Tag: health

Reading Around on February 17th

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Some additional reading February 17th from 01:12 to 15:32:

  • Galoscaves – The technology of building salt-iodine caves, patented in 108 countries, is based on the Black Sea salt, crystallized in natural conditions.

    The sea microclimate created inside the caves becomes an oasis of peace and relaxation for citizens of many countries.

    Since 2000, the Everet Company has been building Galos caves in Poland.

    This summer, the first salt-iodine cave in the U.S. was built according to very strict technological rules.

    Considering the low level of iodine found in the air in the middle-eastern part of the U.S., the cave was erected in the biggest city Chicago, IL. Thanks to the efforts of specialists from the Ukraine and Poland, two caves were built, in which healing attributes are being confirmed by testing.

  • Apple – Support – Apple Expert – Do you have questions or need technical support? Simply describe the issue and an Apple Expert will call you now. Or if you prefer to choose an exact time for the support phone call, schedule an appointment at your convenience. You’ll start at the front of the line—no waiting in the queue, no talking to a machine.

Reading Around on February 16th

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Some additional reading February 16th from 14:41 to 16:17:

  • U.S. Food Policy: Evidence on declining fruit and vegetable nutrient composition – found that fertilized plants contained larger absolute amounts of minerals than the unfertilized plants, but these amounts were sufficiently diluted by the increased dry matter that all mineral concentrations declined, except for phosphorus, which is the common fertilizer.

    Next, Davis looked at historical food composition data derived from three quantitative reports. While these studies are limited by their ability to be compared due to variation in methods, they found:

    apparent median declines of 5% to 40% or more in some minerals in groups of vegetables and perhaps fruits; one study also evaluated vitamins and protein with similar results.

  • I’m Done With Facebook : Edward Champion’s Reluctant Habits – But the Facebook language clearly dictates that you are giving Facebook an irrevocable and perpetual right to distribute and make derivative copies of content you upload to Facebook for any purpose. ANY. Whether it be a book, a film, or whatever other options Facebook may have cooked up. … (If you’ve already granted Facebook the irrevocable right to give up your content and likeness, then how can you still have “all rights and permissions?” Perhaps an IP attorney can sort out this thorny language.) Since Facebook has demonstrated no reservations in sharing private data with developers, the company’s history suggests that this same recurring invasion of privacy will carry forth under the new Terms of Service. The only difference is that Facebook now intends to profit from the content you upload, and they can now use it in any way they want, because you’ve capitulated all your rights to it.

Nigerians can sue US drugs firm

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Is it really better to litigate in the US?

Nigerian families can sue the Pfizer drugs giant in the US over its alleged role in the deaths of children, a US appeals court has ruled. The decision overturns ruling by a lower court that the case must be heard in Nigeria.

Pfizer is accused of killing 11 children and injuring 181 others when an antibiotic was tested on them during a meningitis epidemic in 1996.

Pfizer denies the claims, saying they were victims of the outbreak.
The epidemic killed 12,000 children in Nigerian in six months.

The families say that Pfizer tested out an oral antibiotic called Trovan on some 200 ill children in hospital in Kano, without first getting the consent of their parents.

They say the drug killed 11 children and caused blindness, deformities and brain damage in others

[From BBC NEWS | Americas | Nigerians can sue US drugs firm]

Pfizer’s lawyers will be working overtime this weekend.1

Footnotes:
  1. I removed my lame Nigerian scam jokes, they really aren’t relevant, nor were they that funny. If they made me laugh, maybe I’d keep them. Do you have any good Nigerian scam email jokes? [↩]

A Little Dirt Is Good for You

Seth Anderson0 comment

Why Dirt is Good

Awesome news (even though I don’t have any plans for children. Sorry mom)! Vacuuming is for suckers!

Dr. Ruebush, the “Why Dirt Is Good” author, does not suggest a return to filth, either. But she correctly points out that bacteria are everywhere: on us, in us and all around us. Most of these micro-organisms cause no problem, and many, like the ones that normally live in the digestive tract and produce life-sustaining nutrients, are essential to good health.

“The typical human probably harbors some 90 trillion microbes,” she wrote. “The very fact that you have so many microbes of so many different kinds is what keeps you healthy most of the time.”

