Majikthise

Cops tase 82-year-old heart patient in bed

RCMP officers used a taser to subdue an 82-year-old man in his hospital bed in Kamloops, B.C. last week. The man had become delusional and pulled a knife out of his pocket, police and nurses say. When he refused to drop the knife, the officers tased him three times.

I realize that anyone with a blade is potentially dangerous. I wouldn't expect the officers to try to wrest the knife from the guy. But surely there was a better solution to this problem.

Tasers can kill by disrupting the electrical conduction apparatus of the heart. Even apparently healthy adults and teenagers have died this way. Tasering an 82-year-old heart patient on oxygen seems especially dangerous.

[HT: Pandagon]

Anti-choicers want to ban the Pill

At least they finally came right out and said so.

So, happy Griswold v. Connecticut to you too, American Life League. You're cranks, but you're forthright cranks.
 

Obama on obesity

Meowser takes exception to a recent comment by Barack Obama's claim during a recent Democratic debate that that "[i]f we could go back to the obesity rates of 1980 we could save the Medicare system a trillion dollars."

In this election season, Meowser has some questions about how far this crop of Democrats is willing to go to control obesity:

[W]e have an election coming up next year, and strictly from a fat perspective, I worry about who is going to replace [Bush]. When I found out Barack Obama (much like Hillary Clinton, who has made similar remarks in the past) wanted to disappear me solely because of my weight in order to save the government money, I had to ask: Just how far are they willing to go to make that a reality?

I find this rhetoric offensive. The United States government really is disappearing untold numbers of people, and not because they're fat. (Cf. Stephen Grey's Ghost Plane, an outstanding book that I plan to review soon.)    

Meowser continues:

But I still think I have a right to know just how much agency they are willing to remove from people—and especially fatasses like myself—in the name of "health care cost containment." You'd think the Democrats would be all about personal agency and individual freedom. They damn well ought to be. But I'm afraid that when it comes to nosing around in people's body autonomy, they're just as guilty as the people they want to replace; they just want to nose around in a different part of our bodies, that's all.

Here are some questions I'd love to see asked during Presidential debates (and not just of Democrats):

"Do you believe in reducing the number of fat people by any means necessary? What if people really make an effort to exercise and 'eat right' but are still 'obese'? Do you favor requiring them to have bariatric surgery, or putting them in weight-reduction prisons, or having a police state in which people get their homes broken into and their pantries cleaned out and forced at gunpoint to work out until they drop, or being barred from all restaurants and grocery stores and all public places until they slim down? How far are you willing to go?"

Who said anything about stripping people of agency, let alone disappearing anyone?

If politicians are making hateful or false statements about fat people, they deserve to be called out on their prejudice. However, Meowser hasn't offered any evidence that Obama or Clinton is doing any such thing. She's railing at Obama for an empirical claim about the relationship between health care costs and obesity, and assailing Clinton because she voted for nutrition grants and exercise promotion.

These candidates haven't said anything about people who are already fat needing to diet, much less to disappear. Clinton's bill was aimed at promoting healthy lifestyles across the board. We don't know what Obama has in mind, but we shouldn't assume that he's calling on anyone to diet. He was talking about reducing obesity rates to what we saw in the 1980s through prevention. That could mean preventing obesity through healthy school lunches, phys ed, and grants for bike paths.

As far as health policy is concerned, it would be a mistake to fixate on obesity itself as the primary threat. The rapidly increasing prevalence of obesity is just one very visible symptom of much more widespread public health problems, including poor nutrition and insufficient excercise.

Experts disagree about the extent to which excess body fat itself causes health problems
However, there's no doubt that high calorie, low nutrient diets will eventually cause weight gain in a large percentage of the population. We know that poor nutrition and inactivity are harmful, even to those who don't gain weight. What isn't showing up on your abs may very well be collecting in your arteries.

So, the increasing prevalence of obesity is genuinely worrisome, if only because it appears to be linked to deteriorating diets and declining activity levels on a societal level. Weight isn't a good indicator of individual health. However, it is troubling to see entire populations getting heavier, at younger ages.

