I was at a bar and bat mitzvah yesterday, and there was a girl (about 13) wearing high spiked heels.
On one shoe, the straps were undone.
Why were they undone?
In order to accommodate the ankle brace she was wearing.
Hopefully, she will grow out of the stupid.
The US state security apparatus was trying to suppress these studies, because ……… zOMG Terrorists!!!!!! ………, but the research the likelihood of it making a jump to human transmission has been published anyway:
Avian H5N1 influenza viruses in the wild may be one small step away from spreading effectively between mammals. That is the sobering message from a controversial study by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, published online by Nature1 after months of debate about how to release the findings publicly.
“After wanting to read it for so long, it was like eating again after fasting,” says Vincent Racaniello, a virologist at Columbia University in New York. “And it does not disappoint.”
H5N1, commonly known as bird flu, is highly pathogenic and often lethal in humans, but it cannot spread efficiently between people and cases seem to be rare. To find out if H5N1 could evolve easy transmissibility between humans, Kawaoka and his team mutated its haemagglutinin (HA) gene, which produces the protein that the virus uses to stick itself to host cells. Because flu viruses in the wild can also gain new properties by swapping genes, the researchers combined this gene with seven others from a highly transmissible flu virus, the H1N1 strain that caused a pandemic in 2009.
Kawaoka found that the hybrid virus could spread between ferrets in separate cages after acquiring just four mutations. Three of these allow the HA protein to stick to receptor molecules on mammalian cells, and the fourth stabilizes the protein. “Before we initiated this experiment, we knew that receptor specificity is important,” says Kawaoka. “We didn’t know what else was needed.”
Worryingly, some Middle Eastern H5N1 strains can already recognize human receptors2. Kawaoka’s work suggests that they could be just one stabilizing mutation away from being able to spread between humans. Discovering “that HA needs to be stable to be transmissible through the air between mammals” is a key finding, says influenza virologist Wendy Barclay at Imperial College London.
We knew that H5N1 was only few mutations away from H2H since well before as soon as the security Mafia’s heads started to explode in an orgy of security theater.
The post 911 security apparatus doing more harm than good.
For once, the generic drug manufacturers win one:
The US Supreme Court ruled that generic drug makers can challenge big-name pharmaceutical firms in court to stop them from broadening the scope of their patent descriptions.
The measure overturns a 2010 appeals court ruling and confirms an earlier decision by a federal judge that ordered the US subsidiary of Danish laboratory Novo Nordisk to narrow the description of its patent on repaglinide, an anti-diabetes drug sold under the name Prandin.
Caraco Pharmaceutical Laboratories, the US subsidiary of the Indian firm Sun Pharmaceutical Industries, is seeking to produce a generic version of Prandin.
However Novo Nordisk amended the wording of his patent to extend it, and block the Caraco’s request to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to produce a generic version of the drug.
The FDA cannot approve the sale of a drug that breaks patent protection laws.
In a unanimous decision by the nine Supreme Court justices on Tuesday, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that “a generic company can employ the counterclaim to challenge a brand’s overbrand use code.”
Courts have gotten much more skeptical of what I call overbroad patent bullsh%$ over the years, so this is more of a good trend.
I wish Dick Cheney the best of luck on his recovery from his heart transplant, but from what I understand of the protocols, someone who has had his of at least 4 first heart attacks at age 37, should not even be on the list.
That being said, I want him to lead a good long life, and that he lives long enough to see the decay of his reputation, much like Alan Greenspan has gone from Maestro to goat.
They have given up on attempting to regulate the massive overuse of antibiotics in livestock:
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) pulled a Scrooge move just before Christmas. The agency published an entry in the Federal Register declaring that it will end its attempt at mandatory restrictions on the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture. The agency isn’t advertising the shift, though: This news would have remained a secret if not for Maryn McKenna’s Superbug blog over at Wired. McKenna, who specializes in writing about antibiotics and their link to pathogens, caught the Federal Register notice.
