Is Bill Gates a Humanitarian, Villain or Misguided Man?
Conclusion
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated money to 100 countries and the United States with their stated objective to improve education and world health. Investor Warren Buffet is a primary contributor to the foundation. Some of the foundation’s programs target schools, farmers, and sanitation needs, all worthy causes.
One of their primary programs, with significant funding, has included vaccination programs focused on developing countries. These vaccine initiatives have resulted in documented deaths and injuries for thousands of previously healthy children.
Are Melinda and Bill Gates simply misguided ...
Source: vactruth.com - July 16, 2016 Category: Allergy & Immunology Authors: Michelle Goldstein Tags: Logical Michelle Goldstein Top Stories Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation truth about vaccines Vaccine Death Source Type: blogs
Killing Zika Virus Carrying Mosquitoes with Gene Drives?
Genetically engineering out the lives of pests is not a new idea. The idea of leveraging sexual reproduction to pass specific gene changes (mutations or alterations) through entire populations to control pests has been proposed as far back as the 1940s, for example, A Strain of the Mosquito Aedes aegypti Selected for Susceptibility to the Avian Malaria Parasite Plasmodium lophurae.
Evolutionary geneticist Austin Burt was credited with the method of cutting DNA to reduce populations of disease-spreading species and the associated idea of “Gene drives”. The central idea behind a gene drive is to ensure that the engineere...
Source: NAKEDMEDICINE.COM - June 27, 2016 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Jane Chin Tags: Science and Research Source Type: blogs
Out of Africa
I just got back from the trip of a lifetime: an African safari. I had the good fortune to visit South Africa (both Cape Town/Cape of Good Hope and Krueger National Park) as well as the Zimbabwe side of Victoria Falls. Wow. If you have done it, you know what I mean. If you haven’t, it’s so worth it. No tigers or bears, but lions galore. And elephants and rhinos and hippos (my favorite) and monkeys and I could go on and on. Even ostriches and penguins! It’s something to behold. Of course it’s hard to go the entire trip without making Lion King references or Book of Mormon jokes.
Penguins from near Cape of Good Hope
T...
Source: Disruptive Women in Health Care - June 27, 2016 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: dw at disruptivewomen.net Tags: Cancer Publc Health Source Type: blogs
The death of a child is an abomination
When, aged thirteen, my best friend died of complications from sickle cell disease, her parents could not attend her funeral, or find out where she was buried. My mom explained to me that in the Yoruba culture, because parents are not expected to survive their children, it is considered an abomination for a parent to know where their child is buried. So, the young adults in the extended family attended the burial, and the older people stayed at home with the parents to console them. My grieving eleven-year-old mind interpreted the custom to mean “the death of a child is an abomination.”
That thought resounded i...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - June 23, 2016 Category: Journals (General) Authors: Olubunmi Ode, MD Tags: Physician Hospital Intensive care Pediatrics Source Type: blogs
Are Priority Review Vouchers The Answer To Incentivize Drug Development? Not So Fast.
In the May issue of Health Affairs, two papers examine the potential for voucher systems to incentivize drug development in areas of unmet medical need. Co-authors Kevin Outterson and Anthony McDonnell take a look at potential exclusivity voucher programs designed to encourage development of new antibiotics, while David Ridley and Stephane Régnier analyze the effects that expansion of existing priority review voucher (PRV) programs may have on the value of PRVs as a development incentive.
Ridley and Régnier’s work is of particular importance as both houses of Congress pursue a spate of legislative proposals that do mak...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - June 15, 2016 Category: Health Management Authors: Pranav Aurora, Morgan Romine and Gregory Daniel Tags: Costs and Spending Drugs and Medical Technology Featured Global Health Health Professionals Quality FDA FDAAA priority review rare diseases Source Type: blogs
Case of the Week 400
Welcome to our 400th Parasite Case of the Week! To celebrate the 400th case, I thought I would dedicate this post to education in parasitology and share with you 5 of my favorite parasite teaching tools.1. Embed arthropods and worms in casting resin, using products purchased at your local arts and crafts store. I've used Castin' Craft in the past, but there are other options out there as well. Here is one of my creations - adult Ixodes scapularis ticks (in different stages of engorgement) in a small petri dish:Embedded arthropods are great for teaching because they are durable (e.g. their legs don't fall off from bein...
Source: Creepy Dreadful Wonderful Parasites - June 14, 2016 Category: Parasitology Source Type: blogs
The Economics of Medical Miracles
The Academy Health* blog presents an interesting quandary in health economics. We aren't quite there yet, but the day may come soon when it is possible to essentially cure genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis and sickle cell. That sounds great!The problem is that these are fairly rare diseases, and that the treatment would be administered only once. So, in order to recoup their research and development costs, the purveyors would have to charge enormous prices -- on the order of a million bucks a pop. That's going to make you think, "Oh, this is like those other moral dilemmas about the allocation of scarce resources. We c...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 27, 2016 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Will The Medical Tricorder From Star Trek Become Real?
Analyzing disease instantly: the medical tricorder has been one of the most exciting futuristic technologies in medicine since Star Trek. But will it ever get to the black bag of General Practitioners?
