Later On

Thanks to Tom, who wrote to point out a vendor I have overlooked: Details for Men, located in New York. They have a good line of products. They also currently offer six sampler packs. Substitutions may be made on some blades depending on availability.

Sample Pack 1: Bic, Derby, Dorco ST300, Merkur, Personna Red Pack “Israeli”, Sharp
6 brands, 40 blades total, $14.00, 35¢ per blade

Sample Pack 2: 7 AM Platinum, Astra Superior Platinum, Derby, Dorco ST301, Feather, Personna Red Pack “Israeli”
6 brands, 40 blades total, $14.00, 35¢  per blade

Sample Pack 3: Feather, Merkur, Personna Red Pack Israeli, Wilkinson Sword
4 brands, 30 blades total, $14.00, 47¢ per blade

Sample Pack 4: 7 AM Platinum, Astra Superior Platinum, Bic, Derby, Dorco ST300, Dorco ST301, Personna Red Pack “Israeli”, Sharp, Wilkinson Sword
9 brands, 55 blades total, $14.00, 25¢ per blade

Sample Pack 5: 7 am Platinum, Astra Superior Platinum, Bic, Derby, Dorco ST300, Dorco ST301, Feather, Merkur, Personna Red Pack “Israeli”, Sharp, Wilkinson Sword
11 brands, 75 blades, $35.00, 47¢ per blade

Treet Variety Pack: Treet Platinum, Treet Classic, Treet Dura Sharp, Trig
4 brands, 30 blades, $8.00, 27¢ per blade

Glenn Greenwald wonders what on earth the Center for American Progress is thinking when it prepped Erica Williams):

Last Friday, CNN hosted a panel debate on torture and investigations with two conservatives and two liberals (Daily Kos’ David Waldman and Center for American Progress’ Erica Williams).  Waldman did a genuinely masterful job of arguing the case against torture and for investigations — you can watch the five-minute segment here — but, bizarrely, the representative for CAP joined in with the two conservatives against Waldman to insist that there be no investigations.  This is what she said:

The American people right now are actually not interested in this sideshow and this discussion.  The American people are interested in looking forward — nobody is concerned anymore with what the Bush administration was doing and did.  We decided it was torture.  Conservatives may or may not disagree.  None of that matters at this point and time.

I wonder how Williams reconciles her claims about what “the American people” are and are not interested in with this: …

Continue reading. And read this powerful post by Jane Hamsher, which includes a video of David Waldman pointing out how the story has been misreported—and what the story actually is.

I have commented several times about the deaths of civilians, including women and children, as turning the populace against the US and ultimately strengthening those who are fighting the US. "Collateral damage" is a dismissive phrase that fails to recognize the horror and grief of innocent family members killed by US airstrikes. And $2000 for each dead family member doesn’t quite cut it, does it? Especially if the military continues to kill civilians. It looks as though we’re paying to kill innocents—one expects that the military will eventually ask for a bulk rate: "Instead of $2000 apiece, how about $1500 apiece if we kill 50?"

A good op-ed in today’s NY Times by David Kilcullen and Andrew McDonald Exum:

IN recent days, the Pentagon has made two major changes in its strategy to defeat the Taliban, Al Qaeda and their affiliates in Afghanistan and Pakistan. First came the announcement that Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal would take over as the top United States commander in Afghanistan. Next, Pentagon officials said that the United States was giving Pakistan more information on its drone attacks on terrorist targets, while news reports indicated that Pakistani officers would have significant future control over drone routes, targets and decisions to fire weapons (though the military has denied that).

While we agree with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates that “fresh eyes were needed” to review our military strategy in the region, we feel that expanding or even just continuing the drone war is a mistake. In fact, it would be in our best interests, and those of the Pakistani people, to declare a moratorium on drone strikes into Pakistan.

After the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007, and following much internal debate, President George W. Bush authorized a broad expansion of drone strikes against a wide array of targets within Pakistan: Qaeda operatives, Pakistan-based members of the Afghan Taliban insurgency and — in some cases — other militants bent on destabilizing Pakistan.

The use of drones in military operations has steadily grown — we know from public documents that from last September to this March alone, C.I.A. operatives launched more than three dozen strikes.

