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the problem arises when the scientific community reaches a conclusion before crunching all the data. this leads to paradigm paralysis.

paradigm paralysis most definitely impacts the "sciences." through in some politics and it can get down right ugly.

this also has practical implications - for example, the recommended diet over the last 30 years was *never* scientifically validated. a bunch of health "professionals" got together and decided, without any significant data to support their view, that a low fat, high carbohydrate diet is the way to go for good health.

their conclusion wasn't scientific in the least. while it sounded rational, it turns out the data don't support it as an optimal diet. The joslin diabetes center (affiliated with harvard medical School) switched their dietary recommendations for pre-diabetics and diabetics based on research. They didn't pull it out of their behind as the high carb, low supporters people did.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/22429.php

folks who are up to date on their diets will recognize they are now recommending the zone diet as discovered by dr. barry sears (Phd, biotechnology researcher, former Boston U. and MIT employee).

another mistake i see lots of people making here on slashdot is the idea that diet is as simple as calories in / calories out. this is a gross over simplification, even if there is partial truth to it.

to prove my point beyond any shadow of a doubt, take identical twins, feed them the exact same calories and put them on the same weight training program and inject one with anabolic steroids (muscle building part of testosterone). now, who here would expect them to have the exact same muscle and body fat composition after six months?

nobody? good. the calories in and calories out where the same, but the hormonal impact on those calories was very different. HORMONES ARE INCREDIBLY POWERFUL MEDIATORS WITHIN OUR BODIES.

in like manner, if one eats a diet that elevates insulin, a fat storage hormone, one will tend to get fatter than someone eating the same calories on a diet that doesn't over stimulate insulin production. the low fat, high carb diet sends insulin levels into over drive and, over time, will tend to fatten those who adhere to it. since everyone's hormonal system is unique, it will impact people differently but, more often than not, the fat gut will appear over time, given the assault on insulin that comes hand in hand with high carb diets. in addition, insulin reduces blood glucose and will eventually drain the brain of its #1 energy source, which will make you hungry and crave more blood glucose. this is the true reason why a ton of calories on thanksgiving tends to put people into a mental haze.

no wonder low fat, high carb diets make so many people fat, hungry and worn out all the time. even so, many medical scientists and professionals refuse to admit they were full of crap for all these years and hold fast to the same old crap that hasn't worked for those same years. they have their paradigm and they aren't about to change (admit to being 100% wrong), regardless of the data, and they are literally paralyzed by their paradigm.

frankly, it is amazing that joslin changed their recommendations, even if they fall over themselves as though they figured this out, when dr. sears first wrote about it over a decade ago. truth be told, they were a decade late and should be heckled for being so slow! ;-) better late than never, as they say.

there is only one diet that is truly hormonally balanced - the zone diet. given this hormonally balanced human optimization diet, one would expect great things from people on the zone and even better than great things are actually delivered:

1. dr. sears has personally worked with and crafted the diets of athletes that have won 24 gold medals in the last 4 olympic games.
2. dara torres might be the most famous - she r

2. [England has] less issue with obesity.

3. Neighborhood grocery stores.
4. Neighbors they meet regularly at Neighborhood stores

5. About half the energy consumption per person.

This is just as much about adults as it is about kids. Most humans have urges to have sex they can't hold indefinitely. Abstinence will prevent HIV, STDs and unwanted pregnancies in theory, but it is impossible actually to put into practice. Do you actually know anyone who will abstain from sex their whole life ? And if you are talking about abstinence before marriage, as is apparently taught in some places, that excludes a whole category of people who can't get married - gays, and who are most at risk for HIV. Also, some straight girls who pledged to remain "virgins" before marriage have substituted intercourse with other even higher-risk behavior like anal sex because they just don't know any better.

What we need a comprehensive sex education program that focuses on safe sex, contraception, and preventing STDs/HIV. I don't think abstinence should deserve more than a footnote in such a program because we already know teaching it alone doesn't work.

Note that 16 states have already rejected funds for abstinence-only education, the most recent of which being Arizona.

FYI :
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/21606.php
http://www.avert.org/abstinence.htm
http://www.azstarnet.com/metro/221980
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/reproductive_rights/2008/01/ariz-gov-napoli.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26623-2004Dec1.html

Ah yes, suicide; know how it feels, but curiosity has won out.

