Measles vaccine: Britain bans anti-vaxxer Wakefield

May 25, 2010

Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s license to practice medicine in Britain was stripped away by British authorities earlier today, due to his “ethical lapses” in conducting research against measles vaccines.

Wakefield’s research claims, published in the distinguished medical journal Lancet in 1998, sparked a worldwide hysteria over the claimed link of Mumps-Measles-Rubella vaccine (MMR) to autism.  The journal earlier withdrew the article when the research was exposed as faulty and reaching erroneous conclusions.

Lancet retracted the paper earlier this year.

Effects of Wakefield’s errors ripple across the globe, as children pay the price with measles rates up worldwide, especially in Africa, and in North AmericaRob Breckenridge described the damage for the Calgary Herald:

However, Wakefield’s foul legacy is very much consequential. His latest comeuppance is hopefully a small step in undoing that legacy’s damage, but much damage has already been done.

Wakefield authored a now-discredited paper published in 1998 in The Lancet, which implied that the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine was linked to autism.

Numerous studies have shown no such link exists, but Wakefield’s research had the predictable effect of scaring people away from the MMR vaccine. Vaccination rates plummeted in the U.K., and the number of measles cases soared.

In 2008 in the U.K., there were almost 1,400 cases of measles compared with 56 the year Wakefield’s paper was published. In 2006, a 13-year-old boy died from measles — the first time in 14 years such a death had been recorded.

On top of the multiple studies rejecting the MMRautism link, The Lancet issued a formal retraction of Wakefield’s paper in February, citing his unethical and irresponsible conduct.

Once a disease like measles becomes rare, we tend to drop our guard, either forgetting how serious it is or assuming it can never come back. As we’ve seen in the U.K. it can come back with a vengeance. Unfortunately, it’s not only the U.K. where we’re learning that lesson.

This month, Alberta Health Services confirmed five cases of measles in the Calgary area. Given our lack of recent experience with measles — there was only one case provincewide in 2009 — AHS offered a primer on the disease.

Measles is extremely contagious, meaning one need not have close contact with an infected person. There is no cure, but vaccination can prevent it. There are still pockets of the province where vaccination rates are low and measles cases there have been higher.

Southwestern Alberta is one of those regions. Not only has measles made a comeback there — a 2000 outbreak closed a Lethbridge-area private school — but cases of mumps and whooping cough have been documented over the past two years.

In B.C., 87 measles cases have been confirmed this year. It’s believed many stem from infected out-of-country visitors at the Vancouver Olympics.

All cases involve people who were either not vaccinated, or only partially vaccinated. Eight cases were associated with a single household, where no one had been vaccinated.

As Typhoid Mary denied she could be the cause of the deaths of the people she cooked for, and so continued cooking, Wakefield promises to keep up his campaign for measles.

Good news: Warming probably won’t expand malaria much

May 19, 2010

A paper in the May 20 edition of Nature reports that global warming probably won’t expand the range of malaria much.  That’s good news.

Here’s the press release from the University of Florida, touting the paper written by two University of Florida researchers, among others:

Scientists: Malaria control to overcome disease’s spread as climate warms

Filed under Environment, Health, Research on Wednesday, May 19, 2010.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Contrary to a widespread assumption, global warming is unlikely to expand the range of malaria because of malaria control, development and other factors that are at work to corral the disease.

So concludes a team of scientists including two University of Florida researchers in a paper set to appear May 20 in the journal Nature.

Scientists and public policy makers have been concerned that warming temperatures would create conditions that would either push malaria into new areas or make it worse in existing ones. But the team of six scientists, including David Smith and Andy Tatem, faculty members with UF’s biology and geography departments and both at UF’s Emerging Pathogens Institute, analyzed a historical contraction of the geographic range and general reduction in the intensity of malaria — a contraction that occurred over a century during which the globe warmed. They determined that if the future trends are like past ones, the contraction is likely to continue under the most likely warming scenarios.

“If we continue to fund malaria control, we can certainly be prepared to counteract the risk that warming could expand the global distribution of malaria,” Smith said.

The team, part of the Wellcome Trust’s multinational Malaria Atlas Project, noted that malaria control efforts over the past century have shrunk the prevalence of the disease from most of the world to a region including Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and South America, with the bulk of fatalities confined to Africa. This has occurred despite a global temperature rise of about 1 degree Fahrenheit, on average, during the same period.

“The globe warmed over the past century, but the range of malaria contracted substantially,” Tatem said. “Warming isn’t the only factor that affects malaria.”