The appeal of drone attacks for policy makers is clear. For one thing, their effects are measurable. Military commanders and intelligence officials point out that drone attacks have disrupted terrorist networks in Pakistan, killing key leaders and hampering operations. Drone attacks create a sense of insecurity among militants and constrain their interactions with suspected informers. And, because they kill remotely, drone strikes avoid American casualties.

But on balance, the costs outweigh these benefits for three reasons.

First, …

Continue reading.

I decided that if I could do 22 minutes, 30 minutes would fine. I ended up doing 32, since at the end of the formal walk I kept walking to bring up the recycling from the back of the apartment building to the curb. Quite a bit hotter today, which indicates I should start the walk earlier.

The editorial in the LA Times:

The Obama administration is saying all the right things about the jumble of ineffective and vindictive laws, policies and practices that have made up this nation’s so-called war on drugs. Shortly after he was confirmed, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that he would halt Drug Enforcement Administration raids on medical marijuana dispensaries. Then the Justice Department urged Congress to eliminate the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity in convictions for dealing crack and powder cocaine, which imposed long prison terms on predominantly black defendants.

The most recent reassurance comes from the new drug czar, R. Gil Kerlikowske. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal this week, Kerlikowske said it’s time to retire the phrase "war on drugs." Good. It’s as misguided as the policies it frames. "Regardless of how you try to explain to people it’s a ‘war on drugs’ … people see a war as a war on them," he said. "We’re not at war with people in this country." These sensible pronouncements inspire hope that the administration is moving toward a more rational approach to drugs. There is much to do.

For example, the DEA apparently did not get the memo about raids; it carried out one the day after Holder’s announcement. And although Holder’s refusal to deploy federal resources against the clinics is a welcome respite, we’re still left with the conflict between state and federal marijuana laws. Also, as a candidate, Barack Obama said he supported lifting the federal ban on needle exchange programs, which study after study concludes slows transmission of HIV/AIDS. President Obama’s budget, however, leaves it in place. Administration officials say he now believes the public needs persuading.

It’s in that context that Kerlikowske’s comments matter: By thinking of drug users as combatants in a war, the nation militarized a health problem. The phrase itself shaped flawed thinking and yielded disastrous policies. When he campaigned for the presidency, Obama promised bold change on drugs. The old paradigm should follow the now-discarded phrase into history.

Excellent article in GQ by Robert Draper. It begins:

On the morning of Thursday, April 10, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon prepared a top-secret briefing for George W. Bush. This document, known as the Worldwide Intelligence Update, was a daily digest of critical military intelligence so classified that it circulated among only a handful of Pentagon leaders and the president; Rumsfeld himself often delivered it, by hand, to the White House. The briefing’s cover sheet generally featured triumphant, color images from the previous days’ war efforts: On this particular morning, it showed the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down in Firdos Square, a grateful Iraqi child kissing an American soldier, and jubilant crowds thronging the streets of newly liberated Baghdad. And above these images, and just below the headline secretary of defense, was a quote that may have raised some eyebrows. It came from the Bible, from the book of Psalms: “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him…To deliver their soul from death.”

This mixing of Crusades-like messaging with war imagery, which until now has not been revealed, had become routine. On March 31, a U.S. tank roared through the desert beneath a quote from Ephesians: “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” On April 7, Saddam Hussein struck a dictatorial pose, under this passage from the First Epistle of Peter: “It is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.” (To see these and more Bush-administration intelligence cover sheets, visit GQ.com’s exclusive slideshow).

These cover sheets were the brainchild of …

Read the rest of this entry »

Monica Shaw provides the background and also gives a very easy recipe for a healthful Bircher Muesli, following his original recipe, not the concoction available today. Take a look.

Also, here’s her earlier recipe, slightly different.

I blogged this fantastic recipe (from Science News, no less) quite a while back. Now Mark Bittman has an interesting update (a video at the link):

Mexican Chocolate Tofu Pudding

Time: 10 minutes, plus 30 minutes’ chilling

3/4 cup sugar [I would skip this – LG]
1 pound silken tofu [I found Mori-Nu silken tofu to be the best for this – LG]
8 ounces high-quality bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon chili powder, or more to taste
Chocolate shavings (optional).