Dr. Ruebush deplores the current fetish for the hundreds of antibacterial products that convey a false sense of security and may actually foster the development of antibiotic-resistant, disease-causing bacteria. Plain soap and water are all that are needed to become clean, she noted.

“I certainly recommend washing your hands after using the bathroom, before eating, after changing a diaper, before and after handling food,” and whenever they’re visibly soiled, she wrote. When no running water is available and cleaning hands is essential, she suggests an alcohol-based hand sanitizer.

Dr. Weinstock goes even further. “Children should be allowed to go barefoot in the dirt, play in the dirt, and not have to wash their hands when they come in to eat,” he said. He and Dr. Elliott pointed out that children who grow up on farms and are frequently exposed to worms and other organisms from farm animals are much less likely to develop allergies and autoimmune diseases.

Also helpful, he said, is to “let kids have two dogs and a cat,” which will expose them to intestinal worms that can promote a healthy immune system.

[Click to read more of Jane Brody’s article Personal Health – Babies Know – A Little Dirt Is Good for You – NYTimes.com]

In a recent twitter discussion1 about household chores2, I confessed that vacuuming is one of my least favorites3. Perhaps there’s a reason I’ve been generally healthy my entire life.

Footnotes:
  1. a few weeks ago, or more. Too lazy to find it [↩]
  2. I think washing dishes is my favorite task, therapeutic to immerse one’s hands in warm, soapy water [↩]
  3. probably due to the noise factor, got to protect my delicate ears so that I can appreciate blasting music! [↩]

Honey Laundering

Seth Anderson0 comment

The last eight years1 have not been good for regulatory consumer protection. The FDA is in need of some serious mission change – Obama’s new team has their work cut out for them. Case in point: honey laundering, as Andrew Schneider of the Seattle PI reports. The US imports a lot of honey from China, and it is often contaminated with chloramphenicol or some other antibiotic that is illegal in any food product. The FDA doesn’t seem too concerned, nor does Congress.

Two-thirds of the honey Americans consume is imported and almost half of that, regardless of what’s on the label, comes from China, the Seattle P-I reported last month.

The newspaper’s five-month investigation into honey laundering — the intentional mislabeling of the country of origin — found that tons of Chinese honey coming into the U.S. is tainted with banned antibiotics.

But when the contamination is discovered by the industry through internal testing, insiders say, federal health or customs officials are almost never notified, and the honey ends up being dumped back on the market.

[From Honey Laundering: Tainted product still slips easily into U.S.]

Honey Bucket

Even the tiny percentage of honey that is inspected is frequently tainted, but it doesn’t get destroyed on the spot.

“We don’t want to risk this tainted honey ever getting packed and distributed for human consumption,” said Haff [newly elected president of American Honey Producers], who believes the industry could solve the problem if companies simply alert the Food and Drug Administration each time they discover a tainted shipment.

Instead, some major packers simply return bad honey to the importer, naively trusting them to destroy the shipment and not seek another buyer.

Said Haff: “We run the risk of the importer trying to resell this same adulterated honey for a cheaper price somewhere else.”

That happens all too often. Court documents the P-I obtained after the arrests last year of two Chicago-based executives with Alfred L. Wolff, a German food distributor, reveal how rampant the sale and resale of bad honey is.

Testimony from federal investigators and informants offer a glimpse into a typical deal: Wolff sold Chinese honey to a U.S. honey producer. The packer tested the shipment and found traces of antibiotics. Wolff took the honey back and resold it to another packer who didn’t test for contaminants.

If convicted, the Wolff executives face up to five years in prison for conspiring to falsify country of origin on the Chinese shipments.

In its series, the P-I reported that it had received shipping papers showing that Chinese honey, falsely labeled as a product of India, was sold to several U.S. honey packers, including one of the nation’s largest — Sue Bee Honey Association.

About 2 years ago, we started using agave-based honey instead, lower glycemic index, dissolves easier, tastes as good as regular honey. There could be problems with it too, but since it is a more specialized food, perhaps not.

Anyway, the US food supply has been seriously corrupted by producers like Sue Bee Honey and their enablers at the FDA and other agencies. Disgusting, really.

Read more of the Seattle PIs exposé, including the revelation that the FDA turns a blind eye to the practice of unloading foreign honey of indeterminate origin and dubious quality across the border in Canada. The honey merchants wink at the FDA, and ship the honey through the lightly-regulated NAFTA loop-hole, claiming the honey is now magically “Canadian” because it sat in a Canadian warehouse for a couple of hours.