The reasons why malaria has shrunk are varied and in some countries mysterious, but they usually include mosquito control efforts, better access to health care, urbanization and economic development. The banned pesticide DDT was instrumental in ridding the disease from 24 countries in Southern Europe, the former Soviet Union and elsewhere in the world between 1955 and 1969, Smith said. Researchers debate how the U.S. defeated malaria, but the reduction of mosquito breeding grounds, improved housing and reduced emphasis on agriculture that comes with development — and the reduced risk of bites that accompanies urbanization – probably played a role, Smith said.

“There is no one tale that seems to determine the story globally,” Tatem said. “If we had to choose one thing, we would guess economic development, but that’s kind of a cop out” because the specific mechanisms may still remain unclear, and controlling malaria might also help to kick-start development.

In any case, current malaria control efforts such as insecticide-treated bed nets, modern low-cost diagnostic kits and new anti-malarial drugs, have proved remarkably effective, with more and more countries achieving control or outright elimination. Unless current control efforts were to suddenly stop, they are likely to counteract the spread of mosquitoes or other malaria-spreading effects from anticipated temperature increases, Smith said.

Simon Hay, an author of the Nature paper and one of the chief architects of the Malaria Atlas Project, noted that modern malaria control efforts “reduce transmission massively and counteract the much smaller effects of rising temperatures.”

“Malaria remains a huge public health problem, and the international community has an unprecedented opportunity to relieve this burden with existing interventions,” he said. “Any failure in meeting this challenge will be very difficult to attribute to climate change.”

Key to controlling malaria is the treatment of the disease in human victims.  Malaria parasites must spend part of their life cycle in humans; if medical care can cure humans, mosquitoes have no well of the disease to draw from, to spread it.

This paper says that global warming won’t spread the disease, so long as medical care and local health officials can keep effective treatments — a complete cure for human victims — coming quickly.

Resources:


Nathan Wolfe’s jungle search for viruses | Video on TED.com (Why it’s important to beat H1N1, now)

November 29, 2009

Here’s Nathan Wolfe explaining how viruses work, quickly and at a high enough level to be entertaining, and explaining why we need to worry about H1N1.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “Nathan Wolfe’s jungle search for viru…“, posted with vodpod

Wolfe also explained a lot at the TED Blog:

Take us back a step or two: How did swine flu enter into the human population?

Swine flu has been known since at least the early part of the 20th century, since the 1930s. It was originally a virus of bird origin — all influenza viruses were originally bird viruses — and it probably spread to humans before it was in pigs.

Now, we still haven’t received definitive information on the underlying genetics of this particular virus. But initial reports suggest that it may be what’s known as a “mosaic virus,” which includes components of swine influenzas, bird influenzas and human influenzas. A cosmopolitan virus like that wouldn’t be unprecedented. (Editor’s Note: see Joe DeRisi’s 2006 TEDTalk for more on state-of-the-art virus detection.)

But in any case, this is a virus that appears to come from pigs, and pigs in close proximity spread the flu in much the same way that humans do — coughing, sneezing, and so on. The virus probably initially entered into human populations through people who work with livestock.

Is swine flu here to stay?

Whether this particular virus will sustain itself and become a permanent part of the human landscape is unclear, but that’s certainly what we’re watching for. As it is, the virus may just disappear because of the weather; summers aren’t good for flu viruses.

So this heat wave is working in our favor?

It might be. The virus has had a good start, from the flu perspective, considering that this is really the end of the season. But the unseasonably hot weather may bode poorly for this virus’ potential to establish itself definitively and cause a pandemic. Had this happened in September or October, it would be much more concerning.

Having said that, it’s not impossible that a virus like this might “go into hiding” — in the southern hemisphere or the tropics — and might come to light again next year. So there will be a lot of discussion about expanding the fall flu vaccine to try to control it next cycle.

Is it really possible for us to prevent future outbreaks like this?

Yes, I believe it is. We spend tons of money trying to predict complex phenomena like tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes. There’s no reason to believe that a pandemic is harder to predict than a tsunami. And we’d be foolish not to include forecasting and prevention as part of our overall portfolio to fight these pandemics.

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Use of evidence in science: Homeopathy and nutritionists take a laughable hit

October 9, 2009

Dara O’Briain?  Never heard of him before.

But he’s spot on here, isn’t he?

(Warning:  Not exactly safe for work or school — the “f” word is spoken aloud.]

An ironic tip of the old scrub brush to Gandolf, in comments at Dunamis Word, in an otherwise futile discussion with creationists who claim to have an ounce of rationality left in them.


