief Complaint
Location - Where is it? Does it radiate?
Quality - What does it feel like? Dull? Sharp? Aching?
Quantity - On a scale of 1 to 10 how bad is it? Does it disrupt your daily activities?
Onset - When did it start? What were you doing when it first began?
Duration - How long have you had these symptoms? If it comes and goes how long does it last?
Frequency - Is it all the time or does it come and come?
Progression - Has it gotten better or worse?
Setting - Is it associated with any place or action?
Relieving or Exacerbating - Does anything make it better or worse?
Manifestations - Are there other symptoms?
L2QODFPSREM
Woman Says She Has Feeling in New Face
The French woman who received the world’s first partial face transplant has complete feeling in the new tissue five months after the operation, she told a Sunday newspaper.
Dr. Oliver says bogus.
I’m a pretty poor poker player. If I had more free time maybe I’d be better. :)
I’m playing at Full Tilt in a no limit tournemant. Its pretty early, at the second level. I’ve got about the tourney average at the time.
I’m the small blind with A5s. It comes around with a bunch of calls and I make it 3.5x the BB. BB folds. Button + 3 calls and two middle position players call. Well spit on me, that ain’t so great four handed.
The flop comes
Ah 4h 10d
Why the hell am I sitting there thinking I need to show strength or that I can take this pot? I bet the pot, more than a third of my stack. Two of three call and I know I’m hosed with a 5 kicker. The turn comes
Qd
I check, the next player makes this odd bet just about a tenth of the pot. It gets called and comes to me.
I figure the guy to my left has a solid Ace, and the elephant in the middle position I’m not so sure on. Heart draw? I can win this thing with a five I figure which is what? 6 or 7% to come? Maybe just two outs if I think the five of hearts will make one of the others a flush. The pot is about 12 to 1 to this small bet from my left. Right more than what I need to make the call but I gamble, albeit not much.
The river comes Queen.
I check the guy next to me makes an identical bet to last time. The middle position raises allin (which ain’t much at this point) and I finally bail out.
Turns out the middle position had a Q4 and called a pot sized bet (with fewer chips than myself at the time, perhaps half his stack) with bottom pair and then stuck around to sucker out a full house. The guy to my left had AK.
Why the hell did I make that huge bet as the first to act with a 5 kicker four handed? I’m in fine positions with the blinds, I made a steal attempt pre-flop that was valid, considering big slick merely called the big blind, but then put a bluff at it that wrecked my stack. I should a made a smaller post flop bet just to figure out where I was with that garbage hole card sitting next to my Ace.
As I’ve mentioned Reggie Bush got sucker punched in a Sam Bowie over Michael Jordan kind’ve moment for the Houston Texans. Matt Leinart (a potential Top 3 pick) fell all the way to #10 and late in the third round Dominique Byrd and Darnell Bing (once scouted as a potential first rounder) still have not gone.
The other Trojans who haven’t gone are a little more understandable.
The draft picks so far are:
Reggie Bush - 1st Round, 2nd Pick - New Orleans Saints
Matt Leinart - 1st Round, 10th Pick - Arizona Cardinals
Winston Justice - 2nd Round, 7th Pick - Philadelphia Eagles
Deuce Lutui - 2nd Round, 9th Pick - Arizona Cardinals
Lendale White - 2nd Round, 13th Pick - Tennessee Titans
Dominique Byrd - Should’ve been second round
Darnell Bing - Sould’ve been second round
Pasquarelli on why the Houston Texans have made a catastrophic mistake. They need a play maker and they choose DE Mario Williams. Laughable.
[W]hither the Texans at this point? Well, nothing against Williams, but it’s going to take blind loyalty for a fan base already smarting from the franchise’s snub of popular hometown star Vince Young to understand Friday evening’s decision.
Personally I think Russia is relapsing a bit, into its paranoid Soviet self. Western culture and thought process are just too different; for all of history Russia has been its own and not part of Europe or the west. They simply cannot understand a life and culture so different from what they have experienced. My favorite example is when Putin asked Bush why he fired Dan Rather.
It’s not clear how well Putin understands the controversy that led to the dismissal of four CBS journalists over the discredited report on Bush’s National Guard service. Yet it’s all too clear how Putin sees the relationship between Bush and the American media — just like his own. Bush’s aides have long feared that former KGB officers in Putin’s inner circle are painting a twisted picture of U.S. policy.
