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in order to build the disease networks of tomorrow, we will need to move beyond the current linear approaches to science and to how scientists work. We all like a good story that unfolds in a straightforward way, but the story of disease plays out across a poly-nodal information network, similar to what an air traffic controller might track in the skies above a major airport. Biomedical researchers’ “lock and key” and linear-pathway representations are incomplete, and should be supplemented with disease maps that can now be built using molecular data.
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Cultural barriers are the real stumbling block. As humans, we are highly evolved to adjust to our surroundings: we tend to adapt to a culture, well-conceived or not, and lose sight of its failings.
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We must also build the infrastructure and cultivate the relationships needed to share disease maps with basic researchers, practicing doctors, drug developers, and even the public at large. And that could prove to be even more difficult, because the current closed nature of the medical-information system and its self-directed incentive structure block such sharing. Patents, trademarks, and competition for resources (people, money, and accolades) seal off information and prevent molecular data from being analyzed and shared. Rewards in biomedical research go to “solo workers,” and do nothing to acknowledge the work that can be done only by multi-functional groups.
Particle emissions into Earth’s atmosphere affect both human health and the climate. So we should limit them, right? For health reasons, yes, we should indeed do that; but, paradoxically, limiting such emissions would cause global warming to increase
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according to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the cooling effect of white particles may counteract as much as about half of the warming effect of carbon dioxide. So, if all white particles were removed from the atmosphere, global warming would increase considerably.
CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe dilemma is that all particles, whether white or black, constitute a serious problem for human health. Every year, an estimated two million people worldwide die prematurely, owing to the effects of breathing polluted air. Furthermore, sulfur-rich white particles contribute to the acidification of soil and water.
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Naturally, measures targeting soot and other short-lived particles must not undermine efforts to reduce CO2 emissions. In the long term, emissions of CO2 and other long-lived greenhouse gases constitute the main problem. But a reduction in emissions of soot (and other short-lived climate pollutants) could alleviate the pressures on the climate in the coming decades.
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It is difficult to communicate medical risk to a large audience, especially when official recommendations conflict with emotional narratives. That is why, when the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) in 2009 presented its guidelines for breast cancer screening, which recommended against routine screenings for asymptomatic women in their 40’s and biennial, rather than annual, mammograms for women over 50, the public responded with confused fury.
Illustration by Paul Lachine
CommentsThe key to understanding this response is to be found in the nebulous zone between mathematics and psychology. People’s discomfort with the findings stemmed largely from faulty intuition: if earlier and more frequent screening increases the likelihood of detecting a possibly fatal cancer, then more screening is always desirable. If more screening can detect breast cancer in asymptomatic women in their 40’s, wouldn’t it also detect cancer in women in their 30’s? And, if so, why not, reductio ad absurdum, begin monthly mammograms at age 15?
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The USPSTF recently issued an even sharper warning about the prostate-specific antigen test for prostate cancer, after concluding that the test’s harms outweigh its benefits. Chest X-rays for lung cancer and Pap tests for cervical cancer have received similar, albeit less definitive, criticism.
CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe next step in the reevaluation of cancer screening was taken last year, when researchers at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy announced that the costs of screening for breast cancer were often minimized, and that the benefits were much exaggerated. Indeed, even a mammogram (almost 40 million are given annually in the US) that detects a cancer does not necessarily save a life.
CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe Dartmouth researchers found that, of the estimated 138,000 breast cancers detected annually in the US, the test did not help 120,000-134,000 of the afflicted women. The cancers either were growing so slowly that they did not pose a problem, or they would have been treated successfully if discovered clinically later (or they were so aggressive that little could be done).
A year after the Fukushima reactor catastrophe, we can start to estimate its effects on people’s medical and mental health. Curiously, it’s the mental impact that we can predict best. As a recent Green Blog post by Matthew Wald explained, the medical effects are expected to be too weak and widely dispersed to measure. According to one theory, the increased radiation received by hundreds of thousands of citizens will cause an increase in their cancer rate — but an increase too tiny to detect amid the large number of cancers that will occur anyway. According to a rival theory, radiation at these low levels will cause scarcely any cancers at all. Scientists just don’t know.