This is a sorry end to a process that began in 1977 (!), but McKenna created an excellent timeline that traces the history of the issue back to the 1950s. In 2009, the Obama administration breathed new life into a moribund process because the top two Obama appointees at the FDA, Commissioner Margaret Hamburg and her then-deputy Joshua Sharfstein, strongly supported restricting antibiotic use in agriculture.
But despite Hamburg and Sharfstein’s many supportive statements, the FDA has only produced a draft set of “voluntary” guidelines. And, with this latest announcement, it looks like that’s as far as they’re willing to go.
The depressing thing, in addition to the fact that this practice creates “superbugs” that kill people, is that we know how much this would cost the consumer, based on the Danish experience, and it’s less than 10¢ a pound.
By way of putting this into perspective, antibiotics used at sub-therapeutic levels in feed accounts for 80% of all antibiotic use in the US.
Our feedlots are a petri dish for MRSA, antibiotic resistant E. Coli, etc.
A researcher at a pharmaceutical company was laid off shortly after another company acquired his employer, and shut down their research center.
Well, a few days ago, he was contacted by the blokes wot fired him, and asked to testify on their behalf in some patent litigation.
They offered a consulting fee and legal representation, but he declined, and contacted the attorneys for the other side.
His last sentence, “I explained that I do not want money but maybe they could re-evaluate how they are going to treat the R&D inventors in the future. You know, in case they need them again,” is a hoot.
In Illinois, the state Department of Revenue regularly certifies non-profits, with the idea making sure that they behave in a not-for-profit manner, as opposed to accumulating mountains of cash and overpaying their executives.
Well they have now denied tax exemptions to three hospitals, and are reviewing 15 more because they are abrogating their responsibility to serve their communities:
The Illinois Department of Revenue has denied property tax exemptions to three hospitals and is reviewing applications from 15 others, officials said Tuesday, signaling that the state plans to get tough on nonprofit hospitals it believes operate more like businesses than charities.
At stake are millions of dollars in tax revenues that the hospitals could contribute to cities, parks and schools by paying taxes.
Northwestern Memorial’s Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood, Edward Hospital in Naperville and Decatur Memorial Hospital in Decatur were informed of the decisions Tuesday morning, Revenue Department officials told The Associated Press.
They follow last year’s Illinois Supreme Court ruling that found a central Illinois hospital wasn’t doing enough free or discounted treatment of the poor to qualify for an exemption, obligating it to pay $1.2 million in local property tax payments per year.
The hospitals have 60 days to ask an administrative law judge to review the decisions. In Illinois, property taxes are collected by county governments, and the Department of Revenue decides which institutions are eligible for tax exemptions.
This is actually something bears on my personal past, not from the hospital angle, but from the undeserving non-profit angle.
A little over 20 years (!) ago, I incorporated a not-for profit tax exempt corporation as a 501(c)3 that puts on Science Fiction conventions, which in that case meant that I represented it as an educational organization. While technically legal, I’ve always felt that the organization was more properly a 501(c)7, a social organization.
I filled out the forms, and chased them through the state and federal bureaucracies. And it was all technically legal, and I did not materially misrepresent anything in the applications
That being said, even at the time, I felt that this was an undeserving use of this status.
I was aware of the differences between a (c)3 and a (c)7 at the time, but we felt that we needed the ability for people to deduct donations, and (more importantly) the postage discount available for the (c)3.
The more scrutiny that is placed on organizations that use these sorts of status as a shield (501(c)4 tend to be used as political front group, for example), the better.
There are a lot of slimy things under the rocks that are section 501 of the IRS code.
H/t Washington Monthly.
I’m sitting in a doctor’s office, waiting for Sharon* to get out of her appointment for a colonoscopy.
Getting older is so fun.
When you get old enough they regularly put a video camera up your Tuchas.
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
We got a call from Natalie’s sleep away camp, she was experiencing headaches, tremors, and trouble swallowing.
We took her to the ER, and it appears just to be a minor virus, juxtaposed with not eating anything that day (from the virus), and the fact that she was up until 2 in the morning.
