Dogs; Good for What Ails You

How Dogs are Replacing Drugs in the Treatment of PTSD

Fair or Unfair?

Running legend Michael Johnson believes Oscar Pistorius has an 'unfair advantage'- Short Legs:

The American, winner of Olympic gold medals in the 400m in 1996 and 2000, was talking specifically about Oscar Pistorius, the South African known as ‘blade runner’.

While he stressed that he considers Pistorius, who has been allowed to compete at the London Games in the able-bodied 400m, as a friend, the Dallas-born sprinter revealed that he considers the principle of disabled competitors lining up alongside those without specially developed limbs flawed.

When asked at a Times+ event whether he thought Pistorius's inclusion was political correctness gone mad or an inspiring human story, the 44 year-old said: “I think it is both. I know Oscar well, and he knows my position; my position is that because we don’t know for sure whether he gets an advantage from the prosthetics that he wears it is unfair to the able-bodied competitors.

My opinion, FWIW.  If his current prosthetic legs weigh approximately what his original legs would, let him complete.  If not, add weight to make them equal.  If he wins, give him an asterisk. 

I don't think we need to worry about athletes having their legs amputated and replaced by prosthetics, at least until after one of the them wins gold.

Some Tough News From the Left Coast

My younger brother, Ted, sometimes co-blogger and gun blogger at "A Man, A Dog and A Gun" has some troubling news:

There is no nice or fancy way of saying this.

Thursday, July 12th, my wife received the results of the biopsy.

She has breast cancer.

It is very early. The first “Needle Biopsy” found “Abnormal” cells but her doctor and the specialist wanted to be sure so a biopsy was scheduled for last Friday and the results came back.

After talking with the specialist Monika has decided that with her age/lifestyle/etc she was going to go for a double mastectomy and reconstruction using her own fat (I did offer some of mine…. I may have mentioned something about Dolly Parton while doing so. Monika declined however.) Acording to the spcialist this should offer the best chance of it NEVER coming back as well as reducing or elimiating any need for long term follow up.

Trying to get it scheduled for 3 weeks from now.

We are wishing Ted and Monika and the rest of their family the best possible results. Your best wishes are appreciated as well.

Possums Protein to Provide Universal Anti-Poison Potion

Opossum protein neutralizes nearly all poisons

Opossums may someday provide an antidote to nearly all forms of poison, including everything from snakebites to ricin.

The Journal of Venomous Animals and Toxins has found that the American opossum produces a protein known as Lethal Toxin-Neutralizing Factor (LTNF). And as the Boing Boing blog points out, the LTNF protein is exactly what it sounds like, seeking out otherwise lethal poisons that have entered an opossum's body and neutralizing them.

Amazingly, tests on the opossum LTNF found that the protein even left the marsupial creatures immune to poisons from snakes on other continents that the American opossum had not been previously exposed to.

So this is pretty cool; how does a single protein recognize and neutralize a wide variety of deadly toxins, including ones it wasn't exposed to in the course of evolution, and not have any harmful effect on organisms that carry it?

scientists then injected mice with the LTNF protein and subjected the rodents to venom from otherwise deadly creatures, including Thailand cobras, Australian taipans, Brazilian rattlesnakes, scorpions and honeybees. When the venom did not kill the mice, the mice were then exposed to deadly poisons, including ricin and botulinum toxin. And again, the LTNF protein was able to diffuse the poison, leaving the mice unharmed.

I would think at top priority ought to be getting that protein purified, it's amino acid sequence and folding determined, and a possible route to clinical production explored (Plant the gene in E. coli?).  Not that I have a problem with grinding up Possums to make medicine, but there might be a better way?  Or maybe we could just scrape enough off the highways.

Interestingly, the journal entry on LTNF was published more than 10 years ago, in 1999. As several readers have pointed out, this raises questions as to whether the protein benefits would be applicable to humans and why the test results are only now making news.

How did that get overlooked so long?  Did the post-doc who did work get a job where he/she/it didn't need to produce anything, like say become a regulator?

Low Carb Diet as Epilepsy Treatment

‘Miracle Diet’ Prevents Seizures; Scientists May Know Why

While neurologists have known that a high-fat and very low-carb diet, known as a ketogenic diet, reduces seizures in epileptic patients who are resistant to medical therapy, the “why” to it all has always been a mystery.

But today, some scientists say they may have found the answer. Researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School said seizures might be linked to a protein that changes metabolism in the brain, which is why patients respond so well to the ketogenic diet...

