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Yes, coronary disease is a big problem and yes it's the major killer in the US but it isn't the major killer worldwide, just in developed nations. You'll notice on the first link that cancer is still way up on causes of death in the US and, despite your claims to the contrary, I can assure that now in my second year of medical school that coronary syndromes are a major focus in medical education and research.

The work these scientists did is certainly not the first implementation of this idea but it's quite worth the investment. Stenting is not a miracle cure and likely wont ever be; it's just delaying the inevitable. The only powerful approach to reducing heart related deaths is prevention and education; even then, most deaths due to 'old age' are written up as heart related deaths so they'll keep going up as we get better at fighting the world's real number one killer: simple infections.

Then again, I'm an idiot ......

not a bacteriological one. Antibiotics will do absolutely nothng against a viral disease.

But antimicrobials do work against viruses, and they are overused as well.

Falcon

There's a third option which you neglect: it's a stupid newspaper article full of hyperbole, from which you would be really silly to draw sweeping conclusions about the whole of neonatal care in the UK. Also, if you look on page 34 of this report, it seems like the WHO don't agree with your figures, at least for 2006.

"you might want to ask people from ukraine and belarus how fascinating it is to experience natural, that is, artificial selection in first person."

Are they dying of cancer more?

Deaths, Neoplasms, per 100000 (most recent data available used)

Belarus 164.11
Ukraine 159.08
Denmark 212.62
Germany 170.19
Ireland 181.82
Italy 170.66
Luxembourg 172.65
EU average 178.09

Source:World Health Organisation
http://data.euro.who.int/hfamdb/

This leads us to two issues. One, the machines have to be more cost-effective than an exploited work-force. And even then, what can be automated here can be automated there where the workforce that runs the machines are cheaper (read: exploited).

And then the workforce that runs the machines can be automated to the point where intensive labor isn't required. From here, it's turtles all the way down.

Yes - I'm sure the suicides and the expose on working conditions at the company by China Business News were just aberrations of an overzealous imagination. Meanwhile, Foxconn hired a New York public relations firm because they just want to get their name out there.

In the US, suicides per 100,000k is 10/year. The national average for China is 25/100k/yr. Foxconn - which employs ~900,000 people - had twelve suicides in a six month period. Let's assume that trend continues and call it 25 in a year. That works out to 2.78/100k/yr.

This rate is drastically lower than both the Chinese national suicide rate; and the lower US suicide rate. (Sources: http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suiciderates/en/ http://www.suicide.org/suicide-statistics.html). When you have a company with the population of a small nation, it's easy for appearances to be deceiving. I'm not saying it's a haven of happy workers -- only that conditions may not be as bad as we're assuming. AS far as the report by China Business News -- I would trust that to be about as unbiased as any news source in the US. Again, I'm not claiming that there are no issues - only that we're only being shown a very small window into things.

There are 1 billion people who are overweight *of which* 300 million are obese: http://www.who.int/dietphysicalactivity/publications/facts/obesity/en/

Unfortunately they don't keeps statistics of those who are underweight but not actually malnourished. However, weight distribution in the world is almost certainly normal. There are 6.7 billion people in the world. About 1 billion are overweight and about 1 billion are malnourished. This leaves 4.7 billion who are eight at a healthy weight or underweight. Even if 75% of this group are a healthy weight (unlikely given a normal distribution) it still leaves the underweight and malnourished group at over 2 billion.

With respect to your comment about things getting better in large cities with real poverty problems, I invite you to actually spend time in the slums to see if you change your mind. Notice that not one western city is listed in the top 20. It's not like London or even New York. People in these cities have no homes, no drinking water, no sewage and very little food. Yes, there is wealth there. People come because they are attracted to the wealth (or because they are born in the slums). They might be able to eke out some kind of living by begging. But again, go and look. Spend your holiday in one of these slums and see how much you enjoy it.

There have also been recent allegations that the WHO played up the dangerous nature of the H1N1 influenza virus (which got "pandemic" status) in order for some corporations to profit financially Pandemic, Scandal Allegations

Wrong. I don't know where you got your figures from, but the rate (from the WHO) is between 13 and 15 per 100,000. You're off by three orders of magnitude, putting the Foxconn place at SUBSTANTIALLY over the national average.

Foxconn has been shaking off the reports of the psychological and physical trauma workers face as statistically insignificant, reminding the media that 12 out of every 1,000 Chinese citizens commit suicide every year.

Go ahead, quote Foxconn. You'll get about as much credibility as the Chinese state media.

Twelve out of every thousand citizens? Well, let's look at what the World Health Organization says:

Suicide Rates (per 100,000), by country, year, and gender.
...
CHINA (Selected rural & urban areas) in 1999: 13.0 males and 14.8 females.
CHINA (Hong Kong SAR) in 1999: 16.7 males and 9.8 females.
...

