Anti-Vaxxers Accidentally Fund a Study Showing No Link Between Autism and Vaccines
Heh.
Category: medical
Yeah, It Doesn’t Work in Education Either
A study has shown that payments for quality of outcomes in hospitals do not actually improve those outcomes:
Medicare’s quality incentive program for hospitals, which provides bonuses and penalties based on performance, has not led to demonstrated improvements in its first three years, according to a federal report released Thursday.
The Government Accountability Office examined the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program, one of the federal health law’s initiatives to tie payment to quality of care. Earlier this year Medicare gave bonuses to 1,700 hospitals and reduced payments to 1,360 hospitals based on their mortality rates, patient reviews, degree of improvement and other measurements.
While the payments to a majority of the nation’s hospitals have been affected each year, the audit found the financial effect has been minimal. Most hospitals saw their Medicare payments increase or drop by less than half a percentage point. In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 74 percent of hospitals fell within that range, with a median bonus of $39,000 and a median penalty of $56,000, according to the analysis.
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The report said that even before the program began in October 2012, hospitals had been improving in how consistently they followed basic clinical guidelines, such as performing blood cultures before giving patients antibiotics. That improvement continued but did not increase with the advent of the financial incentives. The same was true for patient ratings, on such items as the quality of communication from doctors and nurses, and for mortality rates for heart attack patients. Heart failure and pneumonia death rates stayed roughly the same.
“Our analysis found no apparent shift in … quality measure trends during the initial years of the program, but such shifts could emerge over time as the program implements planned changes,” the GAO wrote.
This is unsurprising.
As these payments become more significant, I expect to see hospitals use the same tactics as the charter schools: Find a way to encourage hard cases to go elsewhere.
These sorts of pay for performance schemes tend to generate efforts to game the metrics, not to improve performance.
This is a Feature, Not a Bug
The fact that the nominee for head of the FDA has extensive financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry should come as no surprise.
The revolving door has been spinning just as fast during the Obama administration as it ever has been:
It seems to be the season of the revolving door
in health care. The latest version got some media attention, because it involves one of the most important health care leadership positions in the US government, the Director of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). However, the case actually seems much more serious than what the media has recently reported.
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The only fly in the ointment was the matter of Dr Califf’s ties to industry. The WSJ article included,Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Center for Health Research, a Washington-based group focusing on medical-product safety, questioned his ties to the drug industry.
‘Dr. Califf’s expertise and his close ties to the pharmaceutical industry are both well-known,’ she said. ‘His ties to industry have been a source of great concern to public-health experts when he was previously considered for FDA commissioner, and those ties raise important questions about this nomination.’
The MedPage Today article noted that Public Citizen’s Health Research Group stated,‘During his tenure at Duke University, Califf racked up a long history of extensive financial ties to multiple drug and device companies, including Amgen, Astra-Zeneca, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Merck Sharpe & Dohme and Sanofi-Aventis, to name a few,’ Michael Carome, MD, the group’s director, said in a statement. ‘Strikingly, no FDA commissioner has had such close financial relationships with industries regulated by the agency prior to being appointed.’
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‘There are some who believe his relationship with [the drug industry] may be a problem, but most see it as a value-added factor in building a functional, more streamlined relationship with the industry in order to improve the speed with which truly effective and quality drugs and devices are made available, mitigate the excessive costs associated with pharmaceuticals, and influence policies and practices intended to improve health status.’
If that doesn’t scare the hell out of you, it should.
What that nameless source just said is that this is the sort of guy who could make the approval of a drug like Thalidomide go through more smoothly.
What Happens When This Doesn’t Generate a Media Sh%$ Storm?
Martin Shkreli, the hedge fund pharma executive who generated outrage when he bought a drug for rare diseases and boosted its price by over 5555%, has backed down after he got called out by the New York Times:
“Yes it is absolutely a reaction — there were mistakes made with respect to helping people understand why we took this action, I think that it makes sense to lower the price in response to the anger that was felt by people,” Shkreli, 32, said.
Turing Pharmaceuticals of New York bought the drug from Impax Laboratories in August for $55 million and raised the price. Shkreli said Tuesday the price would be lowered to allow the company to break even or make a smaller profit.
