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Claims of a plateau are supported by a 2016 report from the CDC.

Gosh, I'd love to find the link and read the whole context of your Daniel Webster quote. I tried to googled it, and my meager search skills were unable to locate the source.

And, given the stuff Webster has written elsewhere about the public health approach, see http://annals.org/article.aspx... this quote doesn't really sound like Webster...

As you've noted, Mr. Webster runs the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Gun Policy and Research; his job is basically to fund and promote anti-gun research, so when Daniel Webster comes out and says a pro-gun-control study is flawed you know it has got to have some serious problems! Looks like the majority of the Daniel Webster quotes indicting Bindu Kalesan's study are from an email exchange with the Washington Post.

hey, we apparently agree; trying to reduce avoidable injuries and death means you're anti-gun! wow, never thought you'd say it. congrats on your honesty.

Gosh, I'd love to find the link and read the whole context of your Daniel Webster quote. I tried to googled it, and my meager search skills were unable to locate the source.

And, given the stuff Webster has written elsewhere about the public health approach, see http://annals.org/article.aspx... this quote doesn't really sound like Webster...

As you've noted, Mr. Webster runs the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Gun Policy and Research; his job is basically to fund and promote anti-gun research, so when Daniel Webster comes out and says a pro-gun-control study is flawed you know it has got to have some serious problems! Looks like the majority of the Daniel Webster quotes indicting Bindu Kalesan's study are from an email exchange with the Washington Post.

Lookit that: an anonymous commenter dissing Canadian public health care!! Sigh...

I'm Canadian, I occasionally use Medicare and I'm satisfied with it. Yes, outpatient service in hospitals is nearly always slow. But based on personal and other people's experience, real emergencies are generally taken care of quickly.
When/where it's available, avoid outpatient service by using local, smaller health clinics. They're generally fast, and often take appointments so you don't have to wait 4-5 hours at the hospital. When they needed medical care, friends and parents were generally well taken care of and in a timely manner, at no cost to themselves, even when the medical procedure was very expensive.

Yes, people have died in Canadian ER and outpatient waiting areas. A lot more people have died, in the American system, because they couldn't afford medical care at all, and because of its profit-driven exigencies. See here "Is US Health Really the Best in the World?", Barbara Starfield, MD, MPH, from the JAMA: http://www.jhsph.edu/research/... Link goes to a downloadable PDF.

If you wanted to see how most/nearly-all Canadians feel about Medicare, just run stand for office and have a plank in your platform stating that you want to dismantle Medicare and switch to an American-style system.

Even Harper wouldn't have dared to that.

Your post is correct, but the OP is making a valid (if inelegantly communicated) point. Depression is hugely over diagnosed and treated, particularly in the US.

Actual clinical depression is a serious disorder and of course has existed throughout history. However, currently about a quarter of women in the US between 40 and 50 are on antidepressant drugs at any one time, and about 10% of all Americans over 12. These people aren't all suffering from major depressive disorder. Many of them don't meet any of the key criteria for a clinical depression diagnosis.

It's not entirely clear from the abstract, so just for some background (of what I assume is behind the paywall) the main problem with severe flu is cytokine storms. Basically, your immune system can get into a positive feedback loop trying to kill the virus and wind up killing most of the body's cells instead. In the Pandemic Flu of 1918, a great number of the dead were the healthiest ones with great immune systems.

So I'm assuming what's going on here is that they've isolated the parts of the immune system that actually kill the flu, and have a plan to prime them for action. That would be super-awesome. The annual flu deaths, just in the US is in the 3000-49000 per year range. If you have to use government terms, that's at least a 9/11 every year, and if you have to spend a trillion dollars on something, this would be a much better target.

He can't. He's quoting a website verbatim.

However, the title of the JAMA article is "Is US Health Really the Best in the World?", and it's available here, though apart from the statement (accompanied by another citation that I'm not ambitious enough to track down) of the number of deaths, it says little else relevant to this story.