So I can either believe Foxconn that reports 12 per every thousand or the WHO that reports ~28 per every hundred thousand. Now, which statistic is the most believable? Foxconn's statistic means that some twelve million Chinese commit suicide yearly. That's an impressive number unheard of. That number rivals wartime casualties.

Maybe Apple's investments in Foxconn have lead to "good American ethics and proper treatment of employees" after all...

Again, from your own article:

All those who have committed suicide have been between the ages of 18 and 24 and are part of a young generation of migrant workers attracted to jobs in the cities who then face terrible conditions. While these workers’ struggles could have been forgotten, their important role in the global supply chain of high-priced, high-demand devices like the iPhone and the iPad is keeping their stories in the media.

A report released last week by Students and Scholars against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM), a Hong Kong-based workers’ rights non-profit created in 2005, details the exhaustion caused by 12-hour shifts, alienation from not being allowed to speak to co-workers, and a rapid just-in-time production model that has workers putting in a phone motherboard every seven seconds to meet the global demand for high-priced gadgets.

Once a company buys from that sort of situation or profits from that sort of situation, you are doing business to a degree outside of the ethics and proper treatment of employees that Americans demand.

Your post defending Apple confuses and frightens me. Why you would bend over backward to defend Apple when it's clear they've joined the leagues of the other tech companies is beyond me. Face the facts, the global economy has companies inside third world style labor countries lining up to be a part of the supply chain -- and American companies all too glad to make a buck off them! Now we know Apple's no different.

This article reads like a parody. Some guy is (supposedly) worried about sex offenders in the neighborhood - I know, let's X Ray everyone everyday ! That will surely keep people safe, until they all die of cancer.

Seriously, are these guys stuck in the 1950's ? Penetrating radiation for bone scans ? On a daily basis ? I can remember when children's shoe stores had X ray machines, so Mom could view how the shoe fit, but such common uses of X Rays were stopped for a reason, and as a screening device this has no chance.

From the article : Depending on the selected technology, a skeletal scan would only expose a person to radiation that is the approximate equivalent of taking one cross-country airline flight

From the World Health Organization, INFORMATION SHEET Nov. 2005, on Cosmic Radiation and Air Travel :

Aircrew are now recognized in many countries as occupationally exposed to radiation, and radiation protection limits for aircrew are similar to those established for nuclear workers.

If you work through the numbers (and I read the above to mean that, at best, radiation exposure would be similar to air travel, so this is a lower bound), a daily scan would thus amount to 2 to 5 milliSievert (mSv) of radiation each year, substantially exceeding the ICRP guideline of no more than 1 mSv exposure to any fetus during pregnancy, and coming close to or exceeding the guideline of 4 mSv exposure for ordinary workers.

This would, at a minimum, mean that anyone at risk of pregnancy should not be scanned, and radiation workers should not be scanned (as they are typically close to their limits). There is thus just no chance that this would be adopted for regular screening of the general population.

"This must never happen again"

any stats on suicide success rate in countries with lotsa guns vs countries with fewer guns ?

Suicide rates per 100,000, averaging male and female rates: UK 7.55, U.S. 10.55, India 10.65, China 13.9, Switzerland 18.25, Japan 25.3.

Guns per 100 residents: China 3.5, India 4.0, UK 5.6, Switzerland 46.0, U.S. 90.0. Japan's rate of firearms ownership is nearly nil.

(The numbers given are numbers of guns, not gun ownership rates; the U.S. number is distorted by ownership of multiple guns being common. 38% of households and 26% of individuals own at least one firearm.)

So, no, we do not have a higher suicide rate than countries with few guns. Try again.

someone with with a sudden yearning to die and a gun will probably shoot themselves.

You do not understand the nature of suicide. One does not take one's own life on a passing whim.

In Japan, despite the absence of guns, people manage to kill themselves highly effectively by jumping off high places or in front of trains.

In Mozambique 2006, WHO reports:

22 Million Suspected Cases
7 Million Confirmed
19 Thousand Dead
Malaria instance rate went from 20% to 30% from 2001 to 2007

And here's my citation: http://malaria.who.int/wmr2008/MAL2008-CountryProfiles/MAL2008-Mozambique-EN.pdf

That said, I agree that the "1200 times safe levels" quote is fear-mongering. Humans are notoriously bad at judging relative risk (see the Bad Science blog for more).

From the WHO site:

• Dioxins are a group of chemically-related compounds that are persistent environmental pollutants.
• Dioxins are found throughout the world in the environment and they accumulate in the food chain, mainly in the fatty tissue of animals.
• More than 90% of human exposure is through food, mainly meat and dairy products, fish and shellfish. Many national authorities have programmes in place to monitor the food supply.
• Dioxins are highly toxic and can cause reproductive and developmental problems, damage the immune system, interfere with hormones and also cause cancer.
• Due to the omnipresence of dioxins, all people have background exposure, which is not expected to affect human health. However, due to the highly toxic potential of this class of compounds, efforts need to be undertaken to reduce current background exposure.
• Prevention or reduction of human exposure is best done via source-directed measures, i.e. strict control of industrial processes to reduce formation of dioxins as much as possible.