Daraprim fights toxoplasmosis. The infection is particularly dangerous for people who have weakened immune systems, like AIDS patients, as well as for pregnant women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was among those who expressed outrage over the price increase. On Tuesday she outlined a plan she said would limit how much patients have to pay out of pocket for medications each month.
As I noted last night, after Glaxo Smith Kline sold the drug market rights and before Shkreli bought the drug, the price was raised by 1350%, from $1.00 to $13.50 a pill, but since it wasn’t going from $13.50 to $750.00 a pill, nobody batted an eyelash.
Notwithstanding the protestations of contemptible greedheads like Martin Shkreli, generating unearned profits through financial engineering and exploitation of monopoly power benefits no one but contemptible greedheads like Martin Shkreli.
This Is a Clear Case of Immoral Parasitism, and It’s Pharma, so Not the Surprise
You know the story, hedge fund puke buys a pharmaceutical firm, takes an out of patent drug that costs a few bucks, changes the distribution method to make analysis by potential competitors more difficult, and then raise the price by 5555%: (No, this is not a decimal place error)
Specialists in infectious disease are protesting a gigantic overnight increase in the price of a 62-year-old drug that is the standard of care for treating a life-threatening parasitic infection.
The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired in August by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up run by a former hedge fund manager. Turing immediately raised the price to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“What is it that they are doing differently that has led to this dramatic increase?” said Dr. Judith Aberg, the chief of the division of infectious diseases at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She said the price increase could force hospitals to use “alternative therapies that may not have the same efficacy.”
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The Infectious Diseases Society of America and the HIV Medicine Association sent a joint letter to Turing earlier this month calling the price increase for Daraprim “unjustifiable for the medically vulnerable patient population” and “unsustainable for the health care system.” An organization representing the directors of state AIDS programs has also been looking into the price increase, according to doctors and patient advocates.
Daraprim, known generically as pyrimethamine, is used mainly to treat toxoplasmosis, a parasite infection that can cause serious or even life-threatening problems for babies born to women who become infected during pregnancy, and also for people with compromised immune systems, like AIDS patients and certain cancer patients.
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This is not the first time the 32-year-old Mr. Shkreli, who has a reputation for both brilliance and brashness, has been the center of controversy. He started MSMB Capital, a hedge fund company, in his 20s and drew attention for urging the Food and Drug Administration not to approve certain drugs made by companies whose stock he was shorting.
In 2011, Mr. Shkreli started Retrophin, which also acquired old neglected drugs and sharply raised their prices. Retrophin’s board fired Mr. Shkreli a year ago. Last month, it filed a complaint in Federal District Court in Manhattan, accusing him of using Retrophin as a personal piggy bank to pay back angry investors in his hedge fund.
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With the price now high, other companies could conceivably make generic copies, since patents have long expired. One factor that could discourage that option is that Daraprim’s distribution is now tightly controlled, making it harder for generic companies to get the samples they need for the required testing.
The switch from drugstores to controlled distribution was made in June by Impax, not by Turing. Still, controlled distribution was a strategy Mr. Shkreli talked about at his previous company as a way to thwart generics.
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Dr. Aberg of Mount Sinai said some hospitals will now find Daraprim too expensive to keep in stock, possibly resulting in treatment delays. She said that Mount Sinai was continuing to use the drug, but each use now required a special review.
“This seems to be all profit-driven for somebody,” Dr. Aberg said, “and I just think it’s a very dangerous process.”
You can read the details of his looting the last firm he ran here.
I would note that Mr Shkreli is not alone in this behavior: When Glaxo Smith Kline sold the marketing rights to the drug to CorePharma, the price of the drug was $1 a pill,
Is there anything that big finance can’t make destructive and evil?
Nice That This Has Made The Times
It appears that the mainstream media is finally noticing that a big problem in US healthcare is prices, and not people taking their children to the doctor for a case of the sniffles:
As complaints grow about exorbitant drug prices, pharmaceutical companies are coming under pressure to disclose the development costs and profits of those medicines and the rationale for charging what they do.
So-called pharmaceutical cost transparency bills have been introduced in at least six state legislatures in the last year, aiming to make drug companies justify their prices, which are often attributed to high research and development costs.
“If a prescription drug demands an outrageous price tag, the public, insurers and federal, state and local governments should have access to the information that supposedly justifies the cost,” says the preamble of a bill introduced in the New York State Senate in May.