Cranks refuse to budge on influenza hoaxes

September 27, 2009

Friday came and went.  President Obama did as he was scheduled to do, chairing a session of the United Nations Security Council in a meeting directed at nuclear weapons non-proliferation.

This should have silenced some of the cranks, crackpots, crank scientists and hoaxters who had “warned” us that Obama was going to use that opportunity to take over the world and order people to get inoculated against influenza — with some unstated fears that those inoculations would be more dangerous than the flu itself, or turn us all into Volvo-driving, chablis-loving, union-belonging, line-dancing Democrats, or something like that.

:::Sigh:::

No.  Never such luck.

At the post where I debunked the claim that WHO is planning to take over the world with inoculations at the point of a gun, instead of with Auric Goldfinger, SMERSH, KAOS, or Lex Luther, a guy named Simon McDermott complains I don’t give him enough credence.  His letter doesn’t help.

Look:  The World Health Organization is a group of distinguished medical care specialists, public health specialists, and policy wonks, most of whom are too nerdy to want to hold great power — heading up WHO is a stepping stone to no great governmental power position anyone has ever found, least of all at the United Nations, which has no army, no troops of its own of any sort, and advises nations on bettering health care.

The claim that WHO is plotting to take over the world is not just moonbat-shagging silly, it’s completely insane.  It makes no sense on any level, nor is there any evidence to corroborate the claims.  Jane Burgermeister’s website notwithstanding, I have my doubts that she could demonstrate mental competence to enlist as a private in the Russian armed forces.

Moreover, the world faces a crisis in influenza.  With luck and a lot of hard work, we can avoid a spread of a killer flu virus that might make Zero Population Growth look optimistic.  We don’t need hoaxsters, pranksters and fools claiming that influenza is all a great hoax.

Simon said:

I am a freelance writer and have heavily researched the ‘well known’ and ‘established facts’ written in my article that I posted in my previous comment.

The facts are that the H1N1 vaccine has not been safely tested. It takes years to accurately test and research the effects of a new vaccine.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1208716/Half-GPs-refuse-swine-flu-vaccine-testing-fears.html

I have posted a link above to the Mail Online a highly respected national newspaper here in Britain.

The article says that health officials say the vaccine has been thoroughly tested.  No one in the article offers any credible denial of that fact.  The headlines feature an earlier poll of general practitioners alleging that they said the vaccine had not been tested well enough.

Simon:  An out-of-date, nonscientific poll of  GPs in Britain who were underinformed, is not science.

Nor is your reading that story doing “heavy research.”  Googling is not generally considered serious research.

‘First, you exaggerate. Second, that outbreak and the aftereffects are very much on the minds of health officials. Guillan Barre was never linked to the vaccine, by the way. Get some facts, will you?’

This is established fact; although experts now believe that it will be more like one in one million that will contract GBS rather than one in ten thousand.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcnIojjzvvg

No, a badly researched, poorly produced story on a local CBS affiliate, migrated to YouTube, does not make something “established fact.”

GBS is rare, but occurs all the time.  We don’t know the cause, and no one has been able to pin any vaccine as a cause of GBS.  After several million people were vaccinated, a few fell ill from GBS.  No research has ever been able to establish any vaccine as a cause of GBS, however — it may be that those people would have fallen ill with GBS whether they got any vaccine or not.  See the CDC’s information page on GBS:

What causes GBS?

It is thought that GBS may be triggered by an infection. The infection that most commonly precedes GBS is caused by a bacterium called Campylobacter jejuni. Other respiratory or intestinal illnesses and other triggers may also precede an episode of GBS. In 1976, vaccination with the swine flu vaccine was associated with getting GBS. Several studies have been done to evaluate if other flu vaccines since 1976 were associated with GBS. Only one of the studies showed an association. That study suggested that one person out of 1 million vaccinated persons may be at risk of GBS associated with the vaccine.

We’ve had that many kids die of swine flu already this year, in Dallas and Tarrant counties in Texas.    Right now, GBS from all causes is less prevalent than deaths from swine flu.

Also here is a list of dangerous substances that are in other vaccines; we can also expect similar material to be in the swine flu vaccine.

http://www.stunnedmullets.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=130:official-facts-on-vaccines&catid=78:vaccines&Itemid=141

Did you know that potatoes contain carcinogens?  Are you aware that the essential nutrient, selenium, is also carcinogenic?  Did you know that an excess of salt can kill a person?  Are you aware that plain old tap water can be deadly, in several ways?

Gosh, a list of “dangerous substances.”  Did you look at the list?  Did you see that the “dangerous substances” include eggs and yeast?  Are you aware that almost every loaf of bread in America contains more eggs and yeast than three years’ worth of all vaccines for a person?

