Are the interests of a future child a reason for bringing that child into existence? And is the continuance of our species justifiable in the face of our knowledge that it will certainly bring suffering to innocent future human beings? Read more
Author Archives: Jan
Links of Interest: Sperm donors, egg donors, and surrogates
Are Sperm Donors Really Anonymous Anymore? (Slate) In an age of sophisticated genetic testing, the concept of anonymity is rapidly fading. With some clever sleuthing—tests that can track down ancestral origins, donor numbers, and bits of biographical information—parents and offspring can find out the donors. “With DNA testing and Google, there’s no such thing as… Read more
My Daddy’s name is donor
What’s it like to have an anonymous sperm donor for a father? Many people think that because these young people resulted from wanted pregnancies, how they were conceived doesn’t matter to them. But … when they are adults, sperm donor offspring struggle with serious losses from being purposefully denied knowledge of, or a relationship with,… Read more
Understanding the Tea Party
National politics may well determine the future of health care. How to make sense of the angry rhetoric coming from the political right. While MSNCB runs antagonizing documentary footage of Joe McCarthy and Pat Buchanan, the New York Times publishes a thought-provoking essay by philosopher J.M. Bernstein. It’s called “The Very Angry Tea Party” (emphasis… Read more
Links of interest: Antibiotic resistance
Rising Plague (Brad Spellberg) Before getting to the numerous recent news items on antibiotic resistance and urinary tract infections, let me quote from Dr. Brad Spellberg’s Rising Plague: The Global Threat from Deadly Bacteria and Our Dwindling Arsenal to Fight Them. (In the following, “community-acquired” means an infection that begins outside a hospital, and fluoroquinolones… Read more
Overuse of antibiotics: A remote study (part 2)
The controversy about the overuse of antibiotics in raising livestock (see the last post) is background for an interesting scientific study that took place in the Galapagos. It looked at the spread of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria among animals that were totally removed from antibiotics. Would antibiotic resistance become widespread in the absence of… Read more
Overuse of antibiotics: Follow the money (part 1)
Unlike climate change, where there’s a large contingent of denialists who spread doubt about the scientific evidence, no one denies that antibiotic resistance is a problem. There is controversy, however, on the question of just how much the widespread use of antibiotics contributes to the problem. The mechanism is not in dispute: If you expose… Read more
Are some diseases more prestigious than others?
Among medical specialties, some are more prestigious than others. You can generally tell which ones are more prestigious by how well they pay. Surgery and cardiology, for example, rank at the top of the prestige scale. Psychiatry and dermatology are near the bottom. One can also ask if some diseases are considered more prestigious than… Read more
The oil spill: Why did it happen?
There’s a nice piece in The Atlantic on risk-taking behavior – something that applies to many aspects of life, not just how we treat the environment. (Emphasis added) How do such management disasters occur? The easy answer is, there’s a financial incentive for going forward, and a financial disincentive for holding back. Program managers are… Read more
Links of interest: Suicide
There is a great injustice at the heart of the whole process of exploiting cheap labor to make the must-have googaws for the world’s affluent. Every suicide at a Chinese factory is an exclamation point at the end of that last sentence. Both the Chinese and international media know this, and so do Apple and HP and Dell and Foxconn’s top CEO, Terry Gou. It just doesn’t look good when your employees start jumping out of windows in steadily increasing numbers. It is a sign that something is very, very wrong in how humans are organizing themselves on this planet. We don’t want to think about it when we’re playing with our smart phones, or reading the new Wired app on our iPads, but it’s the truth, and it bears constant investigation. Read more
Does astrology make predictions about climate change?
The South Dakota state legislature recently passed a resolution urging public schools to teach global warming as merely one of many scientific theories, definitely not a proven fact. The resolution cited a number of significant, interrelated dynamics affecting “world weather,” including “climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological” factors. It’s a good thing they pointed… Read more
Compression only CPR: Be the Beat
When someone is having a heart attack, bystanders (outside of a hospital) are encouraged to administer life-saving cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR). The traditional form of CPR involves a ratio of 30 chest compressions per minute alternating with two mouth-to-mouth rescue breaths. When I learned CPR, students were provided with a sealed, sterile cloth for covering the… Read more
The esteem of the medical profession: Then and now
Each issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association includes an excerpt from an issue of exactly 100 years ago. (JAMA has been published continuously since 1883.) The May 7, 1910 issue of JAMA included remarks on how much physicians were paid and, by implication, how they were regarded in 2250 B.C. Ability to… Read more
How Big Pharma plans to stay big
The days of exponential growth for the pharmaceutical industry are past. Sales growth has been leveling off since the 1990s. Companies simulate growth by buying smaller companies and firing employees. What will Big Pharma look like as it moves into the future? FierceBiotech provides a summary of a forecast offered by industry expert, Steven Burrill.… Read more
Suicide in Japan (part 2): The Internet and media coverage
There have always been people who wish they were dead, or who have thoughts about voluntary death. But nobody used to be directly encouraged to die. In conventional media, if somebody wrote or said: “I want to die”, the most probable answer was: “Hold on, don’t die!” On the contrary, in the Internet, everybody feels free to write whatever they please under a false name. The moment somebody mentions the intention of committing suicide, original words appear immediately and make their way to the suicide candidate. Horrible words and expressions such as “you are worthless”, “you are dead”, “you don’t deserve to live”, “the world is better off without you” start to appear. … In the Internet’s post modern world, words loose their link with the person responsible for them. … One of the most popular pages for the prevention of suicides had to lower the rule that users only could participate for a maximum 30 minutes, in order to prevent negative emotions from expanding.