1. In a small pot, combine sugar with 3/4 cup water; bring to a boil and cook until sugar is dissolved, stirring occasionally. Cool slightly.

2. Put all ingredients except for chocolate shavings in a blender [I generally use a food processor, which works as well – LG] and purée until completely smooth, stopping machine to scrape down its sides if necessary. Divide among 4 to 6 ramekins and chill for at least 30 minutes. If you like, garnish with chocolate shavings before serving.

Yield: 4 to 6 servings.

Though I think I had, on the whole, a fixed mindset up through early adulthood, there were exceptions: Go, for example. I certainly didn’t understand the game at all when I first started playing, but I could in fact see that I was improving, which encouraged me to study, which led to further improvement, and so on. I fairly early understood that my Go ability was something that I could develop by study and effort.

OTOH, I’ve always felt, “I can’t draw.” Not: “I haven’t learned how to draw.” So, since I couldn’t draw (absolute measure of lack of ability), what was the point of studying? Yet I did want to learn to draw, so from time to time I would buy a book on how to draw. But when I started any of the books, I immediately was dissatisfied with my efforts and decided again, “Yep, I can’t draw.” I’m now thinking of digging out one of the books—Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain seems to be a good one—and actually working through it.

Of course, that brings up the point of persistence and not getting distracted by some shinier new jewel of knowledge. I recall that, just at the time that I needed to study for my PhD comps in math, I suddenly found myself fascinated by Esperanto and my efforts to learn it. Come to think of it, Esperanto is another instance where I somehow grasped that study and effort would be rewarded.

I suppose some things kept being interesting long enough for me to begin to learn and see that improvement and advance was possible.

Another: messy apartment. It’s certainly much easier to say to oneself, “I guess I’m just messy” rather than undertake the effort to learn (and practice) organization and neatness. I know some of the principles. For one, everything should have its own special place, so that (1) you know where to find it, and (2) when you use it, you know where to put it back. Few of my things have a special place. Bad. (Of course, having too much stuff—more stuff than you have places—is an automatic perpetual mess.)

At any rate, Dweck’s book is certainly worth reading. Highly recommended.

Yesterday I blogged about nocebos: when you mind holds beliefs that lead it to attack the body. Last night I was reading Mindset, by Carol Dweck, PhD, and it struck me that she is in a way exploring the same sort of phenomenon, though on the positive side and in different language. The two approaches are looking at the same general thing, but from different angles and with different vocabularies.

Here’s the opening of her book:

When I was a young researcher, just starting out, something happened that changed my life. I was obsessed with understanding how people cope with failures, and I decided to study it by watching how students grapple with hard problems. So I brought children one at a time to a room in their school, made them comfortable, and then gave them a series of puzzles to solve. The first ones were fairly easy, but the next ones were hard. As the students grunted, perspired, and toiled, I watched their strategies and probed what they were thinking and feeling. I expected differences among children in how they coped with the difficulty, but I saw something I never expected.

Confronted with the hard puzzles, one ten-year-old boy pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together, smacked his lips, and cried out, I love a challenge!" Another, sweating away on these puzzles, looked up with a pleased expression and said with authority, "You know, I was hoping this would be informative."

What’s wrong with them? I wondered. I always thought you coped with failure or you didn’t cope with failure. I never thought anyone loved failure. Were these alien children or were they on to something?

Everyone has a role model, someone who pointed the way at a critical moment in their lives. These children were my role models. They obviously knew something I didn’t and I was determined to figure it out—to understand the kind of mindset that could turn a failure into a gift.

What did they know? They knew that human qualities, such as intellectual skills, could be cultivated through effort. And that’s what they were doing—getting smarter. Not only weren’t they discouraged by failure, they didn’t even think they were failing. They thought they were learning.

I, on the other hand, though human qualities were carved in stone. You were smart or you weren’t, and failure meant you weren’t. It was that simple. If you could arrange successes and avoid failures (at all costs), you could stay smart. Struggles, mistakes, perseverance were just not part of this picture.

