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From the original paper in the British Medical Journal, the experiment was to show 7 petri dishes to each of the 6 dogs, one of the dishes containing 'cancered' urine, and repeating this 9 times. So dogs flagged the wrong dish 32 times out of 54, making both a false positive and a false negative every time. I'm no stat wiz, but I feel the "41% success rate" is a bit misleading.

Feel ready to own one or many Tux Stickers?

I'm a doc but don't hold me to any details. :)

I remember the story differently... I thought it was transplanted organs, but looking through the journals it looks like we are both right. Hmmm...

Here is some quotes I can find:
"Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease is one of the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE) that has been transmitted between humans and chimpanzees by electroencephalogram electrodes, previously 'sterilized' using ethanol and formaldehyde." -- J Hosp Infect. 2004 Sep;58(1):78-80

It can be spread through blood transfusions...

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease following corneal transplantation Same article

Davak

You may be dyslexic when reading English. Learning a different language that reads from right to left may eliminate this problem.
Alternatively you should have your optical system replaced with that of the Mantis Shrimp, which has eight different retinal pigments
ranging from ultra-violet to ruby red, and a couple of layer of polarisation filters added for good measure. This should sort out your reading problem.

Toto has already done a lot of work regarding this. PDF(html)

This case looks harsh, but if you look at the judgment, he brought up what look to me like the key points - that the employment contract was unfair - too late in the appeal process. I wouldn't panic (unlikely, I know with the general level of hysteria on /. these days about IP), because it is not clear if this sets any real precedent.

At the London inquest into the world's first automobile fatality in 1896 the coroner said: "This must never happen again." Since then, 25 million people have died on the roads, says the World Health Organization.

1.2 million deaths per year and increasing. Estimates of 50 million injuries. The rates are highest in the third world, but in the US there are over 14 deaths per 100,000.

Personally, I find it slightly ironic that in deaths from human action, the war industry kills 3%, the automobile industry 23%...

So, a new slogan for the peace hippies: Make Segways, Not Cars.

Diesel exhaust exposure and lung cancer: adjustment for the effect of smoking in a retrospective cohort study

Lung cancer in heavy equipment operators and truck drivers with diesel exhaust exposure in the construction industry

Sorry Dude. I know you meant well.

This is certainly true, and there are many instances of big pharma promoting drugs for unlicensed usage, or made up diseases

The problem is not just big pharma per se, but also the way it funds special interest groups (e.g. Multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis) to campaign for wildly expensive drugs of dubious efficacy. This is the malignant end of astroturfing, and many of these supposedly educational sites have a message "this drug works and your doctor better give it to you".
Unfortunately these sort of 'infomercial'/'advertorial' websites do not come under any advertising control body, especially if they are produced at arms length by a 'charity/ self help group'.

I know GPs (Family Physicians) in affluent areas who spend a lot of their time fending off the 'worried well' who look up stuff on the internet. It is actually these people, rather than the true cyberchondriac (who are relatively easy to spot) who make our life difficult, as they haven't bothered to learn probability or epidemiology on their trawl through the websites.

This is certainly true, and there are many instances of big pharma promoting drugs for unlicensed usage, or made up diseases

The problem is not just big pharma per se, but also the way it funds special interest groups (e.g. Multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis) to campaign for wildly expensive drugs of dubious efficacy. This is the malignant end of astroturfing, and many of these supposedly educational sites have a message "this drug works and your doctor better give it to you".
Unfortunately these sort of 'infomercial'/'advertorial' websites do not come under any advertising control body, especially if they are produced at arms length by a 'charity/ self help group'.

I know GPs (Family Physicians) in affluent areas who spend a lot of their time fending off the 'worried well' who look up stuff on the internet. It is actually these people, rather than the true cyberchondriac (who are relatively easy to spot) who make our life difficult, as they haven't bothered to learn probability or epidemiology on their trawl through the websites.

This is certainly true, and there are many instances of big pharma promoting drugs for unlicensed usage, or made up diseases

The problem is not just big pharma per se, but also the way it funds special interest groups (e.g. Multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis) to campaign for wildly expensive drugs of dubious efficacy. This is the malignant end of astroturfing, and many of these supposedly educational sites have a message "this drug works and your doctor better give it to you".
Unfortunately these sort of 'infomercial'/'advertorial' websites do not come under any advertising control body, especially if they are produced at arms length by a 'charity/ self help group'.

I know GPs (Family Physicians) in affluent areas who spend a lot of their time fending off the 'worried well' who look up stuff on the internet. It is actually these people, rather than the true cyberchondriac (who are relatively easy to spot) who make our life difficult, as they haven't bothered to learn probability or epidemiology on their trawl through the websites.

I tend to think CS is better as a hobby... and especially so if you still want to see patients.