In short, dioxins' real danger is not increased cancer risk in the population that ingests it directly. It's the mutagenic risk to our offspring. In layman's terms, you're not going to die of cancer, but your child might be born with a genetic defect that affects their ability to thrive - or maybe even to survive.

A 'safe' dose is therefore difficult to quantify, because we won't know for sure what the impact will be after (for example) 3 generations of exposure at a given level. More to the point, we don't want to find out by waiting to see if our predictions were right. In cases like this, the precautionary principle is by far the better choice.

That's difficult to apply, however, because dioxins are persistent chemicals; they accumulate in the food chain and don't disperse easily. Arguably, there is no such thing as a 'safe' level, because with the passage of time even small annual increments become very large numbers.

As with climate change, decisions deriving from the scientific findings will be largely informed by the moral/ethical/philosophical stance of the policy-makers. The same data set looks very different if you're looking at the problem in terms of the next electoral cycle, as opposed to the next generation.

There's no question where you'd like to be living if you are diagnosed with cancer. The question is do you want a high risk of cancer? If not, then actively ignoring evidence would not be a good strategy. Otherwise, enjoy your years with chemo, radiation and surgical procedures, I hear it's a blast. Those ventilators can give you a few more months or even years to pump up your stats. Also ignore the high child mortality rates and the AIDS epidemic which significantly alter the average life expectancy in developing countries. If you live to age 25 there and don't have AIDS in a developing country, you have a better chance of living to a ripe old age without cancer than a US citizen.

Life expectancy with qualifications is a lot different than raw stat listing of how long the general person might live.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs225/en/index.html

The danger from dioxin is that it is cumulative. The "safe" exposure is what is tabulted to be "not particularly harmful considering consistent exposure over a lifetime." Much like DDT in the environment building up and eventually killing birds by making eggshells too brittle to be hatched, dioxins build up in animal tissues, and accumulate in epic proportions in apex predators (like humans...)

Dioxins are associted with increased risks for a large number of cancers, as well as with reduced fertility, and various sexual birth defects, among other things.

WHO on Dionxin

You might want to look at some statistics ;-).

Though to be clear: several European countries do have a big problem with obesity -- the UK and Germany are worst.

If you disagree, please cite an academic reference that shows fluoride and what the minimum daily recommended levels for intake should be for a normal adult, similar to the levels they have for other minerals and vitamins. Go ahead, I dare you to provide one single reference showing fluoride is a nutritional requirement.

Jesus Christ, did you not even look up wikipedia? Its in the first paragraph for fuck's sake. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation
And here is the reference for it: http://whqlibdoc.who.int/trs/WHO_TRS_846.pdf

What do I win?

Better stats are available here: http://www.who.int/mental_health/media/chinurban.pdf A little outdated, but the point remains that suicide rates vary greatly by age,

Exactly. A little less outdated: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/jul/26/china.jonathanwatts

Suicide is the main cause of death among young adults in China, the state media said yesterday in a report that highlights the growing pressures to succeed in love, work and education in one of the world's fastest changing societies.

Increasing stress, loneliness and a lack of medical support for depression are thought to have contributed to an annual suicide toll that is estimated at 250,000 people a year. According to the China Daily, an additional 2.5 million to 3.5 million make unsuccessful attempts to kill themselves each year.

Better stats are available here: http://www.who.int/mental_health/media/chinurban.pdf A little outdated, but the point remains that suicide rates vary greatly by age, going up as you get older, so you cannot compare a national suicide rate to a suicide rate in a factory where everyone is in their 20s. In fact, based on the stats cited (somewhere between 3.5 and 6.3 per 100,000 for the relevant age groups) and the size of the Shenzhen factory (300,000), you would expect 10-20 suicides for the year on average. This plant has had 10 suicides or so in 5 months. Not extremely high, but high enough to warrant closer inspection into possible causes.

People like to blame Apple, Dell, or any other company that manufacturers gadgets in China (who doesn't nowadays?), but is this really their fault?

According to this URL:
http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suiciderates/en/

China and area have almost 55 suicides for every 100,000 people. Among the highest in the world.

Foxconn employs over 300,000 people according to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn

And has had 9 suicides so far this year, so lets extrapolate that out to 20 in a year.

Suicide rate for China in general.......: 0.00055%
Suicide rate for Foxconn employees: 0.00006%

While this is still too high, I think we should be asking what Foxxconn is doing that results in such an *improvement* over the rest of China.

The media is getting all in a panic over 9 people committing suicide yet ignoring the big picture, which is the thousands of people committing suicide in China just in general.