You’re being irresponsible to the point of recklessness. Yes, people with allergies to eggs should avoid flu vaccines.  No, that doesn’t mean the vaccines are inherently dangerous, that they vaccines don’t work, nor does it mean eggs are inherently dangerous.

It means people who are allergic to eggs should avoid flu vaccines (vaccines are grown in eggs, and some egg proteins remain in influenza vaccines).

Almost all substances are dangerous, when out of place, or in the wrong quantities.  You could note that fact without alarmism and without hysterics.  Dangerous things are all around us.  Flu vaccines fall near the bottom of the danger scales, but near the top of the life-saving scale.

You’re aware that we annually lose around 30,000 people to the pedestrian, seasonal flu?  How many thousands of times greater is the risk of death to flu than death by vaccine?

Research has shown that there are plenty of natural preventative actions that can be taken to protect against catching flu viruses. These are a healthy organic diet, vitamins; such as vitamin D3, regular exercise and certain herbs – all of these are known to boost and strengthen the immune system.

Staying healthy is always a good idea.  H1N1, however, attacks healthy kids. It’s not a question of natural prevention.  Some people have never been exposed to this particular strain or its cousins, and they have no natural immunity to it.  When it strikes, it strikes quickly.  Most of the deaths in the U.S. from H1N1 are to young people who have taken your natural preventive actions.  Vitamins and organic diets don’t work.

In fact, that’s dangerous advice right there.  A medical professional could be subject to malpractice for the advice you just issued.   Kids, Simon is an amateur — don’t try that at home.

I used to regularly take the seasonal flu vaccine before finding out the dangers of vaccines in general; on the two occasions that I did take it I ended up getting flu shortly after taking the vaccine. Since then I have not taken it and decided to go down the alternative route, which has served me very well as I have not had so much as a cold in over three years.

As people grow older they have fewer colds — you never get the same cold virus twice.  When you’re over 30 or 40, you’ve been exposed to most of the variations on cold viruses.  Your reduction in colds is because you’re older, not because you’re healthier.

Ironically, that’s exactly what you argue against.  You’re more resistant to colds because you’ve been “vaccinated” against them.  The vaccination was natural, by catching the viruses and developing immunity.  For flu, we have to have flu shots for the greatest safety.

Don’t argue against flu vaccines by telling us how effectively the natural method of vaccination has protected you from colds, okay?  You look like an idiot when you do that, suggesting you really don’t understand viruses, how they are passed, nor how human immunity occurs.

Since you seem so eager to poison your body with a substance which is clearly more dangerous than swine flu itself, then who am I to stand in your way.

That’s just a crass, cold and craven lie.  There is not even an insane argument to be made that flu vaccines this year are more dangerous than the flu itself.  That’s crazy talk, terrorist talk.  What do you have against old people that you want to see thousands of them die from the flu?   Since the “death panels” claim turned out to be bogus, you decided to go on a one-man campaign to encourage death among the elderly and ill?

Since you are so eager to poison minds with completely bogus attacks on science, let me urge you to volunteer to forego all flu vaccines, but be exposed to the viruses, for the sake of research.  That way the rest of us could benefit from your bizarre animus to life.

I am sorry to hear that there have been a couple of deaths where you live due to swine flu, but there are much safer alternative and natural preventative actions that can be taken. A healthy nutritionally rich diet should be first on the list before we even consider vaccines, of which there is a huge amount of evidence calling into question, their overall safety and effectiveness when fighting disease.

Call the CDC.  Volunteer for flu exposure now, before the rush.  You’re not sure that the vaccines are safe, but you argue that the flu IS safe?  Let’s see you put your life where your mouth is.

I don’t think you’re that big a fool.  Your that whopping dishonest, but not so big a fool.

The problem is that the majority of western doctors are taught absolute fallacies at medical school and in some cases have been brought up to become nothing more than glorified pill prescribers.

The human immune is an extremely powerful and efficient tool when it comes to fighting disease. The reason that it is susceptible to diseases like swine flu at all is because our diets are so nutritionally poor. In many cases this is due to processed foods (filled with additives and preservatives) and poisons such as aspartame in many of our soft drinks.

http://www.naturalnews.com/026168.html

I have posted a link above to a site that lists natural preventives and explains that viruses such as swine flu cannot be contracted by a healthy well maintained immune system.

Don’t look now, but you’re obviously suffering a dementia produced by lack of immunity.

In your case, that dementia could be cured with a trip to a library.

What you wrote in that last excerpt is pure, unadulterated bullshit.