Clearly, the answer isn't to identify people who weigh "too much" and harangue them to lose weight.  If individual bootstrapping worked, the burgeoning diet and fitness industries would have already addressed the problem one consumer at a time.

We often talk about obesity as if fat people have a problem and everyone else is A-OK. That's a dangerous form of self-delusion. We're ignoring the ways in which our entire society has become less healthy since the 1980s. As a society we're driving more and sleeping less. We're awash in high fructose corn syrup because we subsidize too many Iowa corn farmers. Schools are shortening recess and cutting out PE while adding vending machines to generate badly-needed revenue.

Politicians should be encouraged to talk about public health issues. Their health policies should be judged on their merits. If Obama and Clinton are scheming to deprive fat people of their agency, let's see the evidence.

[NB: I don't want to hear any hateful comments about weight or body shape. Take that bullshit somewhere else.]

Antidepressant lengthens worm lifespan

How interesting...

"An antidepressant drug lengthens tiny worms' lives and offers hope of humans living longer too, US scientists say.

In the study, detailed in journal Nature, nematode worms were exposed to 88,000 chemicals in turn and mianserin extended lifespan by almost a third.

The drug seems to mimic the effects on the body of the only known animal long-life regime - virtual starvation. [BBC]"

Mianserin is a tricyclic antidepressant. Molecule shown above.

The researchers don't know why worms exposed to mianserin lived about 30% longer than their untreated counterparts. The researchers took an empirical approach, exposing worms to thousands of different small molecules and noting the effects on survical. Head researcher Linda Buck of the Howard Hughs Medical Institute shared some preliminary hypotheses with Science Daily:

Buck said it was a surprise to find that a drug used to treat depression in humans could extend lifespan in worms. The researchers in Buck's lab found that in addition to inhibiting certain serotonin receptors in the worm, it also blocked receptors for another neurotransmitter, octopamine.

A number of observations support the idea that serotonin and octopamine may complement one another in a physiological context, Buck explained, with serotonin signaling the presence of food and octopamine signaling its absence or a state of starvation. C. elegans, for instance, usually only lays eggs when food is on hand. But serotonin stimulates egg laying in the absence of food, while octopamine inhibits egg laying even when food is nearby. Another example of interplay between the two chemicals is that pharyngeal pumping, the mechanism by which worms ingest food, is jump-started by serotonin and thwarted by octopamine.

"In our studies, mianserin had a much greater inhibitory effect on the serotonin receptor than the octopamine receptor," she said. "One possibility is that there is a dynamic equilibrium between serotonin and octopamine signaling and the drug tips the balance in the direction of octopamine signaling, producing a perceived, though not real, state of starvation that activates aging mechanisms downstream of dietary restriction." [SD]

Another birth control foe to head major federal family planing program

Once again, the nation's birth control czar is anti-birth control.

Emily Douglas of RHRealityCheck reports that Susan Orr, Ph.D. has been named the new acting deputy assistant secretary for the Office for Population Affairs.

Prior to taking the job with OPA, Orr served as the head of the Children's Bureau in the Administration on Children, Youth and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Before she joined George W. Bush's DHHS, Orr was the senior director for marriage and family care at the ultra-conservative Family Research Council. While at FRC Orr co-wrote a booklet entitled "Building the Culture of Life."

Here's what Orr had to say about a bill that would have made contraception a mandatory part of health insurance:

"The mask of choice is falling off," says Susan Orr, a policy expert with the Family Research Council.  "It's not about choice.  It's not about health care.  It's about making everyone collaborators with the culture of death." [Weekly Standard, 10/2/2002, p17.]

Orr's resume also includes a stint as an adjunct professor at Pat Robertson's Regent University.

She also worked for the libertarian Reason Public Policy Institute, where she was the project director for a 1998 study entitled Blueprint for the Privatization of Child Welfare. Her essay Real Women Stay Married was published in Washington Watch in 2000.

Emily Douglas of RHRC writes:

In 2001, when President Bush proposed eliminating the requirement that federal employees' health insurance offer a range of options for birth control coverage, Dr. Orr, then the senior director for marriage and families at the Family Research Council, told the Washington Post, "We're quite pleased because fertility is not a disease. It's not a medical necessity that you have [contraception]."