If you then show these people that (a) Zero people died because of Three Mile Island, (b) 46 firefighters died in the Cherynobyl accident, and (c) nobody died in Japan you will be branded a liar and some kind of anti-environmental kook

Well, here's what the World Health Organization says. Some significant quotes, for people who don't want to bother reading:
 
 
A large increase in the incidence of thyroid cancer has occurred among people who were young children and adolescents at the time of the accident and lived in the most contaminated areas of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine. This was due to the high levels of radioactive iodine released from the Chernobyl reactor in the early days after the accident.

In Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine nearly 5 000 cases of thyroid cancer have now been diagnosed to date among children who were aged up to 18 years at the time of the accident.

  It is expected that the increased incidence of thyroid cancer from Chernobyl will continue for many years, although the long-term magnitude of the risk is difficult to quantify.

The Expert Group concluded that there may be up to 4 000 additional cancer deaths among the three highest exposed groups over their lifetime (240 000 liquidators; 116 000 evacuees and the 270 000 residents of the SCZs).

Predictions, generally based on the LNT model, suggest that up to 5000 additional cancer deaths may occur in this population [ Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine] from radiation exposure

The numbers in this report are contested by a Greenpeace study (available here). Greenpeace estimates the number of cancers attributable to the Chernobyl accident to 270000, out of which 93000 fatal.

Even ignoring the Greenpeace numbers, if you'll say only 46 people died at Chernobyl, but omit the fact that thousands more have contracted cancer as a direct consequence of the Chernobyl accident and 4000 more are expected to die of it, then you're indeed a liar and a kind of anti-environmentalist kook.

Time to move on.

I'm not so sure. Cancer is a funny thing, and "cell-phone use" is kind of a broad behavior. I have seen so many items get shifted from the "causes cancer" to "inconclusive" to "completely safe" category and then back again, that I've got something of a jaundiced eye toward "moving on" based upon one study.

Even if you remove the obvious data-cooking by the industry, there actually were studies in the 50's that showed that the connection between cigarette smoking and cancer was "inconclusive". Better-designed studies, honest studies, showed later that the connection was real.

Yes, because this study was by the World Health Organization. They always do studies that favor Western and American corporations. Obviously a flawed study, nothing but a whitewash from the conspirators at the WHO.

We do not live in the era of horses and five week mail delivery any more. Before you put up stupid shit like this, how about at least making sure we can't easily check it. If you look at basic cause of death statistics for Israel, terrorism isn't even listed it's such a minor issue. Please come back when you've realised that Google exists.

In fact the only good thing about your post is it was less stupid than it's parent post. At least there really are some suicide bomb attacks which kill people in Israel; the Real IRA kills practically nobody.

you respond with a grand conspiracy theory

Well it can be best summed up by this 2004 quote of Dr Michael Fernex formerly of the University of Basel who worked for the WHO;

"Six years ago we tried to have a conference. The proceedings were never published. This is because in this matter the organisations at the UN are subordinate to the IAEA. Since 1986 the WHO did nothing about studying Chernobyl. It's a pity. The interdiction to publish which fell upon the WHO conference came from the IAEA. The IAEA blocked the proceedings; the truth would have been a disaster for the nuclear industry"

So you can see the difference between theory and practice, I've provided you with the actual text of the agreement.

and an allegation about "slow agonising death" for which of course you have no evidence whatsoever.

Oh you don't have to believe me. Even the hamstrung report from the World Health Organisation said;

"The international experts have estimated that radiation could cause up to about 4000 eventual deaths among the higher-exposed Chernobyl populations, i.e., emergency workers from 1986-1987, evacuees and residents of the most contaminated areas. This number contains both the known radiation-induced cancer and leukaemia deaths"

Imagine, based on the actual evidence I've provided you, what the WHO may have been able to uncover had they been allowed to actually reveal the actual truth of the disaster. The Guardian however points out that the IAEA is ignoring the evidence of the volume of deaths occurring as a result of the Chernobyl disaster, so it's unlikely that you will examine them fairly either, of course if no one is actually collecting the data how can it be presented?

The UNICEF report "Human consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear accident" summarised it neatly;

"Life expectancy for men in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, for example, is some ten years less that Sri Lanka, which is one of the twenty poorest countries in the world and is in the middle of a long drawn out war"

Maybe dying of cancer just isn't what you class as a "slow and agonising death".

Time is on the side of truth.

The truth of the matter is that cancer takes years to incubate, thus premature deaths and birth defects will manifest over time. After this generation, the next generation and long after this disaster has passed into lore it will still be well within the toxic half-life of radioactive isotopes such as cesium 137, strontium 90 and plutonium 239.