Footnotes:
  1. well, really last 16 years, plus the four years of Bush the Smarter and eight years of Reagan before [↩]

Hospital Scrubs a Deadly Mess

Seth Anderson1 Comment

I see people walking around in public in scrubs all the time – next time, I’m going to bring this up:

scrubs

You see them everywhere — nurses, doctors and medical technicians in scrubs or lab coats. They shop in them, take buses and trains in them, go to restaurants in them, and wear them home. What you can’t see on these garments are the bacteria that could kill you.

Dirty scrubs spread bacteria to patients in the hospital and allow hospital superbugs to escape into public places such as restaurants. Some hospitals now prohibit wearing scrubs outside the building, partly in response to the rapid increase in an infection called “C. diff.” A national hospital survey released last November warns that Clostridium difficile (C. diff) infections are sickening nearly half a million people a year in the U.S., more than six times previous estimates.

The problem is that some medical personnel wear the same unlaundered uniforms to work day after day. They start their shift already carrying germs such as C.diff, drug-resistant enterococcus or staphylococcus. Doctors’ lab coats are probably the dirtiest. At the University of Maryland, 65% of medical personnel confess they change their lab coat less than once a week, though they know it’s contaminated. Fifteen percent admit they change it less than once a month. Superbugs such as staph can live on these polyester coats for up to 56 days.

[Click to continue reading Opinion: Hospital Scrubs’ Deadly Mess – WSJ.com]

Steve Jobs is Fine

Seth Anderson0 comment

So much speculation about the CEO of any corporation, even one as iconic as Apple, Inc. is unhealthy. Glad the rampant and excessive speculation about Steve Jobs’ illness will be over for a while now.

Pip and his MBA

Apple Inc. founder Steve Jobs, moving to quell speculation about his health, said he is undergoing treatment for a “hormone imbalance,” but intends to continue as the company’s top executive.

Mr. Jobs’s mysterious weight loss caused consternation on Wall Street throughout 2008, heightened by his unexpected decision last month to pull out of the high-profile Macworld trade show.

With the show under way this week, he said Monday that his hormone imbalance has been “robbing” him of the proteins needed for good health.

“Sophisticated blood tests have confirmed this diagnosis,” Mr. Jobs wrote in a letter released to the public. “The remedy for this nutritional problem is relatively simple and straightforward, and I’ve already begun treatment.

“But, just like I didn’t lose this much weight and body mass in a week or a month,” he said, “my doctors expect it will take me until late this Spring to regain it.”

[From Apple’s Jobs Says He Has Hormone Imbalance – WSJ.com]
[non-WSJ subscribers use this link to read story]

Mr. Jobs says he would not keep an illness from the board of Apple, or from the public, if it was an illness that precluded him from performing his magic duties.

“I hope the Apple community will support me in my recovery and know that I will always put what is best for Apple first,” he said.

Apple reiterated a commitment to the public that “if there ever comes a day when Steve wants to retire or for other reasons cannot continue to fulfill his duties as Apple’s CEO, you will know it.” The company also vowed “unwavering support” for Mr. Jobs during his recuperation.

Walt Mossberg’s1 All Things Digital blog has the complete statement:

Letter From Apple CEO Steve Jobs

Dear Apple Community,

For the first time in a decade, I’m getting to spend the holiday season with my family, rather than intensely preparing for a Macworld keynote.

Unfortunately, my decision to have Phil deliver the Macworld keynote set off another flurry of rumors about my health, with some even publishing stories of me on my deathbed.

I’ve decided to share something very personal with the Apple community so that we can all relax and enjoy the show tomorrow.

As many of you know, I have been losing weight throughout 2008. The reason has been a mystery to me and my doctors. A few weeks ago, I decided that getting to the root cause of this and reversing it needed to become my #1 priority.

Fortunately, after further testing, my doctors think they have found the cause — a hormone imbalance that has been “robbing” me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy. Sophisticated blood tests have confirmed this diagnosis.

The remedy for this nutritional problem is relatively simple and straightforward, and I’ve already begun treatment. But, just like I didn’t lose this much weight and body mass in a week or a month, my doctors expect it will take me until late this Spring to regain it. I will continue as Apple’s CEO during my recovery.