The ketogenic diet mimics aspects of starvation by forcing the body to burn fats instead of carbohydrates. The diet produces ketones in the body, organic compounds that form when the body uses fat, instead of glucose, as a source of energy. An elevated level of ketone bodies in the blood reduces the frequency of epileptic seizures.

The study, published in the journal Neuron and conducted in genetically-altered mice, found that the effect of the ketogenic diet on epilepsy can be mimicked using a much more specific and non-dietary approach by manipulating a particular protein in mice, said Gary Yellen, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the study.

But then, the diet is relatively easy.  Why make a drug that simulates the diet?

More (bad) diet news; Why exercise doesn't actually help most of us lose weight:

At least four clinical trials have demonstrated that exercise tends to suppress resting metabolic rate. In all four studies overweight participants who engaged in 300-600 calories worth of daily exercise experienced a significant drop in resting metabolism. According to Drs. Jeff Volek and Stephen Phinney, “Although genetically lean people as a group may respond differently, when overweight humans do more than one hour of endurance exercise daily, resting metabolism on average declines between 5% and 15%.”

There you are; work harder, lay around harder.  That's not to say that exercise doesn't have other benefits, but simply exercising more may not cause the excess lbs to drop off.

And more work on the low carb diet: Not all calories are equal

On the very low-carbohydrate diet, Dr. Ludwig’s subjects expended 300 more calories a day than they did on the low-fat diet and 150 calories more than on the low-glycemic-index diet. As Dr. Ludwig explained, when the subjects were eating low-fat diets, they’d have to add an hour of moderate-intensity physical activity each day to expend as much energy as they would effortlessly on the very-low-carb diet. And this while consuming the same amount of calories. If the physical activity made them hungrier — a likely assumption — maintaining weight on the low-fat, high-carb diet would be even harder. Why does this speak to the very cause of obesity? One way to think about this is to consider weight-reduced subjects as “pre-obese.” They’re almost assuredly going to get fatter, and so they can be research stand-ins — perhaps the best we have — for those of us who are merely predisposed to get fat but haven’t done so yet and might take a few years or decades longer to do it.

 So there you have it; instead of exercising, have a steak, and skip the fries...

How America Dies

The New England Journal of Medicine summarizes how people died in the United States from 1900 to the present.  The quick message:

In 1900 pneumonia, tuberculosis, gastrointestinal infections composed nearly half the total deaths.  With infections largely controlled, we are left to die mostly of heart disease and cancer now at more advanced ages.  Everything else is loose change.

The article has an interesting interactive chart that shows how these trends have changed through the century+.  Go to the NEJM article, and click on the graphic at upper right.  The toll of the Spanish Flu epidemic is startling.  Just today, health researches said a new "bird flu" epidemic could start at any time.  Or never...

I found this interesting:

Accounting for the history of disease also requires us to examine why some disparities in disease are seen as proof of a natural order while others are considered evidence of injustice. The 4.3-year life-expectancy gap between blacks and whites in the United States provokes outrage, but the 4.9-year gap between men and women does not. It is tempting to assume that differences between the sexes are natural and those between races are not. But a 19th-century Journal reader might be skeptical of this explanation: men then lived at least as long as women. The survival advantage of women that appeared in the 20th century owed as much to changes in childbearing, improvements in obstetrical practice, and a new epidemic of heart disease disproportionally affecting men as to differences between the X and Y chromosomes. Disparities in health and disease are outcomes that are contingent on the ways society structures the lives and risks of individuals.

 Spotted at Hot Air.

The Skeptical Environmentalist

Scientists are supposed to be skeptical.

Swiped from Theo's.

The Tribulations of Rural Living

Rabid Skunk Bites Woman at Local Restaurant

On Thursday, June 14 at approximately 3:40 p.m., patrons at Cheeseburger in Paradise, located in the Wildewood Shopping Center in California, Md., were surprised by an unwelcome visitor when a skunk wandered into the restaurant.

It is not clear exactly what transpired, but SMNEWSNET.com has confirmed that a female was bitten by the skunk.

Animal Control was called to the scene where they proceeded to collect and kill the animal. The female who was bitten was taken to the hospital in a personal vehicle.

I knew Buffett fans were rabid, but I wouldn't have considered them skunks.

The skunk is the sixth animal from St. Mary’s County this year confirmed through
laboratory testing to have rabies. Three raccoons and two other skunks involved in contact with owned animals have been confirmed as rabid since January 1. Fourteen animals from St. Mary’s County were confirmed to have rabies in 2011 including two raccoons, five skunks, four foxes and three cats.