I had used LSD before, but tried other methods to break out of the negative feedback loop. One was rebreathing that was adopted by Stanislov Grof, who probably has the most experience in employing Psychedelics as therapy. Or perhaps, get out more, and play in some dirt, as per: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/66840.php - to each their own.

Some people leave behind children as genetic monikers, others leave behind a story as memetic ones. I wanna do both, may end up doing neither, but as long as there is dirt around, it will all turn out well.

There is at least one RFID sponge counting system out there. I don't think it is FDA approved as of yet. We did a trial in one of the hospitals that I worked at. It works very well, except in large patients where body mass interferes with receiving the signal.

I'm a huge fan of the lap desks. I've got one that's a stiff plastic board with a mini beanbag chair on the bottom. I got it at a thrift store for like $3.

It's way more comfortable & ergonomic (as far as laptops go). More importantly, laptops get hot. So, my advice to all you guys out there:

USE A LAPDESK!
DON'T FRY YOUR NUTS!!!

Here's a picture of mine in use.

No, the giant sticker didn't come with it and no, I have no idea what it's supposed to mean.

Yes, or they could do it RIGHT NOW and save 17 years. (Actually, the sweet spot is 12 years away, since it would then take 2.5 years to run for a total of 14.5 years, and 14 would still take 1.25 years for a total of 15.25 years. So they'd save 13.5 years if they could run it in 1 year on today's computers.) While that's not -decades- it IS over a decade. Do you know how many people die of cancer in a decade?

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/37480.php Apparently there's about 550,000 people die of cancer each year in the USA alone! That's 5.5million Americans that could be saved if the cure for cancers comes 10 years earlier.

I think it's pretty hard to argue that they should just wait and do the calculation later, and 'approximate' calculations aren't very good for this kind of research.

Seriously, now we're going to have to deal with a bunch of obese people pointing to this study as evidence of why they don't feel a need to lose weight.

Something's obviously missing in this study, because there is a positive correlation between average lifespan and obesity rates, both when comparing countries around the world and when comparing historical rates within this country. The simple fact is that all else being equal, the fatter a population is, the shorter its average lifespan. The United States, for example, ranks 42nd in world life expectancy - Japan, with much lower rates obesity and average weight, ranks #2. (Behind Andorra.)

Not to even mention other studies (like this one, for example) that show that being even moderately overweight can increase your risk of heart disease by more than 30% - and that's our nation's #1 killer. That's to say nothing of diabetes.

I'll take my chances on being thin, thanks. One study that appears to contradict all scientific knowledge we've accumulated to this point isn't going to change my mind.

.haeger

Scientists at the Medical Research Council have made a discovery that could pave the way for better treatments of type II diabetes. The teams at two MRC institutes (the National Institute for Medical Research and the Clinical Sciences Centre) have determined the structure of the enzyme that regulates cellular energy levels.

The enzyme the scientists have been studying is called AMPK (AMP-activated protein kinase).

There are massive advances being made in recognising faces -- i.e. combine Facebook or Flickr with a tagged photo of someone, and you could then find them on the street in New York in the Google picture. That's why people have the right not to be photographed and have their image broadcast.

Say you have an ECG machine. It's hooked up via sticky contact pads to your chest and is measuring the delicate flickerings of life in your body. It's doing this because it's trying to spot the *tiny* irregularities that could indicate Bad Things.
You can't magically design a machine that's picking up miniscule electrical currents like this and have it unaffected when some idiot brings in a portable radio transceiver and cranks it up nearby while they tell their wife what they want for dinner.
As I type, I'm within 30 feet of a ward full of such machines, and maybe a couple of hundred yards from the EEG devices that measure the brain's electrical activity. As we're testing today, I can wave my phone around and I can watch the interference it causes on the data being captured. Even when I'm not talking on the phone, it's checking in with the nearest base station periodically, and I can see that screwing the traces too. It's not causing those machines to break: but it's fvcking up the data that they're capturing - and that data is being captured as it's for diagnostic purposes. Screwing this up could have really bad consequences for someone.

This is not rocket science.

You can make your own study. Lay out the line for violent crime rates in the United States (available from the United States Department of Justice, http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/viort.htm )
Notice that the line peaks at around 1994, and then drops dramatically, declining by more than 50 per cent to 2005, the most recent figures available.