However, I used to work with those adverse effect records, and citing them directly is incredibly misleading. The 106,000 deaths is only a tiny percentage (0.06%) of the 170,000,000 Americans on prescription medications (rough mental estimate of 48%), and it's inflated. The way adverse effects are recorded, any drug that could possibly be the cause of death is recorded as having definitely caused it. If an epilepsy drug causes a side effect, and the patient takes acetaminophen for it but overdoses and dies, the epilepsy drug is considered to be at fault, because the death was a result of its adverse effect.

The reason for this odd system of inflated numbers is that its purpose. The system was designed to inform doctors and researchers of what could happen as a result of a drug's use, including any previously-unknown interactions. By recording that an epilepsy drug, when taken with acetaminophen, could cause overdose symptoms, researchers could be pointed to an interaction between the two medications.

For direct deaths, the percentage (original research, no source) is closer to 0.001%, and the majority of these (to the point where I couldn't really differentiate "all") were where the prescription triggered an allergic reaction that wasn't already known (or at least recorded in the doctors' notes).

If you're going to reference something, at least give us farking title

how about a link to a PDF

According to the Humane Society, the United States and Gabon are the only two countries in the world that still test on Chimpanzees. The paper I'm looking at was from 2007, so the official legislation prohibiting it you mention from 2 years ago may have been pretty easily passed if no one was using them for testing in the EU at that time anyway. http://altweb.jhsph.edu/bin/g/c/paper111.pdf

I'm trying to get the clearest objective picture I can about what's going on the food industry, and it doesn't look pretty. Sorry. I'm sure you have access to information that I don't, and follow these things more closely. I rely on reports by journalists, researchers, government agencies, and activists who also have access to information that I don't, and who also follow these things more closely than I do. Just because I'm not in the field doesn't mean I can't try to find what's going on and form an opinion. I will see if I can find the Journal of Dairy Science report you're talking about.

Anyway, you can accuse me of FUD, but there are real, serious, and ongoing health consequences to food industry practices:
* Mad Cow Disease: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3355625.stm
* E Coli in Spinach: http://www.kwtx.com/home/headlines/4198816.html
* Salmonella in Eggs: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/business/23eggs.html?_r=1&ref=business

People die when industry cuts corners and regulatory agencies don't do their job.

More of my resources:
* Agricultural Antibiotic Use Contributes To 'Super-Bugs' In Humans - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/07/050705010900.htm
* Denmark's Case for Antibiotic-Free Animals - http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/10/eveningnews/main6195054.shtml
* The above article cites Professor Ellen Silbergeld - http://faculty.jhsph.edu/Default.cfm?faculty_id=648
* The true cost of cheap chicken - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-true-cost-of-cheap-chicken-768062.html
* Agriculture Pollution report from Defra (UK government) - http://www.defra.gov.uk/foodfarm/landmanage/water/csf/index.htm
* Wikipedia page on Factory Farming - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_farming

Activists (I am listing them separately, to be fair):
* http://www.nrdc.org/water/pollution/ffarms.asp
* http://www.ciwf.org.uk/
* http://www.farmsanctuary.org/issues/factoryfarming/
* http://www.iowasource.com/health/CAFO_airqu_0805.html
* Food, Inc. (movie)
* Ominvore's Dillemma, Michael Pollan
* Eating Animals, Michael Safran Foer

Speaking of food, most people in the industrial nations also _eat_ petroleum. In the USA the ratio appears to be 13 kcal petroleum energy to produce 1 kcal of food, according to: http://www.jhsph.edu/bin/g/k/What_You_Eat.pdf (25:1 for producing meat).

I'm not sure if there's enough organic food to go around, at least in the developed countries (there isn't in some undeveloped countries either).

It is possible to produce lots of crops per area by planting many different types of crops in the same area ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercropping ) but this is usually more human labor intensive - machines don't tend to cope with that sort of thing as well.