Thank you, but we’ve already heard the “smart pills” joke.

I am not a ‘crack pot’ and neither are others who show a distinct lack of trust in bodies like the WHO and companies such as Baxter, because history has taught us that they have seriously let us down in the past.

You mean, you advocate crackpot ideas for noble reasons?  Alas, that leaves you in the category of crackpot.  Anyone who thinks killer flu is safer than vaccines is a crackpot, or an idiot, or an agent of evil.  I’m assuming you’re not an idiot, and not an agent of evil.  Can you convince me otherwise?

If after examining the evidence that I have provided you still believe that the vaccine is safe, then be my guest, take it, it is your right to choose, but please do not belittle with your derogatory use of humour those who do not!

The reason I talk about this information is because I want people to be safe, and nobody wants a repeat of the 1976 debacle.

Better to keep quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

Shut up.  Nobody wants a repeat of the 1918 debacle, either — and you should be ashamed of campaigning for it as you are.

If we all lived clean and healthy natural lives then there would be no need for vaccines at all.

There you go with that crackpot stuff again.  If you think that chicken pox and shingles would disappear without vaccines, you’re a fool.  If you fail to understand that polio can’t be beaten without vaccines, you’re a greater fool.

If you claim that people could beat chicken pox, smallpox, measles and polio without vaccines, you’re a dangerous tool of crackpot evil.

Maybe it is our social system that needs a rethink, because if you examine Amazonian tribal communities, who have had little to no contact with the outside world, you find a distinct lack of disease in these societies.

There’s a whopper I’d like to see some serious studies on.

That testifies to a lack of virus transmission, but you will also find a distinct surplus of diseases that diet can’t cure.  Someday spend some time studying Huntington’s Disease, Huntington’s Chorea, and how the prevalence of the disease in one of those isolated Amazonian tribes contributed to the search for a cause.  Of course, almost every member of that tribe had the disease.  (It’s genetic, and no vaccine can prevent or cure — yet.)  You’ll also find they die of bacterial diseases that modern medicine can treat — those physicians you mock.

Dirty living equals disease; an unclean polluted environment equals disease; the addition of chemicals to our food, drink and drinking water equals disease; when are we going to wake up and realise that the cause of disease is not some unknown, unfortunate ‘random factor’, but the way we live our lives.

Of course, clean living increases asthma.  A lack of pollution tends to correlate with lack of civilization.  The absence of chlorine in our drinking water contributes to cholera epidemics and typhoid, the lack of fluorine in our water means more dental caries and brain infections.  Trace amounts of iodine in salt have all but eliminated goiter.  When are you going to wake up and realize that some disease causes are well known, some diseases easily preventable, and life is complex and cannot be made perfectly safe with today’s technology, but was a minefield of deadly infections without today’s technology?

If we live our lives soaked in superstition and crank science, we haven’t even a prayer (full irony intended).  You’re not advocating for better health.  You’re ranting about stuff you don’t know about.

Although in the case of Baxter the cause of the so called ’swine flu virus’ may well have been them!

I think there’s a better case that you are the cause of swine flu than there is a case that any drug company manufactured the stuff.  Among other clues you should look at is the prevalence of swine flu in swine populations around the world — today and historically.  Influenza viruses tend to be species specific, and it’s actually quite rare for them to jump species.  That’s why, when they jump, they can be so deadly.

But then, that’s what you’re campaigning for, right?  You’d love to see a virus wipe out most people, especially those with scientific knowledge — right, Simon?

Ugh.

Get an education about flu and other viruses:

Don’t let your friends go without this information, please:

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U.S. Boy Scouts join UN and NBA to fight malaria

August 28, 2009

Press release from the malaria-fighting group Nothing But Nets:

Nothing But Nets Teams Up With Boy Scouts of America to Fight Malaria

Boy Scouts of America Celebrate 100 Years of Service by Extending Reach Outside Nation’s Borders; Millions of Scouts Across the U.S., including Distinguished Eagle Scout Bill Gates Sr., Spread the Word on Malaria Prevention.

Detroit, MI (Vocus/PRWEB ) August 28, 2009 — The United Nations Foundation’s Nothing But Nets, a grassroots campaign to prevent malaria by sending long-lasting insecticide-treated nets to families in Africa, announced today that the Boy Scouts of America has joined the malaria-prevention campaign as part of its 100th Anniversary Celebration. Throughout the year, Scouts from around the country will work within their communities to raise awareness about malaria, a leading killer in Africa.