Whether human qualities are things that can be cultivated or things that are carved in stone is an old issue. What these beliefs mean for you is a new one: What are the consequences of thinking that your intelligence or personality is something you can develop, as opposed to something that is a fixed, deep-seated trait? Let’s first look in on the age-old, fiercely waged debate about human nature and then return to the question of what these beliefs mean for you…

It’s a fascinating book with many implications for child-rearing. For example, you never praise a child for how smart s/he is, but rather for how well they work. Good grades are attributed to good work, not to intelligence. You can find more information in this earlier post.

I have to admit that I was praised for being smart and really didn’t learn how to study and work at things until I was an adult—and study skills are best learned very young, otherwise it’s difficult to embed them deeply enough.

Andrew Sullivan has a good post and then a second good post on McChrystal. Both are worth reading in full and raise serious questions about McChrystal’s suitability. From the first:

An interesting piece from someone who once served under him and clearly worships him. Read it all. Money quote:

Obviously writing from the seat of retirement, and with absolute respect and gratefulness for LTG McChrystal’s aggressive leadership, personable demeanor, and unwavering mentoring, I envy the guys that are soon to find themselves sharing the same mess hall, weight room, and helicopter as The Pope. The man is unstoppable. Demonstrably more committed than most. More open, in fact insistent, on creative and innovative ideas from his subordinates to fight the war on terror. From my perspective, our rules of land warfare, our respect for human life, and our strategic constraints handcuff us to the point that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable. But, with LTG McChrystal at the helm now all bets are off.

That last sentence suggests that McChrystal disagrees with the customary “respect for human life” demanded of the US military. McChrystal’s past is mysterious but there is little doubt that he was deeply involved in one of the worst torture outfits in Iraq, Camp “Nama”, an acronym for “Nasty Ass Military Area”. The key sources for what went on at Nama are a NYT story here, and a Human Rights Watch report here. Two prisoners were tortured to death in this place. It was extremely closely monitored, with records of all sorts of torture and abuse, and yet there are also extensive stories of abuse that went well outside even the torture techniques approved by Cheney and Rumsfeld. Remember also that Iraq was, even by the standards of the Bush administration, supposed to be under the Geneva Conventions. The camp’s record has been shrouded in secrecy from the beginning.

Nama housed the “black room” – a torture cell: …

Continue reading.

From the second:

As Fred Kaplan noticed, the man Obama has just selected to be his new commander in Afghanistan has a history. It appears to involve some pretty horrifying toleration of rampant abuse and torture of prisoners:

“Once, somebody brought it up with the colonel. ‘Will [the Red Cross] ever be allowed in here?’ And he said absolutely not. He had this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there’s no way that the Red Cross could get in: “they won’t have access and they never will. This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating, even Army investigators.” …

During his first six or seven weeks at the camp, Jeff conducted or participated in about fifteen harsh interrogations, most involving the use of ice water to induce hypothermia …

Cold can be a serious torment to a naked man on a winter night; in Afghanistan, one prisoner died from hypothermia. Sometimes, to maximize the humiliation of the Iraqi men, American women would be brought in to watch them undress. Sleep deprivation was also used to an extreme extent, especially in Jeff’s early days at Nama.

They could keep a prisoner on his feet for twenty hours, and although the rules required them to allow each prisoner four hours of sleep every twenty-four hours, nowhere did it say those four hours had to be consecutive–so sometimes they’d wake the prisoners up every half hour. Eventually they’d just collapse. “This was a very demanding method for the interrogators as well, because it required a lot of staff to monitor the prisoner, and we’d have to stay awake, too,” Jeff says. “And it’s just impossible to interrogate someone when he’s in that state, collapsed on the ground. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Within the unit, the interrogators got the feeling they were reporting to the highest levels. The colonel would tell an interrogator that his report “is on Rumsfeld’s desk this morning” or that it was “read by SecDef.” “That’s a big morale booster after a fourteen-hour day,” Jeff says with a tinge of irony. “Hey, we got to the White House.”

The full Esquire piece is here. Who was responsible for overseeing one of the worst torture and abuse centers in Iraq?