The psychological impact, however, is plain. Precisely because damage from very-low-level radiation cannot be detected, people exposed to it are left in anguished uncertainty. Many believe they have been fundamentally contaminated for life. They may refuse to have children for fear of birth defects. They may be shunned by others who fear a sort of mysterious contagion.
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Such great psychological danger does not accompany other materials that put people at risk of cancer and other deadly illness. Visceral fear is not widely aroused by, for example, the daily emissions from coal burning, although, as a National Academy of Sciences study found, this causes 10,000 premature deaths a year among Americans. It is only nuclear radiation that bears a huge psychological burden — for it carries a unique historical legacy.
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To be sure, people knew that nuclear energy had a good side. Already in the 1950s, radiation therapy was saving lives by the million. But thoughts of “good atoms” were overwhelmed by the terrors of the Cold War. Outcries against bomb tests focused on the radioactive materials they spread around the world on the winds. Debates over fallout shelters offered an image of a dead planet scourged by radioactive dust. In short, fear of nuclear war drove home images of radiation as an insidious contamination that was uniquely deadly on a global scale.
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A Christian organisation in Bath has been asked to take down claims stating that God can heal certain illnesses after a complaint from an "unofficial adviser to the media".
The Advertising Standards Authority accused Healing on the Streets (HOTS) of giving false hope to the sick, preventing those with specific illnesses including cancer, asthma, and other conditions from seeking medical assistance due to their prayer claims.
for the less well educated, the risk of dying goes down as church attendance goes up. As you would expect.
Surprisingly, however, for the educated the effect is exactly opposite! Educated people who go to church often are actually more likely to die young!
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Sherkat puts this down to the double-edged effects of religious teaching on healthy behaviour.
On the one hand, it encourages abstinence from harmful drugs like tobacco and alcohol. That's great for the ill-educated who may not know any better (or be motivated to abstain). But not so much use for the educated, who have had the risks drummed into them and who are unlikely to overdo the booze and fags in the first place.
On the other hand, it tends to undermine science and evidence-based medicine. That might be particularly a problem for the educated, who might otherwise be expect to know better.
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One possibility is that people are turning to alternative medicine because their needs are not being met by traditional medicine. As the late medical historian Roy Porter was fond of pointing out, before the 20th century this certainly was the case.4 Medical historians, in fact, are in agreement that until well into the 20th century it was safer not to go to a doctor, thus leading to the success of such nonsense as homeopathy—a totally worthless nostrum that did no harm, thus allowing the body to heal itself.
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Another explanation may be found in examining what CAMers are offering that mainstream physicians are not: TLC. By this I do not just mean a hand squeeze or a hug, but an open and honest relationship with patients and their families that provides a realistic assessment of the medical condition and prospects. People are going alternative because in too many instances physicians have become highly skilled technicians—cogs in the cold machinery and massive bureaucracy of modern HMO medicine.
I witnessed the effect directly over the course of a decade during my mother’s recurring and malignant meningioma brain tumors. She finally succumbed, but in the process I gained a deeper understanding of why people turn to alternative medicine. Don’t get me wrong—my mother’s doctors were brilliant, her care the very best available, and we have no regrets about what might have been. And that’s the point. Even under such ideal conditions I found the whole experience frustrating and unfulfilling: it was nearly impossible to get honest and accurate information about my mom’s condition; neither my father nor I could get doctors to return our calls; misinformation and (usually) no information was the norm; and despite my best efforts, the relationship with her physicians (with one exception—her oncologist whom I befriended), could not have been more detached.
