Public Health

Is depression as dangerous as smoking? A 12-person panel has published a paper in the journal Circulation saying that their review of literature indicates that depression should be listed with smoking, obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure as risk factors for heart disease. The National Institute of Mental Health has already said it won't use DSM-5 as anything more than a glossary of terms and equating depression to smoking in heart disease is not going to get depression covered on insurance plans the way diabetes is, it is going to put psychology claims farther on the fringes of the…

Long after gluten-free, low-fat and tapeworm diets have been consigned to the dustbin of quaint health fad history, vegetarians will still insist their way of is better. In at least one way, they may be right. It's one of the few dietary choices that has a long enough history for real data to exist, and an analysis of seven clinical trials and 32 studies published from 1900 to 2013 in which participants ate a vegetarian diet, and in which differences in blood pressure (BP) associated with eating a vegetarian diet were measured, found that eating a vegetarian diet was associated with a…

A cookbook editor in the New York Times says I am wrong on the gluten-free fad and that, if it makes people feel better to buy gluten-free, to leave them alone.  Well, well, well, look at the New York Times embracing libertarianism and food choice when it comes to fads their demographic happens to embrace. Like with sugar and GMOs, they want science and reason to stay out of it, because those are weird fetishes of a large chunk of their readership, while we are constantly told how stupid people are if they don't accept global warming. Right? No, not this time. In their debate section,…

Last week, the USDA released its annual Pesticide Data Program (PDP) report about pesticide residues on food. This release comes from extensive sampling of crops entering the market during 2012. Here is the official summary statement from the USDA: "The Pesticide Data Program provides reliable data through rigorous sampling that helps assure consumers that the produce they feed their families is safe." And the official statement from the EPA: "The newest data from the PDP program confirm that pesticide residues in food do not pose a safety concern for Americans." For the agricultural…

Researchers say they have cleared up one aspect of how our bowels move that has mystified scientists for, well, forever.  It isn't all unknown. Segmentation motor activity in the gut that enables absorption of nutrients was described in the late 1800s. But now gastroenterologist Jan Huizinga and a team have learned that of the two types of movement, segmentation motion occurs when not one but two sets of pacemakers interact with each other to create a specific rhythm. They then work together with nerves and muscle to generate the movement that allows for nutrient absorption. The other…

Periodontal disease occurs in 13 percent of humans today. Why are humans even susceptible to periodontal disease, when most animals do not get periodontal disease? Is it human behavior or something else that contributes to chronic inflammatory disease in humans? It can't be modern living or dental hygiene. The inflammatory disease-causing bacteria has been found in a Medieval German population, by analyzing the dental calculus - plaque - from teeth preserved for 1,000 years. Christina Warinner, research associate in the Molecular Anthropologies Laboratories at the University of Oklahoma,…

 Wherever he is, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim a/k/a Paracelsus must be doing the Foxtrot in his grave. Because somehow a bunch of dopes have managed to “correct” something he got absolutely right 600 years ago. You know what it is.  Unfortunately, the dopes are not so dopey when it comes to spreading their message: Because a chemical is toxic or carcinogenic in high doses (usually in rodent experiments) that it poses a danger to humans at miniscule doses. Therefore we should be scared of any chemical that they tell us is dangerous, regardless of…

If we want to see worldwide trends in public health, look to the South Pacific archipelago of Samoa and American Samoa. About 75 percent of the U.S. territory's adult population is obese, the highest rate in the world. Rates of type 2 diabetes top 20 percent and a recent study found that the elevated obesity rates are now even present in newborns. This obesity epidemic began there a few decades ago. Brown University epidemiologist Stephen McGarvey has investigated the obvious question: How did all this happen? On a panel yesterday at the AAAS meeting in Chicago, McGarvey said that three main…

Tularemia, also called "rabbit fever",  is, unlike anthrax or smallpox, the bioweapon you are least likely to know about. But it is common in the northeastern United States and because it has been weaponized in various parts of the world could be a significant risk to biosecurity. At the Annual Biophysical Society Meeting in San Francisco, Geoffrey K. Feld, a Postdoctoral researcher in the Physical&Life Sciences Directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), described the team's work to uncover the secrets of the bacterium Francisella tularensis, which causes tularemia…

Hospitals use disinfectants but they don't all kill the human papillomavirus (HPV), according to a new paper. Non-sexual transmission of the virus is exceedingly rare but hospitals need to be cautious so changes should be made, say researchers from Penn State College of Medicine and Brigham Young University. HPV is commonly transmitted, the bulk of the population has had it and almost anyone sexually active will get it at some point in their lives and never know it. But because it has been linked to cervical cancers, health care providers are concerned about non-sexual transmission also. For…