Then you need to gather data representing the share of people who play videogames (available from studies like this http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/75614.php ) over the years and draw a line that will go up.

If you lay those lines on top of one another, you'll notice that they are inversed, that is, the more people who play video games, the fewer violent crimes there are. Now, you can be safe and argue that this is merely a correlative argument (isn't this interesting?) or you can push it further and suggest that playing videogames may actually decrease the likelihood of people committing violent crime. How could that be? Well, maybe it's an outlet for aggression. Or maybe it's due to things like, if you're in a room playing videogames you're just less likely to amuse yourself doing things that will lead to a fight...

It was done in Italy more than 2 years ago to gauge the number of actual users against survey data.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/28659.php

He bought cheap generics and resold them across the internet. What an evil man. Americans should be forced to pay full price! Beside we can call him a 'drug dealer' and it sounds like he sold crack cocaine to the vicars daughter, not heart medicine to people who couldn't afford to pay for the overpriced version sold down the street.

Walmart import cheap generic drugs to drive price down GOOD.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/54783.php

Individual import cheap generic drugs to drive price down BAD.

By deleting a single gene in a small portion of the brains of mice, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center found that the animals were affected in a way resembling schizophrenia in humans.

After the gene was removed, the animals, which had been trained to use external cues to look for chocolate treats buried in sand, couldn't learn a similar task, the researchers report in a paper appearing in today's issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.

Dr. Robert Greene, professor of psychiatry, and his colleagues have found that eliminating a gene in a mouse's brain creates memory problems that are reminiscent of schizophrenia. T he researchers deleted the gene, which codes for a part of a protein involved in passing signals between nerve cells needed for learning and memory. When a similar protein is blocked by drugs in humans, it leads to a psychotic state similar to schizophrenia.

ORIGINAL

Fine, I choose not to be under psychological stress every day. I choose not to listen to those that somehow think they have magical will power that I do not. I choose not to wreck my body with constant up and down weight changes or stress induced illnesses. All of which studies show occurs to the obese when the try to lose weight and not the blessed thin. Have you bothered to read a study on the successes of diet? After 5 years the rate is so low as to be statistically insignificant. What is worse is the damage done to these peoples' body by this exceeds the health risks of the weight they are trying to lose in the first place. For what ever reason some people cannot control their weight and some small fraction can. For reasons that do no correlate to will power, in fact many obese people are among the most strongly willed people on earth. That is why so many die from the stress induced illnesses long before their weight takes their lives. The pathetic idea put forward that some how thin people have the will power to be thing and obese people just choose to be fat is ignorant at best and arrogant at worst. Some day the reasons for obesity will come out. Just like they did for mental illness, diabetes, and ulcers. Each of which came with these same types of stigmas.

A example study.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/67422.php

On another note, given this so called friend effect seems to be able to affect friends of friends even those that live at great distances, did this researcher compare this to the spread of a contagion before making wild assumptions about a socially spread behavior?

It's in America, but it's not America. Just like your heart in your chest, but it's not your chest.
 
Is the fog starting to clear now, or are you simply too obese to care?

All raw agricultural products carry a minimal risk of contamination, said a University of Illinois scientist whose research focuses on keeping foodborne pathogens, including the strain of E. coli found recently on spinach, out of the food supply. "Once the pathogenic organism gets on the product, no amount of washing will remove it. The microbes attach to the surface of produce in a sticky biofilm, and washing just isn't very effective,"

Another myth. Malpractice suits account for 0.46% of our total healthcare expenditures. An interesting observation is that Canada, for example, actually pays out more to plaintiffs than US courts do.

According to you, there is a problem with telling people the truth, and that is that everyone thinks in black and white, so we have to baby it down into some sort of John Stossel news report about how a shark is less likely to kill you than lightning or a car... fine, but we can still be cautious when flailing around in water, amiright.. but still, it doesn't get through to them, so because of that you think the black-and-white thinking people are going to rid the world of radiated transmissions.

So, really, who is so Fuck all grounded in reality here?

You're the one who said there's "ranks of scientific and medical studies and scientists saying there was no danger from MMR vaccinations", yet I just showed you research that says that you, and all those scientist are probably wrong.

So do you want to tell me how safe Wi-fi and Thimerosal is again? You do realize that when money is at stake, statisticians lie. Studies linked mobile phones to brain tumors... and the industry comes up with a short-term study saying it doesn't. All the independent Neutrasweet studies caused brain tumors, but the Neutrasweet studies didn't.