Rabies has been a problem in the rural counties in Maryland at least since I arrived here in 1985.  At least one rabid cat has been reported to have bitten some one in the St. Leonard/Calvert Beach vicinity.  It's important to vaccinate pets, and people who work with wildlife often get preventative rabies immunizations.

Coffee, Keeping You Smarter Longer

Coffee Cuts Alzheimer's Disease Risk

Tampa, FL (June 4, 2012) Those cups of coffee that you drink every day to keep alert appear to have an extra perk – especially if you're an older adult. A recent study monitoring the memory and thinking processes of people older than 65 found that all those with higher blood caffeine levels avoided the onset of Alzheimer's disease in the two-to-four years of study follow-up. Moreover, coffee appeared to be the major or only source of caffeine for these individuals.

My parents drink a lot of coffee, and it seems to be working for them...

The study shows this protection probably occurs even in older people with early signs of the disease, called mild cognitive impairment, or MCI. Patients with MCI already experience some short-term memory loss and initial Alzheimer's pathology in their brains. Each year, about 15 percent of MCI patients progress to full-blown Alzheimer's disease. The researchers focused on study participants with MCI, because many were destined to develop Alzheimer's within a few years.

Blood caffeine levels at the study's onset were substantially lower (51 percent less) in participants diagnosed with MCI who progressed to dementia during the two-to-four year follow-up than in those whose mild cognitive impairment remained stable over the same period.

No one with MCI who later developed Alzheimer's had initial blood caffeine levels above a critical level of 1200 ng/ml – equivalent to drinking several cups of coffee a few hours before the blood sample was drawn. In contrast, many with stable MCI had blood caffeine levels higher than this critical level.

Coffee is one of those things that some significant number of people are always looking for excuses to ban.  There have been countless busted studies on the possible hazards of coffee and caffeine, including pancreatic cancer and breast cancer, but they always vanish upon more work.  In the meantime, evidence continues to accumulate that it does have some net benefits.  Another recent study shows shows that coffee is also active against gout.

Who Will Take Granny in for Her Shots?

Trial of Alzheimer’s Vaccine is Successful

Swedish researchers report the successful trial of a vaccine that helps individuals develop protective antibodies that can prevent progression of Alzheimer’s disease.
...
The prevailing hypothesis about the origin of Alzheimer’s involves APP (amyloid precursor protein), a protein that resides in the outer membrane of nerve cells. Instead of being normally decomposed, APP forms harmful beta-amyloid proteins, which accumulates as plaques and kills brain cells.
...
The new treatment, which is presented in Lancet Neurology, involves active immunization, using a type of vaccine designed to trigger the body’s immune defense against beta-amyloid. In this second clinical trial on humans, the vaccine was modified to affect only the harmful beta-amyloid.

The researchers found that 80 per cent of the patients involved in the trials developed their own protective antibodies against beta-amyloid without suffering any side-effects over the three years of the study.

Somebody sign me up before I forget...

Found at Instapundit, of course.

There Is No Constituency For 'Normal'

A pretty good talk on the inflation in the diagnosis of mental illnesses:



Swiped from Maggie's Farm.

I Blame Jenny McCarthy

Opting out of vaccinations could get tougher in California

The re-emergence of some vaccine-preventable diseases has prompted the California legislature to consider a bill that would make it more difficult for parents to opt out of vaccinating their kids.

The legislation would require that parents get counseling from a doctor before opting out of immunizations for their children.

The reason I blame Jenny is because she has become an activist against vaccinations.   Her war on vaccinations began when her son Evan was diagnosed (possibly erroneously) with autism in 2005.  She became convinced by now debunked studies that her son's condition was caused by the mercury compound, thimerosal, used to preserve vaccines.  Using her status as a celebrity (Playmate and star of a sitcom) she helped popularize this point of view.


As a result, in 2008, she was awarded the 2008 Pigasus Award for Psuedoscience, by the James Randi educational foundation, for the 'Performer Who Has Fooled The Greatest Number of People with The Least Amount of Effort'.

Last year, the United States saw its highest number of reported measles cases in 15 years, even though the disease was eliminated from the country in 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

One theory behind this rise, according to Dr. Richard Pan, the state assemblyman who introduced the bill, is that the recent trend away from immunizing children. That's why he wants to make it more difficult to bypass vaccine requirements in his state.