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An article in the May Consumer Reports Health shed some light on this question. It discussed the widely publicized medical study that showed, contrary to expectations, that “raising HDL (good) cholesterol with drugs did nothing to protect against heart attacks.” This, the article said, was surprising because observational studies had shown that people with lower levels of HDL had more heart attacks than those with higher levels of HDL. An observational study, however, shows only a correlation between two variables (e.g., level of HDL and number of heart attacks). The new result came from a randomized clinical study, using one group of patients who receive a given treatment and a “control group” of patients who do not. Unlike an observational study, such a study can show whether or not, for example, higher HDL actually prevents heart attacks. The article went on to emphasize that “we should almost never rely on the results of observational studies, which can only suggest associations with disease but not prove them.”
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implicit in most media reports, is that acting on the results of the unreliable observational studies “couldn’t hurt and might help.” This makes sense if I have a medical problem for which there is no reliable remedy. If nothing else has helped my arthritis, insomnia or back pain, it would make perfect sense to try a remedy that will not do serious harm and has some probability of working.
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Dr. Okumu has discovered that malaria-carrying mosquitoes gather on dirty-sock-smell four times more than they gather on humans. So putting in some old socks — or a synthetic equivalent — will make this mosquito-trapping device really effective. Okumu says that feet are one of the key sources of the odor which allows mosquitoes to identify humans.
The last time James Bond was seen puffing away on screen (when he was still played by Pierce Brosnan), the anti-smoking lobby were outraged at such blatant glorification of nicotine. No mention was made of his serial promiscuity, nor that he drove his car in excess of the speed limit, or even his relish for killing good, honest Russians. But lighting up in public? How dare he? For Simon Clark, spokesman for Forest (the Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco), this merely illustrates just how mad the world has become.
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"Presumably you wouldn't be able to get away with: 'If you're fat, you're ugly', because that would be rude; insensitive. Nevertheless, it's become perfectly acceptable to persecute, and denigrate, smokers. But it shouldn't be. It's wrong."
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"We live today in an over-regulated society in which the government interferes in every level of our lives," he says. "This used to be a nanny state. It's a bullying one now. I was in Austria recently for a smokers' conference and it was all so fantastically civilised. The coffee houses have indoor smoking areas, but they also have something else we don't: decent ventilation. That's all we need. As a non-smoker, I can tell you that the smoke didn't bother me, nor any of my fellow non-smokers. We all sat side-by-side. Now, tell me, why can't we live like that?"
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The Environmental Working Group (EWG) has recently released a report listing the “Dirty Dozen” and the “Clean 15″ of fruits and veggies, giving consumers an idea of which foods have been found to be most contaminated with chemicals. Although EWG clearly states that eating any fruits and veggies is definitely better than eating none, the Group aims to give concerned shoppers some knowledge for the produce isle. Their methods involve poring over studies published by the FDA and USDA, tallying findings and making them more accessible to the often blind-sided consumer.
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it has become standard practice to maximize the yield of produce without regard for its quality, as is a well-known fact in the meat industry — this may seem to feed more people, but if one apple now carries the overall benefit of, say, half a healthy specimen (as an arbitrary example), how many apples does one really need to eat? Would it not be better to grow high-quality, nutritiously dense produce with a smaller yield? Even genetically-modified produce which is bred to resist pests poses problems — despite GM produce being in use, pesticide use has not decreased, in fact, it has increased. These products may still be susceptible to other pests, or have problems all their own.
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Although pesticides are used to get an adequate amount of produce to consumers at ‘reasonable’ prices, and the residual levels on produce are ‘below government limits’, the fact remains that consumers are swallowing synthetic chemicals. After knowing the facts, one can only be the judge for oneself. What it may come down to, is consumers’ desire for a ‘perfect berry‘, fruit, etc. — if we change our opinion of what produce “should” look like to what it truly is in nature (does the human beauty industry ring a bell here?), we may solve some of these problems .