The reality is that direct exposure killed less than a hundred

The reality is the genetic abnormalities and diseases caused by this accident are generations away and unlikely to be seen by anyone alive today. direct exposure will occur as long as there is a food chain to absorb these isotopes and people to eat that food.

Nuclear Power just isn't as dangerous as the images of an A-bomb denotation would suggest.

Of course, it's much worse. An A bomb may release more radiation in the form of gamma radiation but much less material in terms of radioactive isotopes than a nuclear reactor - especially in these circumstances.

You "point" doesn't stand because you never made one.

Perhaps you just missed it. Hopefully the information presented here will help you understand it.

...make up scary nonsense...your respo

So tell me - why has every other first world nation been able to implement universal coverage? Why have so many of those nations consistently beaten the US in virtually every measure of health care efficacy? Why have so many of those nations consistently beaten the US when it comes to quality of life,

Because the metric used included equal access to health care. Of course a system which provides health care to all its citizens will score higher than a system where some citizens are not covered because they choose not to or cannot afford to buy insurance. Citing that metric as a reason why the U.S. needs universal coverage is circular reasoning.

child mortality rate,

When I looked into this and added up the stillbirth and infant mortality rate (PDF warning), the U.S. ends up in the middle of the pack of developed nations. Indicating there's still misreporting of infant deaths as stillbirths to try to lower your hospital/country's infant mortality rate, artificially lowering the U.S.' ranking in world infant mortality rate.

and lifespan?

Has more to do with lifestyle. All those jokes about fat, lazy Americans have a degree of truth to it.

In terms of quality of health care, the U.S. is really no different than other developed nations. That's not what's broken. The problem is the U.S. spends a massively disproportionate amount of its GDP on health care compared to those countries. 14% vs. about 8%.

If we're concerned about the effects of medical care, perinatal mortality is a better measure. Using that rate, the US (7) is slightly better than, for example, the UK(8), and more than twice as good as Cuba(17), which people love to point out has a better infant mortality rate than we do. This also prevents the issues with defining a live birth, since it includes late term still births. That said, I wouldn't say our infant mortality numbers are 'very bad' as the grandparent suggested. Yes, several countries are higher than us. But 2/3 of the countries in WHO's list have more than twice our infant mortality rate.

"We supposedly pay 17% now, and we live longer lives, have better medical care, and are generally heather than our contemporaries in other countries" Except you're not and you're just making shit up: The US is 38th in life expectancy. Even Cuba does better than the States. Almost every other 'European' nation (plus Japan) does better : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy Your infant mortality is higher also and you're *much* more likely to die before you're 60. http://www.who.int/countries/usa/en/ vs http://www.who.int/countries/gbr/en/ And to get that inferior level of healthcare you spend about 3x per capita as a comparable European nation. Good job.

"We supposedly pay 17% now, and we live longer lives, have better medical care, and are generally heather than our contemporaries in other countries" Except you're not and you're just making shit up: The US is 38th in life expectancy. Even Cuba does better than the States. Almost every other 'European' nation (plus Japan) does better : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy Your infant mortality is higher also and you're *much* more likely to die before you're 60. http://www.who.int/countries/usa/en/ vs http://www.who.int/countries/gbr/en/ And to get that inferior level of healthcare you spend about 3x per capita as a comparable European nation. Good job.

Are you a Jesuit, a trial lawyer, or both? ;)

The military is a prerequisite of a state ("A language is a dialect with an army and navy"). It cannot be socialist, no matter its extent. A public library is, by the strict criteria, probably socialist, but it's so inexpensive that I just can't get too worked up about it. Fair enough?

If you're talking about the government providing non-essential services directly, you're talking about socialist goals. That doesn't make them communist goals, or fascist goals, or even (necessarily) bad ideas. It doesn't mean that you're trying to go back to pre-Thatcher Britain.

As for the one sixth, it may be a bit of an exaggeration for now, apparently. According to the WHO tables US healthcare spending was 15.3% of GDP in 2006, while 1/6 would be 16.67%. However, it has been rising as a percentage, so it's a good rough estimate. It's certainly more than 1/7.

I've actually had to increase my sodium intake to get to the recommended amount. My diet (lost 80 lbs so far!) has been moving me away from processed foods, which means that on some days, I'm consuming as little as 600mg of sodium. The present USDA recommendations (available at http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/DRI//DRI_Water/water_full_report.pdf ) for people my age (9-50) are between 1500 and 2300, unless they're in an at-risk group. This means that some days, I have to add a teaspoon of kosher salt to my food (which can be trouble if you're trying to salt raspberries). The WHO recommends less than 1700mg ( http://whqlibdoc.who.int/trs/WHO_TRS_916.pdf ), so I've been trying to keep my intake between 1500 and 1700.

