Public Health

Do you care where the food you buy comes from? amy, CC BY-NC The public reaction to the Hepatitis A scare linked to contaminated frozen berries imported from China continues. Consumer confidence in imported food is likely to have suffered a hit, and consumers are questioning the safety of imported food. Public health activists are calling for clear country of origin food labeling. Retailers are promising consumers stricter testing procedures for imported food products. Farmers are demanding a level playing field so they can compete against imports. Government authorities are defending…

A new paper based on a series of theoretical calculations using applied physics says that if you smoke 15 cigarettes in a sealed car in just over an hour, you could lose consciousness. So crack a window. Or don't smoke in a car. Or don't smoke. Why create the estimate? Starting this October, drivers in England will be banned from smoking in their cars if they are carrying children as passengers and the reason was not just because of vague epidemiological claims about second-hand or even third-hand smoke, but because of the real threat of carbon monoxide poisoning. Physics to the…

Health marketing materials used to promote measles vaccine during the 1960s. CDC The news on the current measles outbreak contains plenty of reminders that measles causes brain damage, pneumonia, hearing loss and death. A few lone voices have spoken up to say measles isn’t that serious, including an Arizona doctor who said it’s “really just a fever and a rash” – and soon found himself under investigation by his state’s medical board. Back in the 1960s, it wasn’t controversial to call measles benign. Though the disease killed about 400-500 Americans a year, it was considered a normal part of…

So, is justice really blind? Who knows?  But, with the right recipe it can become deaf and dumb rather quickly.Here is the recipe. Mix the following in equal quantities: Junk science and medicine, a misguided and politically-driven regulatory agency, a flawed legal system, predatory trial lawyers, a self-anointed know-nothing consumer "advocate," greed, and a company with deep pockets, and voila: the perfect mix.  There is no need to run this experiment; it was done 30 years ago at the expense of Dow Corning, the largest maker of silicone breast implants. What happened to the…

Less efficiency sounds bad, in the modern world of optimization, where everyone wants to sell you a 10-minute workout that maximizes your time.  But in the ancient world of evolution, you need to turn the tables. Due to the boom-and-bust nature of existence prior to the last 50 years, we have evolved protection against starvation - our bodies adjust on the fly. That is why if you just go on a crash diet, you will lose some weight right away and then plateau and if you eat normally again, the weight comes back. Your body 'settles in for a long winter' and metabolic efficiency goes up. So…

Time is imprinted in our genes. Daily circadian rhythms (circa, about; diem, a day) control the harmonious oscillation in all biological systems. “At the gene level, circadian rhythm is the most conserved cluster of genes in biology. Fruit flies and humans have about the same genetic code for circadian rhythm. This machinery is the linkage between biological processes and the environment ,” stated Professor Ali Keshavarzian, Director, of the Division of Digestive Diseases at Rush University Medical Center. The Earth rotates on its axis with a cycle of 24 hours and all biological systems…

Contrary to claims by proponents, only a minimal amount of heavy metals are removed in the hookah 'filtration' process. On average, only 3% of heavy metals present in tobacco are removed and this would not be enough to protect users from exposure to the toxins.  Shisha smokers claim that a hookah is less damaging than cigarette smoking due to 'filtering' by bubbling through water but a typical hookah smoking session can expose someone to 100-200 times the volume of smoke in a single cigarette. Shisha is a waterpipe in which a mixture of tobacco and flavorings or molasses sugar is…

There has been a long-running belief that greedy insurance companies deny patients needed care to maintain profits but in hindsight it seems to have been just the opposite; health care was expensive because of defensive medicine policies needed to ward off lawsuits that could happen even if the care was fine but did not work. Another example is dialysis for kidney patients. About 400,000 Americans are on it and many of them started sooner than ever before. There is no measurable difference in how sick patients are at the time of initiation or in the reasons for dialysis initiation other than…

One way to look at addiction is to consider it a form of learning, a type of learning that is extremely effective in its ability to affect the adolescent brain, report researchers working under an NIH grant. The maturation process of the brain may cause teens and young adults to become addicted faster than older adults, because the impulse control centers of the brain are not fully developed in the younger cohort. Drugs not only interfere with the normal processing functions of the brain, they actually change both the structure and function of the brain. Over time, drug use and abuse can…

Precision medicine could prevent the flawed 'one size fits all' diet recommendations we currently get from the federal government and self-professed nutrition experts who latch onto the latest fad to sell books. 29 million Americans already already have diabetes and the way to separate those with the highest risk of developing the disease from those with lower risk, and channel resources into areas most likely to help each of them individually, is the goal of the "precision medicine" approach. It is still rudimentary, relying on systematic review of epidemiology to claim causation by…