A new study revealed that in 2007, the U.S. was seriously behind when it came to life expectancy. Canada and Japan have enjoyed increases in life expectancy every year, yet the States’ numbers actually reversed — for the first time since the Spanish flue epidemic of 1918! The Florida coast, California, Hawaii and the Northeast are doing pretty well, but there are counties sprinkled in everywhere which appear to be struggling; in fact, eight out of every 10 counties are lagging when it comes to keeping pace with health statistics.
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Experts believe that these dismal numbers — the first decrease since the early 1900′s — are due to a lack of preventative care. Many don’t have health insurance, delaying visits to the doctor and not having adequate education or resources to live healthy in the times between. Appalachia, the Deep South and Texas have some of the lowest life expectancies in the country.
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Flue shots, breast examinations and colonoscopies may save a lot of lives, but some people don’t have the means to get these done; until the disparity of health care is narrowed, these procedures may be lacking for certain populations. This study may make policy-makers in the States take heed, but until then it is up to families themselves to take healthy living into their hands — a healthy food movement may be the answer, as good-quality fresh fruits and vegetables can provide the ‘preventative care’ physicians say is lacking. Check out your county in the maps below, and skip the MickyD’s next time. You can find full-size maps at the end of the study.
While the belief that prolonged close-up activities like reading and playing computer games cause short sightedness (myopia) is popularly held, new research indicates that a deficiency of sunlight is the true culprit.
Many epidemiological studies have examined the issue of computer, video and television based activities on the eye health of children and have found no association between time spent using digital media and the development of myopia. While it is an intuitive association to make, it simply has not been confirmed. There are some studies that have found an association between the time spent doing near-work activities such as reading and studying, but the results are inconsistent and marginal. There may be an indirect link where children have substituted large amounts of time spent outside with these activities.
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his finding has now been confirmed in a number of other studies from the U.S., Singapore and China. Our hypothesis that the mechanism of the effect of light was mediated by retinal dopamine, a known inhibitor of eye growth whose release is stimulated by light, has also been supported by animal experiments. All of these studies confirm a consistent link between the time spent outdoors and the prevention of myopia, possibly crucially mediated by the at least ten-fold increase in light levels between indoor lighting and being outside. So yes, it is highly likely that there is a direct connection between time spent outside and preventing myopia.
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the effect of light on the prevention of the development of myopia may have a threshold effect, that is both the level of light required and the duration of light exposure may need to reach critical amounts before light has its preventive effect.
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it's easier to pollute than protect public health, that regulatory agencies turn a blind eye, that elected officials are corrupted to go along, that big money nearly always gets its way, that organizations like NCI and ACS abound with conflicts of interest, and that many scientific community members willingly compromise their integrity in return for generous research grants and other benefits.
As a result, cancer is a growth industry, environmental harm and human health the price for big industry profits. The power of vested interests keeps them burgeoning. Public awareness can change things, not decades more worthless research in lieu of simple solutions, eliminating harmful substances that kill.
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everyone can vote with their pocketbook, boycotting harmful products, buying safer ones, and encouraging others to do the same thing. That's how important battles are won, by ordinary people at the grassroots - getting informed, doing the right thing, telling others, and proving where real power lies when it's used constructively.
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the war on cancer is being lost, not won, because profits take precedence over public health, a testimony to corrupted priorities and criminal politicians who enforce them.
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Cancer has proliferated because of the dramatic increase in carcinogenic environmental and workplace substances, Epstein saying in the preface to his 1978 book:
"Cancer is caused mainly by exposure to chemical or physical agents in the environment. The more of a carcinogen present in the human environment, hence the greater the exposure to it, the greater the chance of developing cancer from it. There is no known method for measuring or predicting a 'safe' level of exposure to any carcinogen below which cancer will result in any individual or population group."