According to People for the American Way's eyewitness report of the 2001 CPAC Conference...

Dr. Susan Orr of the Family Research Council cheered President Bush's revocation of the "Mexico City Policy" as proof that he is pro-life "in his heart" and urged that his administration move quickly to revoke approval for RU-486 and enforce O.S.H.A. standards in abortion clinics.

Last year, Orr received an alumni award from her alma mater, the University of Dallas. Here's an excerpt from the official press release, praising Orr for her efforts on behalf of Teen Choice, a "pro-abstinence nonprofit organization":

Orr has been Associate Commissioner of the Children’s Bureau in the Administration for Children and Families of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services since 2001. At the helm of the oldest federal agency focused on the welfare of children, Orr oversees a budget of $8 billion. Orr combines her career as an advocate for foster care and free adoption with community service efforts as a member of the board of directors for Teen Choice, a pro-abstinence nonprofit organization. [10/28/05]

I'm trying to determine whether Teen Choice of DC is the same organization as ULTRA Teen Choice. Here's the ULTRA Teen Choice website--the Guard Your Diamond art is quite something...

This isn't the first time the Bush administration has installed a vocal opponent of birth control as the nation's birth control czar. This time, they've gone one better, choosing a person who opposes government funding in general and birth control in particular.

A few months ago, Larisa Alexandrovna and I exposed some of the dubious professional qualifications of the last confirmed Deputy Assistant Secretary, Dr. Eric Keroack.   

Ostensibly, Keroack's main qualification for managing the $283 million Title X women's health care program was his two decades of experience as OB-GYN.

It was later learned that he let his specialty certification lapse without informing his bosses at Health and Human Services. At the time of his confirmation, he was also under investigation by the Massachusetts medical licensing authorities, including allegations of Medicaid fraud. Finally, documents obtained by Raw Story show that Keroack was unable to prove that he completed the continuing medical education required to keep his license in MA.

In fact, Keroack was probably chosen to run Title X because of his bone fides in the anti-choice community. He pioneered the use of medically unnecessary ultrasounds at phony reproductive health clinics. He also traveled the nation, lecturing about how sexually promiscuous women fry their brains with their own hormones, illustrating his points with slides of Looney-Tunes characters.

My Raw Story colleague Jason Rhyne also has a piece about Susan Orr today.

Another interesting factoid: Orr is the author of Jerusalem and Athens: Reason and Revelation in the Work of Leo Strauss, published in 1995 by Rowman and Littlefield. She also wrote a chapter on the implications of Straussian philosophy for welfare policy.

If You Have Had MRSA...

...then please take this survey (it's anonymous). The survey designers are trying to understand more about about the concerns of people affected by MRSA. The survey should take about 25 minutes to complete. Also, if your blog can handle it, please think about posting the link

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Influenza and Low Hanging Fruit

In response to this post about annual influenza (also crossposted here), I received several emails and comments that missed the whole point (I'll take the blame for that). I am not denigrating the importance of 'other' diseases. AIDS and cancer are worth curing and preventing. My point about influenza is that preventing most of the deaths can be thought of as 'low-hanging fruit.'

Unlike AIDS or various cancers (there is no single 'cancer'), we don't need a medical or technological breakthrough that might or might not happen. We also don't need behavioral modification, such as STD awareness or smoking cessation campaigns. And, while behavioral modification is worth pursuing, the number of lives saved is relatively modest compared to vaccination (it's not like AIDS or lung cancer have gone away).

With annual influenza, all we need is more vaccine stuck into the appropriate people. There's no new technology to develop (although cell-based culture would be an improvement). Once a person is vaccinated, there's no behavioral modification needed. We could have an effective vaccination strategy up and running in two to five years (being a pessimist, I'll say five). A couple of years to increase vaccine production facilities, two years to work out the distribution kinks, and year five, it works.

There are very few problems can be solved solely by throwing buckets of money at them (although buckets of money are either helpful or necessary). Annual influenza is one of those problems than can be solved simply by investing more resources. That's why this is so frustrating: it is utterly within our power to save roughly 28,000 lives per year, and yet we fail to do so.