BSA Chief Scout Executive Bob Mazzuca and Nothing But Nets Director Adrianna Logalbo launched the life-saving partnership today during a malaria workshop at Detroit Edison Public School Academy. Bill Gates Sr., Distinguished Eagle Scout and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Honorable Dave Bing, Mayor of Detroit and Deron Washington of the NBA’s Detroit Pistons, joined Mazzuca and Logalbo at the workshop to teach more than 65 local Scouts about malaria and how to help prevent the deadly disease.

“Every single day, in almost every community across the nation, Scouts are doing their part to make this world a better place by becoming good citizens. But our concern for others doesn’t stop at our borders. We are global citizens,” Mazzuca said. “Even during a challenging economic recession, it’s hard to imagine that nearly 3,000 people die every day from a preventable disease like malaria. We’re pleased to work with the UN Foundation’s Nothing But Nets campaign to help make a positive difference for the children in Africa.”

The Boy Scouts of America joined the Nothing But Nets campaign as part of its newly launched A Year of Celebration, A Century of Making a Difference program, one of eight major engagement programs the organization is undertaking as part of its 100th Anniversary Celebration. A Year of Celebration is a recognition program that rewards Scouts, leaders, and BSA alumni for devotion to five of Scouting’s core values: leadership, character, community service, achievement, and the outdoors. For the Year of Celebration service award, Scouts can choose to participate in the Nothing But Nets service project.

“We are pleased to partner with the Boy Scouts of America and see hundreds of youth leaders work together to raise malaria awareness and spread the message of how simple it is to prevent the disease,” Logalbo said. “This initiative is powered by passionate people, and we are grateful to have the Boy Scouts help us build support to prevent malaria in Africa.”

Through this partnership with Nothing But Nets, Scouts will help build awareness about malaria and prevention by conducting service projects such as removing standing water in parks–a breeding ground for mosquitoes–and creating educational tools and activities that illustrate the impact of malaria on the global community.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been a partner of the UN Foundation and its Nothing But Nets campaign since 2006 and is dedicated to eliminating malaria deaths. “It is wonderful to watch the Scouts reach out to help other young children in Africa,” Bill Gates Sr. said. “I am proud of the Boy Scouts’ dedication to service and welcome another great partner in the fight against malaria.”

Long-lasting, insecticide-treated bed nets are an easy and cost-effective method to help prevent malaria. Bed nets prevent malaria transmission by creating a protective barrier against mosquitoes at night, when the vast majority of transmissions occur. For more information about Nothing But Nets, visit www.NothingButNets.net.

About Nothing But Nets:
Nothing But Nets is a global, grassroots campaign to save lives by preventing malaria, a leading killer of children in Africa. Inspired by sports columnist Rick Reilly, more than 100,000 people have joined the campaign that was created by the United Nations Foundation in 2006. Founding campaign partners include the National Basketball Association’s NBA Cares, the people of The United Methodist Church, and Sports Illustrated. It costs just $10 to provide a long-lasting, insecticide-treated bed net to prevent this deadly disease. Visit www.NothingButNets.net to send a net and save a life.

About the Boy Scouts of America:
Serving nearly 4.1 million youth between the ages of 7 and 20, with more than 300 councils throughout the United States and its territories, the BSA is the nation’s foremost youth program of character development and values-based leadership training. The Scouting movement is composed of 1.2 million volunteers, whose dedication of time and resources has enabled the BSA to remain the nation’s leading youth-service organization. For more information on the BSA, please visit www.scouting.org.

More information about 100 Years of Scouting can be found at www.scouting.org/100years.

Press Contacts:
For media inquiries regarding the United Nations Foundation’s Nothing But Nets, contact:
Amy DiElsi
Communications Director, Children’s Health
(o) 202-419-3230 (c) 202-492-3078

For media inquiries regarding the Boy Scouts of America, contact
Nicole Selinger
(o) 314-982-0573 (c) 314-805-2165


End the hoaxes, part 1: Health care costs cause bankruptcies

August 17, 2009

Health care costs, especially coupled with lack of adequate insurance even for insured people, drove our nation to the brink of economic collapse.

We need health care reform now, to help get our economy back on its feet.

“Unless you’re a Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, you’re one illness away from financial ruin in this country,” says lead author Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., of the Harvard Medical School, in Cambridge, Mass. “If an illness is long enough and expensive enough, private insurance offers very little protection against medical bankruptcy, and that’s the major finding in our study.”

Woolhandler and her colleagues surveyed a random sample of 2,314 people who filed for bankruptcy in early 2007, looked at their court records, and then interviewed more than 1,000 of them. Health.com: Expert advice on getting health insurance and affordable care for chronic pain.