"The Politics of Cancer" explained how exposure to environmental and occupational carcinogens causes cancer. Yet they're avoidable because safe substitutes exist. Nonetheless, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and American Cancer Society (ACS) - groups Epstein calls "the cancer establishment" - ignore preventable causes, searching for non-existant magic bullet cures. In fact, they allocate minimal budget amounts to prevention while deceiving people to believe they stress it.
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"(t)he cancer establishment is fixated on damage control - diagnosis, treatment and basic genetic research - and is indifferent, if not sometimes hostile, to cancer prevention - getting carcinogens out of the environment."
"The second factor is conflicts of interests, which are significant when it comes to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), but profound and overwhelming (for) the National Cancer Society (NCS)." In fact, they're incestuously tied to the "drug industry, the mammography industry, the pesticide industry, and other such industries" that profit from cancer proliferation. It's big business. The more victims, the greater the bottom line benefits.
Notably, one former NCI director left for a drug industry position. Another went to the American Cancer Society (ACS) before heading up the fiberglas industry, producing a recognized carcinogenic product that should be banned.
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Epstein and other public health experts know the war on cancer is winnable by determining avoidable and involuntary carcinogenic exposures, then lobbying Congress to remove them legislatively or by regulations.
He also supports laws that criminalize or hold corporations and their officials accountable for knowingly introducing new carcinogens into the environment.
Instead, of course, they buy politicians like toothpaste, lobby effectively for pro-business legislation and deregulation, and control corporate friendly "watchdog" agencies serving them, not the public interest by revolving door their officials in to run them.
in a study released on Thursday, the folks at the Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies in Chattanooga, Tenn., decided to take an in-depth look at the promises made by purveyors of new coal plants.
Their findings seem to suggest that the trade-off that many cash-strapped communities make — specifically, accepting the health and environmental risks that come with having a new coal-burning power plant in their midst, in return for a boost in employment — is not what it’s cracked up to be.
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The analysis looked at the six largest new coal-fired power plants to come online between 2005 and 2009, including facilities in Pottawattamie County, Iowa; Milam and Robertson Counties, Tex.; Otoe County, Neb.; Berkeley County, S.C.; and Marathon County, Wisc. All were plants exceeding capacity of 500 megawatts.
Researchers combed through each project’s initial proposals and job projection data, including public statements, published documents and other material. They then set about taking the pulse of employment — before, during and after construction — in the areas where the projects were built, relying chiefly on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.
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The big idea: Even accounting for other ups and downs in employment activity in these counties, projects of this magnitude should stand out amid the data din, permitting some ground truthing of the coal projects’ actual impact on the local economy.
The results: only a little over half, or 56 percent of every 1,000 jobs projected, appeared to be actually created as a result of the coal plants’ coming online. And in four of the six counties, the projects delivered on just over a quarter of the jobs projected.
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The idea that your job or your boss is leading you to an early grave is one of several myths debunked in an analysis of a 90-year study that followed 1,528 Americans. Among other myths: be optimistic, get married, go to church, eat broccoli and get a gym membership.
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Researchers Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin report their conclusions in a new book, The Longevity Project. "Everybody has the ideas — don't stress, don't worry, don't work so hard, retire and go play golf," says Friedman, a psychology professor at University of California-Riverside. "We did not find these patterns to exist in people who thrived."
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At the core of their 20 years of research is a study started by Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman in 1921. Terman died in 1956, but other researchers carried on the study. One participant was biologist Ancel Keys, whose life-long work helped popularize the Mediterranean diet. He died in 2004 at age 100. He enjoyed gardening as an activity much of his life.
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Sarah Finocchario-Kessler, at the University of Kansas, used data from one such drug trial to see what the effect of religious beliefs (and other psychological factors) was on medication taking.
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One recent study looked at whether people with HIV took their medicine as they were supposed to. Most trials of new drugs monitor this, and it can be done very easily simply using special bottles that record each time they're opened. -
Sarah Finocchario-Kessler, at the University of Kansas, used data from one such drug trial to see what the effect of religious beliefs (and other psychological factors) was on medication taking.
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