I have given more than my all to Apple for the past 11 years now. I will be the first one to step up and tell our Board of Directors if I can no longer continue to fulfill my duties as Apple’s CEO. I hope the Apple community will support me in my recovery and know that I will always put what is best for Apple first.

So now I’ve said more than I wanted to say, and all that I am going to say, about this.

Steve

Footnotes:
  1. of the WSJ, but I think this site is independent [↩]

The Walking Miracle

Seth Anderson0 comment

Perhaps you read of this tragic incident1

Perhaps the most tragic part of Jen’s story is that she falls into a loophole where she currently has no medical insurance.
At the time of attack, Jen was just four weeks shy of securing medical insurance from her new employer, and just 3 months away from marrying Joe, which will entitle her to spousal insurance through his employer.
Jen’s medical bills are likely to skyrocket to the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now, coupled with the impact of her recovery, Jen and Joe have the unimaginable anxiety of how to pay immense medical bills for treatment that saved her life.
Jen, a Chicago native who loves to bike and is engaged to a Marine Corps Veteran hero, is an everyday American. This tragedy could have happened to anyone. Jen is just like you, just like your sister, just like your best friend – just like the lady who manages your favorite local restaurant. It happened to Jen…and she needs your help.

[From The Walking Miracle]

the story itself:

On Monday, August 25, 2008, Jennifer Hall was brutally attacked by two homeless people on the South Side of Chicago. Out celebrating her 36th birthday with fiancé Joe Hoffman, Jen was viciously kicked in the head until she became unconscious… an unprovoked altercation that left Jen lying in a pool of her own blood with only four teeth left in her mouth.

Medical experts familiar with Jen’s trauma said that nine out of 10 people in her condition are brain dead and don’t survive.

But Jen is fighting the odds.

Footnotes:
  1. though, not from me, as I inexplicably failed to publish this post. Doh! Probably because I wanted to say something about healthcare in this country being so horrible [↩]

Could I survive on nothing but potatoes and milk?

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Could one live, like so many of my ancestors allegedly did, on a diet consisting of mostly potatoes? Cecil Adams says, well, nearly.

No Dumping Potatoes

The good news: A spuds and milk diet definitely has possibilities — the Irish, to cite the best-known example, got by mainly on potatoes until the infamous blight of 1845 wiped out their main course. The bad news: (1) Considering the quantities you’re going to have to eat, you’d better really like potatoes. (2) If you’re literally going to eat nothing but potatoes and milk, you risk — brace yourself — serious molybdenum deficiency.

Years ago I tackled the question of whether you could live by bread alone. (See The Straight Dope: Can man live by bread alone?) Answer: Yeah, for about six months, but then you’d die of scurvy. Things won’t be anywhere near that bad on milk and potatoes. Before the Great Famine, the traditional Irish peasant meal consisted mainly of potatoes, milk, oats, beans, barley, and bread. Potatoes were the mainstay. As the years grew leaner, dairy products largely disappeared from the Irish diet, since poverty forced many farmers to sell their milk to pay rent. By the time the famine hit, the peasants were eating pretty much just potatoes, supplemented with some salt fish and oatmeal. I’ve seen it said that a third of the population lived on potatoes and nothing else, although that seems doubtful, as we’ll see. Edward Wakefield, an English land agent and amateur social scientist who traveled Ireland from 1809 to 1811, calculated each Irish peasant family member consumed 5.5 pounds of potatoes per day. An 1846 source claims a working man needed at least 8 pounds of potatoes a day to survive if nothing else were available; a typical family of six would need 26 pounds.

How did the Irish do on this diet? We can’t be certain — nobody was conducting nutrition studies in those days. But there’s reason to believe they were healthier than you might guess. In the century before the famine, Ireland had the highest birthrate in western Europe. Some credit potatoes, saying the availability of easy-to-grow, easy-to-cook spuds made it practical to raise large families. Telling evidence on this score, one historian writes, “is that the Irish in general and Irish women in particular were widely described as healthy and good-looking.” I don’t know about you, Josh, but any diet that gets results like that is good enough for me.

[Click to continue reading The Straight Dope: Could I survive on nothing but potatoes and milk?]

I knew I loved potatoes…

and if one supplemented one’s diet with the occasional bowl of oatmeal, and even some salad, you’d be well enough to down pints of Guinness Stout.