“Was the colonel ever actually there to observe this?” …

Continue reading.

From The Simple Dollar. More info here.

Worth reading.

Your mind generally wins. Fascinating article on nocebos by Helen Pilcher in the New Scientist:

Late one night in a small Alabama cemetery, Vance Vanders had a run-in with the local witch doctor, who wafted a bottle of unpleasant-smelling liquid in front of his face, and told him he was about to die and that no one could save him.

Back home, Vanders took to his bed and began to deteriorate. Some weeks later, emaciated and near death, he was admitted to the local hospital, where doctors were unable to find a cause for his symptoms or slow his decline. Only then did his wife tell one of the doctors, Drayton Doherty, of the hex.

Doherty thought long and hard. The next morning, he called Vanders’s family to his bedside. He told them that the previous night he had lured the witch doctor back to the cemetery, where he had choked him against a tree until he explained how the curse worked. The medicine man had, he said, rubbed lizard eggs into Vanders’s stomach, which had hatched inside his body. One reptile remained, which was eating Vanders from the inside out.

Doherty then summoned a nurse who had, by prior arrangement, filled a large syringe with a powerful emetic. With great ceremony, he inspected the instrument and injected its contents into Vanders’ arm. A few minutes later, Vanders began to gag and vomit uncontrollably. In the midst of it all, unnoticed by everyone in the room, Doherty produced his pièce de résistance – a green lizard he had stashed in his black bag. “Look what has come out of you Vance,” he cried. “The voodoo curse is lifted.”

Vanders did a double take, lurched backwards to the head of the bed, then drifted into a deep sleep. When he woke next day he was alert and ravenous. He quickly regained his strength and was discharged a week later.

The facts of this case from 80 years ago were corroborated by four medical professionals. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is that Vanders survived. There are numerous documented instances from many parts of the globe of people dying after being cursed.

With no medical records and no autopsy results, there’s no way to be sure exactly how these people met their end. The common thread in these cases, however, is that a respected figure puts a curse on someone, perhaps by chanting or pointing a bone at them. Soon afterwards, the victim dies, apparently of natural causes.

You might think this sort of thing is increasingly rare, and limited to remote tribes. But according to Clifton Meador, a doctor at Vanderbilt School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, who has documented cases like Vanders, the curse has taken on a new form.

Take Sam Shoeman, who was diagnosed with end-stage liver cancer in the 1970s and given just months to live. Shoeman duly died in the allotted time frame – yet the autopsy revealed that his doctors had got it wrong. The tumour was tiny and had not spread. “He didn’t die from cancer, but from believing he was dying of cancer,” says Meador. “If everyone treats you as if you are dying, you buy into it. Everything in your whole being becomes about dying.” …

Continue reading. For a look at a positive aspect of this phenomenon, approached from a different angle by a different researcher, take a look at this post.

Very interesting article by Joan Melcher in Miller-McCune:

A little more than a year ago, a team of scientists that included Wildlife Trust President Peter Daszak identified Mexico and other tropical locales as "hotspots" for emerging zoonotic diseases (diseases that can be transmitted between humans and animals, including the H1N1 virus).

In a paper published in Nature, the team made a predictive map of where diseases are most likely to emerge — Latin America, tropical Africa and Asia — and, for the first time, were able to correlate socioeconomic, environmental and ecological factors to disease risk.

Daszak has adjunct positions at three American and two British universities, and has served on committees of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the World Health Organization, National Academy of Sciences and Department of the Interior. His research focuses on the taxonomy, pathology and conservation impact of parasitic diseases. He is executive director of the Consortium for Conservation Medicine.

We caught up with Dr. Daszak by phone last week.

Miller-McCune.com: What sort of analyses are you doing now?

Peter Daszak: We’ve been analyzing trade and human travel data information in and out of Mexico before and after the outbreak. What we’ve found is that it looks like Mexico imports hundreds of thousands of pigs every year for the pig industry. Often these swine influenzas don’t cause huge critical signs in pigs, so it could go pretty much unnoticed. The other thing is that Mexico does import pigs from other countries in Latin America and countries in Europe – not many, but enough to bring over other strains. In terms of origins, it may be that this virus was hanging around a long time in pigs in North America as a region, switching genes with other viruses, and then the avian gene got inserted.