They concluded that 62.1 percent of the bankruptcies were medically related because the individuals either had more than $5,000 (or 10 percent of their pretax income) in medical bills, mortgaged their home to pay for medical bills, or lost significant income due to an illness. On average, medically bankrupt families had $17,943 in out-of-pocket expenses, including $26,971 for those who lacked insurance and $17,749 who had insurance at some point.

Overall, three-quarters of the people with a medically-related bankruptcy had health insurance, they say.

“That was actually the predominant problem in patients in our study — 78 percent of them had health insurance, but many of them were bankrupted anyway because there were gaps in their coverage like co-payments and deductibles and uncovered services,” says Woolhandler. “Other people had private insurance but got so sick that they lost their job and lost their insurance.” Health.com: Where the money goes — A breast cancer donation guide.

Personal bankruptcies played a large role in the banking crisis of late last year and early 2009.  Personal bankruptcies played a huge role in the collapse of mortgage securities markets, which prompted the banking crises.

If anything, current proposals do not go far enough in reforming insurance.

“To ignore the fact that medical costs are an underlying problem of the economic meltdown we’ve experienced would be to turn a blind eye to a significant problem that we can solve,” she said [Elizabeth Edwards, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress].

Edwards was joined by Steffie Woolhandler, a co-author of the Harvard study [discussed above] who sharply criticized current reform efforts.

“Private insurance is a defective product that leaves millions of middle-class families vulnerable to financial ruin. Unfortunately, the health reform plan now under consideration in the House would do little to address this grave problem,” Woolhandler said.

Without new legislation along the lines of the Democratic proposals in Congress, our nation faces economic doom.

Phony assertions of “death panels,” phony assertions of “creeping socialism,” phony claims about bad care in England, Canada and France, are all tools that help push our nation to economic failure.

Please do not be hoaxed.

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Straight talk: Berenbaum on DDT and malaria

August 12, 2009

Plus, she’ll answer your questions.

But hurry.

One of the world’s great authorities on mosquitoes, May Berenbaum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, spends this week talking about mosquitoes and malaria, and answering your questions.

Public Radio International runs a feature this week with Dr. Berenbaum answering questions.

(Hey, Beck!  Are you decent this week?)

(Steven Milloy?  Got the guts to ask a real scientist a question?)

You should see these first:

Life Cycle of Malaria, WHO and Campaign to Roll Back Malaria

Life Cycle of Malaria, WHO and Campaign to Roll Back Malaria

You like straight talk – why not share it with others?

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Think you have health insurance? Wrong

August 7, 2009

Baseline Scenario lays out the facts: People fear government reform of health care because they think it will interfere with their own health insurance.  Such people need to understand that they don’t have health insurance, and a broader government plan is the only saftey net they have to protect them from going naked against major health expenses.

Right now, it appears that the biggest barrier to health care reform is people who think that it will hurt them. According to a New York Times poll, “69 percent of respondents in the poll said they were concerned that the quality of their own care would decline if the government created a program that covers everyone.” Since most Americans currently have health insurance, they see reform as a poverty program – something that helps poor people and hurts them. If that’s what you think, then this post is for you.

You do not have health insurance. Let me repeat that. You do not have health insurance.

Just one more point in a series of misconceptions, misperceptions, and unwarranted listening to false claims about health care and legislation designed to save our tails.  James Kwak and others at The Baseline Scenario do a good job explaining economics in the U.S. today.  In this piece he makes the point that in terms of health care, we are all among “the poor” (save for those few of you who make more than $1 million a year and have done for the past decade).

Ask not for whom the health insurance reform bill tolls; it tolls for you.


Probably not the way to get a good reputation among scientists

July 19, 2009

Tensions between science and religion, and science and business, continue to drag down Texas’s hopes to be known as a major research location.

A hard look shows it’s not just the Deliverance-style local politics at the State Board of Education on science standards.  Texas has trouble in a lot of areas.

For example, imagine a hurricane wiped out the town where one of the state’s major medical schools resides, and in the aftermath, rather than working to preserve the jobs of professors who agree to come back to the damaged buildings and storm-wracked town, the university uses the troubles as an excuse to get rid of faculty — not bad faculty, necessarily, just faculty the administration doesn’t like, or doesn’t know, or just for the heck of it.

This ain’t no way to run a medical school.

The rolling disaster that hit the Universityof Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, starting with Hurricane Ike, continued through unexpected layoffs of faculty on top of the 3,000 people laid off due to storm damage.  The layoffs were unjustified, too, many thought, and so they appealed.  The appeals process seems to have offered only a semblance of justice, to many of those involved, according to an article in The Scientist (free subscription required).