In an article being published Thursday, more than 100 prominent oncologists called for support of a grass-roots movement to stem the rapid increases of prices of cancer drugs, including by letting Medicare negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies and letting patients import less expensive medicines from Canada.
“There is no relief in sight because drug companies keep challenging the market with even higher prices,” the doctors wrote in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings. “This raises the question of whether current pricing of cancer drugs is based on reasonable expectation of return on investment or whether it is based on what prices the market can bear.”
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“The industry has used R&D costs for the justification, but anyone who is reasonably sophisticated understands those are sunk costs and have little to do with pricing,” Mr. Rother said. “The more important information is any calculation of value. If the drug actually cures people, then what costs in health care are you saving?”
Dr. Jerry Avorn, a professor at Harvard Medical School and critic of some drug company practices, said the industry “has brought this on itself by charging prices that are so astonishing, it makes citizens wonder, ‘Where did this figure come from?’ ”
Yes, it does make citizens wonder.
What could help is ending evergreening, where a company uses a compliant FDA and US Patent Office to extend their legal monopolies, or the insane way in which the orphan drug act is used to grant legal monopolies on drugs that are literally thousands of years old. (For example Colchicine has been in use for at least 3500 years, and when the company got exclusivity, it raised the price by a factor of 50)
The problem with drug prices, as well other medical prices, is that we have structures in place that allow corporations, which are by their very nature designed to function as sociopaths to extort excessive rents.
And we are exporting this model to the rest of the world through out trade deals like the TPP and TTIP, which will put the health of citizens in the signatory nations at the same sort of risk that exists here.
Out F%$#ing Standing!
I have been out of work for the past few months, and tomorrow I start a new job at Nozilizer, a company that makes No2 based sterilizers.
As is my wont, I am not going to be blogging about this new job, because this is a way for me to end up on unemployment list.
Even better, it is less than a 10 minute walk from the Lexington Market Metro stop, so I won’t be using my car to commute.
Time for a hearty “Boo Yah!“
The Latest in Patent Abuse
Colgate just filed a patent on Indian herbal recipes that have existed for thousands of years:
India has successfully blocked two patent claims of US consumer goods major Colgate-Palmolive, which wanted intellectual property right (IPR) cover on two oral compositions made from Indian spices and other herbs.
One patent battle took almost seven years, after the New York-based company filed a claim at the European Patent Register on September 29, 2008, for a composition containing botanical extracts from three herbs, including cinnamon, a common kitchen spice across India, known here as “dalchini”.
India opposed the claim using the traditional knowledge digital library (TKDL) database, created in the last decade to fight biopiracy.
The database, maintained by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), submitted its plea in May 2011, and the European patent office ruled in India’s favour last month.
Two years after filing the first patent claim, Colgate-Palmolive moved another application in 2010 before the European patent office, seeking protection for another oral composition containing nutmeg, ginger, “Bakul” tree, camphor, cinnamon, turmeric, Indian banyan, black pepper, long pepper, Neem and clove. The solution is for treating oral cavity diseases.
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The digital database, containing Ayurveda, Unani and Siddha formulations, and known medicinal properties of Indian herbs, was created following India’s successful IPR battles on haldi (turmeric), neem and Basmati rice.
The Union Commerce Ministry spent Rs 7.61 crore in 2000 as legal fee to reverse a patent examiner’s decision on basmati rice. “Going by that standard, the TKDL has saved upwards of Rs 500 crore so far, and more to come. In the next step, the government should not only add many more ancient books to the TKDL database but also incorporate knowledge from manuscripts,” said Gupta, who retired in 2013.
There needs to be some sort penalty when firms file fraudulent, because this sort of crap is endemic.
Anti-Vaxxers Can Go Cheney Themselves
We just had the first measles death in the U.S. in a dozen years:
Well, anti-vaxxers Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey should really feel like sh%$ right now.
For 12 years, not a single American has died because of the measles virus. But because of the anti-vaxxer movement, death by measles is once again a stark reality in the United States.
On Thursday, the Washington State Department of Health confirmed that a woman succumbed to the disease after discovering the cause of death via an autopsy.
In a statement released by the agency, the woman apparently contracted the disease unknowingly while at a hospital during a measles outbreak in the spring. And she was even more vulnerable to the disease because the medication she had been taking weakened her immune system.