As a movie fan, I love talking about how the science fiction movies of the last 100 years have shaped our ideas about medical technology. When university students doing film studies asked me to give a talk on how sci-fi influenced medical technology, I dedicated a whole section to technology inspired by Star Trek. The long list includes telepresence, the hypospray for painless injections, voice–activated communicators, the...
Source: The Medical Futurist - May 25, 2016 Category: Information Technology Authors: berci.mesko Tags: Portable Diagnostics GC1 Source Type: blogs
Answer to Case 396
Answer: Plasmodium vivaxThanks to everyone who wrote in on this case. As nicely described by Florida Fan, Yasir and Antonio, the infected red blood cells are larger than the uninfected neighboring cells and Schuffner's dots (stippling) are present, thus indicating that this is either P. vivax or P. ovale infection. You can then narrow down the choices by noting the ameboid chromatin which is most consistent with P. vivax. Some softer features of P. vivax that are also seen in this case are the 'hugging' or 'molding' of infected cells to neighboring cells and the predominance of rounded rather than oval forms.Florida ...
Source: Creepy Dreadful Wonderful Parasites - May 16, 2016 Category: Parasitology Source Type: blogs
April blogs digest: a DNA quiz, the microbiome, freebirthing, is dancing good for the brain? And more
How much do you know about DNA?
National DNA Day is celebrated on 25 April, to recognize the anniversary of the successful completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003 and the discovery of DNA’s double helix in 1953. The goal of this special day is to offer students, teachers, and the public an opportunity to learn about the latest advances in genomic research, and how those advances might impact all of our lives. Take our quiz to see how much you know!
Microbiome and the modern environment
Journal of Physiological Anthropology published a series looking at the effects of the modern environment on the microbiome, askin...
Source: BioMed Central Blog - May 5, 2016 Category: Journals (General) Authors: Sophie Marchant Tags: Biology Health Medicine blogs digest Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, April 25th 2016
This study offers one useful data point, as the authors describe a genetic alteration that can boost the supply of new immune cells in old mice. The decline in that supply with age is one of the factors leading to poor immune function - and that means more than just vulnerability to infections, as the immune system is also responsible for destroying potentially cancerous and senescent cells, as well as clearing out forms of damaged proteins and unwanted metabolic waste. Various possibilities for increasing the number of new immune cells already exist in principle, such as regenerating the thymus, or cell therapies in which...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 24, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
UC Davis Storer Lecture series - since 1963 87% of speakers are male
I wrote this blog post a while ago but never published it partly out of fear for upsetting some of my colleagues. I try to be brave about such things, but I guess I just did not quite get up the poxy. Well, today something came up that stimulated me to write the post. I got an email announcement for a talk that seems potentially quite interesting. The problem is not the talk. The problem is with the endowed Lectureship that this talk is connected to. So here is the post I have worked on on and off over the last year or more.UC Davis has an endowed lecture series- the Storer Lectureship in the Life S...
Source: The Tree of Life - April 20, 2016 Category: Microbiology Authors: Jonathan Eisen Source Type: blogs
High Net Worth Individuals Will Support Medical Research in a Big Way, But Only in Fields Already Mainstream
In this day and age, the biggest difference a billionaire can make to the near future is to fund medical research. The costs of that research are falling rapidly with progress across the board in biotechnology, and the foundation for transformative new medicine can be created with a fraction of one billionaire's net worth, if spent wisely. Perhaps a bigger incentive in some cases than making the world a better place is that research can move from start to finish rapidly enough for those who fund it to benefit. We all age and suffer from age-related disease in the same way, no matter what our net worth, and everyone wins or...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 18, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Activism, Advocacy and Education Source Type: blogs
Narrative Matters: On Our Reading List
Editor’s note: “Narrative Matters: On Our Reading List” is a monthly roundup where we share some of the most compelling health care narratives driving the news and conversation in recent weeks.
Stunting The Growth Of Children With Disabilities
Parents of children with severe disabilities concerned about being able to physically care for their children as they grow up are finding hope in a treatment known as “growth-attenuation therapy,” but questions about the ethics of the therapy, and a lack of long-term outcomes data, mire the treatment in controversy.
In The New York Times Magazine, Genevieve Field tells the...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - March 30, 2016 Category: Health Management Authors: Jessica Bylander Tags: Elsewhere@ Health Affairs Featured Narrative Matters autism heart disease On Our Reading List Source Type: blogs
Expunging a Blended Class: The Fall of Kingdom Protozoa
In yesterday's blog, we introduced and defined the term "Class blending". Today's blog extends this discussion by describing the most significant and most enduring class blending error to impact the natural sciences: the artifactual blending of all single cell organisms into the blended class, Protozoa.For well over a century, biologists had a very simple way of organizing the eukaryotes (i.e., the organisms that were not bacteria, whose cells contained a nucleus) (1). Basically, the one-celled organisms were all lumped into one biological class, the protozoans (also called protists). With the exception of animals and pl...
Source: Specified Life - March 27, 2016 Category: Information Technology Tags: Apicomplexa classification complexity data science irreproducible results ontologies ontology protists protoctista protozoa Source Type: blogs