(1):'more information to use against me (or you).'
That information is now with your insurance company, how is that ANY better ? in fact, that is WORSE, because there are NO restrictions and checks on validity, sale of data, ...
(2): that has nothing to do with private public health care, but with your broken 'democracy'
(3) i don't think that's enough. the private firms need to be regulated. a few examples of regulations could be : a flat rate for everybody + everybody can go and come when he pleases, and no company should be able to kick you out.

the following 2 statistics provide the results of private health care:
1/ http://www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/press_releases/2005/anderson_healthspending.html
    'U.S. Still Spends More on Health Care than Any Other Country'
2/ http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html
    Usa ranks 37th.

The problem with that approach is that there are varying degrees of "evidence based medicine" and to be honest, most of the things doctors treat on any given day rarely fall into one of the well studied areas. If your kid has a simple ear infection, we can tell you that there is little harm in waiting a couple of days before starting an antibiotic. What happens if your child is a diabetic? Or on chemo? Or has had four ear infections in the past year. The EBM studies don't address those patients.

As somebody pointed out a few posts above, things change all of the time. Do we put diabetics on aspirin? What happens when the evidence "disagrees". As a scientist, you are well aware of how fragile truth can be. And you are likely in a field that can do real controls. We seem to know quite a lot about medical conditions, but as usual, one finds the more one knows, the more one doesn't know.

It might take an hour, two hours, a week to go over the current evidence for a moderately difficult clinical problem, say, chemotherapy of a particular cancer in a patient with a significant preexisting disease. Nobody has that kind of time to devote to any given patient, and even if one did, the ultimate answer might not be so satisfying.

That rant aside, the Cochrane Collaboration offers the best chance of you finding out the status of the evidence surrounding a given clinical question. For someone with any sort of biological background and some time, you could at least hope to have an idea of how good the evidence is.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:unofficial&hs=jqR&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=US+healthcare+spending+compared+to+other+countries&spell=1

http://www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/press_releases/2007/anderson_healthspending.html

from their rectums.

Taken from a recent press release:

Statement Regarding POPLINE Database

I was informed this morning that the word "abortion" was blocked as a search term in the POPLINE family planning database administered by the Bloomberg School's Center for Communication Programs. POPLINE provides evidence-based information on reproductive health and family planning and is the world's largest database on these issues.

USAID, which funds POPLINE, found two items in the database related to abortion that did not fit POPLINE criteria. The agency then made an inquiry to POPLINE administrators. Following this inquiry, the POPLINE administrators at the Center for Communication Programs made the decision to restrict abortion as a search term.

I could not disagree more strongly with this decision, and I have directed that the POPLINE administrators restore "abortion" as a search term immediately. I will also launch an inquiry to determine why this change occurred.

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and not its restriction.

Sincerely,

Michael J. Klag, MD, MPH
Dean, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

The authoritative study of civilian casualties was done by a group from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Here is a link to an article bolstering the validity of the study; it has links to a review of the original study.

The "iraq body count" guys are just counting dead listed in press releases.

Then how about Johns Hopkins?
The truth is there, you just don't want to see it.

On a side note, the 1,000,000 figure is pretty much pulled out of nowhere - last I checked, the most pessimistic estimates were ~100,000.

Is that because you haven't 'checked' since 2004? The number of reported deaths in the conflict is close to (but less than) 100000, but obviously not all deaths in a conflict are reported.

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated 100000+ 'excess' deaths by 2004. By July 2006--that's a full year ago now--they estimated over 650000 deaths.

Feel free to quarrel with their methodology if you're qualified, but (a) don't try to suggest that the numbers could not possibly be approaching the million mark, and (b) please do not try to imply that 100000 deaths brought on by a 'war of choice' isn't a truly hellish number.

On a side note, the 1,000,000 figure is pretty much pulled out of nowhere - last I checked, the most pessimistic estimates were ~100,000.