Um, if you can't prove that it's 100% safe, then why are you so upset like there IS no threat? You have to be honest with people. Some people will be crazy no matter what you do.

And if over-reaction is such a bad thing, why don't you stop. Just like you, when I hear people over-reacting, I start to suspect they're crazy, especially when they start telling me about how safe cars and sharks and vaccines are, relatively, because it starts to sound like they're bullshitting me on their side, when all they have to do to win me, is be honest, and less dramatic.

"...despite massed ranks of scientific and medical studies and scientists saying there was no danger from MMR vaccinations..."

Thimerosal Linked To Autism: New Clinical Findings
The Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part A: Current Issues, an authoritative journal featuring original toxicological research, has published, "A Case Series of Children with Apparent Mercury Toxic Encephalopathies Manifesting with Clinical Symptoms of Regressive Autistic Disorders," by Geier and Geier (2007).

This new study leaves little doubt there is a direct causal link between mercury exposure from Thimerosal-preserved biological products (vaccines and Rho(D) products) and mercury poisoning diagnosed as an autism spectrum disorder
(ASD). --medicalnewstoday.com

I never seem to fit.

I always thought I was a low testosterone kind of guy; I'm "Mr. Nice guy", have a head full of hair but little on my chest, etc.

Then I see an article in New Scientist that I can't find now (so here's a different article about the same subject) and it seems that I must have high testosterone. This explains why I can get usually laid but usually by women who already have boyfriends but I can't get a decent steady girlfriend myself.

But I'm good with kids. Both my daughters are "daddy's girls" who stayed with me when my ex-wife left (try being a single father of teenaged girls!), which goes against what the article says. There's nothing whatever feminine about my face.

Now this FA says high testosterone guys like angry faces? Not me, angry faces piss me off.

I guess I'm just weird.

-mcgrew

PS- oblig:

Q: WHAT DO YOU WANT?
A: Well, I was told outside that...
Q: Don't give me that, you snotty-faced heap of parrot droppings!
A: What?
Q: Shut your festering gob, you tit! Your type really makes me puke, you vacuous, coffee-nosed, maloderous, pervert!!!
A: Look, I CAME HERE FOR AN ARGUMENT, I'm not going to just stand...!!
Q: OH, oh I'm sorry, but this is abuse.
A: Oh, I see, well, that explains it.
Q: Ah yes, you want room 12A, Just along the corridor.
A: Oh, Thank you very much. Sorry.
Q: Not at all.
M: Thank You.
A: (Stupid git!!)

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?ne wsid=63260

according to that, Brazil qualified for 65 cents a day per patient but Merck refused.

200,000 * 365 * .65 = 47,450,000 dollars per year.

200,000 * 365 * 1.10 = 80,300,000 dollar per year.

Merck shot themselves in the foot over 33 million dollars.

We are dealing with recouping a sunk costs. at the 65 cents a day, merck would have recouped over 225,000,000 dollars of their RnD Costs from brazil alone.

Mercks accountants and sales people need a serious talking to. Getting 47 million is a lot better then nothing. Before I get a snarky answer, no, 1 dollar a year isn't metter then nothing. 65 cents a day for every country would be more then enough to recoup their sunk costs, make a very nice mulit billion dollar profit in the limited pharm patent time period. After which they can compete in the generic world, or just go on to the next great pill.

InTHIS case it's is about Mercks greed.Since Brazil said they would go back to paying merck if they agree to 65 cents a day, merck is taking some time to ss if they can get more pressure on Brazil.
Prablably in a few week, Brazil and Merck wii have a deal.

Sorry to disappoint, but there's a lot of people inside drug companies that give a lot of shit about people. I personally know I could be making a hell of a lot more money in the financial industry than I do in pharma. Why have lobbiests & etc to deal w/ governmental issues? Tell ya what, when the HMO's, AARP, & etc quit pushing the government to expropriate drugs & give them away for free, the companies would be more than happy to drop the government affairs and get back to doing science. But in the current climate, if you don't lobby, your interests will get buried. And then, once the investors realize that there are no more paying customers, you'll have no drug industry. Hope there's good leaches around in a few years when you decide to get sick.

Where get the $1e9 dollars per drug? Lots of places. Here's a couple:

The Tufts CSDD studies is a good source, their estimate was $900 mil four years ago.

Medical News Today estimates $1.2 billion for a new biological

Essentially, when you want the drug companies to give away a drug, you want to expropriate their property. As an investor, ask yourself whether you're willing to put your money into an industry that's subject to expropriation, and think about whether you want a drug industry around or not the next time a pesky little virus emerges from the forrest.

All sugars promote tooth decay.

Also http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?ne wsid=65470, http://jcem.endojournals.org/cgi/content/full/89/6 /2963, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/05/05050 3152956.htm

Fructose depresses leptin and insulin levels. Leptin is normally produced when you eat, and this triggers the "ok, I'm no longer hungry" signal in your brain so you stop eating. Lowering the leptin level causes you to still feel hungry, even after you've eaten. Switching from fructose to sucrose will allow your body to regulate itself better.

Its probably going to take some major lawsuits (and bankruptcies) to fix this problem ...

Developing a brand new drug is incredibly expensive, involving many rounds of clinical trials and government reviews. The fact that drug companies spend a lot on advertising has nothing to do with their huge fixed investment required to research and test the drug and getting it approved for production. Maybe some of the R&D can be outsourced to places like India and China, and I'm sure some of it has, but in the end you need substantial numbers of incredibly bright scientists with advanced degrees willing to work for many years on what is essentially a gamble, something that may turn out to be almost a complete waste of time. And you need to conduct many rounds of those expensive trials (and sometimes you still end up with a disaster like Vioxx).

And no, financially it's not an easy business to run either.

Easy. Folks who want to give them out to girls at Christian Rock festivals to get them to engage in "higher risk" sexual activities, as they are wont to do.

If I were in high school today, I'd hang out in the Christian youth group.

To start off, God I wish I didn't need the internet. I'd get rid of it so fast. I'd kill to get back all the time I coulda spent doing real work, or reading, or being outside spent instead spent on Slashdot. Honestly, I have some envy for people that actually don't need it. You can do what you really have to do at work or the library. So I don't think lack of the internet is any sign of poverty in america or whatever.

BUT

There is honest-to-god food insecurity in the US. Yeah I mean that all those poor people living in the lap of luxury don't know where their next meal is coming from, or have to choose between food and rent. And just cus you don't see them from the freeway on your commute from suburbia to office park doesn't mean they don't exist. What's all the more fucked up about it is that the problem is about 10 times worse here than in every other industrialized country, because American politicians are far more interested in invading foreign countries and pork for their districts than giving a f--- about starving people.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?ne wsid=32800
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err11/

Sorry, I don't have any sympathy for aboriginals.

They should just be exterminated? They almost were and now you want to quibble about some seeking justice?

As for the health effects of the mining, they're bad in African nations because nobody there cares about the health of the workers, but in modern nations all reasonable safety precautions are taken. We can't control what goes on in Africa without invading them, so I don't see what you expect us to do about it. Not that it's relevant anyway, since we weren't discussing africa to begin with.

Tell that to those in Bosnia and Iraq who have to live with DU, Depleted Unranium. Veteran To Talk About Depleted Uranium . Army Personnel Tested For Depleted Uranium .

Hum, Listening to Tony Blair might drive anyone to drink, but how do you know that these guys are right http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?ne wsid=35849 when they blame booze alone for an increase in liver disease deaths?

This is why controlled experiments are performed. The problem here is that apparently fraudulant methods were used in the original analysis and then data were held confidential for a long period to keep those fraudulant methods from being exposed.

Monsanto has been involved in criminal activities http://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/lr19023. htm in the past so it is not so suprising that they would do this sort of thing. The report in question is what they used to get approval in these countries so the relevant data you have there is that they lied to the regulators to gain approval. Maybe they thought it would be cheaper than bribery in this case.

In any case, you do not know how many people have become sick or how many have been killed because of what they have done. Cases of illness similar to those seen in the rats have to now be examined to see if it is corn that is causing the illness. The lack of labeling is going to make the task more difficult. But, if labeling of GM foods does get going, the one for this variety will need to be the skull and crossbones.

What kind of EGCG levels do you get with that?

Actually a lot people said you shouldn't have done it before the fact. They said "your own inspectors say there isn't anything there". The White House fired two weapons inspectors for failing to find weapons of mass destruction and then without any real evidence that there actually were WMDs there they grabbed hold of the flimsey story of a drunken lout and proclaimed that had absolute proof there was evidence.

There is only one obvious conclusion, they didn't care whether there was or wasn't because they could fathom that they could do anything wrong. This is a common theme that has run through the Bush white house, and will likely run through any Republican successors white house. They censor science unless the results are what they want them to be.

Those marines were lied to by their leaders, their lives were wasted in a country that obviously posed no threat to the United States. While the soldiers themselves should be honored for serving their country, their leaders (especially Bush and Co.) are the ones who should be paying the price for playing games with the facts to try and make them fit their warped view of reality.

I don't like this because it forces young girls to get vaccinated against a disease that they can prevent by simply not having sex. It's not like measles, which can be transmitted innocently and anonymously. You have to actually have sex to get the virus.

You must mean something different than what you are actually saying, because what your statement implies is that you expect females to never have sex. Not just young females, but all females. After all, if you get vaccinated at age 14, won't you still be immune at 30 or 40? How many women do you expect to reach 40 without having sex? This vaccine is not just meant to protect a girl when she's a teenager. It's meant to "last throughout a woman's reproductive years". The point of doing it early is that if you're going to do it at some point, you might as well do it earlier because statistically you get more benefit out of doing it earlier.

Now, you may say that if people are in monogamous relationships (i.e. marriage), they don't stand much chance of getting a sexually-transmitted disease. But even if people believe they should still be virgins when they get married and should never divorce and they do their best to stick to that, they still have some chance of getting a sexually-transmitted disease. A woman could be a virgin when she gets married and have a husband that cheats on her without her knowledge. Or, a virgin woman could marry a man who had one previous sexual partner, who happened to have the disease. You don't have to be woman of highly questionable moral character to get the disease.

Now, here's the next question: you may believe that having sex as a teenager (or having premarital sex, or whatever) is wrong. Let's say we all agree about that. But, what should the penalty for giving in to temptation be? If we don't give the vaccine to kids solely because we think they shouldn't be having sex, aren't we saying that we think the penalty for making a poor decision about sex should (potentially) be cancer? I thought the whole point of encouraging people to be wise about who they have sex with and when they start doing it and whether they take it seriously was to help them have a better life because you care about them and love them. But withholding a vaccine seems to amount to saying, "Haha, you had sex and you got cancer! I guess that wouldn't have happened to you if you were a good person!" That doesn't seem like love. That seems like a hateful, damaging form of self-proclaimed moral superiority.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?ne wsid=6558

The UK government is becoming alarmed at the spiralling costs of binge-drinking. The health bill for the NHS (national health service) is becoming a serious concern. The social costs - crime and the disruption to family life are rising dramatically.

The government is going to propose having wardens at taxi ranks at weekends at night. They said they are also going to bear down on pubs that serve alcohol to under 18s.

The problem is a cultural one, say many experts. Many of Britain's youth go out on Friday and Saturday nights with just one aim - to get blind drunk.

Two groups of people in the UK are beginning to become a serious problem to themselves and those around them.

The first group consists of people aged 18-25. They go out just to get as drunk as they can. Their behaviour causes serious problems of crime, disorder and the clogging up of emergency rooms in hospitals (A&E Departments).

The second group consists of older people who are chronic drinkers. They are drinking more often and more heavily. The NHS is seeing a rise in cases of cirrhosis and heart disease among this older group.

The government says it would like to see more of a continental European cafe-bar culture. Britons are the biggest binge-drinkers in Europe. Binge-drinking basically means going out on the town to get blind drunk.

Autism Rates Drop After Mercury Removed From Childhood Vaccines

An article in the March 10, 2006 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons shows that since mercury was removed from childhood vaccines, the alarming increase in reported rates of autism and other neurological disorders (NDs) in children not only stopped, but actually dropped sharply - by as much as 35%.

Using the government's own databases, independent researchers analyzed reports of childhood NDs, including autism, before and after removal of mercury-based preservatives. Authors David A. Geier, B.A. and Mark R. Geier, M.D., Ph.D. analyze data from the CDC's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and the California Department of Developmental Services (CDDS) in "Early Downward Trends in Neurodevelopmental Disorders Following Removal of Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines."

The numbers from California show that reported autism rates hit a high of 800 in May 2003. If that trend had continued, the reports would have skyrocketed to more than 1000 by the beginning of 2006. But in fact, the Geiers report that the number actually went down to only 620, a real decrease of 22%, and a decrease from the projections of 35%.

(etc. at http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?ne wsid=38784)

...boots are the British govt. new source of fear.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?ne wsid=58921

What next, banning teeth because they can cause bites? Oh wait, their diet takes care of that.

Actually, I found this parasite fasinating

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?ne wsid=44092

It knows how to regulate the human immune system for it's own purposes. It actually seems quite close to being a symbiote, since it can treat Crohn's disease. Reminds me a bit of Goa'uld in SG-1 actually.

But I guess Rabies manages to change host behaviour in a way that encourages transmission.

If you're a man diagnosed with prostate cancer, you have a 57 percent chance of it killing you in Britain. In the United States, the chance of dying drops to 19 percent. Again, reports Bartholomew, "Britain is at the bottom of the class and America is at the top."

Most people don't die of prostate cancer, they die of something else first (something like 70% of men over 80 have it in some form). So if men live longer in the UK, and end up dying of prostate cancer, as opposed to the US, where they die of a heart attack or something else, where does that leave your statistics? It makes a nonsense of them. Frankly an article written for The Spectator (a right wing monthly magazine for businessmen) doesn't inspire much confidence, and the figures you quote sound like he's cherry picked them to make the case he'd already decided on before writing.

Here's some from the Journal of the American Medical Association which completely contradict the source you quoted (The Spectator via The Pittsburg Tribune). I know which I trust to rule out confounding factors and try to give a fair estimate.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/healthnews.php?new sid=42717

PS Being given drugs, an angiogram or intrusive surgery does not necessarily affect the outcome for the better, however much patients demand action, and medical statistics are anyway fraught with difficulties as an indicator of Health Service performance.

Don't forget that they also failed to take a stand in favor of cervical cancer like the Family Research Council wanted them to.

"But, this does scare me - I invisage a future wear the government knows where you are at any time, if not by picking up your face on the streets, to embedding some sort of chip. This is the way we are heading (sure, not for a while, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't think 20 year ahead)"

No need for being scared anymore, since now you can go and have a full face transplant.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/healthnews.php?new sid=55080

Obesity and weight gain in general is closely linked to the control of blood sugar. When blood sugar levels crash after people eat the wrong foods, they get hungry again. It's the body's way of trying to stabilize blood sugar levels.

The drug companies research on diabetes is closely linked to their research on obesity. So, the next headline you read may be "Drug cures obesity". http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?ne wsid=46718

One of the best explanations of blood sugar vs. weight can be found in Barry Sears book "The Zone". http://www.drsears.com/booksbydrsears.page He actually started his research to try to extend his life. His male ancestors tended to die of heart disease in their fifties. He's already lived longer, so that's one indicator that his findings are effective. On of his key findings was the role that blood sugar levels have on athletic performance and weight gain.

The tone of your post is pretty judgemental. The weight gain epidemic in America has way more to do with the choices people are given and not so much to do with the fact that people are a bunch of fat lazy slobs. Someone who's glued to their desk for nine or ten hours a day and then has to spend another three hours commuting, isn't going to get the exercise they need, nor do they have the time or energy to cook a healthy meal when they get home.

BTW. If I had to sum up what Dr. Sears says: Eat way less red meat and way more vegitables. It worked for me.

I see a number of posts debating the methods of data collection and what it could possibly mean. The real work that must be done now is to investigate these claims and investigate possible mechanisms. If this claim is true, there are going to be rather intense repurcussions. My money? It's not the television itself, it is the non-interactive world that it produces.

Autism is on the rise http://www.fightingautism.org/idea/autism.php. My mother is a school nurse and she's noticed a large increase in the size of the special ed classes. The number of students that are affected (and yes, you can tell that these kids really do have autism by observing them) has gone from a handfull to enough to fill more than two classrooms.

Think about what the possible mechanisms could be. It is not going to be anything exotic like radiation or refresh rates or the like. We are plopping children down in front of the TV during the time their brains are 'wiring'. Their brains are learning to deal with a world that fits in a tiny box and that they have no control over. The brain isn't something that plops out of the womb fully done; it learns to adapt to the sensations around it. A recent study suggests that an imbalance of communication pathways is a likely mechanism of autism. It is known in development that pathways are pruned as children develop ( Early Brain Development ).

So, plop a kid down in front of the TV for hours a day. They are transfixed and their brains are wiring to cope with a world in a box that they can provide no input to or alter in any way but changing channels, volume level or the off button. That's really not a stretch. Prepare for articles about tv watching monkeys.

I used to be in the "BMI == Worthless" camp myself.

Then I grew up and lost over 80 pounds.

If you want to ignore it, that's your decision. Be overweight. But stop pretending you're not. And also, more to the point, stop trying to convince everybody else that they're not overweight because you can't deal with your own issues.

Wow dude, sounds like you have some anger issues to deal with... attacking other people and accusing them of being in denial just because you were.

Sorry, but BMI is bunk, and people are not just saying that because they may or may not be over weight. It is just plain common sense that you cannot measure how healthy someone is using BMI, as it lumps fat and muscle together and is a fairly useless indicator. YOU may have thought it was bunk in the past because YOU were in denial. That doesn't mean there aren't logical reasons to reach the same conclusion. And that doesn't mean the strangers on slashdot, who you know nothing about, are in denial like you were. Also nobody said anything about "trying to convince everybody else that they're not overweight", the discussion was simply that BMI is not a valid measurement. It's like trying to tell how fast a computer pefroms by measuring the physical volume it occupys. By that logic old computers that took entire floors of buildings and ran on vaccum tubes are faster than modern notebooks with dual core processors in them. I mean come on, a computer that takes up that much space MUST be fast right? Wrong! In this case volume doesn't matter, and trying to use it as a measurement of performance is not a valid method of measuring or comparing the data. See what I mean yet?

You used emotional reasons to reach a conclusion in the past. Now you are following your emotions again in stating that BMI is not bunk. Sorry, the rules of logic don't change just because your in a bad mood. BMI is bunk, and you have left over anger issues probably from being angry with your self while you were overweight. Don't take it out on the rest of us, and in the future try researching your claims before firing off such comments...

>Bush cannot say: "those North Koreans have nukes - we need a
strong man at the helm", simply because he was at the helm when North Koreans
got nukes in the first place.

Frightened people are more likely to support Bush. The more things go wrong, the more support he'll get.

Health care spending in the United States has increased by $621 billion since 2000 to $1.9 trillion this year, and current expenditures for health care services account for about 24% of the increase in the gross domestic product between 2000 and 2005, according to a report by researchers at the Boston University School of Public Health.

Actually it's a little more than 5%. 50% of all personal bankruptcies in the U.S. ar caused by medical expences. Most of these people actually had medical insurance at the time too.

Here's some links:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6895896/
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0202-08.ht m
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?ne wsid=19515

For more info: http://www.pcrm.org/ Thank you for mentioning Diabetes to prove my point: did you know that a major study released recently showed that Diabetes can be combatted greatly by eating a vegan diet (completely animal/cruelty free diet) ? http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?ne wsid=49091 . Clearly you have friends stuck in an animal lab somewhere working really hard to push pills in an effort to up the bottom line. All you're doing is pressing propaganda for your industry which seems to have endless drives to get money from the public...to no avail! Over and over again. One would imagine that decades of animal testing, and tens of thousands of white-coated "professionals" would have achieved at least one cure or healing method for one major ailment by now. It certainly has helped the wallets of pharmaceuticals, researchers, etc. but that is not what we're looking for. But no, now you're going to make a silly argument that there's a specific path to a cure that only eggheads like you can fill. Give me a break. Going to university doesn't make you an expert. It helps you work for powerful companies that will pay you big bucks to endlessly make the shareholders think you are making strides when you're just buying nicer cars, stereos, and having more luxurious vacations. This is the case for the vast majority of those of us who have worked for large corporations in practically ANY field. Information technology is and will be the way to real cures...with perhaps some advances in biology which will allow us to use/generate human tissue. If animal labs had glass walls, public opinion would have stopped our dear doctor from continuing his research anyway.

"This is useless" would say-the Health Minister for South Africa, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.

She has her own "very effective" approach against AIDS/HIV. She sais it is vital for people to build up their immune system so she strongly
believes in giving people the choice between antiretroviral drugs and taking traditional remedies, such as lemons,
garlic and beetroots. In fact she promotes mostly the second while her boss, never acknowledged that HIV is the cause of AIDS.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/healthnews.php?new sid=50037