In all cases, the WHO recommends keeping your sodium and potassium levels equivalent (70mmol of sodium, 70-80mmol of potassium, or 2800-3200mg of K). Too little potassium/too much sodium results in too much muscle activity and hypertension, too little sodium/too much potassium results in too little muscle activity, heart arrhythmia, respiratory collapse, coma... The FDA recommends a bizarre amount of potassium (120mmol or 4700mg) based on the sodium sensitivity of African Americans and something about kidney stones. For most people who do not have a sodium sensitivity, this will just be eliminated by the body, which may cause problems with the kidneys and liver. Also note that while sodium is mentioned on food labels, potassium is usually not, and some foods are very high in potassium but don't bother to mention it.

Each of the documents I linked has a long list of studies that they used to determine those levels, but I'd really like to see something more concrete and which doesn't simply vilify sodium. Alas, that's far too common in the diet advice I see online.

To put numbers to your comments:

We do know the actual RF wattage that can be produced, it's not some big mystery it takes 2 seconds of googling. See WHO, it is between 10 and 100W, with newer towers being smaller power levels.

It should be obvious that cell towers don't use parabolic antennas. They are typically going for wide coverage, which directly translates into a low-gain antenna. You will notice that most cell antenna masts have three antennas pointing 120 degrees apart, which suggests probably about 6dB gain per antenna, maybe a bit less. The vertical pattern is narrowed, so call it another 2dB, so call it 8dB gain. The max equivalent isotropically radiated power (EIRP) will thus be 100W*10^0.8 = 630W.

630W / (4*pi*(6m)^2) gives 1.4W/m^2 at a 6 meter (20foot) distance.

The ANSI standard at 300MHz in uncontrolled environments is 2W/m^2. So it is under the gov. mandated safety limit. It could be much less if the base station is not an old high power one, or could be a bit higher if my antenna gain estimate is off. Standing wave effects (if reflection and incident wave are in phase at your location) could push it higher, but the 2W/m^2 is actually 20% the exposure level for controlled environments (10W/m^2), so there is already a generous safety margin to account for that. And cell phones operate over 300MHz where the limits are actually higher.

If in doubt, call the phone company and get details, or do as others say and shield your apartment.

If anyone is interested, here is a summary of the study in a presentation form (PDF):
COFAM study result http://www.who.int/peh-emf/meetings/archive/en/vanrongen_tno.pdf

The ranking you refer to explicitly lowers our score based on distribution of health care independent of outcomes. If you base it just on outcomes we creep back up the rankings. Still not best, but the decision to include that in the ranking artificially lowers the US.

Some of the other individual components are suspect too. I'm sure everyone is familiar with the issues involving the definition of live birth when calculating infant death. When looking into it, I found that using perinatal mortality (of which infant deaths are a subset) reversed the relative ranking of the US and UK. Perinatal mortality probably has it's own issues, but it does eliminate differences in treatment of extremely premature births.

WHO's assessment system was based on five indicators: overall level of population health; health inequalities (or disparities) within the population; overall level of health system responsiveness (a combination of patient satisfaction and how well the system acts); distribution of responsiveness within the population (how well people of varying economic status find that they are served by the health system); and the distribution of the health system's financial burden within the population (who pays the costs).

http://www.who.int/whr/2000/media_centre/press_release/en/index.html Instead of taking claims made by biased proponents (both those for health care and against it), read what they are citing and see the obvious spin.

Finally! Someone tries to answer one of my questions! Kudos!

I don't find your argument very compelling, given that, according to WHO, 3,000 children die from malaria in Africa daily. That's over one million per year. That's a staggering number.

So, it increases the risk of breast cancer five-fold. To what degree would it increase the chances of adulthood?

-Peter

I don't really see why using it sparingly indoors would be any safer than using it sparingly outdoors.

It's not safer. It's more effective. Blanketing a large area with any chemical probably isn't a great idea.

It's my opinion that using a comparatively miniscule amount of the chemical in the places where it is vastly more effective at preventing disease sounds like a pretty good idea. It seems that the WHO agrees.

-Peter

The energy of a carbon bond is a few electron volts. IOW, that much energy is needed to cause a chemical change in the molecule.
The energy of a 2GHz cell-phone photon is about 0.00001 eV. Cell-phone photons cannot cause a chemical change.

Here's the QM version in more detail http://www.who.int/peh-emf/meetings/archive/valberg_bsw.pdf:
"A repeatable, explicit, and predictive mechanism capable of producing biologically significant responses (modulation dependent or not) from low-level RF fields has not been found." You can accept quantum mechanics as a valid standard, or you can base your understanding upon who provided the funding.

insurance for wind ? For when a turbine explodes and the government has to clean up the mess; while spilling radiation all over europe, leading to thousands of deaths ?
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/index.html

http://www.who.int/csr/don/2010_01_08/en/index.html

People in the west seem to think because there hasn't been a big impact that it means nothing happened and that it's over.