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The woman who died caught a disease that should have remained wiped out within our shores and it would have remained that way had it not been for anti-vaccination nut jobs who refuse to vaccinate their kids out of some ridiculous notion that the MMR vaccine causes autism. This death was preventable and shows why it is time to require vaccinations by law and eliminate the exemptions that allowed the measles to have a comeback in the first place.
It gets even worse, because this woman had been vaccinated for the disease:
A woman who became the first person to die of the measles in the U.S. in 12 years had been vaccinated against the disease, it has been revealed.
Health officials said she had the injection as a child but succumbed because she had a compromised immune system.
Dr. Jeanette Stehr-Green, the Clallam County health officer, told KOMO-TV the woman had been vaccinated as a child, but because she had other health problems and was taking medications that interfered with her response to an infection ‘she was not protected.’
The anti-vaxxers are morally responsible for the death of this woman.
Their actions are unsupported by the facts, selfish, and evil, and I am pleased as punch that California has tightened up its vaccination criteria.
We May Be Seeing the Beginning of the First Pandemic Caused by Patents
We are seeing a major Middle East Respiratory Syndrome outbreak in Korea:
Two men have died of Middle East respiratory syndrome in South Korea, officials said Thursday. Theirs were the third and fourth confirmed deaths in what has become the largest outbreak of the virus outside the Middle East.
As fear spread, the government of President Park Geun-hye was accused of not doing enough to contain the outbreak and of endangering the public by withholding information about it.
At a news conference on Thursday, the influential mayor of Seoul, Park Won-soon, castigated the national authorities for not disclosing that a doctor at a Seoul hospital who was quarantined on Sunday with symptoms of the syndrome, known as MERS, had attended a gathering of more than 1,500 people in the southern part of the city only the day before.
More than 1,160 schools and kindergartens in South Korea have been shut down temporarily, and many Koreans are wearing surgical masks in public.
It has a fairly high mortality rate (about 40%, down from earlier estimates of over 50%), largely due to “co-morbitities” (Things like diabetes, heart disease, asthma, COPD, etc.). The mechanism seems to involve a phenomenon known as HLH, which is one of the cytokine storm syndromes (the immune system going haywire), which causes edema in the lungs, and things like secondary pneumonia.
Historical note: The lethality of Spanish Influenza was also largely caused this cytokine storm/pneumonia mechanism. (Got your attention now?)
Note also that the cytokine storm tends to effect young adults more than the rest of the population. (I definitely have your attention now.)
One problem with dealing with what is (at this time) a small problem, is that, using purloined samples, the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam sequenced the virus, and filed a patent on the genome, preventing timely research on things like vaccines and antiviral medications:
In the ongoing investigation of the MERS virus, a team from Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam received two patient samples from Dr. Ali Mohamed Zaki, an Egyptian scientist working in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. After sequencing the MERS DNA, EMC claimed ownership of the samples. EMC now requires scientists hoping to work on the MERS problem to sign legal agreements with Erasmus. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is still waiting to receive samples of MERS for testing that were collected in October 2012 because the legal teams from the CDC and Erasmus cannot negotiate agreeable terms for a material transfer agreement. As a result of these legal delays during a disease outbreak, Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization, publicly criticized Erasmus for putting patent laws ahead of protecting “your people.”
I have covered these issues here.
Labs cannot do research because the Erasmus Medical Center has this tied up in patents, even though it is an discovery, and invention which is what has traditionally been required for patents.
Right now, MERS, a coronavirus, is not that contagious because, unlike some of its near relatives in that viral family like the common cold, because, unlike the cold, it lurks deep in the lungs, as opposed to the nose and sinuses, so coughing and sneezing out virus is far less likely.
At least, it’s not that contagious right now.
I don’t know about you, but I’d like to see a vaccine, and perhaps some antiviral drugs, before it develops an affinity for sinus tissue, and starts behaving more like measles.
That cannot happen, because of our current insane patent regime.
It’s More than Just the Baltimore Police That Are Dusfunctional
It appears that a the Baltimore jails are systematically denying appropriate healthcare to its inmates:
Weeks after Baltimore announced plans to construct a new, $30 million youth jail, a motion filed by the ACLU, Public Justice Center, and Law Offices of Elizabeth Alexander claims detainees are routinely denied life-saving medications, due to systemic failures in the Baltimore City Detention Center (BCDC). In addition to gross medical neglect, the motion alleges that inmates are also housed in moldy, vermin-infested units that exacerbate existing health problems.