Crossposted at Mike the Mad Biologist

'Ordinary' Influenza: A Public Health Failure

This post by ScienceBlogling revere about the horrendous human cost of influenza is getting some serious exposure.  This gives me an excuse to mention something I haven't in a long time:

Stop worrying about avian influenza.  Get serious about 'ordinary' influenza.

Why?  Last year, 'ordinary' influenza killed roughly 36,000 U.S. residents.  That's about equal to breast cancer which kills 40,000 annually.  Before the polio vaccine, the polio virus killed 3,000 people annually, and, even if you adjust for population increases, that number would be roughly 9,000 in today's terms. HIV/AIDS kills about 18,000 U.S. residents annually. That means, in the U.S., for every person who died from AIDS, two people died from influenza. With AIDS and breast cancer, people run, walk, jump, skip, and pogo stick for The Cure. Lots of bleeping ribbons. But influenza is a silent killer.

And most of those deaths could be prevented.

I've described elsewhere how a sane vaccination strategy could lower influenza deaths by eighty percent--that's over 28,000 lives.  And we don't need to piously invoke Hope for a Cure.  We just have to vaccinate more people--and the right ones.  It's that simple.

Could you even imagine the kind of pandimensional shitstorm that would ensue if we could reduce AIDS or breast cancer by eighty percent, and we didn't, simply because we couldn't get it together?

For a long time, I was willing to support the concern about avian influenza because I figured that the steps needed to prepare for avian influenza could be 'repurposed' for ordinary influenza. All of the things we'll need to stop a pandemic are the same things we can use every year to treat the annual influenza outbreak: the ability to rapidly produce hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine, a serious distribution system (actually, having a system would be helpful), and educating people about proper public hygiene.

None of that has happened. We don't produce enough vaccine to adequately vaccinate the U.S. population against the annual epidemic (we would need roughly 200 million doses), and that's a reflection of our 'surge' capability, so good luck if an avian pandemic happens.

But what's truly scandalous is our vaccination strategy--or lack thereof. Let's leave aside the fact that people actually have to pay money to receive a vaccine against a disease that kills 36,000 people annually.

Actually, rattle that last sentence around in your noggin.  For that not to be utterly insane, you have to have Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged shoved so far up your ass that it's sticking out of your mouth.

And the people who are vaccinated are the wrong people. Yes, elderly people should receive the influenza vaccine because it reduces their likelihood of death by about thirty percent. The focus on the elderly, however, ignores a basic, albeit Yogi Berra-esque, rule of viral transmission: the best way to avoid getting influenza is to not come in contact with people who have it. In other words, we have to vaccinate those who spread the disease: medical workers, nursing home patients and staff, and children aged 5-18. Studies indicate that vaccinating seventy percent of children aged 5-18 could reduce influenza deaths by up to eighty percent.  In other words, the grandchildren are killing their grandparents.

All that requires is enough vaccine and a system to get it to the people who need to take it (for children, it's called schools).  Since we can't even do this right, even though we know that we will have an ordinary influenza 'epidemic' every year, I don't think we stand a chance against a real pandemic. 

The reason we haven't implemented these simple steps, I think, is because we've been far too focused on avian influenza. Quite simply, people don't really care about avian influenza. They're too focused on trying to get by, not losing their jobs, and, to use El Jefe Maximo's phrase, "putting food on their family." Worrying about something that might happen isn't even on their radar screens in any serious sense*.

We need to stop focusing on a possible pandemic, and start focusing on the annual epidemic. Because right now, we're not prepared for either.

*Of course, if you ask people, they'll state they're worried, but not enough to do anything about it, which is what matters.

Crossposted at Mike the Mad Biologist

Perverse Justice: Padilla, solitary, and the brain

My latest column for In These Times is up.

It's about how solitary confinement and coercive interrogation destroyed Jose Padilla's mental faculties.

Medical examiner who ID'd Dr. Mengele dies

Leslie Lukash, the medical examiner who helped identify the remains of the notorious Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele has died at the age of 86.

Lukash was the chief medical examiner for Nassau County for 46 years.