In fact, it is still very active in Europe. This is because people aren't getting vaccinated. Some clamping down on people lying about vaccines needs to be done. Also stop calling it 'the Jab'.

And squalene too...funny how no one ever complains about the squalene in their olive oil or naturally occurring in the human liver, but when there's squalene in vaccines the anti-vaxxers can't shut up about it. Kind of funny when you think that the anti-vaccination crowd and the alternative medicine crowd seem to have strong connection, and the alt-med folks love all things 'natural and wholesome,' including, of course, olive oil. That's the arrogance of ignorance for ya.

It's not the squalene, or the mercury, it is the vaccines. Get rid of squalene, and whatever else, and they'll find a new 'problem.' That's what happened with mercury in the MMR vaccine. They ditched the mercury, and people found some other chemical to complain about (aka moving the goalpost). The anti-vax crowd won't be happy until the syringe is filled with water, and even then, they'll only be satisfied so long as you don't call it something scientific (because scientific=scary), like dihydrogen monoxide.

Not immune, but very resistant. To see just how much crowd disease resistance we have gained, look at what happened to native Americans once us Eurasians came over.

Not true.
Plague or TBC will kill you if untreated with antibiotics. Granted... you will walk around for a lot longer with TBC than with plague, but both will kill you.

Also, Indians didn't die because they lacked the immunity. They died because they lacked the treatment. They have never before seen the diseases "white man" brought over.
Just like hundreds and thousands of "palefaces" have died from those same diseases.

All primitive medicine was moving the live/die border a little bit - some might live that would otherwise die, but still innate resistance to disease or better adaption to diet (such as the ability to digest milk efficiently) would help your survival chances a lot.

Really? There are no proven herbal extracts, teas or sources of vitamins and minerals?

And the ability to digest milk is not "an adaptation" buy "a race" - it is an enzyme.
An enzyme naturally produced in the human body - we use it to digest mother's milk. It is just that we stop producing it if we don't use it.
Who gets to keep the enzyme in the system? People who eat dairy products.
How did that happen historically? Someone switched to dairy direct from mother's milk - and then raised his/her kids the same way.
That is why you can wean people back to dairy, unless they can't produce the enzyme in the first place.
We still have about 5% of that kind of humans on the planet, despite the fact that they used to die as babies before lactose-free baby formula was invented.
And we will keep having at least as much, unless we start doing some active and systematic genetic engineering on humans. Recessive genes are still genes.

Fourth, where did you get that number from anyway?

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs211/en/

Seasonal epidemics

Influenza epidemics occur yearly during autumn and winter in temperate regions. Illnesses result in hospitalizations and deaths mainly among high-risk groups (the very young, elderly or chronically ill). Worldwide, these annual epidemics result in about three to five million cases of severe illness, and about 250 000 to 500 000 deaths. Most deaths associated with influenza in industrialized countries occur among people age 65 or older. In some tropical countries, influenza viruses circulate throughout the year with one or two peaks during rainy seasons.

Who said we were? Who said there was?

Well gee... I would just LOVE to have a who.int link for that, it would make for a great joke.
But I was actually replying to your statement of the flu being dependent on high population densities. Cause it isn't.
Just the same as a dirty shirt and a couple of ears of wheat won't turn into mice if left in a warm and damp place for a while.
Diseases are not created by packing people closely together - it helps to spread the disease faster but that is it.

What I am, and what I WAS trying to say is - people die from influenza regardless if they are all alone in the middle of nowhere, or if they are in the middle of New York.
There is no permanent immunity. It is not like chicken pox or mumps. That is why you need to get your flu shot again each year.

 
We don't have the time to mutate our way since we came up with the idea that we can use a club to get what we want.
Natural resistance to say... cancer, means nothing if the cancer-susceptible club-wielding tribe decides to steal your food or that you are an abomination.
Or their crazy, baby-eating god tells them that they too can be cured from cancer if they eat your flesh.
You know... kinda the way they use virgins to treat AIDS in parts of Africa today.

GP can't show a study there to prove his point because there's none. For sure there are studies on the effects of mobile phone use, but none of them does point to cancer risks.

Among the 2200 results are a number of studies on the influence of mobile phones on cells and EEG rhythms.

From a WHO fact sheet:

Scientists have reported other effects of using mobile phones including changes in brain activity, reaction times, and sleep patterns. These effects are small and have no apparent health significance.

And for cancer risks:

Several studies of animals exposed to RF fields similar to those emitted by mobile phones found no evidence that RF causes or promotes brain cancer.

It turns out I would only weigh 200X0.902 = 180 lbs (by combining Newton's law of gravity with the equation for density in a proportionality statement you get Fg is proportional to 6.6/cuberoot(6.6/(1/3))squared = 0.902). I would then fall into the "healthy" range for BMI, so as soon as the first interstellar space ship is built sign me up Scotty.