The opinion of the west is no different in the general population, many of whom mistake how the west and America function for their own methods of doing thing.
Now we have very confident word that any bird flu pandemic will be squashed by a Russian made vaccine.
“Only when a pandemic virus strain develops will a vaccine be created, and it will not take long - only about a month,” Mikhail Zurabov said after a meeting of health ministers of the Group of Eight (G8) industrial nations in Moscow.
He said Russian scientists were working on two potential vaccines.
Pretty sketchy rhetoric, but I guess we’ll see.
What more can said? The Houston Texans are fools for passing on both Reggie Bush and Vince Young for DE Mario Williams. This will go down as one of the biggest blunders in NFL draft history.
The Houston Texans have signed North Carolina State defensive end Mario Williams, making him the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft Saturday.
Texans general manager Charley Casserly had cautioned earlier in the week that anyone concluding the team had decided on Southern California tailback and Heisman Trophy winner Reggie Bush and was only using Williams as leverage was mistaken.
The choice of Williams by the Texans could dramatically alter the landscape of the early segment of the first round. The New Orleans Saints, with the second choice, have indicated they would snap up Bush if he fell to their slot. But the Saints had hinted, in general, that they might entertain trade offers for their pick.
The availability of Bush at the No. 2 spot would almost certainly elicit trade offers.
I don’t know what they expect to collect. Still this has been a pretty gruesom story over the past several months. But as the AP story says,
Lawsuits have been filed for two men, one in Nebraska and one in Ohio. Each contends he caught a hepatitis virus from tissue implanted in back and spine operations — an assertion that lawyers acknowledge will be difficult to prove.
Its hard to prove what caused these diseases.
Mexico has legalized a broad range of street drugs. But it might not be as dramatic as the headline makes it seem.
I believe in the legalization of most drugs for personal use. I’m just wondering how the legalization of just about every drug (just not marijuana) will affect health in the Mexico - Texas border region, where my school has a huge presence.
Mexico’s Congress approved a bill Friday decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana, ecstasy, cocaine and heroin for personal use a measure sure to raise questions in Washington about Mexico’s commitment to the war on drugs.
If signed into law, the bill could have an impact on Mexico’s relationship with the United States and on the vast numbers of vacationing students who visit Mexico, often to take advantage of its rarely enforced drinking age of 18.
The bill says criminal charges will no longer be brought for possession of up to 25 milligrams of heroin, five grams of marijuana about one-fifth of an ounce, or about four joints and half a gram of cocaine about half the standard street-size quantity, which is enough for several lines of the drug.
“No charges will be brought against … addicts or consumers who are found in possession of any narcotic for personal use,” the Senate bill reads. It also lays out allowable quantities for a large array of other drugs, including LSD, MDA, ecstasy about two pills’ worth and amphetamines.
Sale of all drugs would remain illegal under the proposed law, unlike the Netherlands, where the sale of marijuana for medical use is legal and it can be bought with a prescription in pharmacies.
While Dutch authorities look the other way regarding the open sale of cannabis in designated coffee shops something Mexican police seem unlikely to do the Dutch have zero tolerance for heroin and cocaine. In both countries, commercial growing of marijuana is outlawed.
Rape shield laws may prevent a jury for the Duke lacrosse rape case from hearing the victim’s previous claim of rape. But from the same story we have the most eyebrow raising comment,
A phone number for the accuser has been disconnected, and her father said Thursday night he remembered little about the incident except going with police to a home where he said his daughter was being held “against her will.”
Asked Thursday if she was sexually assaulted, her father said, “I can’t remember.” In an interview with the News & Observer of Raleigh, posted Thursday night on the newspaper’s Web site, he said the men “didn’t do anything to her.”
What is up with this family and accuser? Her father doesn’t remember his daughter’s first rape? Are you kidding me? Is this just like for giggles? Are we witnessing a trend here?
I used the Commonwealth Fund, a non-profit organization dedicated to healthcare for all (read: government funded universal coverage) as an example of taking agenda driven information and studies with a grain of salt. I understand the Commonwealth Fund is a charitable organization especially in regards to giving to medical centers and schools around New York but they’re certainly on a mission for universal healthcare.
Now you can watch the current president of the Commonwealth Fund discussing the Massachusetts plan for providing healthcare for all.