It seems it made the step into human disease in Mexico. The next question is how did it travel so widely so rapidly? The answer to that is through travel networks, which are incredible now. We’ve been tracking travel information, and we’ve found that a large number of passengers traveled to other Latin American countries from Mexico at that time. Some of those countries haven’t reported many cases, if any. So I think we’re going to see a bigger impact in Latin America as those cases get noticed.

They’re probably not being noticed because they’re not being reported. These are people who traveled to Brazil or Venezuela and went home, maybe to the countryside, and got ill and have not yet seen a doctor.

Mexico City is a hub for connections to Latin America. The volume of travel to Latin America from Mexico is huge. It’s also a huge connector for people traveling from Houston, Miami and New York. The richer countries that can afford better health care are going to report the cases first. That’s why we saw cases reported rapidly in New Zealand. New Zealand picks up cases very quickly because it’s got better reporting and better health care. We should expect to see surprising numbers of cases from places like other parts of Asia, Australia and even Africa.

M-M: You noted in a recent article that your group will be releasing findings related to the H1N1 virus. When will they come out? …

Continue reading.

Very interesting article—and I like that it’s illustrated with a photo of Donald Trump. Go read.

Interesting article by Anne Landman:

A recent study in the Journal of Preventive Medicine found that young people who feel action should be taken against the tobacco industry are more likely to want to quit smoking.

To determine young people’s attitudes toward the tobacco industry, researchers asked how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the following statements:

• "Taking a stand against smoking is important to me"
• "I want to be involved with efforts to get rid of cigarette smoking," and
• "I would like to see cigarette companies go out of business."

Compared to respondents who didn’t support action against the tobacco industry, those who agreed with these statements were three times less likely to be smokers. Among current smokers, respondents who had a negative attitude towards the industry were over four times more likely to plan to quit, compared to smokers who didn’t support action against the industry. The study was the first to link attitudes toward the tobacco industry to smoking behavior among young adults.

Given the new evidence that knowledge of the industry’s dirty dealings can help people stop smoking, what better cessation aid than TobaccoWiki?

To the industry, less is more

Cigarettes may be the most highly engineered consumer product in history. Unlike alcohol, marijuana, cocaine or heroin, cigarettes have been the focus of an astonishing amount of corporate money and scientific innovation over the decades aimed at making smoking easier, more addictive and — most importantly — more profitable for the manufacturers.

In 1940, a commercial cigarette contained 1300 milligrams of tobacco by weight. By the 1980s it contained only 750 milligrams of tobacco, or about 40% less tobacco than 60 years ago. This is in part because modern cigarettes contain more additives. Another reason is that cigarettes now contain more air and less tobacco. Cigarette makers "puff" tobacco using dry ice or other gases, the same way that wheat or rice is "puffed" for cereals. Puffing expands the tobacco volume without increasing its mass, thus allowing manufacturers to put less tobacco in their cigarettes, charging smokers for more air and less tobacco.

Realize what’s in your cigarettes

The best motivator to stop smoking might be learning about cigarette additives, cigarette contaminants, or tobacco industry target marketing.

To make cigarettes more appealing and to increase their profits, tobacco companies have …

Continue reading.

Would having more women paramedics help? The story:

Women with chest pain are less likely than male patients to receive recommended, proven therapies while en route to the hospital, according to new research from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Despite evidence showing that the drugs aspirin and nitroglycerin are important early interventions for people who may be having a heart attack, women don’t get them as often as male patients with the same types of symptoms, says a new study that will be presented Friday, May 15, 2009 at the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine’s annual conference. While the researchers found no differences in the types of care given by emergency medical service (EMS) providers to African-American and white patients, they are troubled by the evidence that women may be receiving sub-optimal care, and say it highlights the need for pre-hospital providers to be sensitive to the fact that women may have atypical symptoms. Since chest pain is a leading cause of emergency room visits in the United States, accounting for more than 8 million visits a year, the implications of the findings are broad.