 Remember, there are only two or three reasons to pay attention to Jenny McCarthy (NSFW link).

The Jenny McCarthy Death Count:

As always, thanks to Wombat-Socho for including this (and the others) in Rule 5 Sunday "Train in Vain" at The Other McCain.

Midnight Music - All I Wanna Do is Soak Up the Sun

Sheryl Crow Diagnosed With Benign Brain Tumor

Just a month ago at a show in Florida, Sheryl Crow did what every singer hopes never happens: she forgot lyrics to her hit song “Soak Up the Sun” in front of the entire audience. She quickly hid the hiccup by explaining that it was her age that hindered her memory. What Crow didn’t reveal was that just months before she was diagnose with a brain tumor.

In a new interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, she opened up about her sudden forgetfulness and memory lapses. “I worried about my memory so much that I went and got an MRI. And I found out I have a brain tumor,” she said candidly.

“I haven’t really talked about it,” she went on to say. “In November, I found out I have a brain tumor.” But she assured fans that it’s nothing to be worried about. “It’s benign, so I don’t have to worry about it. But it gives me a fit.“ She was even in high spirits while opening up about her diagnosis, having laughed with the reporter the entire time.

As always, thanks to Wombat-Socho for including this (and the others) in Rule 5 Sunday "Train in Vain" at The Other McCain.

Genius and Insanity Linked

Scientists Find Truth in "Mad Scientist" Stereotype: There Is a Link between Genius and Insanity

Genius and insanity may actually go together, according to scientists who found that mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are often found in highly creative and intelligent people.

The link is being investigated by a group of scientists who had all suffered some form of mental disorder.

Bipolar sufferer Kay Redfield Jamison, a clinical psychologist and professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said that findings of some 20 or 30 scientific studies confirms the idea of the "tortured genius" or "mad scientist".

Jamison said that creativity appears to be significantly linked to mood disorders, especially bipolar disorder. For instance, one 2010 study that tested the intelligence of 700,000 Swedish 16-year-olds found that highly intelligent adolescents were more likely to develop bipolar disorder in a decade-long follow-up. "They found that people who excelled when they were 16 years old were four times as likely to go on to develop bipolar disorder," Jamison said Thursday night during a panel discussion at New York’s World Science Festival.

I guess I'm just not smart enough to be insane.  Or am I? 

Good News for Health Nuts

A summary of recent research into the effect of life style on health:

High-fat diets are good for you.

Low-carbohydrate diets that require patients to fill up on fats won't lead to harder arteries, researchers say -- at least not in the short-term.

Those who lost 10 pounds after curbing their carb intake had no differences in arterial stiffness than those on a more traditional, low-fat diet, Dr. Kerry Stewart of Johns Hopkins and colleagues reported at the American College of Sports Medicine meeting in Denver.

High-fat diets help you lose weight.
 

The Atkins diet may have proved itself after all: A low-carb diet and a Mediterranean-style regimen helped people lose more weight than a traditional low-fat diet in one of the longest and largest studies to compare the dueling weight-loss techniques.

A bigger surprise: The low-carb diet improved cholesterol more than the other two. Some critics had predicted the opposite.

Steak and lard and bacon are good eats.

Few experts now deny that the low-fat message is radically oversimplified. If nothing else, it effectively ignores the fact that unsaturated fats, like olive oil, are relatively good for you: they tend to elevate your good cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein (H.D.L.), and lower your bad cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein (L.D.L.), at least in comparison to the effect of carbohydrates. While higher L.D.L. raises your heart-disease risk, higher H.D.L. reduces it...

But it gets even weirder than that. Foods considered more or less deadly under the low-fat dogma turn out to be comparatively benign if you actually look at their fat content. More than two-thirds of the fat in a porterhouse steak, for instance, will definitively improve your cholesterol profile (at least in comparison with the baked potato next to it); it's true that the remainder will raise your L.D.L., the bad stuff, but it will also boost your H.D.L. The same is true for lard. If you work out the numbers, you come to the surreal conclusion that you can eat lard straight from the can and conceivably reduce your risk of heart disease.

Low salt diets increase the risk of death.

A new study found that low-salt diets increase the risk of death from heart attacks and strokes and do not prevent high blood pressure,...

The investigators found that the less salt people ate, the more likely they were to die of heart disease — 50 people in the lowest third of salt consumption (2.5 grams of sodium per day) died during the study as compared with 24 in the medium group (3.9 grams of sodium per day) and 10 in the highest salt consumption group (6.0 grams of sodium per day). And while those eating the most salt had, on average, a slight increase in systolic blood pressure — a 1.71-millimeter increase in pressure for each 2.5-gram increase in sodium per day — they were no more likely to develop hypertension.

