My late father-in-law practiced psychiatry in the Midwest, and was—by any standard—brilliant. For one thing, he never received a grade lower than “A” from grammar school, all the way through his medical education… Continue reading
Category Archives: Public health miscellany
Meds Aren’t Always The Answer
Posted in Health, Medicine, Pharmaceuticals, Psychology, Public health miscellany
Tagged meds, psychiatry
Study: Austerity hurts Greek public health
Expect this to be used as ammo to attack U.S. budget cuts. Continue reading
Posted in Politics, Public health miscellany, Uncategorized
6 in 10 people worldwide lack access to flush toilets or other adequate sanitation
Why doesn’t the UN work on this? Continue reading
Posted in Public health miscellany
Licensing Naturopaths
Evidence-based medicine is becoming “outdated” and junk science is becoming more widespread than ever in healthcare — including medical guidelines, especially preventive wellness initiatives and public health policies. With poor science behind all too much of even accepted medical practice, the most irrational pseudoscience is no longer easy low-hanging fruit to stop. Continue reading
Posted in Health, Public health miscellany
Public health at Harvard
Harvard just announced its latest public health course, “Human Health and Global Environmental Change”: Continue reading
Posted in Climate Change, Health, Public health miscellany
Correlations are not causations — except at universities and in public policy?
Beginning with a false premise, university researchers dredged computer simulation studies looking at associations (risk factors) and reported that one of the variables could be causal. This, it appears, now passes for science and support for public policies. Continue reading
The new healthcare rules finally revealed
At literally the eleventh hour — 11:45pm EST — on Tuesday night, just before the start of the Thanksgiving holiday break, the Obama administration released its new health care guidelines under Obamacare. Continue reading
Posted in Health, Public health miscellany, Risk assessment
Beware of the cat: Britain’s hidden toxoplasma problem
New research shows 350,000 Britons a year are being infected with pet-borne parasite linked with schizophrenia and increased suicide risk Continue reading
Hunting for the deadliest prey in the jungle: viruses
We are on the brink of a new pandemic age, warns the Indiana Jones of pathogens. And what he finds in the wilderness could destroy our cities, he tells Mark Piesing. Continue reading
Posted in Public health miscellany
Spraying for West Nile Moves to Manhattan
For only the third time in a decade, the city’s Department of Health will shift its spraying of pesticides into Manhattan. The action is aimed at killing mosquitoes and preventing West Nile virus and the rarer, but deadlier, eastern equine encephalitis (EEE). Continue reading
Posted in Pesticides, Public health miscellany
Tagged disease vectors, vector control
Gene Blues
Autism, as anyone who has ever written about the topic can attest, is a subject that provokes strong reactions. So it was no shock when a recent Nature study that clarified the well-established link between paternal age and a child’s risk for autism and schizophrenia got lots of attention. What was surprising was how that news, which one of the study’s lead authors described as “sort of a little bit of our side story,” obscured the implications of the paper’s main findings—namely, that the genetic health of the species is now facing a serious threat. Continue reading
Posted in Autism, Public health miscellany
Aerial spraying appears to have curbed West Nile-carrying mosquitoes, Dallas council told
The aerial pesticide spraying program over Dallas County appears to have reduced the number of mosquitoes that can carry the West Nile virus, at least according to preliminary findings detailed for the Dallas City Council on Monday. Continue reading
Posted in Pesticides, Public health miscellany
Tagged disease vectors, vector control
How to get drug companies to put needs before profits
Oh this is such a superficially attractive idea – and so seriously stupid. Either we all pay a lot of additional taxes for basic medical research or we allow companies the potential for big profits commensurate with the risk investors are underwriting (and since basic medical research involves enormous costs to bring a new drug to market – and many more failures than successes – that necessarily means mind-boggling profits must be on offer to make the risk worthwhile). Don’t be seduced by the siren call of altruistic medicine – it basically means no medicine. Seriously bad idea. Continue reading
Mike Shaw: 29 billion reasons to lie about cholesterol
Justin Smith published a book with that title in 2009, and next month, the movie will be released. In the meantime, check out the many resources on his website. Continue reading
Rep. Brian P. Bilbray and Dr. John C. Reed: ‘We choose to end cancer’
As laudable as their aims may be this is misguided. The “war on cancer” has been a major failure and the money for the most part could have been far more effectively applied elsewhere. Worse, much of the available research money and effort is squandered on fashionable maladies (big voting block, women, better really care about breast cancer, even though it’s a lousy way to allocate funding and effort). As it happens the “choice to end cancer” was made several decades ago but the problem has proven less tractable than the relatively simple engineering challenge of going to the moon. Continue reading
Build a Better Toilet to Get Rich and Popular
A sustainable, energy-producing toilet for developing countries has meant a flood of phone calls–and an investment from Bill Gates Continue reading
Posted in Development, Public health miscellany, Water pollutiuon
Tagged potable water, sanitation
Dallas Deploys Old Weapon In New Mosquito Fight
The recent outbreak of West Nile virus in the Dallas area has led to a new round of large-scale spraying for mosquitoes — a method of treating outbreaks that has generations of success, and even nostalgia, behind it. Continue reading
How £11bn pledged for water sanitation aid never arrived
Tens of millions denied access to clean water as cash for projects is not paid out Continue reading
Nutrient-boosted Golden Rice should be embraced
ONE of the more unedifying aspects of the fight over genetically modified food has been the unbending opposition of Greenpeace and others to rice that has been modified to help prevent blindness. Golden Rice contains a precursor of vitamin A, deficiency of which blinds an estimated half a million children every year. Continue reading
Nutrient-boosted foods protect against blindness
THERE’S a new weapon in the battle against blindness, and it’s bright orange. A sweet potato bred naturally to contain loads more beta carotene than its traditional counterparts has helped stave off vitamin A deficiency in thousands of Ugandans. The announcement comes as other results confirm that beta-carotene-packed genetically modified rice can also boost dietary vitamin A effectively. Beta carotene is converted into vitamin A in the body. Continue reading