Still, there is nothing like an ER visit to F%$# up your day.
She’s back at camp, and so are we overnight, just in case.
Someone has discovered the handwritten notes of Dr. Bruce Jessen, a psychologist who helped design the CIA’s torture program, and it shows that the goal of the program was torture and the exploitation of prisoners. I would further add that the documents show that he knew that torture did not work, and simply produced false statements, which means that there was no purpose to the program beyond producing false propaganda:
Bush administration officials have long asserted that the torture techniques used on “war on terror” detainees were utilized as a last resort in an effort to gain actionable intelligence to thwart pending terrorist attacks against the United States and its interests abroad.
But the handwritten notes obtained exclusively by Truthout drafted two decades ago by Dr. John Bruce Jessen, the psychologist who was under contract to the CIA and credited as being one of the architects of the government’s top-secret torture program, tell a dramatically different story about the reasons detainees were brutalized and it was not just about obtaining intelligence. Rather, as Jessen’s notes explain, torture was used to “exploit” detainees, that is, to break them down physically and mentally, in order to get them to “collaborate” with government authorities. Jessen’s notes emphasize how a “detainer” uses the stresses of detention to produce the appearance of compliance in a prisoner.
But no prosecutions, because Barack Obama is too busy torturing his own whistle blowers.
Why Dr. Jessen still has a medical license is beyond me.
Read the whole article, it’s extensive and chilling.
Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!The man who pursued William Jefferson Clinton’s penis from Arkansas to the District of Columbia, Richard Mellon Scaife, has lambasted Republicans on their attempts to completely defund family planning:
The Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives — urged on by conservatives opposed to abortion — has voted to defund Planned Parenthood. On this issue, Republicans and conservatives are dead wrong.
My grandmother was a friend and a supporter of Margaret Sanger, one of America’s earliest, most effective advocates of birth control.
I met Sanger several times before her death in 1966 and was impressed by her intellect and her commitment to many issues, not the least of which was enabling every woman to be “the absolute mistress of her own body,” as she put it.
I didn’t agree with everything the formidable Mrs. Sanger espoused. Yet I respected her dedication to making health-care and birth-control services available to all Americans, especially to those with low incomes, no insurance and no other recourse to medical services.
When you have gotten too combative for rabid right wing Pit Bull for Dick Scaife, you have seriously gone off the rails.
Obama’s budget achieves a fair amount of costs savings by shortening the exclusivity period for drugs and ending payments from big pharma to generic drug manufacturers not to manufacture their drugs:
Big pharmaceutical companies could face increased competition from generic drugmakers under two proposals put forth by the Obama administration on Monday despite earlier savings extracted from drugmakers as part of last year’s healthcare law.
President Barack Obama, as part of his 2012 budget proposal, called for cutting the number of years drugmakers could exclusively market brand-name biologic drugs to 7 years from 12.
He also set his sights on ending controversial “pay-for-delay” deals that affect traditional, chemical drugs by giving the U.S. Federal Trade Commission power to block them. Under such pacts, brand-name and generic drugmakers settle patent challenges with payoffs that delay lower-cost rivals from reaching the market.
I’d feel a little bit better about this if he also wasn’t cutting home heating aid to the poor in the same budget though.
Representative Gabrielle Giffords is recovering remarkably quickly from her head wound:
Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has recovered enough from a bullet to the brain to ask for toast with breakfast.
Few details are available, but Pia Carusone, Giffords’ chief of staff, confirmed that the congresswoman made the verbal request on Monday when hospital workers at TIRR Memorial Hermann brought her a meal.
“Yes, that’s accurate,” Carusone said in an e-mail.
This is really remarkable progress.
A hickey triggered a stroke for a woman in New Zealand.
Luckily, she recovered after a regime with treatment with anti-coagulants.
Steven Wakefield’s now discredited paper in Lancet claiming a tie between autism and vaccines is now more than just a zealot doing bad science.