Arsenic in Water at EPA Approved Standards Linked to Heart Disease

Seth Anderson0 comment

This is the true legacy of George Bush, Dick Cheney and their evil crew: an Environmental Protection Agency that actively works towards lowering our national health.

Battle for Hearts and Minds

In the U.S., many locations are known to have groundwater containing arsenic concentrations in excess of the new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standard of 10 parts per billion. But now comes research that suggests the EPA’s supposedly “safe” level of arsemic allowed in water supplies for public consumption isn’t safe at all. In fact, water laced with the federally-approved amount of arsenic could be causing high blood pressure and artery-clogging arhterosclerosis.

According to animal research by University of Pittsburgh scientists set to be published in the December issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, and available online now at http://www.jci.org/articles/view/35092, arsenic at EPA-approved levels for drinking water causes pores in liver blood vessels to close, potentially leading to cardiovascular disease and hypertension. This study calls into question whether present Environmental Protection Agency standards (currently based only on the risks of arsenic causing cancer) are stringent enough.

[From Arsenic in Water at EPA Approved Standards Linked to Heart Disease]

Rural (so-called Red States) are prime targets for the death dealers at the EPA:

The current federal standard for arsenic in public water systems not only may be too high, but it only applies to drinking water sources that serve more than 20 people. “We are especially concerned about water from individual wells in small, rural and semi-rural communities that are exempt from the EPA requirement and often contain levels of arsenic that exceed the EPA limit,” Dr. Barchowsky stated in the press release. “Our findings raise some concerns about whether current EPA-developed standards can effectively protect against cardiovascular risks posed by arsenic in drinking water.”

The study is a strong reminder that no one in the U.S. should assume that because their water supply is dubbed “safe” by the EPA that it doesn’t contain not only arsenic but other toxins. For example, most public water supplies are known to contain a host of pharmaceutical and pesticide residues,too. Testing your water or finding a proven system of safe water filtration are the only known ways to make sure you are putting pure water into your body.

FDA Likes the Taste of Melamine

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Melamine – it’s what’s for breakfast!

The Food and Drug Administration said it found “trace levels” of the industrial chemical melamine in one sample of U.S.-made infant formula and in a few samples of other products like nutritional and medical supplements made by U.S. manufacturers of infant formula.

The FDA said, however, the formula and the supplements were safe to consume. “These are extremely low levels,” Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, said. “It didn’t cause any concern at all, not from a health standpoint.”

[From FDA Tests Find Melamine Traces in Baby Formula – WSJ.com]

Yeah, why don’t you drink a big glass of melamine then, and we’ll watch.

Eight years (or longer, really) of downsizing the FDA, and similar watchdog agencies has had a real effect: the FDA doesn’t even pretend to be on the side of consumers anymore.

Dr. Sundloff said the melamine detected was tiny. Out of 87 samples, it found one sample with 0.137 parts per million and 0.140 parts per million on a verification test.

Even so, the findings are likely to upset parents who feed formula to their babies. But just how much is at stake for the manufacturers isn’t certain. Infant nutritional businesses are lucrative properties for some big U.S. drug makers, including Abbott, Wyeth and Bristol-Myers, though Wyeth doesn’t make or market its infant formula in the U.S. Mead Johnson’s revenue from its Enfamil infant formula has totaled $872 million so far this year.

Money over public health.

Lactic Acid Found To Fuel Tumors

Seth Anderson0 comment

A story that merits close attention: both for how the research will be reported in tomorrow’s newspapers, and how the scientific community reacts.

A team of researchers at Duke University Medical Center and the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) has found that lactic acid is an important energy source for tumor cells. In further experiments, they discovered a new way to destroy the most hard-to-kill, dangerous tumor cells by preventing them from delivering lactic acid.

…

Many tumors have cells that burn fuel for activities in different ways. Tumor cells near blood vessels have adequate oxygen sources and can either burn glucose like normal cells, or lactic acid (lactate). Tumor cells further from vessels are hypoxic and inefficiently burn a lot of glucose to keep going. In turn, they produce lactate as a waste product.

Tumor cells with good oxygen supply actually prefer to burn lactate, which frees up glucose to be used by the less-oxygenated cells. But when the researchers cut off the cells’ ability to use lactate, the hypoxic cells didn’t get as much glucose.