Suicide in Japan (part 1): The recession
Some cultural factors exacerbate the problem: lack of religious prohibition against suicide, reluctance to discuss mental health and stress-related problems, a literary tradition that romanticizes suicide, a view of suicide as an honorable act, a way of taking responsibility for failure, among other issues. The breakdown of family and social networks and the increasing isolation of individuals contribute to the problem.
Justice triumphs for whistle-blowing Texas nurse
The wheels of justice may turn slowly, but for Anne Mitchell, the Texas nurse who was prosecuted for complaining about the unethical conduct of a doctor, justice is proceeding. The doctor in question, Rolando Arafiles, is about to be formally disciplined. (For background on this story, see Whistle blowing: Nurse Anne Mitchell vs. Dr. Arafiles.)… Read more
The Economist reviews Kaiser Permanente health care
The “newspaper” The Economist originates in London, but it has a wide circulation, with almost half of its subscribers in the US. A recent issue contained a lengthy opinion of the health care provider Kaiser Permanente (KP). Europeans tend to regard American health care with distain. French President Nicolas Sarkozy commented, after the passage of… Read more
Novartis gender discrimination verdict: Guilty as charged
The Novartis gender discrimination trial has concluded, and damages have been awarded to the plaintiffs. Novartis must pay $3.4 million in compensatory damages and $250 million in punitive damages. Highlights of the trial’s testimony included the behavior of one manager, Brian Aiello, who asked female sales reps to sit on his lap while he showed… Read more
What musical instruments convey about social class
Here’s an interesting observation on the associations between musical instruments and social class. It’s from Paul Fussell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (emphasis and paragraph breaks added). There seems no place where hierarchical status-orderings aren’t discoverable. Take musical instruments. In a symphony orchestra the customary ranking of sections recognizes the difficulty and… Read more
A generation obsessed with material wealth
From Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land: As recently as the 1970s, the idea that the point of life was to get rich and that governments existed to facilitate this would have been ridiculed: not only by capitalism’s traditional critics but also by many of its staunchest defenders. Relative indifference to wealth for its own… Read more
Links of interest: Sleep
Data Underload #18 – Sleep Schedule (Flowing Data) A picture worth a thousand words. Diagram of the hours of the day showing when we’re asleep and awake throughout the lifespan. Sleeping (or Not) by the Wrong Clock (The New York Times) When your sleep schedule is out of sync with the rest of the world,… Read more
Genetic testing: Walgreens says it will, and then it won’t
On Monday, news broke that Walgreens was about to announce a genetic test kit, available in stores starting on Friday. The kits would allow consumers to test for such things as how you respond to statins or blood-thinners; whether you carry genes for Tay-Sachs disease or cystic fibrosis; whether you have an increased risk for… Read more
Links of interest: Organic food
Organic Foods Slideshow: To Buy or Not to Buy Organic (WebMD) A slide show with advice on when to buy organic and when it’s OK to use conventionally grown fruits and vegetables. Peaches, apples, peppers, strawberries, pears, grapes, broccoli, and more.. Organic: What it means on different products (Los Angeles Times) Is the extra dollar… Read more
The new Chinese middle class and syphilis
In his recent book on the financial crisis, John Lanchester mentions China’s unprecedented economic growth, which has created a “hugely expanding, highly consuming new middle class.” China’s [middle class] went from 174 million to 806 million, arguably the greatest economic achievement anywhere on Earth, ever. Chinese personal income grew by 6.6 percent a year from… Read more
Antibiotic resistance genes in soil microbes
We’ve known for years that antibiotic resistant bacteria (ARB) are increasingly a problem in hospital settings. As the recently published (and excellent) book Superbug describes, ARB are also increasingly common in the community – in sports teams, prisons, and on pig farms, for example. A recent study finds that antibiotic resistance is on the increase… Read more
Is it OK to eat and drink during labor?
Sometimes childbirth – the hours spent in labor – can last a long time. You can get thirsty. Or hungry. Is it OK to eat and drink during labor? If not, why not? In any childbirth scenario there’s always the possibility that surgery – and general anesthesia — will be necessary. Under anesthesia there’s a… Read more
Are married people happier? Are parents?
These research findings, of course, fly in the face of our cultural dogma that proclaims it impossible for people to achieve an emotionally fulfilling and healthy life unless they become parents. And that’s a problem, because the vast majority of American men and women eventually have children, yet conditions in our society make it nearly impossible for them to reap all the emotional benefits of doing so.
Scientists confront political attacks on climate change
There’s a wonderful letter (PDF) in Science signed by 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences. It’s titled “Climate Change and the Integrity of Science,” and it’s not simply about climate change. It argues that politically motivated attacks on climate change threaten the very integrity of science. As the lead signer points out, since… Read more
Do children really need chocolate baby formula?
Should parents use chocolate milk to bribe toddlers to eat their vegetables? Mead Johnson’s chocolate-flavored “Toddler Formula” has received a decidedly mixed reaction from blogging moms, ranging from outrage to gratitude. Read more