The organizations behind the motion conducted a comprehensive review of 13 death cases and 24 randomly-selected medical records from 2013 to 2015, concluding that inmates with chronic diseases had their medications interrupted. For instance, an HIV-positive detainee alleges his antiretrovirals were taken away upon entry, but nurse notes indicate that some of his medication wasn’t available, which is why he didn’t receive it for five days. BCDC allegedly failed to give another inmate with a significantly low white blood cell count his prescribed retrovirals until shortly before his death. The review says hypertensive cardiovascular disease claimed the life of another detainee who was prescribed medication for his blood pressure and heart but was never given the proper drugs. Due in part to a failure to complete ordered laboratory tests, another person allegedly died of because of blood in the sac close to her heart. And people with diabetes allegedly did not receive prescribed insulin for extended periods of time, and had their dietary restrictions ignored.
The motion also claims that inmates with physical disabilities are denied proper medical attention. On multiple occasions, BCDC allegedly failed to give an inmate with urinary problems clean catheters, and the one bathroom he can access is flooded. The motion also mentions a detainee relegated to a defective wheelchair who had back pain for five months, but wasn’t given his muscle relaxant. Additionally, the motion claimed an amputee with severe pain hasn’t had a thorough exam to evaluate his pain or prescribe the most effective medication.
I understand that locking people up is expensive, but if you are going to lock people up, you have to provide at least minimally competent medical care.
What the F%$#ing F%$#?
I understand that HIV remains a major public health image, but this is nuts:
The newest battle against HIV/AIDS stigma is being waged in blood and ink.This month, the small Austrian magazine Vangardist will release a special-edition issue printed entirely in ink that has been infused with HIV-positive blood, in an effort to force readers to confront — and break — taboos that persist around the virus. The magazine, which is marketed toward “progressive” urban young men, plans to release 3,000 print copies of the spring “Heroes of HIV” issue, a theme inspired by the three donors who contributed their blood to the project, as well as people living publicly with HIV.
“We believe that as a lifestyle magazine it is our responsibility to address the issues shaping society today,” Vangardist publisher Julian Wiehl said. “With 80 percent more confirmed cases of HIV being recorded in 2013 than 10 years previously, and an estimated 50 percent of HIV cases being detected late due to lack of testing caused by social stigma associated with the virus [sic]. This felt like a very relevant issue for us to focus on not just editorially but also from a broader communications standpoint.”
As Wiehl explained to the Washington Post, the print edition will be packaged in a sealed wrapper, so the reader must “break the seal to break the stigma.” While it is well-known that HIV can only be transmitted through direct contact with bodily fluids such as blood and semen, and there is no health or safety risk posed by handling the blood-infused ink, Vangardist hopes to make a statement that challenges the public. (The magazine did take extra measures to ensure the ink would be sterile, and autoclaved the donated blood before using it.)
I have no words.
Our F%$#ed Up Drug Policy, Colorado Edition
Medical Marijuana users in Colorado have taken to buying pot recreationally to avoid appearing in a registry that the DEA might access:
Though sales of recreational marijuana are increasing swiftly, medical marijuana sales in Colorado fell during 2014, GreenWave Advisors calculated, along with the number of new medical cardholders, CNBC reported. Many medical users in the state have begun to purchase on the recreational side despite a lower tax rate.
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“As long as Medpot is illegal on the federal level no one wants to register for a pot card for fear the feds now know who and where they are, knowing fully the feds could and would come bust them on a federal charge,” wrote Jeffrey Moab in a comment attached to the CNBC story. “People are willing to pay extra bucks to remain invisible to the feds.”
We need to take pot off the schedule 1 registry.
Roger Goodell’s Worst Nightmare
Breakout star rookie linebacker Chris Borland has retired out of concerns for his neurological health:
San Francisco 49ers linebacker Chris Borland, one of the NFL’s top rookies this past season, told “Outside the Lines” on Monday that he is retiring because of concerns about the long-term effects of repetitive head trauma.