Diet soda makes you fat.

For one study, researchers at the center followed 474 diet soda drinkers, 65 to 74 years of age, for almost 10 years. They found that diet soda drinkers' waists grew 70 percent more than non-drinkers. Specifically, drinking two or more diet sodas a day busted belt sizes five times more than people who avoided the stuff entirely...

"Artificial sweeteners could have the effect of triggering appetite but unlike regular sugars they don't deliver something that will squelch the appetite," Sharon Fowler, obesity researcher at UT Health Science Center at San Diego and a co-author on both of these studies, told the Daily Mail. She also said sweeteners could inhibit brain cells that make you feel full.

Salt helps your body get rid of bad cholesterol.

Danish researchers report in the American Journal of Hypertension that reducing sodium consumption led to a 1% drop in blood pressure in people who had normal pressure readings, and a 3.5% drop in those with hypertension. But other changes may offset those benefits: people who cut dietary salt also saw a 2.5% increase in cholesterol levels and a 7% boost in triglycerides. Like high blood pressure, elevated levels of cholesterol and triglycerides are risk factors for heart disease. Excessive triglycerides can also contribute to diabetes.

 And now, exercise may increase heart risk.

By analyzing data from six rigorous exercise studies involving 1,687 people, the group found that about 10 percent actually got worse on at least one of the measures related to heart disease: blood pressure and levels of insulin, HDL cholesterol or triglycerides. About 7 percent got worse on at least two measures. And the researchers say they do not know why.

The problem with studies of exercise and health, researchers point out, is that while they often measure things like blood pressure or insulin levels, they do not follow people long enough to see if improvements translate into fewer heart attacks or longer lives. Instead, researchers infer that such changes lead to better outcomes — something that may or may not be true.

Some critics have noted that there is no indication that those who had what Dr. Bouchard is calling an adverse response to exercise actually had more heart attacks or other bad health outcomes. But Dr. Bouchard said if people wanted to use changes in risk factors to infer that those who exercise are healthier, they could not then turn around and say there is no evidence of harm when the risk factor changes go in the wrong direction.

There you go, eat right, live well; die anyway. Tomorrow's menu, bacon wrapped fillet (heavily salted) chased by a double margarita, with salt.

Embellished from a post by rdbrewer at Aces.

4,500

Today some 4,500 beacons are being lit across the planet, in Commonwealth countries to mark the Queen's 60 year reign. These are being ignited at 10pm local time, with the first lit in Tonga, followed by New Zealand and Australia*. The final beacon will be lit tonight at around 10.30pm BST in London by Her Majesty at the end of a free concert in her honour.

Sadly it was announced shortly before the concert that the Queen's husband Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh had been taken ill and would not be at the Queen's side. It is expected he will spend a few days in a nearby hospital.



*It's always refreshing to see a staunch Republican like Aussie Prime Minister Julia Gillard having to acknowledge and pay tribute to Royalty LOL.

Does Fever Help Prevent Cancer?

Have modern sterile environments and antibiotics boosted the rate of cancer?

An interesting study which suggests that occasional bouts of infectious diseases that cause fevers leads to a reduction in cancer:

Information on potential breast cancer risk factors, history of fever during the last 10 years, and blood specimens were collected from 839 incident breast cancer cases and 863 age-matched controls between October 2008 and June 2010 in Guangzhou, China...
The effect of the fever appears to be dependent on which genetic variant of interferon gamma the women carried. Interferons play roles in immune regulation. So this comparison of interferon gamma variants was not randomly chosen.
This association only occurred in women with CT/TT genotypes [0.54 (0.37–0.77)] but not in those with the CC genotype [1.09 (0.77–1.55)].

So there appears to be a genetic connection as well; if you have the right genes, fever can help keep you cancer free,

The idea that lower infectious disease incidence is associated with higher rates of cancer is not new.

Since the 19th century, it has been repeatedly observed that spontaneous cancer regressions were coincided with acute infections and the cancer patients had a remarkable disease-free history before the onset of cancer. In the 20th century, an inverse association between infectious diseases, particularly febrile ones, and cancer risk has also been consistently found for malignant melanoma and glioma using modern epidemiological methods.