For the dangerous hypoxic cells, “it is glucose or death,” said Pierre Sonveaux, professor in the UCL Unit of Pharmacology & Therapeutics and lead author of the study, published in the Nov. 20 online edition of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. ….

The next challenge was to discover how lactate moved into tumor cells. Because lactate recycling exists in exercising muscle to prevent cramps, the researchers imagined that the same molecular machinery could be used by tumor cells. “We discovered that a transporter protein of muscle origin, MCT1, was also present in respiring tumor cells,” said Dewhirst. The team used chemical inhibitors of MCT1 and cell models in which MCT1 had been deleted to learn its role in delivering lactate. “We not only proved that MCT1 was important, we formally demonstrated that MCT1 was unique for mediating lactate uptake,” said Professor Olivier Feron of the UCL Unit of Pharmacology & Therapeutics.

Blocking MCT1 did not kill the oxygenated cells, but it nudged their metabolism toward inefficiently burning glucose. Because the glucose was used more abundantly by the better-oxygenated cells, they used up most of the glucose before it could reach the hypoxic cells, which starved while waiting in vain for glucose to arrive. “This finding is really exciting,” Dewhirst said. “The idea of starving hypoxic cells to death is completely novel.”

[Continue reading: Lactic Acid Found To Fuel Tumors]

Very interesting stuff.

Freddy Goodwin Hides Drug Company Funding from NPR audience

Seth Anderson0 comment

Dr. Goodwin sold his ethics, and NPR, for such small amounts.1 Petty greed. Is the money really worth it?

Neon - NH Ballin Drugs Prescriptions

An influential psychiatrist who was the host of the popular NPR program “The Infinite Mind” earned at least $1.3 million from 2000 to 2007 giving marketing lectures for drugmakers, income not mentioned on the program.

The psychiatrist and radio host, Dr. Frederick K. Goodwin, is the latest in a series of doctors and researchers whose ties to drugmakers have been uncovered by Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa. Dr. Goodwin, a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, is the first news media figure to be investigated.

Dr. Goodwin’s weekly radio programs have often touched on subjects important to the commercial interests of the companies for which he consults. In a program broadcast on Sept. 20, 2005, he warned that children with bipolar disorder who were left untreated could suffer brain damage, a controversial view.

“But as we’ll be hearing today,” Dr. Goodwin told his audience, “modern treatments — mood stabilizers in particular — have been proven both safe and effective in bipolar children.”

That same day, GlaxoSmithKline paid Dr. Goodwin $2,500 to give a promotional lecture for its mood stabilizer drug, Lamictal, at the Ritz Carlton Golf Resort in Naples, Fla. In all, GlaxoSmithKline paid him more than $329,000 that year for promoting Lamictal, records given to Congressional investigators show.

[From Radio Host Has Drug Company Ties – NYTimes.com]

Kudos to Senator Grassley, by the way, who isn’t all bad.

My radio-listening mornings have been replaced by sleeping in, so I cannot verify or deny NPR’s claims to be canceling the show as soon as the current episodes are aired, but the controversy first emerged way back in May of 2008. NPR’s Ombudsman tried to spin the fact that technically, The Infinite Mind is not an NPR show:

But more importantly, the show didn’t disclose that the guests and host had some financial ties to makers of anti-depressants. “To me, it’s not terribly relevant whether there’s a clear scientific link between anti-depressants and suicide,” said Gary Schwitzer, publisher of HealthNewsReview, an independent website that evaluates health coverage. “Bill Lichtenstein does good work. But he should have disclosed the financial ties.”

One of the guests was Peter Pitts, a former Food and Drug Administration official. The show’s host doesn’t mention that Pitts is senior vice president for global health affairs at a public relations firm. That firm represents drug companies that make anti-depressants. Lichtenstein acknowledged that Pitts’ business ties should have been mentioned. He said Pitts didn’t disclose them while the Website Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, where Pitts is president, says he did.

“If we had known, and (full mea culpa here) we should have, we would have disclosed that connection,” wrote Lichtenstein in a response on Slate’s, The Fray. “Pitts apparently didn’t disclose it elsewhere, either – he’s appeared on NPR’s Talk of the Nation as well as PBS’ News Hour with Jim Lehrer, without either of those programs mentioning the PR company ties.” (Slate responded to Lichtenstein on May 12.)