There are plenty of opportunities and interesting projects out there if you want to do some technical work... and you don't even have any formal training to get involved and make a contribution:

OSCAR McMaster
GPLed software for the family practice. I went to one of their workshops... led by a engineer/MD from my alma mater. :-) Based on MySQL, Tomcat & Java.

GnuMed
My personal favourite. wxPython & PostgreSQL based. Led by an engineer/MD.

Tk Family Practice
The creator has an amazing collection of free eMedicine links.

The future of eMedicine is going to look like this - picture of Dr Tux. The British Medical Journal thinks so -- Medical software's free future

If you want to do engineering, I'd go the biomedical engineering route--that is where I'm coming from... and will continue to do some work.

As you are going into some sort of medical field, I hope you learn how to be a pro-active thinking sort of person, not just a reactive "lose your rag" naysayer.

Let me remind you from your study of the history of science that you know many ideas that turned out to be right at first met violent opposition from the scientific community. History has shown us that many scientists do very poorly at considering and accepting new ideas. At least in your ability to reject new ideas, you seem well on the way to being a good run of the mill mediocre scientist.

Stanley Prusiner, the scientist who coined the term prion, originally speculated that Alzheimer's may in fact turn out to be a prion disease. This speculation came in the mid 1980's.

Of course you know that Stanley Prusiner was award the Nobel prize for his work with prions, don't you?

I would at least consider the ideas of a Nobel prize-winning scientist, not reject them outright. It may not be that 100% mad cow = Alzheimer's as the body is a very complex system. However, mad cow could certainly be a leading factor in why Alzheimer's is growing at an amazing pace and being found in many younger people.

In today's most modern research, we are finding evidence that prion-like structures are involved with how memory works. Here's some information from a dementia site, note the links to Cell at the end.

Here's a December 29, 2003 recap from a government website of some of what is going on.

I could provide you with many many links and sources, but I suspect you will be a closed-minded doubter until either CJD rears its ugly in your life or you go ahead and do the research yourself.

Here are a few more places to start exploring --

#123400 CREUTZFELDT-JAKOB DISEASE; CJD

variant Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease Citations 1-10 of 66 total displayed.

That's all. If you eat beef, I would strongly urge you to do the research. Your life and the lives of people you care about may be at stake :-)

In other words, the death rate from the common cold is 0.6/1000, or a little more than 7% of total worldwide deaths.
You can't really believe that, can you? 1 in 14 people die of a cold? For comparison, cancer killed about 1.6/1000 (1988). Heart disease , about 1.9/1000. Do you really believe that cancer and CVD kill only 3x as many people as the cold each of us gets every year?

Actually, pharmaceutical companies do create'diseases' to sell more of their products.
Isn't corporate capitalism wonderful?

<quote>
Objective To examine the association between intake of total fat, specific types of fat, and cholesterol and risk of stroke in men.

Design and setting Health professional follow up study with 14 year follow up.

Participants 43732 men aged 40-75 years who were free from cardiovascular diseases and diabetes in 1986.

Main outcome measure Relative risk of ischaemic and haemorrhagic stroke according to intake of total fat, cholesterol, and specific types of fat.

Results During the 14 year follow up 725 cases of stroke occurred, including 455 ischaemic strokes, 125 haemorrhagic stokes, and 145 strokes of unknown type. After adjustment for age, smoking, and other potential confounders, no evidence was found that the amount or type of dietary fat affects the risk of developing ischaemic or haemorrhagic stroke. ...
</quote>

Damn! The guy in figure three has a REALLY tiny penis! That's just unbelieveable! I'm NOT kidding or trolling, just look at it. It must be about 3/4 of an inch thick.

What kind of title is this really? To use something not even written properly is digraceful I mean what teh fsck? [source listed on pdf]

Hollywood needs to stop promoting smoking worldwide

What ever happened to freedom of choice? Philip Morris co isn't forcing anyone to smoke, nor is Hollywood. People make their own decisions and not some advertiser.

The tobacco industry recruits and retains smokers by associating its products with excitement, sex, wealth, rebellion, and independence. Films are a powerful way to make this connection---and, as a paper in this week's issue of Tobacco Control shows,1 they succeed.

Retains smokers with sex, wealth, rebellion? Shit where is my money, and sex? I smoke because I choose to, and I know the consequences of my actions. I am not being misled by anyone but myself for smoking. These lobby groups distort facts, and this request is ridiculous. Personally I think this group should have specified a "specific" company, as their current demand can affect anyone advertising. Say someone on Friends drinking Pepsi, get realistic what would they expect a cloudy dot around anything with a label? Oh Please, Patriot Act for advertising now. Shoddy article, unrealistic demand.

I was a little disappointed the article didn't mention some of these more positive uses of the technology. There are some online journals that have gone one step further and granted free access to a list of third world countries (people who could really use the free information). There are some pretty high profile sites in there, too, like the BMJ Specialist Journals, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Proceedings of the National Acadamy of Sciences. I tried to find some press releases for those journals, but came up empty handed.