Borland, 24, said he notified the 49ers on Friday. He said he made his decision after consulting with family members, concussion researchers, friends and current and former teammates, as well as studying what is known about the relationship between football and neurodegenerative disease.
“I just honestly want to do what’s best for my health,” Borland told “Outside the Lines.” “From what I’ve researched and what I’ve experienced, I don’t think it’s worth the risk.”
Borland becomes the most prominent NFL player to leave the game in his prime because of concerns about brain injuries. More than 70 former players have been diagnosed with progressive neurological disease after their deaths, and numerous studies have shown connections between the repetitive head trauma associated with football, brain damage and issues such as depression and memory loss.
“I feel largely the same, as sharp as I’ve ever been. For me, it’s wanting to be proactive,” Borland said. “I’m concerned that if you wait ’til you have symptoms, it’s too late. … There are a lot of unknowns. I can’t claim that X will happen. I just want to live a long, healthy life, and I don’t want to have any neurological diseases or die younger than I would otherwise.”
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Borland was expected to be a key part of the 49ers’ defense this season, after the retirement of All-Pro linebacker Patrick Willis last week. Borland replaced Willis, 30, after six games last season; Willis had sustained a toe injury.
Willis’ retirement had no role in his decision, Borland said.
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Borland, who is listed at 5-foot-11, 248 pounds, earned accolades for his aggressiveness and instincts at inside linebacker. He had 107 tackles and a sack in 14 games, eight of them starts. He was the NFC’s defensive player of the week for his performance against the New York Giants in Week 11. He led the 49ers with 13 tackles in that game and became the team’s first rookie linebacker with two interceptions in one game. He received one vote for NFL defensive rookie of the year.
His success this past season did not make his decision more difficult, Borland said: “I’ve thought about what I could accomplish in football, but for me, personally, when you read about Mike Webster and Dave Duerson and Ray Easterling, you read all these stories, and to be the type of player I want to be in football, I think I’d have to take on some risks that, as a person, I don’t want to take on.”
Borland was referring to former NFL greats who were diagnosed with the devastating brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, after their deaths. Duerson and Easterling committed suicide.
This guy has one season in the NFL, and he was arguably on a path to a multimillion dollar pay day, and he decided that it was not worth dementia in his late 40s.
You gotta figure that the current generation of teenage jocks, and their parents, are becoming less likely to take up football, and news like this will make them less likely.
The pipeline of new players has to be drying up a bit.
I’m not sure what the solution is to the CTE problem in the NFL, or if there is a solution, but a good start would be accelerometers in helmets and set them at an appropriate level (not sure of the level, I’m an engineer, not a doctor, dammit!*).
Once the sensor trips, the player gets a mandatory few weeks off on injured reserves and treatment.
*I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!
So, Now I’m Thanking Richard Nixon and Pierre Elliot Trudeau ……… Odd History
It turns out that the surge, and subsequent drop, in crime in Canada also appears to be an artifact of lead exposure:
I’m happy to see lead at least get a shout out. Unless I’ve missed something, this might actually be the first time the New York Times has ever mentioned childhood lead exposure as a possible explanation for the decline in violent crime. Progress!
But while Eckholm is right to say that none of the other factors he mentions can explain a decline in violent crime that happened all over the world, he’s wrong to include lead in that list. It’s the one explanation that does have the potential to explain a worldwide drop in crime levels. In particular, the chart on the right shows the use of gasoline lead in Canada, which peaked in the mid-70s and then began dropping as catalytic converters became more common. Leaded gasoline was banned for good in 1990, and is now virtually gone with a few minor exceptions for specialized vehicles.So what happened? As Zimring says, Canada saw a substantial decrease in violent crime that started about 20 years after lead emissions began to drop, which is exactly what you’d expect. I calculated the numbers for Canada’s biggest cities back when I was researching my lead-crime piece, and crime was down from its peak values everywhere: 31 percent in Montreal, 36 percent in Edmonton, 40 percent in Toronto and Vancouver, and 53 percent in Ottawa. CompStat and broken windows and American drug laws can’t explain that.
It is almost certain that lead exposure is a significant factor the rise and fall of crime world wide, and given the wide variations in techniques used by law enforcement, it is likely the most significant factor in the rise and fall of crime worldwide.