Lichtenstein is correct about Talk of the Nation. Pitts appeared on the show in June 2005, one year after joining the public relations firm Manning Selvage & Lee, according to the firm. The call-in show identified him only as with the Pacific Research Institute, which lists itself as a non-profit educational charity promoting free market policy solutions.

Another issue is The Infinite Mind’s funding. According to Lichtenstein, he takes no more than 15 percent of the budget from any one sector. In 2006, he told me, the program got $100,000 from Eli Lily, which makes the anti-depressant, Prozac.

All that said: Is The Infinite Mind an NPR show?

Technically, it depends on what you mean by an NPR show.

but then recommended NPR add disclaimers:

a few things should happen. On NPR’s website listing “popular public radio shows,” NPR should make it clear which are distinctly NPR-produced shows and which ones are not. For instance, the site lists Prairie Home Companion and provides a link, even though the popular show is produced and distributed by American Public Media, a competing public radio service.

The Infinite Mind, particularly since it deals in the controversial world of science and medicine, should include information on its website about how it is funded. It should also add Peter Pitts’ public relations job to the link for the “Prozac Nation” episode and to any related transcripts.

Being upfront about real or potential financial conflicts of interest is key to establishing credibility. Financial associations don’t mean that experts should necessarily be disqualified as commentators, but the public must be told about them.

With the Internet, it is much easier for news operations to be transparent, and they should take advantage of the ability to be more transparent if they ever want to win back the public’s respect and trust.

Again, I don’t listen to the show, but it seems as if NPR never followed this advice:

Margaret Low Smith, vice president of National Public Radio, said NPR would remove “The Infinite Mind” from its satellite radio service next week, the earliest date possible. Ms. Smith said that had NPR been aware of Dr. Goodwin’s financial interests, it would not have broadcast the program.

and Dr. Goodwin was very concerned about maintaining his home in Aspen, and wasn’t going to let any damned ethics get between him and that sweet, sweet drug corporation cash…

In the fine print of a study he wrote in 2003, Dr. Goodwin reported consulting or speaking for nine drugmakers, including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Novartis. Mr. Grassley asked for payment information only from GlaxoSmithKline. Dr. Goodwin said that in recent years, GlaxoSmithKline paid him more than other companies.

He said that he had never given marketing lectures for antidepressant medicines like Prozac, so he saw no conflict with a program he hosted in March titled “Prozac Nation: Revisited.” which he introduced by saying, “As you will hear today, there is no credible scientific evidence linking antidepressants to violence or to suicide.”

That same week, Dr. Goodwin earned around $20,000 from GlaxoSmithKline, which for years suppressed studies showing that its antidepressant, Paxil, increased suicidal behaviors.

Footnotes:
  1. well, $1,400,000 isn’t petty cash, but Dr. Goodwin wasn’t hurting for cash [↩]

McCain proposes to Destroy Health Care

Seth Anderson0 comment

We’ve discussed McCain’s devious plan to destroy the American Healthcare system, and replace it with a wink; Paul Krugman sketches what the end result would turn out to be quite clearly:

Any Porthole in a Storm

But the people gaining insurance would be those who need it least: relatively healthy Americans with high incomes. Why? Because insurance companies want to cover only healthy people, and even among the healthy only those able to pay a lot in addition to their tax credit would be able to afford coverage (remember, it’s a $5,000 credit, but the average family policy actually costs more than $12,000).

Meanwhile, the people losing insurance would be those who need it most: lower-income workers who wouldn’t be able to afford individual insurance even with the tax credit, and Americans with health problems whom insurance companies won’t cover.

And in the process of comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted, the McCain plan would also lead to a huge, expensive increase in bureaucracy: insurers selling individual health plans spend 29 percent of the premiums they receive on administration, largely because they employ so many people to screen applicants. This compares with costs of 12 percent for group plans and just 3 percent for Medicare.

In short, the McCain plan makes no sense at all, unless you have faith that the magic of the marketplace can solve all problems. And Mr. McCain does: a much-quoted article published under his name declares that “Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”

I agree: the McCain plan would do for health care what deregulation has done for banking. And I’m terrified.

[From Paul Krugman – Health Care Destruction – NYTimes.com]

Those who can afford it already won’t be affected, much, by this plan, but the rest of us will be screwed. Note: I did the math for myself, and I would come out about even, at the moment. But, my rates went up 14%1 this year, and about the same last year2, and presumedly would increase again next year. So the McCain healthcare tax credit would soon be insuffecient for paying for my plan, and my deductible is quite high already.