Is that because you haven't 'checked' since 2004? The number of reported deaths in the conflict is close to (but less than) 100000, but obviously not all deaths in a conflict are reported.

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated 100000+ 'excess' deaths by 2004. By July 2006--that's a full year ago now--they estimated over 650000 deaths.

Feel free to quarrel with their methodology if you're qualified, but (a) don't try to suggest that the numbers could not possibly be approaching the million mark, and (b) please do not try to imply that 100000 deaths brought on by a 'war of choice' isn't a truly hellish number.

Reference: Bush has killed more people than Saddam Hussein: 654,965 people.

• http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=49 9296
• http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/plurals.htm #word_as_word
• http://www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/style_manual /a.html#acronym_plural

Quote: The "personal firewall" in Windows XP SP2 was never advertised to block outgoing connections.

Why did people moderate that comment up? Microsoft never claimed it made good software, so the quality of its software should ignored?

George W. Bush never advertised himself as a moral person, so he shouldn't be impeached? The U.S. government never advertised itself as non-violent, so the fact that it has killed 650,000 Iraqis should be ignored?

Also worth noting, Bill Gates is one of the world's biggest funders of measles research programs.

Still off-topic. The web site you posted has the right idea, but only reports those deaths that are directly and clearly reported in two different independent media sources. It provides an extreme low-end figure on actual mortality, because in the middle of a gruesome war, not every death is actually reported by two independent media sources. On the other hand, a statistical analysis right here provides a more representative count. The result is that about 100,000 extra people in Iraq died as a result of the invasion, outside of Fallujah. Fallujah's death count was so high that it statistically qualified as an "outlier" and was excluded from the study in the interests of impeccable statistical work, so we don't know how many people were killed there. And that's as of about September of last year, so we don't know what's happened since then. I think iraqbodycount.net is doing good work, but pointing people there without explaining the meaning of the number is misleading. It understates the problem (if 25,000 people dead can be considered understating). Sorry to be depressing.

"In 2001, there were 29,573 gun-related deaths in the United States--or about 80 deaths per day. Firearm deaths represent 1 of every 5 injury deaths in the U.S."
-- John Hopkins University, http://www.jhsph.edu/gunpolicy/US_factsheet_2004.p df

"Key Statistics: On average per year, only one percent of actual or attempted victims of violent crime (62,200) use a firearm in an attempt to defend themselves. Another 20,300 use a firearm in an attempt to defend their property during a theft, household burglary, or motor vehicle theft. Conversely, victims report an annual average of about 341,000 incidents of firearm theft. In 1992 offenders armed with handguns committed a record 931,000 violent crimes."
-- "Handgun Victimization, Firearm Self-Defense, and Firearm Theft" by Michael R. Rand, Crime Data Brief, U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, April 1994

Both forms are correct for modern usages.

Just because an error is moderately widespread doesn't mean it's no longer an error -- and indeed, there are certainly many dissenting opinions with regard to the acceptability of using apostrophes to pluralize acronyms.

I never understood the old reasoning behind something like "PVRs." That just doesn't make any sense. "Personal Video Recorderss" eh?

The acronym is for an individual unit -- a PVR is a personal video recorder, not a "personal video recorders". "PVRs", thus, refers to the plural: "personal video recorders". Quite appropriate.

Is he worth hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives? Because that's how many his men have killed since he was in power.

And guess what? We killed ten of thousands ourselves "liberating" them, and now the civilian death rate is worse than it was under Saddam.

And they didn't just die from bombings, we're talking rape and torture. And no, not the kind of torture where people have sex in front of you and make you undress, but the kind where things are shoved up your ass that don't belong in your ass, where you are slowly killed, you know, real torture.

You mean like the Iraqi teenager who was seen in Abu Ghraib, lying on the floor with his anus bleeding while US troops discussed sodomizing him with metal objects? I guess that story didn't get reported on FOX News, huh?