Given the clearly racist assumptions of broken windows policing, and the even more clearly racist subtext of America’s fascination with incarceration, it’s not surprising that the law enforcement establishment has studiously avoided looking at lead’s effects on crime.
Racially biased law enforcement philosophies, particularly when it generates more money for law enforcement and incarceration is a feature of, and not a bug in, our society.
Yes, Jeb Bush Should be Stapled to the Whole Sordid Terri Schaivo Affaire
Charlie Pierce reminds us of what he did:
Jeb Bush made a family tragedy into a family horror. He willingly put the power of his office behind lunatics who were jumping fences, calling bomb threats into elementary schools, putting bounties on Michael Schiavo’s head, and endagering great people doing wonderful work at a hospice. This episode shouldn’t be an obscure part of his past. It should define him as a politician, and as a man.
Just to remind you.
Terri Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state, and then Governor Jeb Bush decided to intervene to prevent the removal of her feeding tube in a transparent attempt to make nice with the “Pro-Life” terrorist crowd.
Michael Schiavo, Terri’s husband, and the target of this obscenity, has some choice words for the “smart” Bush:
In his announcement Tuesday that he would explore a 2016 presidential bid, former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-FL) promised to focus on “ideas and policies that will expand opportunity and prosperity for all Americans.” But he made no mention of his most controversial act during his two terms in office: his attempts to take custody of Terri Schiavo and overrule her husband Michael’s decision to remove her feeding tube, fifteen years after cardiac arrest had left her in a vegetative state.
ThinkProgress spoke with Michael Schiavo and the attorney who represented him in the matter, George Felos, about Bush’s presidential candidacy. Both expressed concern that Bush’s record was one of government interference and opposing individual liberty.
“If you want a government that’s gonna intrude on your life, enforce their personal views on you, then I guess Jeb Bush is your man,” Schiavo explained, adding, “We really don’t need another Bush in office.”
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Though Michael Schiavo got a court order in 2002 to remove his wife’s feeding tube — he said his wife had not wanted to be kept alive artificially — Jeb Bush intervened, pushing the state legislature to pass an unconstitutional bill in a special session giving him authority to order the feeding tube reinserted. When a state judge ordered it removed again, Felos told ThinkProgress, Bush “manipulated the organs of state government in order to try to evade the court order.”
“Through the Dept. of Children and Family Services and through the Department of Law Enforcement they tried in the courts to ignore the higher court pronouncements – this was documented in an article by the Miami Herald,” he recalled, though, “when local authorities said you’re going to have to go through us in order to get her, and the state law enforcement agency backed down.”
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“It’s one thing to have your own personal beliefs,” Felos said, “It’s quite another to use your official powers and your official office to subvert the court and the lawful process.”
He also recalled that after Schiavo’s death, Jeb Bush went after Michael Schiavo personally, asking the state’s attorney to investigate whether he had called 911 fast enough. “It was very odd, almost like a personal vendetta the governor had towards Michael Schaivo.” The state’s attorney found no evidence against him and closed the case. “The propriety of using your office to hunt and harass people, as the governor did to Mr. Schiavo after his wife’s death, I think raises significant questions about his judgment and his character,” Felos said.
Michael Schiavo, nearly a decade later, said he believes Jeb Bush’s intervention was a purely political move and an act of buffoonery. “If you want a government that’s gonna be intrusive and interfere in your personal life, vote for Bush. If you want to live like that, want people to interfere in your personal lives, then vote for him,” he said.
The whole Schiavo matter defines who and what Jeb Bush is as a politician and as a person.
It should also be noted that when it became national news, the American public recoiled in horror.
They should recoil in horror at Jeb Bush as well.
Eight Finger Typing
Nothing major, but I have bandages on both index fingers, so my typing is slow and imprecise.
I should be better in 24-48 hours.
The real question is whether or not it helps or hurts the quality of my writing.
It’s Good to be a Jew
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have found circumcision to be unambiguously medically beneficial:
On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines regarding the safety and benefits of circumcision. While the CDC won’t actually instruct parents to get their sons snipped (since it is a personal decision that could be influenced by culture and religious beliefs), the report makes it clear that it is a very good idea to do so, and urges teenage boys to elect to have the surgery if they have not already.