Footnotes:
  1. my tweet: Because of “inflationary trends in health care”, my health insurance premium went up 14%. Whippee. [↩]
  2. too lazy to look back [↩]

The Body as Bacterial Landlord

swanksalot0 comment

Robert Lee Hotz has written an extremely fascinating look at our bacterial over-lords. If I wasn’t so busy, I’d love to create a treatment of this concept for a possible sci-fi thriller. Or something. Too interesting not to research further.

When scientists discovered that bacteria, not stress, caused most stomach ulcers, the insight overturned a century of medical dogma, transformed clinical practice and garnered a 2005 Nobel Prize for the two researchers who made the connection so many others had missed. After people adopted antibiotics to treat gastric distress, though, microbiologist Martin Blaser and his colleagues at New York University began to document an odd medical trend.

Ulcers did drop dramatically, as expected. So did the incidence of stomach cancer. As the bacteria, called Helicobacter pylori, virtually disappeared among children, however, cases of asthma tripled. So did rates of hay fever and allergies, such as eczema. Among adults, gastric reflux disease became more common, as did some forms of esophageal cancer, researchers noted.

To Dr. Blaser’s way of thinking, antibiotics and other sanitation measures are eliminating the harm these bacteria cause at the expense of the protection they provide us.

The human body teems with so many microbes that they outnumber our own cells ten to one. Vast schools of bacteria are in us and around us, like fish nuzzling a coral reef. “They are not simply along for the ride,” says Stanford University microbiologist David Relman. “They are interacting with us.”

Yet almost all of them are still unknown to science, since most cannot be grown and studied in the laboratory. In ways mysterious to medicine, this microbial menagerie of fellow travelers in and on us is controlling our health, affecting obesity, cancer and heart disease, among others.

[From The Body as Bacterial Landlord – WSJ.com]

Our constant interference with the body through use of anti-biotics has real consequences:

…As many as 500 species of bacteria may inhabit our guts, like H.pylori. Maybe 500 or so other species make themselves at home in our mouth, where each tooth has its own unique bacterial colony, Dr. Relman recently determined. No one knows how many species we contain in all. This past August, researchers at Kings College London identified yet another new species of oral bacteria between the tongue and cheek.

Until recently, half of humanity harbored these H. pylori stomach bacteria, according to a 2002 study in the New England Journal of Medicine. Indeed, we appear to have evolved together. Among those born in the U.S. during the 1990s, however, only 5% or so still carry these microbes, largely due to the indiscriminate use of antibiotics.

After analyzing health records of 7,412 people collected by the National Center for Health Statistics, Dr. Blaser and NYU epidemiologist Yu Chen reported this summer in the Journal of Infectious Diseases that children between three and 13 years old who tested positive for H. pylori bacteria were 59% less likely to have asthma. They also were 40% to 60% less likely to have hay fever or rashes.

Bacteria has evolved for billions of years, and is now an essential part of the human body

Last week, University of Chicago immunologist Alexander Chervonsky and his collaborators at Yale University reported that doses of the right stomach bacteria can stop the development of Type 1 diabetes in lab mice.

“By changing who is living in our guts, we can prevent Type 1 diabetes,” Dr. Chervonsky says.

Other bacteria are just as crucial to our well-being, feeding us the calories from food we can’t digest on our own, bolstering our immune systems, tending our skin and dosing us with vitamins, such as B-6 and B-12, which we are unable to synthesize unaided.

And there is work being done attempting to categorize the bacteria, and figure out what exactly each contributes to our body:

For the first time, researchers are attempting to identify and analyze the types of bacteria that live within us, in an effort that makes the Human Genome Project look like child’s play. Instead of sequencing the genes of one microbe at a time, researchers in a five-year, $125 million NIH effort called the Human Microbiome Project are analyzing entire communities of mixed bacteria at once, in a technique called metagenomics.

To start, researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., are sequencing the genomes of 200 microbe species isolated from 250 healthy volunteers. They are sampling bacteria from the skin, gut, vagina, mouth and nose, then attempting to identify them by cataloging variations in a single gene sequence that all bacteria share.

If I was in school right now, this might be a very tempting field to enter.
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