I’ve been arguing a lot of late about complex case exemptions to the 7th amendment. I will be honest, while I support caps on punitive awards in medical malpractice cases they make me uneasy. Let the injured collect what they deserve. I just don’t think the current system does a very good job of actually identifying those who actually deserve per physician negligence. While information on actual jury verdicts is scarce, there is plenty of evidence to imply that for any number of reasons the current system simply doesn’t compensate the right people.
Looks at healthcare claims in New York and then in Utah/Colorado both turned up statistics that showed 90+ percent of patients who suffer negligence never get compensated, either because they never seek to or because they fail in their claims. Meanwhile in the Utah/Colorado study 77% of those who collected on claims did so absent of negligence. It doesn’t distinguish if the insurance companies settled in these cases (highly likely) or the amount was won by verdict at trial. I contend it is outrageous, no matter if the insurance company paid them off or not.
Part, albeit not of the all problem, is that juries are incapable of deciphering complex medical or pharmaceutical suits for the technical nature of them. The unreliability of the system to seek out true negligence forces insurance companies to settle non-negligent cases at a higher rate than they otherwise would. I think the single greatest thing that can be done to solve this problem isn’t caps on awards but healthcare courts.
On the issue of jury compentency I appreciate John Calfee’s New York Sun piece. It comments on the recent Vioxx jury award for the 77-year-old diabetic.
Essentially, the jury had to decide three things. One was whether Vioxx was a substantially contributing factor to the heart attack suffered by an elderly ex-smoker with diabetes and coronary artery disease. Unfortunately, science can’t give us a good answer. Mr. McDarby was clearly at great risk for a heart attack. But there is no way to know which of a multitude of precipitating factors tipped the balance on that terrible day. We don’t even have reliable data indicating an extra probability of a heart attack in the relevant circumstances.
The jury simply had no way to determine whether the plaintiff would have had a heart attack if he had used a different pain reliever. Relying on an unpredictable mix of intuition and emotion, the jury simply guessed.
The second issue was failure-to-warn. The plaintiff argued that in addition to complying with all FDA regulations about warnings, Merck should have specifically warned the doctor not to prescribe Vioxx to this patient. What warning, we should ask, and to what effect? Here, the jury had even less foundation than when deciding causation. The most important data about Vioxx and heart attacks had long since been published and widely discussed in medical circles. Moreover, Vioxx was a lifesaver for patients with a propensity toward fatal ulcers, which every year kill thousands of patients taking older drugs that Vioxx replaced. Whether more warnings would have pushed the patient toward more safety or just rearranged Mr. McDarby’s numerous various risk factors was something the jury could not possibly discern. No scientifically based warning could have said something like “there is a so-and-so percent extra chance of a heart attack.” A warning would presumably have said something like “don’t prescribe this to patients with a high risk of heart attack,” but what good would that have done in the absence of information about whether the obvious alternative treatments were better?
Again, the jury had to guess. And again, there is no reason to think its guess would have been better than the FDA’s own expert assessment.
The third question was whether to award punitive damages, something never before done to a pharmaceutical manufacturer liability case in New Jersey. Under New Jersey law, the jury had to find that Merck had withheld information from the FDA in a “wanton and willful” manner. Again, a problem for the jury was the FDA itself. As a former FDA staffer testified, the FDA was satisfied that Merck had turned over all the information it needed. How did the jury reach a conclusion so different from the FDA’s own? Here lies one of the most unsettling parts of this trial. Merck, like all responsible manufacturers, massaged the Vioxx data as it arrived, trying to get a fix on the true heart-attack risk and other matters in a diverse mix of patients. The FDA has to know that firms do that kind of analysis all the time. The jury said Merck should have shared its own preliminary assessment of the data with the FDA even though the FDA famously makes up its own mind about such things and the underlying data had in fact already been given to the FDA. Had Merck not undertaken its analysis, there would have been nothing to keep from the FDA.
Indeed, I agree that the decision on the punitive award was most troubling. The data had been turned over for the FDA to do their own analysis. Such was the final word. As well, the data was from studies unrelated to the heart risks of Vioxx. And yet, the fact that the analysis, which Merck was under no obligation to do, was slow in being turned over to the FDA (because it was preliminary) they were found against.