• R, including several add-on packages (such as tseries, RODBC, coda, mcmcpack, gtkdevice, rgtk, rquantlib, qtl, dbi, rmysql), out-of-the box support for the powerful ESS modes for XEmacs as well as the Ggobi visualisation program;
• A complete teTeX, TeX, and LaTeX setup for scientific publishing, along with TeXmacs and LyX for wysiwyg editing;
• Perl and Python with loads of add-ons, plus ruby, tcl, Lua, and Scientific and Numeric Python;
• The Emacs and Vim editors, as well as Gnumeric, kate, Koffice, jed, joe, nedit and zile;
• Octave, with add-on packages octave-forge, octave-sp, octave-epstk, and matwrap;
• Computer-algebra systems Maxima, Pari/GP, GAP, GiNaC and YaCaS;
• the QuantLib quantitative finance library including its Python interface;
• GSL, the Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) including example binaries;
• The GNU compiler suite comprising gcc, g77, g++ compilers;
• the OpenDX, Plotmtv, and Mayavi data visualisation systems;
• it includes apcalc,aribas,autoclass,

Actually, the periods are not necessary in an acronym "unless an organization's style calls for them". Anway, I can counter by claiming it is a trademark that started out as an acronym, therefore any spelling but "NASCAR" is incorrect. Finally, if "NASCAR" were just a word like "laser" and "radar" it would be "nascar" not "Nascar".

This is a rant. If you don't want to read it, don't.

It's been clear to me for some time that when it comes to energy policy, stupidity and fear rule the day. I believe Heinlein once wrote: "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity". Can there be a more truthful statement? Consider:

We humans handily ignore the 13 TRILLION pounds of carbon emitted by our chemical-fuel economy, nearly all pumped out of the ground, causing global climatic change. Many people go so far as to argue that this would have no effect on the global ecology!

How can you argue that this much CO2 will not have an effect on our environment?

We pay little more than lip service to all of the apparent results of our decisions to persue chemical energy.

I'm not one to say that we should go back to banging rocks, and eat bark and bugs, but since we all think so highly of our children WHY AREN'T WE THINKING ABOUT THE WORLD THEY WILL LIVE IN?

I cringe every time I see a new make of unsafe, inefficient, ecologically expensive SUV and consider the irony of the owners of such vehicles being among the most likely to have an "I love America" bumper sticker when such vehicles provide only a dependence on foreign oil. Even funnier still is the idea that an SUV is a good car "for the kids"...

And yet, when you mention alternatives, such as this ultra-clean and efficient compressed-air car that cleans the air as it drives, refuels in under 2 minutes, and provides reliable transportation at an equivalent cost of around $0.35 per gallon of gas, it's "nerdy" or "unsafe" or "a hassle".

And, perish the thought that having a clean, safe, self-sufficient micronuclear power plant ! I mean, cheap, safe, non-polluting energy! Oh, "but it's DANGEROUS!" they say. Never mind the annual death toll of just under 1.2 MILLION people from those wonderful cars. If 2 dozen people died in a power plant, it'd be a "national disaster" in the papers, but 1.2 million people dying in cars barely make the obituaries column on page B-11.

How is stupidity not in power?

And one of the primary reasons why the SUV is so popular is because of all the stupid legal benefits that automakers enjoy for making large, cheap, polluting, inefficient, over-priced-but-"stylish" SUVs and light trucks.

If we just applied some sense to the situation, we'd have cars that didn't pollute, we'd have energy that didn't force us to sell the birthrights of our children, all combined with a reasonable economy we could all be proud of.

What kind of world are your grandchildren going to live in?

Um, because humans are intelligent beings and cows and mice aren't.
Why should intelligence be the criteria for giving animals humane consideration? What does this have to do with the ability to feel pain and suffer?

From altweb (alt. to animal testing):
In 1789, philosopher Jeremy Bentham sounded the rallying cry for animals everywhere: "The question is not, can they reason, nor can they talk, but can they suffer?"