With the widespread introduction of antibiotics and antipyretics since the beginning of the last century, however, the critical role played by fever has often been overlooked, resulting in considerable changes to the clinical course and magnitude of the immune response that develops following acute infections. These changes may be part of the reasons for the substantial increase in the age-adjusted incidences or mortalities of malignant diseases during the early part of the last century in western countries and in the late of the last century in China. It has been observed that every 2% reduction in infectious disease mortality was followed by a 2% increase in cancer mortality over a 10-year interval from 1895 to 1963 in Italy.

An important question is whether the drop in deaths due to the treatment of infectious diseases is greater than the increase in deaths due to higher cancer rates in treated populations?  I would think that it would.  Fever producing diseases are mankind's ancient enemies, and the ability to treat fevers is one of the great advances in medicine.  I'm not giving up my Aspirin or Tylenol when I'm burning up from some random virus to prevent some hypothetical cancer years later, and I would be even less likely to not take an antibiotic that could halt a potentially fatal bacterial infection.

Another slightly related article on cancer:

 "What does it mean to say that something causes 16% of cancers?"

I can't do this one justice by cutting excerpts.   Read the whole thing, and remember that this applies to more than just cancer statistics, it applies to a wide array of science, particularly the way science is portrayed in the media.

Ah, the Joys of Aging...

...When your eyeballs turn from jello to soup.

A few days before we were set to go on the the trip to Alaska, I noticed something odd was going on with my right eye (for those who have followed this, I had a cataract in my left eye operated on in October).  The vision was very cloudy, bright lights had huge halos and the cloudiness would come and go.  I had a notion of what was happening, so I didn't say anything to Georgia, and we went on the trip anyway.  It has continued to improve, but upon getting back I made an appointment to get it looked at, and went this afternoon.

While I had not remembered the name of the condition, I had guessed what it was pretty accurately.  It is called Posterior Vitreous Detachment, and it is caused by the aging of the "vitreous" (what we used to call vitreous humor or eyeball goo) of the eye, the clear goo that fills most of the eyeball.  When you are young, it is the consistency of jello, but at you age it becomes thin and watery, and shrinks away from the retina.  The remaining trash from this process forms floaters, often a large one which interferes with the vision.  Mine seems to wander around and get in the way fairly often, although the problem is becoming less pronounced daily. One symptom I missed was flashing spots (where the vitreous tugs on the retina as it pulls away).  Hey, we used to pay good money for that.

The good news is that it is basically harmless (though occasionally it can tear the retina), and the effects fade with time.  The bad news is that there is no simple and convenient treatment.  I asked the doc if she couldn't just stick a straw in there and suck out the crap, and she said that maybe a retina surgeon could, but that it wasn't worth the risk.

New Drug Promises to Prevent HIV

FDA favors first drug for HIV prevention

Federal drug regulators on Tuesday affirmed landmark study results showing that a popular HIV-fighting pill can also help healthy people avoid contracting the virus that causes AIDS in the first place. While the pill appears safe and effective for prevention, scientists stressed that it only works when taken on a daily basis.

The Food and Drug Administration will hold a meeting Thursday to discuss whether Truvada should be approved for people who are at risks of contracting HIV through sexual intercourse. The agency's positive review posted Tuesday suggests the daily pill will become the first drug approved to prevent HIV infection in high-risk patients.

FDA reviewers conclude that taking Truvada pre-emptively could spare patients "infection with a serious and life-threatening illness that requires lifelong treatment."

I hate to be Debby Downer, but here's my problem with this.  To think you need this drug means you have to know what high risk behavior spreads HIV, not be willing to quit said behavior, and have the discipline to take the drug daily.   Good luck with that.

Good News, Food to Still be Plentiful in 18 years!

Obesity could affect 42% of Americans by 2030

The new projection, released here Monday, warns that 42% of Americans may end up obese by 2030, and 11% could be severely obese, adding billions of dollars to health care costs.

"If nothing is done (about obesity), it's going to hinder efforts for health care cost containment," says Justin Trogdon, a research economist with RTI International, a non-profit research organization in North Carolina's Research Triangle Park.

"The obesity problem is likely to get much worse without a major public health intervention," says Eric Finkelstein, a health economist with Duke University Global Health Institute and lead researcher on the new study.

I guess the modellers have predicted that the bad effects of global warming climate change will not have kicked in by then, and killed all the crops.

And of course, this calls for the government to put us all on a diet.

UPDATE:  A timely rant by Ace; Read the whole thing

Americans are too fat. They ought not be fat.

But it is far more important that they be free than they be thin.