The story hasn’t got much traction in Texas media.


Swine flu shuts down prisons: Let the prisoners out?

May 3, 2009

This headline from the Sacramento Bee sure caught my eye:

Swine flu case shuts down visits at all 33 state prisons

Of course, I read it too fast, and skipped over the word “visits.”  I had to click on the story to see whether they were going to tell the prisoners to stay at home for a week, like the Fort Worth, Texas, school district did.   I suppose, after a fashion, that was exactly the message.

At the Officer of the Receiver for California Prison Health Care Services, spokesman Luis Patino said Sunday that an inmate in Centinela State Prison in Imperial County was diagnosed as probable for the H1N1 virus, or swine flu.

“The inmate and his cellmate have been isolated, Patino said. “They remain at the prison.”

Whew!

Ticket sales for movies are way up in those areas where the schools are shut down — good news for the opening weekend of X-Men Origins:  Wolverine.

Maybe we’d be better off if the kids remained in school, as well as keeping the convicts in the prisons.

Is the panic over swine flu too much? If we go back to the week ending March 21, 2009, we find that there were already more than 22,000 cases of influenza in the U.S., with 35 pediatric deaths.  Has the swine flu added to either the rates of infection or the rates of death?  If the dramatic steps, the event cancellations and school closings, are appropriate for the swine flu, shouldn’t they have been appropriate for the other flu viruses, too?

Do we really need to close schools?  What do you think — tell us in comments.

See the CDC’s report on swine flu at their site:    H1N1 (Swine Flu)

Other resources:


McCain picked the wrong woman

September 3, 2008

We need judgment and wisdom in a vice president of the U.S., as well as in a president.

Judging from this open letter to Gov. Sarah Palin, Sen. John McCain picked the wrong woman.

So we do get to talk about your policies. And we do get to talk about hypocrisy. You asked us to repect your family’s privacy, but you won’t respect my family’s privacy to make our own decisions!

“Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that, as parents, we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned,” said Palin, 44, and her husband. “We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents.” They asked the media to respect their child’s privacy.

How come she gets to make a decision but the rest of the girls and women in America don’t! You won’t even let me learn in school about all the decisions I might need to make!

McCain could have used a woman like FrecklesCassie. Alas for McCain, she’s about 20 years too young.

Maybe he should have waited. At a minimum, he should have shopped around for someone with more common sense.


Nobels: Medicine prize for gene knockout tools

October 8, 2007

My general predictions about Nobel Prizes are way off after the first announcement today.

The London Telegraph announced it:

The Nobel prize for medicine is shared today by Mario Capecchi, Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies for their work on stem cells and genetic manipulation that has had a profound impact, from basic medical research to the development of new treatments.

Although stem cells are one of the hottest fields in science today for their potential for growing replacement cells and tissue for a wide range of diseases, the prestigious 10 million Swedish crown (£750,000) prize recognised the international team’s work for genetically manipulating stem cells to find out what genes do in the body and to provide animal versions of human disease to help hone understanding and test new treatments.

Capecchi was born in Italy and is a US citizen. Both Evans and Smithies are British-born. Sir Martin is known for his pioneering work on stem cells in mice, while Capecci and Smithies showed how genes could be modified.

The Nobel Committee press release gives their formal identification and affiliations:

Mario R. Capecchi, born 1937 in Italy, US citizen, PhD in Biophysics 1967, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA. Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics and Biology at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA.

Sir Martin J. Evans, born 1941 in Great Britain, British citizen, PhD in Anatomy and Embryology 1969, University College, London, UK. Director of the School of Biosciences and Professor of Mammalian Genetics, Cardiff University, UK.

Oliver Smithies, born 1925 in Great Britain, US citizen, PhD in Biochemistry 1951, Oxford University, UK. Excellence Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, USA.

My usual (and still standing) prediction is that most Nobel winners will be Americans, and educated in America’s public schools. Of the three announced today, one is Italian born (but a U.S. citizen now), and the other two are British.

Update: Turns out that Dr. Capecchi moved to the U.S. from Italy at the age of 9. Does anyone know where he went to elementary, junior high and high school?

Capecchi’s success belies his very difficult upbringing in war-torn Italy during World War II. At the age of four, he was separated from his mother, who was taken by the Gestapo to the Dachau concentration camp. For the next four-and-a half years, he lived on the streets, fending for himself by begging and stealing. The two reunited when Capecchi was nine, and they soon moved to the United States, where he began elementary school without knowing how to read or write or how to speak English.

More prizes to come.

Sources: