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It's true that dirt and germs are everywhere, but serious infectious disease is really caused by an extremely, extremely small subset of those, and the primary factor determining whether or not you get sick is your exposure to the pathogen.

I'll certainly mostly agree to the first two clauses of what you write, but as to the last part as to "primary" factors, then how do doctors survive their first year of work around sick people? :-) Clearly the picture is much more complex than "exposure leads to disease".

For example, in general, most (though not all) doctors are wealthier and better nourished than average, and come from similarly successful mothers. Could this not have something to do with improved disease resistance? It certainly is unlikely to be vaccinations, since as a general rule from what I read medical personel are one of the least vaccinated of all populations. :-) For example:
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&uid=16320981&cmd=showdetailview&indexed=google
"RESULTS: Among vaccine nonrecipients, doubts about the efficacy and necessity of influenza immunization were prevalent and more often reported by nurses than physicians (75% vs 41%, P = .002; and 55% vs 23%, P = .001, respectively). Physicians more often than nurses reported lack of time as a reason for not receiving influenza vaccination (23% vs 5%, P = .01). After intervention, the immunization rate of HCWs increased from 19% to 24% (P = .03). The immunization rate of physicians increased from 43% to 64% (P = .004). No change was noted among nurses (13% vs 14%) and other HCWs (16% vs 16%)."

Note that 24% overall rate after arm-twisting is for pediatric healthcare workers in a university children's hospital. :-) And I'd love to know what those 36% of doctors who skip getting a flu shot were thinking... Aren't they likely to be exposed to a flu and give it to their pediatric patients? Are they all criminally negligent? Or maybe not? :-)

First, note how there are some major issues I raised which you ignore (like attributing improvements in health mostly to sanitation and better nutrition instead of vaccination, or pointing out the vast conflict-of-interests in the system). Like most people promoting vaccination, you have chosen to focus on other less critical issues from a social-investment point of view. You also ignore the whole ethical side of the issue, which is my main concern -- and strangely enough is not yet a concern of most slashdotters, which is very ironic as many here run GNU/Linux precisely for ethical concerns (i.e. the ethical problems of putting one for-profit closed-source un-free US company in charge of the world's desktop computing infrastructure, comparable to putting a few for-profit closed-source un-free pharmaceutical companies in charge of world health).

For what it's worth, I was in an graduate program in Ecology and Evolution. From what I understand from that, much of the practice of immunology (though not all the theory) completely ignores that field and aspects of predator-prey co-evolution. Viruses can evolve very quickly -- which is one reason HIV is so hard to address. Much of vaccination just addresses the low hanging fruit, while potentially creating huge problems down the road. This is the same as with the use of agricultural pesticides which wipe out normal predator-prey cycles in the environment and often lead to larger boom-bust cycles and ever larger pesticide applications for pesticide-optimized crops which are ever weaker in natural immunity. People are only now coming in the USA to accept what a problem the evolution of bacteria can cause in relation to the overuse of antibiotics (like in agricultural feeds), which eventually may culminate in a return to 1930s-style bacteriophage therapy (which uses evolution in medicine in real-time to make a cure). And there are emerging viral respiratory disease which are becoming more common as HiB, for example, diminishes; just think of it, have you heard recently of any drastic drop in infant mortality in the USA?

You cite an intro book in immunology, but just looking at the table of contents
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=imm.TOC&depth=2
it ignores the very issues you argue against -- evolution of pathogens (beyond a mention of evolution in the afterword), collective community memory of disease passed on from mother-to-child (the point being to assist the child while they develop their own natural immunity to a variety of things), and other aspects of immunity -- including the mind-body connection which a more typical path of infection may interact with versus injections (which you apparently just dismiss without understanding, but clearly at least the placebo effect exists). I'll agree the human body is exposed to lots of pathogens on a routine basis -- however, it remains unknown how the immune system will function as you burden it with even more "just in case". And that burden includes in an odd persistent injectable way the by-products like carried-along animal viruses randomly present in the growth medium.

You do have a good point about the increasing challenges of today's society. But on the other hand, it is undermined by your argument we are already exposed to lots of pathogens in the natural world. So which is it? :-) I feel if you think deeply about this contradiction in your rebuttal you may come to some new insights about the nature of the vaccination debate.

The bottom line is that immunization the way it is done today is "just in case" medicine with has all sorts of problematical ethical issues (which are mostly ignored by the medical community and apparently most of the slashdot community). And it has shaded into a religious argument, including the assumption that anyone who disagrees is evil and stupid. One can make similar ethical arguments against "just in case" schooling by the way -- it's

Excuse me, but that's complete and utter bullshit. We have no idea how the brain works. None. Not even the tiniest inkling. We have a hundred years of psychobbabling (and massively conflicting) faddery, but no data. We barely understand what a single neuron does, we're just catching on to the idea that glial cells aren't "just structural", and we have not got a single clue about what parts of an intact, healthy brain are handling complex concepts like the consequences of sex.

I have known teens who were far more responsible than the adults around them; and I have known adults who should have had their reproductive facilities arbitrarily removed for rampant spawning of children they could not possibly take proper care of. You can't just wave you hand and indict teenagers as a group. Good grief. That's just moral heavy-handedness coupled with wishful thinking.

First, there is a very big line that separates science from public policy. This line comes into play in issues like climate change, as well as whether people should get, or be forced to get, vaccinations. I don't know which videos this research is looking at, but there needs to be a clear distinction between science and evidence, and any dictation of what actions our institutions should take as a result.

Ever since UofT's board of regents sided with drug maker Apotex and against their own whistleblower, Dr. Nancy Olivieri, I've been very hesitant to trust any of the conclusions announced through the entrenched medical establishment at UofT and it's semi-commercial "partnerships". I'd urge interested readers to google up on that affair, because I think it's instructive to the entire collapse of public trust in the way science is carried out.

Further, I think there's some disengenuity lumping in "childhood vaccinations", which have 20 years plus of widespread use, fine-tuning, and knowledge about their long-term effects, with these brand new vaccinations which are being literally rammed down the public's throats. Dr. Wilson's own research has shown serious cause for concern regarding flu vaccinations, for example.

The thing is, if you compare the budgets of NASA (http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2006/feb/HQ_06056_Budget_Statement.html) and NIH (http://www.nih.gov/about/director/budgetrequest/fy2007directorsbudgetrequest.htm) (the agency responsible for funding most federal health research), it turns out that NIH gets about $12 billion a year more than NASA. Granted, not all of that is spent on AIDS or cancer research, but there is the additional factor that substantial private monies are also spent on health research, while little private money is spent on the sorts of things NASA does. With the government also spending a trillion+ dollars a year to treat certain ill people (and to try to slightly lessen some social ills), it seems that they are already following your recommendation that money should be spent on AIDS or cancer research instead of NASA. Of course, there is the question of why AIDS or cancer research in particular should be a priority--what about antibiotics? Almost everyone needs those at some point in their lives, after all. Or better anti-malarial drugs--about twice as many people per year are killed by malaria than by cancer. Finally, some (such as the late Gerard K. O'Neill) have suggested that space travel and exploration could be used to help solve certain problems on Earth, particularly poverty. Space travel is no cure-all, of course, and there are also many smart people who doubt that space industry or the like would do much good or be very practical, but it is difficult to know for sure without going.

-FL

here is the pubmed citation and abstract link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&uid=6668953&cmd=showdetailview/

...and Paris Hilton was standing on top of a huge phallic symbol yelling: "Hey guys! Why didn't you pick me?!?" The nerd who captured Nicole Richie was found hours later, his brain encrusted with neurosyphilis. Lindsey Lohan and Britney Spears were found in a closet "lezzing out" with some butch roaches. When prompted for a statment, they replied "this doesn't mean we're gay. They're not even the same species as us."

$32,000 is a little low, but really, not that far off. Look at the stipend level recommendations from http://www.niaid.nih.gov/ncn/budget/stipendlevels.htm/NRSA and it's about right. Some schools do have a cost of living increase, but starting postdocs at http://www.gladstone.ucsf.edu/gladstone/site/postdoc/section.php?id=935 UCSF start at $43, 000. Not much, really, for living in SF.

What usually happens is that these people are in such an agitated state that when approached by law enforcement (or a security guard, or some shopkeeper who is trying to get them out of the store, or some passerby trying to get them out of running down the middle of the road in heavy traffic) tend to get even more aggressive and attack, and don't respond to the usual methods of being subdued like pepper spray or threat of arrest or being shot or anything. It can and and often does take 4 or 5 heavily trained policemen to get these guys out of danger. What has happened in the past is that these people continue to fight even when restrained in handcuffs, and then die of a sudden cardiac event most likely due to all the excitement and inability to calm down due to whatever drugs they are on. Over the years this has been well recognized and most sensible jurisdictions have rules such as "once handcuffed do not place in prone position" due to higher chances of these people dying from positional asphyxia.

Anyways, back to the Taser thing. Taser for years and years have been saying that since these deaths can happen WITHOUT the use of a Taser, then it's reasonable to assume that their use had no bearing on whether or not the guy lived or died and he probably woulda died anyways because documented causes of people with excited delirium have and will continue to die under these circumstances. And what they are saying is true to a certain extent: If people die without it, then why would you expect its use specifically to be the sole cause of their death? This guy in this most recent case most certainly was in a crazed state and very well could have died without the use of the Taser: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2007/11/24/custody-death.html. But that doesn't mean that the use of the Taser even in these cases wasn't contributory in some way. That recent Vancouver airport case had negative toxicology as far as I know, so we can't blame drugs on that guy's death, though he was clearly agitated. But it's just very difficult to prove, even with this video evidence, that the death was caused directly by the taser. It's electrical current. It doesn't leave any pathology.

Two jurisdictions in the States (Ohio and Chicago) have both attempted to certify deaths with "due to Taser" in the death certificate and both have been sued into submission. Taser has a huge lobby and has hired a number of physicists (not doctors) including this guy http://www.andcor.com/page/1/news_032206.jsp to go around the country giving lectures on how Tasers won't cause death and certifying them otherwise will land you a big fat lawsuit.

Anyways, it's a complicated issue, but in reference to your original question, excitation delirium is a state of agitation and occasionally extreme violence and paranoia usually brought on by stimulants and can commonly cause death in a mechanism not yet completely understood. Taser has been using it as an explanation for why people who have been Tasered go on to die for years. Hope that helps. The issue is extremely contentious and and very political at the moment.

The tired notion that a calorie is a calorie is demonstrably false. If it were true, we wouldn't worry about the efficiency of the machines we build! In the case of humans, if we encourage the inefficient use of calories, we can lose more weight while eating more calories. This is not just armchair stuff, it's been empirically demonstrated in more than one study. A few are mentioned here: http://www.locarbrecipes.com/atkinsresearch.html The myth that "A calorie is a calorie" is a matter of thermodynamics is rigorously debunked here: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=506782

Just for starters, when nutritionists talk about calories, they're not really talking about calories like a physicist would. They're really talking about "food calories," which I believe are equivalent to kilocalories. This may be a minor point, but it serves to illustrate that if you think nutrition science maps directly onto physics, you are wrong.

There is no difference in calories...we call them calories because if your cereal said it had 100 kilocalories per bowl people wouldn't know what that means. This is fitting since it is the Thanksgiving season in the US... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1133564, and as evident by that story, it maps perfectly to physics. The thing is this, ever think how many C-C bonds or C-H or C-N bonds are in your 6oz of corn flakes? Sufficient to say, not enough to be counted by "calories" and certainly 100,000 calorie breakfast would turn some heads. Lets not even mention that measuring in calories is like measuring in drams, or a pound...the world has long since moved on to the joule, for energy, in science anyway.

Nutritionist, in the ICU for example, use the Harris-Benedict equations for determining caloric needs for patients in various stages of hurt.

Second, and more importantly, any good college chemistry instructor will tell you that the body does not "release energy" from the chemical bonds in food

Again, not to pick here, but that good college professor would be 100% incorrect. Your body, thankfully does release energy from chemical bonds, particularly oxidative phosphorylation. This, aside from generating a bulk of our ATP (energy) allows us to maintain a 37.3C body temperature within a wide range of environmental conditions.

In short...to simplify, digestion isa complex process, not all food is equal, but not in the way you think (Carbohydrate 4 kcal/gram,Protein:4 kcal/gram,Fat 9 kcal/gram, Alcohol 7 kcal/gram) and you can measure the "calories" in a food as if you had a gas gauge, for all intents and purposes. I mean this in the general sense of "if I continue to the level of activity, but halve my food intake, you will lose weight. Will it all be fat? No, if you ran and consumed and extra 3500kcal, would you lose exactly 1 pound? Not exactly, but enough to get close.

1. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/002457.htm
2. http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FPNS%2FPNS31_02%2FS0029665172000412a.pdf&code=a16c418636d75bd92cf84720c13bb8d5
3. http://www.adajournal.org/article/PIIS000282239800100X/abstract

Human trials!

Too bad I don't have breasts ...

Since I'm not living in a metabolizm cage, can't rule it out ;)

Wasn't a heavy soda drinker, I used to drink one or two cans a day, which only accounts for ~ 20lbs of weight loss. And that's ignoring the increased caloric consumption of Gatorade (powder form, which doesn't contain HFCS, not the pre-made liquid, which does). I probably did drop my caloric intake a little bit, but I don't believe it's >400 kCals a day. Dunno. The literature is inconsistent, but one paper that struck me was this, from a group at U of Toronto.

4) Are there genetic conditions that promote obesity?
5) Are there viruses that promote obesity?
6) Are there different types of intestinal flora that promote obesity in humans?
7) Are there other causes that I can't think of that cause the human body to think it's in starvation mode and preferentially store every calorie it can as fat? Yes, I bet there are.

Couple that with the difficulty of applying the scientific method to humans (average life span of 75 years and ethical problems) and I think you'll see why medicine is a 'non-science.'

That difficulty is only a logistic difficulty, how to track a large number of people over a long period of time. But it is possible to overcome this difficulty, as is shown in the ERGO research project, where 10.000 people over 55 have from the Rotterdam district 'Ommoord' been tracked since 1990 (including yearly MRI scans of every single person). Since last year they've expanded this research to people over 45. This research already led to an astounding numbert of publications.

And indeed, some ethical issues, even by just following normal seamingly healthy persons: what do you do when you find abnormalities during the MRI brain scan? Dutch article with a picture and English article -that's not very useful is it- for subscribers only.

Patents, legislation & belief in what is good for you are what ruin medicine. Look at all the Hindu medicine that was ignored by the West for the longest time because it was ... well, Hindu.

Which is just as silly as using Hindu medicine because it was ... well, ignored by the West.

Males can get breast cancer too:

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/malebreastcancer.html

How about using medical information instead?

Remember to check against MEDICAL resources people...Example: After hearing stories from a nurse friend, I found "digital stimulation" is nothing I want ANYTHING to do with...

...'cause in this case, it *doesn't* mean Aussie p0rn...

Targeting the diseased cells is probably the biggest problem we face for treating disease today. How can you tell the difference between a cancerous cell and a healthy cell. If you could get all these "breakthroughs" to the correct cells, we could cure cancer easily.

As far as these "breakthroughs" are concerned, its all about PR. If I run a lab and I have something that might have the possibility to cure a disease, I might encourage my department to advertise it by talking to the press. A potential philanthropist might see the article and decide to donate money to the university where I do my research.

Everytime I see one of these press releases, I go straight to the target of the compound. Is it important for all cell types or just cancer cells. It this case I would say that there isn't enough information known about the pathway to jump up and down yet. See for yourself!
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=gene&cmd=retrieve&dopt=default&list_uids=3397

Until you learn enough biology to understand this URL, its best to just keep doing those breast cancer walks, and raising smoking awareness.

The signal to noise ratio for IM is no better/worse than email - after all, they both come from the same source.

When using e-mail, or any non-realtime mode, people are more likely to wait until they have something to say. It's why letters that survive to us from past eras, even letters from people whose education in written English was less than masterful, often seem so eloquent: one might spend a week thinking of things to say.

When you're in an IM conversation - or a phone conservation, or a face-to-face conversation (though there other factors also come into play) - there's less buffering and filtering. Silence seems awkward, so we fill it with low-quality data.

I'd be more inclined to use one of the most chilling verbs around...change.

There's nothing chilling about change. There is, though, something annoying about hoopla about minor changes being some sort of Great Social Upheaval.

Now instead of spending hours on the phone saying nothing, kids spend hours on FaceSpace or SMSing or IMing saying nothing. Instead of getting their morals "corrupted" by hanging out at the pool hall and listening to ragtime music, or by comic books and rock and roll, they get "corrupted" by (insert outrageous video game of the month) and (insert outrageous hip-hop album of the month). The gadgets change, the scenery changes, but human nature remains the same.

You are right in thinking that the grandparent is paranoid. The gene sequences are freely available on the web. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=gene&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=full_report&list_uids=672 details various forms of BRCA1. Also, patenting genes is not as nebulous as it was a few years ago. Now one must have a use, and not just a diagnostic use, for the gene to get a patent.

Then we can start to make changes to the houses so that the epidemic of lung diseases can be tackled. This is due to the houses not having chimneys and all cooking is done over an open charcoal fire.

Be careful there. I don't know the situation in Madagascar, but let me relay a story I heard which is possibly relevant:

In East Africa, Peace Corps volunteers wanted to improve the design of the huts the Masai would build. They taught them to incorporate a large vent, eliminating the smoke build-up. Worked beautifully, at least until malaria went totally out of control. Apparently the smoke kept the mosquitos out, so the pre-Peace Corps design was a reasonable compromise - lung diseases are preferable to malaria.

You may not want to make this change without other anti-mosquito or anti-malarial precautions. Googling finds a paper on the subject: Smoke and malaria: are interventions to reduce exposure to indoor air pollution likely to increase exposure to mosquitoes?. Probably worth reading if you haven't already.

SEC. 221. The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

The NIH doesn't only fund research that's useful to researchers and companies, though it does do that (e.g. new drug research), but also research that's useful to practicing physicians, like studies of the real-world efficacy of treatment options, prevalence and severity of side effects, meta-analyses of the literature, etc., etc. There is a strong governmental interest in having the results of these taxpayer-funded studies actually be available to doctors, since that was the purpose of funding them in the first place. That requires: 1) that someone not keeping up with all the literature can still locate studies relevant to their practice; and 2) that they can actually read the study. The NIH created the PubMed online abstract indexing service to address #1; this bill would address #2.

Superwiz is most definitely correct to point out there is gold in them thar data.

However, it's not strictly true that either Open Access to journal articles "misses the real problem", nor is it true NIH and other organizations are not moving on this issue of Open Access to data.

1) The NIH has a Data Sharing and Access Policy which strives to get such data out there where all can reap the full benefits of mining it.

          http://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/data_sharing/data_sharing_guidance.htm

2) NIH is also committed to funding both repositories and application of algorithmic tools for mining such data (e.g., all of the resources hosted by NCBI such as the Entrez data sets and tools). For some of the more complex data types that are being generated, NIH is funding grants and contracts to help make this data more available.

3) The Science Commons (associated with the Creative Commons) has as one of its primary objectives to create and persistently host a richly expressed repository of public research data (primary data and derived data) specifically to catalyze discovery by the broader community.

          http://sciencecommons.org/

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The recognition is there. Some significant technical obstacles still need to be addressed. But I do think the desire SuperWiz expresses here will gradually become a given over the next decade.

I would also add that prior to the 1990's, no research lab made much effort to get their data (raw & derived) out into the "commons". Most didn't think of it as valuable, and there is some truth to the thought that such a deluge would slow - as opposed to hasten scientific discovery.

I believe this view is changing, and we will see the expectation data needs to be published will be a given within a decade.

As an academic and NIH scientist, I find it appalling that NIH funded research isn't openly accessible to the public -- I further believe that all academic publications should be free, but that's a different topic. NIH already encourages authors to archive NIH-funded, accepted manuscripts in Pub Med Central http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ . Some journals do this automagically, some will encourage you to do it yourself, some will not mention PMC, but still allow authors to submit. Perhaps they haven't done so well publicizing this to their intramural scientists, but this is a great way to get federally funded research freely distributed through federally funded servers with enough of a time lag that mercenary journals can still retain some value in subscriptions.

PS: Here's a link to the current NIH Open Access Policy:

          http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-05-022.html

It's not a simple problem, I agree, but I don't think the solution has to be very complicated either. For example, the NIH has much experience in maintaining large, secure, open databases.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez

I do think the scientific community would get behind an NIH initiative to publish papers through the NIH. The NIH employs tens of thousands of people, and thousands of IT people.

More importantly, tons of profitable websites exist that disseminate information that costs a lot of money to publish. Open journals can be ad supported like any other website. There are probably other solutions that may work better, but it's not an insurmountable ideal.

More importantly, it's not a matter of convenience. It's a matter of principle.

That's why you have publicly funded research.

in that there's no real such thing yet like 'mathematical biology.'

We're getting there.

Report here. Select a random group of ignorant African men, circumcise some of them. Give them vague advice on safe sex, then tell them to go out and have sex. See how many of them come back with HIV.

It was concluded that you're about 50% more likely to catch HIV if you're uncircumcised. I'd say, especially in a society where circumcision is not standard (i.e. not Israel, USA, Philippines, etc.), if you've just had part of your cock lobbed off, you're very likely to change your sexual habits and people are less likely to have sex with you. If you're just given advice and then told to go away, you're more likely to carry on as usual.

Experimentation on the negro is not exactly new, of course.

Care to point me to any scientific evidence that Tamiflu, Relenza, or any other such drug in the pipeline will save a single person from a pandemic type flu virus?

Sure, because I have nothing better to do with my time than do the research you clearly haven't done yourself.

First of all, Tamiflu has been shown to not only reduce the duration and severity of flu symptoms, but used as a prophylactic, reduces the chances of catching the flu by 74%. Here are some facts to back that up: Go here and enter these PMIDs: 17535069, 17253479, 17115954.

There's tons more out there and anyone willing to get off their butt and do the research can find it. Now granted, there haven't been any large scale trials with H5N1 in people because not that many people have had H5N1. That said, combination therapies in mice with H5N1 have proven quite effective. There's no guarantee it will work in people, but all the evidence suggests that H5N1 is susceptible to neuraminidase inhibitors like Tamiflu will be effective against H5N1. It won't be 100%, but based on the existing data, I suspect it will have a pretty significant impact.

Now, I've done some of your legwork for you. How about you back up this statement: "Even for non-pandemic strains, the evidence that vaccines and antivirals have had any impact of flu death rates is extremely thin." with some evidence of your own.

Established in 1988 as a national resource for molecular biology information, NCBI creates public databases, conducts research in computational biology, develops software tools for analyzing genome data, and disseminates biomedical information - all for the better understanding of molecular processes affecting human health and disease

Of course, it makes you wonder, why couldn't they create some disease to kill the cane toad off? Or destroy opium poppies etc.

Because after you've swallowed the horse, you're dead, of course. Ah, the wisdom of children from decades past. Who would have thought that unleashing ever more dangerous things could come to such a tragic end?

Pretty powerful word there, extinction...

The problem being that I never used it once, called for it, nor do I advocate it for ANY species.

Pardon my saying so, but I believe that the doctors have a different take on it than you do.

Believe it or not, I know a number of people dissuaded from dangerous personal experimentation after seeing it done on MB. You could almost call the show "Jackass for Geeks". Anecdotal evidence, to be true, but no more so than your guessing at any pain the roaches might feel.

Really? If you're American, I'm pretty sure some of your tax money goes to Welfare. I'm not equating the poor with cockroaches or vice versa, but the simple fact remains that darn near EVERY living beast needs food and shelter at some point. That costs cash. My question: Where do you propose the funds for cockroach care come from?

Again, with that word, "extinction". I've never advocated it, because I know what an ecosystem is. They faithfully play their part in nature as scavengers, and it works quite well. Let them stay there.

What you seem to be missing is that they have NO part in the human ecosystem. Spreading disease, respiratory illness, and otherwise freaking out the squeamish, they need to be relegated elsewhere outside OUR environment.

I'm not saying that you necessarily have to save the "domesticated" cockroach singlehandedly. I'm not claiming you have the resources to do so. What I AM standing by is that rather than complaining about it, you need to first figure out where the resources will come from to care for the ones you believe you need to "save".

OK, there have been other tests (including one involving spinal fluid, ouch) that have been 90+% accurate (or were initially purported to be in manufacturer-sponsored studies).

It doesn't matter.

Dementia has lots of possible causes, and there's really no way to tell most of them apart from just seeing the symptoms. That means that a dementia screening is required, and when done by an appropriate specialist (usually a neurologist, neuropsychiatrist, or geriatric psychiatrist), it's roughly 90% accurate, PLUS you have either ruled out or discovered other more easily identifiable and sometimes reversible causes of dementia, which is important for what should be obvious reasons. That is why none of these tests have replaced the standard screening, although the companies that have produced them have spent millions trying to market them as suitable replacements. The accepted diagnostic standards haven't changed much in 20 years, really, the link given is still the gold standard or still a large part of the basis for more current standards for specialists or generalists.

The only big revolution is that some progress is being made on the metabolic processes that cause the plaques and tangles to appear in the brain, which might allow for preventative treatment, but it would probably need to begin in your 20's. Elan Pharmaceuticals was working on an antibody that could clear plaques from the brain, but it was unclear how much this would help those who were already suffering from AD, as brain cells will eventually start dying, although if this approach proves successful the disease may certainly be stopped and the damage kept from progressing, but it can't reverse existing damage.

And yes, this is my field. Here's some recommended reading for those looking for more info.

OK, there have been other tests (including one involving spinal fluid, ouch) that have been 90+% accurate (or were initially purported to be in manufacturer-sponsored studies).

It doesn't matter.

Dementia has lots of possible causes, and there's really no way to tell most of them apart from just seeing the symptoms. That means that a dementia screening is required, and when done by an appropriate specialist (usually a neurologist, neuropsychiatrist, or geriatric psychiatrist), it's roughly 90% accurate, PLUS you have either ruled out or discovered other more easily identifiable and sometimes reversible causes of dementia, which is important for what should be obvious reasons. That is why none of these tests have replaced the standard screening, although the companies that have produced them have spent millions trying to market them as suitable replacements. The accepted diagnostic standards haven't changed much in 20 years, really, the link given is still the gold standard or still a large part of the basis for more current standards for specialists or generalists.

The only big revolution is that some progress is being made on the metabolic processes that cause the plaques and tangles to appear in the brain, which might allow for preventative treatment, but it would probably need to begin in your 20's. Elan Pharmaceuticals was working on an antibody that could clear plaques from the brain, but it was unclear how much this would help those who were already suffering from AD, as brain cells will eventually start dying, although if this approach proves successful the disease may certainly be stopped and the damage kept from progressing, but it can't reverse existing damage.

And yes, this is my field. Here's some recommended reading for those looking for more info.

OK, there have been other tests (including one involving spinal fluid, ouch) that have been 90+% accurate (or were initially purported to be in manufacturer-sponsored studies).

It doesn't matter.

Dementia has lots of possible causes, and there's really no way to tell most of them apart from just seeing the symptoms. That means that a dementia screening is required, and when done by an appropriate specialist (usually a neurologist, neuropsychiatrist, or geriatric psychiatrist), it's roughly 90% accurate, PLUS you have either ruled out or discovered other more easily identifiable and sometimes reversible causes of dementia, which is important for what should be obvious reasons. That is why none of these tests have replaced the standard screening, although the companies that have produced them have spent millions trying to market them as suitable replacements. The accepted diagnostic standards haven't changed much in 20 years, really, the link given is still the gold standard or still a large part of the basis for more current standards for specialists or generalists.

The only big revolution is that some progress is being made on the metabolic processes that cause the plaques and tangles to appear in the brain, which might allow for preventative treatment, but it would probably need to begin in your 20's. Elan Pharmaceuticals was working on an antibody that could clear plaques from the brain, but it was unclear how much this would help those who were already suffering from AD, as brain cells will eventually start dying, although if this approach proves successful the disease may certainly be stopped and the damage kept from progressing, but it can't reverse existing damage.

And yes, this is my field. Here's some recommended reading for those looking for more info.

And here I'd thought vacuums were the top of the list.

You might have an ulcer. Helicobacter pylori was found to cause peptic ulcers in the 1980s. http://digestive.niddk.nih.gov/ddiseases/pubs/hpylori/

I doubt that is their function

It must be (though not an exclusive one), as the whole body is involved in control of posture, which is not a particularly easy task, neither from theory (for an idea) nor in practice (see sig).

CC.

A THIRSTY Crow found a Pitcher with some water in it, but so little was there that, try as she might, she could not reach it with her beak, and it seemed as though she would die of thirst within sight of the remedy. At last she hit upon a clever plan. She began dropping pebbles into the Pitcher, and with each pebble the water rose a little higher until at last it reached the brim, and the knowing bird was enabled to quench her thirst.

Moral: Necessity is the mother of invention.

Hmm R-ingTFA is highly recommended in these environs.

In fact, this particular topic isn't at all settled. It has been a very active area of research for decades, and questions related to this have spawned field changing debates. In a nutshell, before molecular biology, people thought all change was bad or adaptive. Then a dude named Kimura suggested that a lot of DNA change has very little consequence to survival. If most DNA changes are largely irrelevant to survival, then mutation rates largely dictate evolution. If mutation is dependent on metabolism, the voila! You get the result you see in the article.

However, another unrelated explanation with the very same prediction was made 34 years ago by a Tomoko Ohta, a student of Kimura's. If a lot of mutations have very small effects, then these very small effects can only be fully realized in large populations because of genetic drift. Thus, these small changes can be seen easiest in the larger population, which incidentally tend to be smaller and have higher metabolisms. Again, voila, you get the result you see in the article. In fact, the authors even admit as much:

...larger organisms generally have smaller effective population sizes (Lynch & Conery 2003), we cannot rule out the possible influence of effective population size, as predicted by the 'nearly neutral' theory (Ohta 1973).

Ultimately, the authors have added to the debate and have by no means closed it. But that's what's fun, isn't it?

at the DNA level, so it would make sense that it applies to proteins as well. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=46451

That's been done a few times see Risk of dementia in diabetes mellitus: a systematic review. for a review.

I think the authors of the current study were claiming something different - that the way in which the pathology of AD leads to clinical symptoms is by essentially causing a new brain specific type of diabetes.

This is a slightly confusing issue in dementia. The early stages of dementia, even the pre-clinical stages, lead to weight loss for various reasons. So rapid weight loss is associated with increased dementia risk over a couple of years, which is the finding of the short follow-up studies you have quoted.

Conversely, being overweight or obese in midlife is strongly associated with and increase in dementia risk in old age. For references and a discussion of the misinterpretation of the kind of studies you have quoted see Obesity in middle age and future risk of dementia: a 27 year longitudinal population based study and The epidemiology of adiposity and dementia.

It may be a type of Hypoglycaemia. I suffer from reactive hypoglycaemia and I find it helps to completely avoid high sugar foods and drinks unless I'm planning on exercising or prepared to crash out for a while afterwards. One can of coke is usually enough to knock me out for an hour or so if I don't do any physical activity soon after drinking it. I find avoiding caffine also helps.

I imagine they can do it in the time they say. I also imagine the results are very simple, like looking at one STR sequence and counting how many lengths of it are in the person's genome in a process similar to qPCR, less RFLP/southern, as parent seems to think. Despite what TFA might imply, I don't think there's endonuclease digestion involved. I may be wrong, and they could have a really, really fast breifcase thermocycler making this work. Maybe, doubt it.

I'm not any kind of STR expert, but from cribbing Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_tandem_repeat, here's my impression of what's going on with this kit:

1. get cells = blood and semen. yum. In fact, I'd infer this kit is probably a "semen-only" deal in practice, which makes isolating the DNA that much easier, since semen is largely DNA.
2. isolate DNA. Do it yourself, kids! (http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/units/activities/extraction/) 2-5 minutes with a kit.
3. PCR. Here's where things get interesting. What are their primers? I think they're using 5-10 nucleotide STR sequences that are already conjugated to a fluorescent dye. Since STRs for human identification use are just, according to wikipedia, 4-5 STRs (10-50 nucleotides) long, each cycle can probably be as short as 30 seconds. With ramping the temperatures we can call that 1 minute per cycle. How many cycles do we need? 10 cycles gives us 2^10 copies of the original STR, that's (biologist math)1000 copies(/biologist math). Add 2 minutes for our hot-start polymerase, and that's 12 minutes for PCR. Whoo! It well may be less, i.e. shorter elongation, fewer cycles. This is where they're claiming to save time, so who knows.
4. electrophoresis. Undoubtedly capillary, you can see it in the photo (at least I can), and since we're looking at stuff that's only 75 nucleotides max, can be done very quickly. I don't really know capillary gel electrophoresis, but it apparently kicks the shit out of slab gel electrophoresis: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=330505. We'll call that 10 minutes, lol. Could be a bit more? Balances with the PCR.
5. Of course, we added a 10-100 nucleotide standard conjugated to a different fluorescent species from the primers (i.e. the primers glow green and the standard glows red), so we can use our shitty little built-in 2-wavelength spectrophotometer to see where our unknown sample's bands are.

And now we have our data! And that only took... 25 minutes! Of course, this isn't a full-blown RFLP, like parent seems to assume. But just for doing a quick-and-dirty count of STRs, this could work. That's how I'd do it. Maybe I just invented a competing type of kit, lol. In any event, looking at the picture, I get the feeling their pipettes are crap.

Note this doesn't show how many repeats of a given legth the accused has, so the asshole could have 3 5-repeat ones and 2 4-repeat, and the machine would show that as being the same as a person with 1 of each. Also, they may use more fluorescent dyes to look at more STR sequences without too much difficulty. But in general, the samples will be unclean at best, total crap more often than they'll like to admit, and, in the end, only good as a blood-type-and-then-some test. How juries will react to this, I don't know.

To get even farther from parent, the real threat to your privacy is coming from gene chips, the next generation of sequencing technology. This kit is comparatively rudamentary, and obviously expensive. Yet more overhyped crap, whee!

Do you have any idea what you're talking about? I will rephrase that. You do not have an idea what you're talking about. I'm not even going to debate with you about suffering: I put human beings first and animals second. If it comes down to a choice between a human being and 4,000 animals, I know which way I'd choose. Period. End-of-statement.

When you've finished dealing with the fact that I disagree with you on every point, go read this. After you've educated yourself on how wrong you are, come back tell me that what you said is even slightly relevant. Like the GP, I've had two family members suffer from severe clinical depression, suicide was narrowly averted multiple times. In one case the onset was before the age of antidepressants: he drank to mask the effects of the depression, but overall alcohol simply worsens the problem. When one of the early drugs became available we got him on it (Elevil in the late seventies, I think ... it's been a long time) and the difference was like night and day. "I have my life back" he said, and stopped drinking ... he didn't need it anymore, just to feel normal for a while. It was astonishing, and the relief we all felt was palpable. He still suffered from the effects of his condition 'til he died, but at least he had a life. If that drug hadn't come out when it did he wouldn't have lasted another six months, a year tops. He switched to different drugs over time, as better ones became available, but he got an extra twenty five years because of them.

People who claim that no-one needs antidepressants ("Tom Cruise, are you listening?") are fools. Ignorant assholes who would cheerfully consign other human beings to a living hell contained within their own skulls. I still don't understand how it must feel to suffer from this disease, and yet I had to deal with the consequences of it for almost thirty years. All of us did, and it was ... very difficult. I'm not saying that antidepressants (like virtually all drugs) aren't capable of being abused, but to claim that people suffering from clinical depression should just "get over themselves" is a preposterous falsehood. Period. End of statement.

If there is a God, I hope He delivers people like you a sample of what you say doesn't exist. For just a few years: I wouldn't want you to get so depressed that you actually off yourself. Maybe then you'll understand why what you just said offended me to the core.