Tag: health

Simple Health-Care Reform

There is no logical reason to get health insurance through your employer. This entire system is an accident of World War II wage and price controls. It’s economically senseless. It makes people stay in jobs they hate, decreasing labor mobility and therefore overall productivity. And it needlessly increases the anxiety of losing your job by raising the additional specter of going bankrupt through illness.

The health-care benefit exemption is the largest tax break in the entire U.S. budget, costing the government a quarter-trillion dollars annually. It hinders health-insurance security and portability as well as personal independence. If we additionally eliminated the prohibition on buying personal health insurance across state lines, that would inject new and powerful competition that would lower costs for everyone.

Abolish the entire medical-malpractice system. Create a new social pool from which people injured in medical errors or accidents can draw. The adjudication would be done by medical experts, not lay juries giving away lottery prizes at the behest of the liquid-tongued John Edwardses who pocket a third of the proceeds.

The pool would be funded by a relatively small tax on all health-insurance premiums. Socialize the risk; cut out the trial lawyers. Would that immunize doctors from carelessness or negligence? No. The penalty would be losing your medical license. There is no more serious deterrent than forfeiting a decade of intensive medical training and the livelihood that comes with it.

via Charles Krauthammer – A Better Plan for Health-Care Reform – washingtonpost.com.

Swine Flu Started At Smithfield Farm In Mexico

The operations, grouped under a Smithfield subsidiary called Granjas Carrol, raise 950,000 hogs per year, according to the company Web site—a level nearly equal to Smithfield’s total U.S. hog production.

April 6 – Veratect reported local health officials declared a health alert due to a respiratory disease outbreak in La Gloria, Perote Municipality, Veracruz State, Mexico. Sources characterized the event as a “strange” outbreak of acute respiratory infection, which led to bronchial pneumonia in some pediatric cases. According to a local resident, symptoms included fever, severe cough, and large amounts of phlegm. Health officials recorded 400 cases that sought medical treatment in the last week in La Gloria, which has a population of 3,000; officials indicated that 60% of the town’s population (approximately 1,800 cases) has been affected. No precise timeframe was provided, but sources reported that a local official had been seeking health assistance for the town since February.

via Biosurveillance: Swine Flu in Mexico- Timeline of Events.

Drug Decriminalization? Portugal’s Success Story

At the recommendation of a national commission charged with addressing Portugal’s drug problem, jail time was replaced with the offer of therapy. The argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts underground and that incarceration is more expensive than treatment — so why not give drug addicts health services instead? Under Portugal’s new regime, people found guilty of possessing small amounts of drugs are sent to a panel consisting of a psychologist, social worker and legal adviser for appropriate treatment (which may be refused without criminal punishment), instead of jail.

The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.

via The Portuguese Experiment: Did Legalizing Drugs Work? – TIME.

Study Questions “Free Will”

They asked 14 subjects to lie in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, which allowed the researchers to track more brain regions for longer than Libet had. They instructed the subjects to decide spontaneously whether to press a button on the right or one on the left. The volunteers could decide at their own pace, but they had to report the moment of the conscious choice based on a clocklike device in the scanner.

The researchers scoured the brain for changes that correlated with the final decision. The earliest brain pattern that coded for a left or right choice was in the frontopolar cortex, right behind the forehead. The pattern predicted a left or right decision with about 60% accuracy and occurred about 10 seconds before the conscious choice, the team reports online this week in Nature Neuroscience. “We weren’t expecting this kind of lead time,” Haynes says. Even though the predictions weren’t perfect, “there’s not very much space for operation of free will,” Haynes says. “The outcome of a decision is shaped very strongly by brain activity much earlier than the point in time when you feel to be making a decision.” Haynes says the group hopes to extend the work to more realistic choices such as what to drink or what game to watch

via Case Closed for Free Will? — Youngsteadt 2008 (414): 3 — ScienceNOW.

Most Politically Incorrect Restaurant?

heartattackburgernursesAn “all you can eat” French Fry bar, which are fried in pure lard, capped by a 8000 calories burger, where even the bun is cooked in lard, no diet drinks – could this be the most politically incorrect restaurant in the world. Click on the link below for more.

via Heart Attack Grill Diet Center

Do Vitamins Work?

many people gobble down megadoses of vitamins believing that they boost the body’s ability to mop up damaging free radicals that lead to cancer and heart disease. In addition to the more recent research, several reports in recent years have challenged the notion that vitamins are good for you.

via News Keeps Getting Worse for Vitamins – Well Blog – NYTimes.com

Cleanliness Equals More Sickliness?

Immune Systems Increasingly On Attack – washingtonpost.com
Our obsession with germs and cleanliness is not exposing children the ability to develop resistance and anti-bodies.  Some studies now indicate that more than half of the U.S. population has at least one allergy.

The cause remains the focus of intense debate and study, but some researchers suspect the concurrent trends all may have a common explanation rooted in aspects of modern living — including the “hygiene hypothesis” that blames growing up in increasingly sterile homes, changes in diet, air pollution, and possibly even obesity and increasingly sedentary lifestyles. Continue reading “Cleanliness Equals More Sickliness?”

A Way To Wipe Out Dengue Fever?

Engineered Mosquitoes Could Wipe Out Dengue Fever
Oxitec’s technology is a variation of a proven process called “sterile insect technique,” which scientists have already used to eliminate the screwworm and the Mediterranean fruit fly from North America. It involves irradiating male insects, causing mutations that make them sterile. When released into the wild, they mate with females who then fail to reproduce.

But the amount of radiation used in that technique kills mosquitoes. So in a twist on the sterile insect technique, Alphey discovered a way to genetically program the bugs to die unless they’re fed the common antibiotic tetracycline.

By postponing death with tetracycline, the scientists can keep the altered bugs alive long enough to breed them in large numbers. When released into the wild, they no longer receive tetracycline so the previously silenced gene springs into action. The bugs stay alive long enough to breed with wild females, but their offspring die young.

7 Medical Myths

BBC NEWS | Health | ‘Medical myths’ exposed as untrue

Drink at least eight glasses of water a day
We use only 10% of our brains
Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death
Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight
Shaving causes hair to grow back faster or coarser
Mobile phones are dangerous in hospitals
Eating turkey makes people especially drowsy
But a review of evidence by US researchers surrounding seven commonly-hold beliefs suggests they are actually “medical myths”.
Continue reading “7 Medical Myths”