"Women with heart attacks have higher death rates than men, so these findings are very concerning, and it’s important for us to try to figure out why this is happening," says lead author Zachary Mesiel, MD, MPH, an emergency physician and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar and Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at Penn.

Heart attack damage takes place gradually, as portions of the heart muscle are deprived of oxygen over several hours. Early interventions like aspirin therapy — which reduces clotting around the ruptured coronary plaques that grow to block blood flow to the heart — play an important role in preventing damage to this cardiac tissue. Recent national efforts underscore the maxim that in treatment of heart attacks, "time is muscle." Many EMS organizations, for instance, have outfitted ambulances with cardiac monitoring equipment that can send information about a patient’s heart rhythm ahead to the hospital so the cardiac catheterization lab can be alerted to prepare for a patient who will need prompt treatment to open their blocked arteries. Initiatives like these have helped hospitals to reduce their so-called "door-to-balloon time," which describes the minutes between when the patient arrives at the hospital and is sent to the cardiac cath lab. The time patients spend being cared for by EMS personnel in the field or in an ambulance is also a vital part of that chain of care, so Meisel and his colleagues say emergency responders should strive to implement best practices for all chest pain patients.

The new Penn study examined 683 cases in 2006 and 2007 in which EMS was summoned for a complaint of chest pain and brought patients to one of three Philadelphia hospitals in the University of Pennsylvania Health System…

Read the rest of this entry »

Very intriguing post by Tom Ricks:

Greg Jaffe, the new kid on the Washington Post block, has a great profile of Defense Secretary Gates in that newspaper today. It tells you a lot about Gates, beginning with this explosive opening: When Gates travelled to Dover Air Force Base in March to receive some war dead incoming from Afghanistan, he was told they had been killed in a Humvee hit by a roadside bomb. Gates snapped, "Find out why they haven’t gotten their goddamn MRAPs yet.."

But the biggest chunk of news is after the jump, when Jafee reveals that last year all the service chiefs formally nonconcurred with Gates’ decision in the National Defense Strategy to take on additional risk in the area of conventional warfare in order to focus the military more on irregular fighting. Gates heard out the Chiefs and then put aside their concerns. To do that, he had to be pretty confident in his own views-and also probably pretty persuaded that the Chiefs are out of touch.

Jaffe also deftly recounts how Gates reached down into the guts of the Air Force’s UAV program to get it to yield more resources to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When told that UAV pilots needed time to drive one hour to a town to ear, go to the bank, and pick up kids at a day care center, Gates put aside money to get those amenities on their base. Jaffe has an Air Force officer who was involved complaining: "I was having to justify my organization down to the gnat’s ass just about every week." My thought: Good for Gates. This sort of micro-managing is what Winston Churchill did occasionally during World War II, especially when he felt the organization was using small things to block his larger goals.

Good for Gates, and good for Jaffe. I am glad to see him in my old slot at the Post.

I believe that patenting genes is a wrong-headed idea, so I thought this post by Rebecca Skloot was excellent. It begins:

Earlier this week, the American Civil Liberties Union and several other groups filed suit against Myriad Genetics — the company that holds the patent on the breast cancer gene.  They’re hoping to get the breast cancer gene patent revoked, but more than that, they’re aiming to stop gene patenting all together.

Today, in my new column in Slate’s Double X Magazine, I go into the story of the breast cancer gene and the impact the ACLU claims it’s had on science and patient care (a hint: it’s not good). I also look at the suit itself, the cases that have come before this one, and what they say about the ACLU’s odds for success. 

I’ve covered the long history of legal battles over the ownership of human tissues taken from patients during biopsies (including one case in which a man’s cells were patented and licensed for millions of dollars without his knowledge).  But this is the first lawsuit challenging all existing gene patents, which could have a huge impact on science.  It’s fascinating stuff, and it’ll be interesting to see what happens next (Myriad hasn’t responded to the suit yet). 

I’ll keep covering the case as it moves forward.  For now, as a bit of follow up, here are a few specific details from the lawsuit that I wasn’t able to fit into my article:

I suggest reading the story here, to put the information below in context.  Here are a few highlights from the complaint (see: Association for Molecular Pathology v. United States Patent Office): …

Continue reading.