Brian Deer of the British Medical Journal reveals that it was outright fraud:
In the first part of a special BMJ series, Brian Deer exposes the bogus data behind claims that launched a worldwide scare over the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, and reveals how the appearance of a link with autism was manufactured at a London medical school.
………
Unknown to Mr 11, Wakefield was working on a lawsuit, for which he sought a bowel-brain “syndrome” as its centrepiece. Claiming an undisclosed £150 (€180, $230) an hour through a Norfolk solicitor named Richard Barr, he had been confidentially 8 put on the payroll two years before the paper was published, eventually grossing him £435 643, plus expenses.
(emphasis original)
Now the question is when he goes to jail for fraud, though if I were the prosecutor, I would add felony murder to the bill of indictment as well.
Laurence Klotz relates what might be the worst mdeical lecture of all time.
You see, before there was Viagra, there was an injectible treatment for erectile dysfunction developed by Professor G.S. Brindley, and at the lecture where he revealed these techniques, he dropped trow to reveal that he was sporting an artificially induced erection:
Professor Brindley, still in his blue track suit, was introduced as a psychiatrist with broad research interests. He began his lecture without aplomb. He had, he indicated, hypothesized that injection with vasoactive agents into the corporal bodies of the penis might induce an erection. Lacking ready access to an appropriate animal model, and cognisant of the long medical tradition of using oneself as a research subject, he began a series of experiments on self-injection of his penis with various vasoactive agents, including papaverine, phentolamine, and several others. (While this is now commonplace, at the time it was unheard of). His slide-based talk consisted of a large series of photographs of his penis in various states of tumescence after injection with a variety of doses of phentolamine and papaverine. After viewing about 30 of these slides, there was no doubt in my mind that, at least in Professor Brindley’s case, the therapy was effective. Of course, one could not exclude the possibility that erotic stimulation had played a role in acquiring these erections, and Professor Brindley acknowledged this.
The Professor wanted to make his case in the most convincing style possible. He indicated that, in his view, no normal person would find the experience of giving a lecture to a large audience to be erotically stimulating or erection-inducing. He had, he said, therefore injected himself with papaverine in his hotel room before coming to give the lecture, and deliberately wore loose clothes (hence the track-suit) to make it possible to exhibit the results. He stepped around the podium, and pulled his loose pants tight up around his genitalia in an attempt to demonstrate his erection.
At this point, I, and I believe everyone else in the room, was agog. I could scarcely believe what was occurring on stage. But Prof. Brindley was not satisfied. He looked down sceptically at his pants and shook his head with dismay. ‘Unfortunately, this doesn’t display the results clearly enough’. He then summarily dropped his trousers and shorts, revealing a long, thin, clearly erect penis. There was not a sound in the room. Everyone had stopped breathing.
But the mere public showing of his erection from the podium was not sufficient. He paused, and seemed to ponder his next move. The sense of drama in the room was palpable. He then said, with gravity, ‘I’d like to give some of the audience the opportunity to confirm the degree of tumescence’. With his pants at his knees, he waddled down the stairs, approaching (to their horror) the urologists and their partners in the front row. As he approached them, erection waggling before him, four or five of the women in the front rows threw their arms up in the air, seemingly in unison, and screamed loudly. The scientific merits of the presentation had been overwhelmed, for them, by the novel and unusual mode of demonstrating the results.
It does sound like something that you would see on an HBO comedy, doesn’t it?
Remember, the folks who listen to the junk science don’t just put themselves at risk, but they place the rest of the population at risk by poking holes in herd immunity.
The net result of all this is 10 infants have died in the worst whooping cough outbreak in California whooping cough outbreak in over ½ a century.
Jon Stewart at his best.
Tudza (l) and Lavi (r) as radioactive zombie cats
We took Lavi to the vet for what appeared to be some tooth problems.
It’s a tumor, and an aggressive malignant one in her head.
She probably will not make it to year’s end.
She’s had a good run, being over 17½, and had survived a bout of hepatic lipidosis about 5½ years ago, but it looks like she will not make it through year’s end.
It’s to be expected when cats reach this age, but it is still a bummer.