And in reply to the AC, WHO says "Body Mass Index (BMI) is a simple index of weight-for-height". Though they say mass, they use weight to calculate it.

Pretty much anything that involves inhaling delicious incomplete-combustion products is bound to be a bad plan(it doesn't get the anti-drug crusaders upset, so nobody really cares; but chronic inhalation of the smoke from nasty little heating/cooking fires in the unventilated shacks of the developing world causes enormous morbidity and mortality). Outside the chem101 and/or very carefully tweaked laboratory world of perfect hydrocarbon combustion into carbon dioxide and water vapor, breathing combustion products is pretty much always a bad plan.

On the plus side, if you just want to deliver nicotine, we have plenty of ways to do that, in pretty much any quantity and release curve you fancy, with health risks no greater than those imposed by the nicotine directly.

(Swine Flu) A virus that was super-contagious and infected nearly everyone,

... except that H1N1 isn't "super contagious" - it's not even as contagious as regular flu. The hype from Mexico was wrong - of the 152 people who supposedly died from it (which is what made people thinkit was highly contagious), revised figures showed only 7 actually did.

The big lesson here is don't listen to Fox News and CNN, and don't let Fox News and CNN dictate government policy. (And I'd blame WHO and CDC for part of this as well - they have a financial and institutional interest in keeping the hype going well after it was obvious it was mostly bullshit).

Well the WHO say that it's about as contagious as normal flu. Most experts are likely to say we don't quite know yet but it looks like it is about as contagious as the seasonal flu. H1N1 is not as virulent as first thought and does not seem to have got worse in the northern hemisphere flu season as feared. We should be happy! I can't see how whether 152 or 7 died has much to do with how contagious it is. Your reply to gilleain does not really make much logical sense,the only figure which would matter is how many caught the virus.

The definition of the word has been constant for decades. The definition currently used by WHO is still the same: "A pandemic is a worldwide epidemic of a disease". Not fatal, just widespread. Same as last century.

The only thing that changed was someone looking to expand their empire. THAT is what this "pandemic" has been about. Everyone generating hoopla over it did so with ulterior motives. The media, so that they could make more $$$ with more viewers. The governments, so they could look like they're doing SOMETHING and also to take some of the attention away from the massive bail-out frauds, WHO and CDC so that they could justify their budgets, drug manufacturers for $$$$.

We've been cheated yet again. Why? Because the majority of people can't be bothered to do a little fact-checking. "We have met the enemy - and he is us." It's sad. What we really need is a tax on credulity.

For myself I think at least in USA the follow-on question is how is there a vaccine for something that by political reasons generates so much revenue in taxes, something like 33 billion?

Yes indeed the health care costs for emphysema and COPD and cancers of lips,gums, larynx, tongue, esophagus and others are like 133 billion.

How far is the concept of vaccine taken if Brazil, China, Turkey, India and USA are still the 5 largest producers of tobacco? Wouldn't the recognition be that this harvest, about 20 billion worth of it has to be ended at least for human luxury use?

It's like after Fleming inventing penicillin somehow we are deluded to think its OK for products full of bacteria to be still on the store shelves and saying well we got penicillin we can also have these too - the penicillin will save us when we want it. That's not the concept of vaccination.

What good will that do in a socialist country like Iceland?

"Ah Ha! You have breast cancer in your family. You'll get the same free treatment as everyone else! Ah Ha!"

The Ministry of Health is responsible for the overall administration of health affairs and matters relating to health insurance.The health sector is regulated according to the Health Service Act of 2007 by which all inhabitants have right of access to the best possible health service at any given time for the protection of their mental, social and physical health. The main objectve of the Act on the Rights of Patients of 1997 is to ensure that there is no dicrimination against patients on grounds of gender, religion, beliefs, nationality, race, skin color, financial status, family relation or status in other respect.

The health service in Iceland is primarily financed by central government. Financing is mainly based on taxes or 85% and 15% is fee for service.

The country is divided into health care regions, each with their own primary health care centres, some of which are run jointly with the local community hospital. The primary health care centers have the responsibility for general treatment and care, examination, home nursing as well as preventive measures such as family planning, maternity care and child health care and school health care.

Hospitals in Iceland may be ranked as specialized teaching hospitals, general hospitals and community hospitals. Hospitalization is free of charge. The specialized hospitals perform most operations and procedures in all specialist medical fields. The health service is staffed by trained and qualified professional groups.

Life expectancy in Iceland (2003) is among the highest in the world. Average life expectancy at birth for females is 82,5 years and for males 78,7 years. Infant mortality is among the lowest in the world, 2,4 per 1000 live births.

Good Reading: http://www.euro.who.int/document/e82881.pdf

If we banned cars we could save thousands of people from being killed or severely injured every year,

Wrong. You'd save many tens of thousands from being killed. Many hundreds of thousands would be save from injury: http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/publications/road_traffic/world_report/en/