Ridiculous, you can’t win. Either you refuse to perform your own analysis (which certainly wasn’t required of Merck as the FDA had all the data) and the jury hears how you should have. Or you do, and the jury hears how it is evidence you knew your drug was dangerous and maybe even covered it up. How is the FDA not the final authority on this?
Healthcare courts would put decisions in the hands or jurists with medical training. Not necessarily biased physicians but not the mechanic down the street either.
I would not trust myself to come to a fair conclusion on the issue of a manufacturer’s fault during a plane crash. I don’t trust an engineer to come to a fair conclusion on the issue of my medical competence.
In some African countries there is a growing spread of circumcision.
Armed with new studies suggesting that male circumcision can reduce the chance of H.I.V. infection in men, and perhaps in women, health workers in two southern African nations are pressing to make circumcisions broadly available to meet what they call a burgeoning demand.
The most striking studies suggest that men can lower their own risk of infection by roughly two-thirds, and that infected men can reduce the odds of transmitting the virus to their partners by about 30 percent, simply by undergoing circumcision. Research suggests that the cells on the underside of the foreskin are prime targets for the virus and that tears and abrasions in the foreskin can invite the infection.
The angry owner of the house USC star tailback Reggie Bush’s family was living in, says he knew about his relationship with his parents and that the family skipped out on rent.
The landlord, Michael Michaels, said that Bush’s mother and stepfather agreed to pay $4,500 in monthly rent when they moved into the Spring Valley house he bought for $757,000 in March 2005, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported Friday.
They didn’t pay for the first few months but promised to pay when the Heisman Trophy-winner started earning millions of dollars after turning pro, said Michaels, who described himself as a real estate investor.
Michaels’ attorney, Brian Watkins, claimed that Bush was made aware of the situation and also promised to repay the debt when he turned professional, according to a report in Friday’s Los Angeles Times.
A source close to Bush told ESPN’s Joe Schad that while the family had at first agreed to pay rent on the San Diego home, they quickly realized there was no way they could afford to. After falling behind on payments, the family will claim, however, that they were repeatedly told not to worry, that they would not be evicted.
“Originally there was a rental agreement, but they never paid a dime,” Watkins told the Times. “It was always, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll pay you — you can take it out of our profits.”‘
Bush, however, did not sign with Michaels’ firm, New Era Sports & Entertainment LLC, which Watkins said the running back’s stepfather helped found. Relations with the family deteriorated and Watkins sent the player’s parents an eviction notice on April 3, a copy of which he showed the Union-Tribune.
Bush’s parents, LaMar and Denise Griffin, moved out of the house last week. Bush has said his parents left because they found another place to live.
Watkins said he plans to file a $3.2 million fraud lawsuit against Bush’s parents and possibly Bush. The sum includes $300,000 in money that Michaels claims he and another investor, a documented gang member named Lloyd Lake, put into the business, plus punitive damages.
Bush turns around and says Michaels and his marketing firm threatened him when he refused to be represented by them for his NFL debut.
The NFL Players Association and NFL Security have concluded that sports agent David Caravantes and fledgling marketing company New Era Sports used an attorney to try and force USC running back Reggie Bush to pay them $3.2 million after Bush decided not to sign with the group, sources told ESPN’s Joe Schad on Thursday.
According to the sources, Caravantes threatened to reveal embarrassing personal information about the Bush family if he did not receive the money. Sources also say Caravantes tried to evict the family from a San Diego house they rented from his business associate Michael Michaels.
Meanwhile, Irish Trojan sums up the Mark Sanchez rape allegation.
He apparently enters the only bar within walking distance of USC (which is notorious for letting in underage drinkers) around 11:20. He leaves, alone, around 1:00 am and is next seen when he, clearly drunk, offers to help two fellow students help push their car which has run out of gas. This is around 1:30 am.
Earlier reports stated that the alleged victim says Sanchez [assaulted her] at or around 12:30 a.m. But the Daily News says he met her at Cardinal Gardens around 1:30 a.m. or shortly thereafter. So, there is an inconsistency in the timeline there. What conclusions we should draw from that is anybody’s guess at this point.
He must have met her around or after 1:30 am seeing that the 9-0 and then two students can attest to his actions and whereabouts before then.
In anycase there’s some reports that the rape may lead to Mark Sanchez losing his eligibility under NCAA rules. Such is a minor side effect obviously in the big scheme of things.
What a mess for everyone involved.