“The scientific evidence is clear that the benefits outweigh the risks,” said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “The first thing it’s important to know is that male circumcision has been associated with a 50 to 60 percent reduction of H.I.V. transmission, as well as a reduction in sexually transmitted infections such as herpes, bacterial vaginosis and the human papilloma virus (H.P.V.), which causes penile and cervical cancer,” he continued.
They also ignore the role that a traditional Brit Milah in preventing alcoholism: You get your very first taste of wine, then ……… Whack!!!!.
It kinds of puts one off of boozing too much.
This is Kind of a Big Deal
The National Institute of Mental Health has withdrawn its support for the DSM-5, the 5th edition Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the massive update of the American Psychological Association’s encyclopedic, and controversial, diagnostic manual:
Just two weeks before DSM-5 is due to appear, the National Institute of Mental Health, the world’s largest funding agency for research into mental health, has indicated that it is withdrawing support for the manual.
In a humiliating blow to the American Psychiatric Association, Thomas R. Insel, M.D., Director of the NIMH, made clear the agency would no longer fund research projects that rely exclusively on DSM criteria. Henceforth, the NIMH, which had thrown its weight and funding behind earlier editions of the manual, would be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.” “The weakness” of the manual, he explained in a sharply worded statement, “is its lack of validity.” “Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure.”That consensus is now clearly missing. Whether it ever really existed remains in doubt. As one consultant for DSM-III conceded to the New Yorker magazine about the amount of horsetrading that drove that supposedly “evidenced-based” edition from 1980: “There was very little systematic research, and much of the research that existed was really a hodgepodge—scattered, inconsistent, ambiguous.”
According to Insel, too much of that problem remains. As he cautioned of a manual whose precision and reliability has been overstated for decades, “While DSM has been described as a ‘Bible’ for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each.” And not even a particularly good dictionary, apparently. Of the decision to steer research in mental health away from the manual and its parameters, Insel states: “Patients with mental disorders deserve better.”
I’m wondering how much of this is a generational thing.
The people who have been in charge of the DSM since at least the late 1970s are all roughly of the same age, being in their 40s back then, and being in their ate 1970s now, and as such, advances in genetics, neurochemistry, and imaging allow for a far more quantitative approach to the discipline.
Huh, It Wasn’t the Polio Vaccine
One of the theories about the origin of HIV/AIDS, related to my by my younger brother, Daniel, well over a decade ago, was that its origins began with an early variant of the Polio vaccine, the Salk vaccine, which grown in monkey kidney cultures, provided an avenue for SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus) to become HIV (Immunodeficiency Virus).
Well, if the result of a recent DNA sequencing is accurate, the jump to humans occurred well before the first tests of any of the Polio vaccines:
The deadly virus responsible for the global HIV/AIDS pandemic emerged around 1920 in the city of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to new research that has relevance to the effort to understand how another deadly virus, Ebola, reestablished itself in West Africa.
The study, published in the journal Science, reveals that the HIV virus was already established and spreading in Africa long before the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first took note of it. The CDC’s first record of the illness occurred on June 5, 1981, when an unusual type of “pneumonia” was detected in five homosexual men from Los Angeles.
No one then knew that the deadly strain of the virus, which has since killed an estimated 39 million people, had already taken hold in the Congo some 60 years earlier.
“It seems a combination of factors in Kinshasa in the early 20th century created a ‘perfect storm’ for the emergence of HIV, leading to a generalized epidemic with unstoppable momentum that unrolled across sub-Saharan Africa,” co-author Oliver Pybus, an Oxford University zoologist, said.
Lead author Nuno Faria, also from Oxford University’s Department of Zoology, explained that “by the end of the 1940’s, over one million people were traveling through Kinshasa on the railways each year.” At the time, what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo was under Belgian colonial rule and experiencing steady urban growth.
Faria and his team examined the genetics of 348 “HIV-1 group M” samples from the former Belgian Congo, and 466 additional samples from nearby regions. This particular viral strain, “M,” has proven to be the deadliest in humans, but virologist Beatrice Hahn of the University of Pennsylvania explained to Discovery News that it represents just one of several different instances where the illness jumped from a non-human primate to people — likely by the consumption or handling of bushmeat.
That’s about 30 years before the Polio vaccine tests.
BTW, I would also note that while AIDS attracted the attention of medical authorities in the early 1980s, the earliest case in the US, though the doctors at the time did not know it, was the death of a teen in St. Louis in 1969.