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Boots on the Ground by Dusk: My Tribute to Pat Tillman
By Mary Tillman with Narda Zacchino
Hardcover $17.13
By Charlotte Mosley
$26.37
$19
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James Jordan (CC BY-ND 2.0)
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counts 1,118 cases of West Nile virus in the U.S. through the third week of August in what is shaping up to be the worst year ever for the disease since it was first detected in the country in 1999. Forty-one people have died from the virus so far this year.
Posted on Aug 22, 2012
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Parker Michael Knight (CC BY 2.0)
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President Obama’s new health care law cuts money used to pay for emergency care for undocumented immigrants, a service that some of the nation’s most hard-pressed hospitals have long been required to provide.
Posted on Jul 27, 2012
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Last time on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Juan Cole’s informed comment on developments in Damascus; Wal-Mart owns America; Internet hypochondria; Comic-Con culture clash; and unbundling education.
Posted on Jul 23, 2012
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Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey (CC-BY)
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Last time on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Juan Cole’s informed comment on developments in Damascus; Wal-Mart owns America; Internet hypochondria; Comic Con culture clash, and unbundling education.
Posted on Jul 23, 2012
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ana_omelete (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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Medical professionals are puzzling over why a hand, foot and mouth disease has killed so many children in a relatively small outbreak in Cambodia.
Posted on Jul 12, 2012
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Centers for Disease Control
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More than half of the people infected with H5N1—the bird flu virus—are dead, so it’s a damned good thing the virus isn’t airborne. That is, until now. U.S.-funded researchers in the Netherlands have successfully engineered a viral H5N1 strain that can spread through the air, realizing fears of a potentially weaponized germ that infects easily and kills half its victims.
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Dr. Lance Liotta Laboratory (CC-BY)
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Here’s a bit of bad news for the sexually active: Chlamydia infections in the U.S. reached an all-time high in 2010 with 1.3 million cases reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s the largest number ever reported for any condition, the agency says. (more)
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Flickr/mckaysavage (CC-BY)
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By Suzanne Petroni —
These are daunting numbers, almost as unfathomable as that looming 7 billion figure. But there’s no need to turn away because the scope of the problem is simply too large to comprehend.
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Flickr / curran.kelleher (CC-BY)
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Tobacco giants, wary of the effect new government-mandated warnings may have on cigarette smokers, filed a lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday, claiming that the labels are unconstitutional. (more)
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Wikimedia Commons / Mattosaurus
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Here’s a reason to postpone travel plans to Germany: A new kind of E. coli bacterium has been discovered and has already killed 18 people and infected more than 1,500, according to the BBC.
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Al-Jazeera English
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The death toll in Haiti’s cholera epidemic is rising. The toll now exceeds 3,300, official sources say, and the number of people infected has soared to 150,000 in just two months since the outbreak began.
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Wikimedia Commons
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Here’s a startling statistic for you: Latino-Americans tend to get Alzheimer’s disease seven years earlier than white Americans. Researchers blame the phenomenon on limited access to medical care and lower levels of education and income.
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bbc.co.uk
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Over the last year, Haitians have been hit by a catastrophic earthquake and harsh tropical storms, and now another kind of trouble has hit the Caribbean country: a cholera scourge that has already claimed more than 1,000 lives.
Posted on Nov 16, 2010
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Al-Jazeera English
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A cholera outbreak that has killed about 200 people in rural Haiti is threatening to spread to the capital, Port-au-Prince, potentially endangering the hundreds of thousands of earthquake survivors crowded into squalid camps around the city.
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U.S. Agency for International Development
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Anyone remember the Millennium Development Goals that nations made at the beginning of this millennium? Well, it turns out some people do, and they are meeting Monday to evaluate the efficacy of efforts to reduce poverty, disease, intolerance and inequality.
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U.S. Navy / MC2 Ted Green
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By Adil E. Shamoo —
Iraq has between 25 and 50 percent unemployment, a dysfunctional parliament, rampant disease, an epidemic of mental illness, and sprawling slums. The killing of innocent people has become part of daily life. What a havoc the United States has wreaked in Iraq.
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Flickr / jepoirrier (CC-BY-SA)
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Researchers say they have developed a 100 percent accurate spinal tap test for the brain disease. Brain scans, too, have become a potentially important tool in diagnosing the disease. The new tests are significant because Alzheimer’s can begin more than a decade before symptoms show up and because there is hope that new drugs could be effective.
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Flickr / Bernt Rostad
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This could be a case in which the cure may cause problems above and beyond the severity of the symptoms, but a study that sounds like more fun than others we’ve heard of has found that alcohol consumption may help ease the pain caused by rheumatoid arthritis, as well as check the disease itself.
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Centers for Disease Control
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Researchers in Canada showed young adults photos of obviously diseased people and found that the subjects’ immune systems were significantly more aggressive when later exposed to a glop of bacteria. Test subjects got a negligible boost from similarly upsetting, but not disease-y, images.
Posted on Apr 5, 2010
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Flickr / tapasparida
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Leading scientists are criticizing Chinese doctors and farmers for what they believe is a reckless overuse of antibiotics in both the medical and agricultural industries, which, they argue, has led to an explosion of resistant “superbugs” endangering global health.
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Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation / Prashant Panjiar
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Bill Gates made a big announcement at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Friday. The Microsoft entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist revealed that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will donate $10 billion over the next 10 years to the cause of fighting disease around the globe through vaccines and immunizations.
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Flickr / joey.parsons
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Before we scare you, keep in mind that if everyone in America who experienced high blood pressure—that’s about a third of us—got dementia, you would know about it. However, new research suggests that the relationship between hypertension and dementia is more pronounced and alarming than doctors previously understood ... (continued)
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Wikimedia Commons / Webridge
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Scientists are now able to map the complete genetic codes of lung and skin cancer, and now an international effort is in motion to do the same for more varieties, including breast, stomach, liver, brain, mouth and pancreatic cancer.
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securingpharma.com
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A new vaccine trial is underway in Africa in an attempt to control malaria, a disease that not only kills 1 million people every year, but also makes 300 million seriously sick. If the trial results come back positive, a worldwide vaccine could be available as soon as 2012.
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flickr.com
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Washington, D.C., has the highest rate of AIDS in the country, and millions of federal dollars are spent trying to alleviate it. But a new investigative piece uncovers a corrupt system where books were cooked, corners cut, and $400,000 lost to a nonprofit launched by the leader of a cocaine ring.
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telegraph.co.uk
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Worried about catching the dreaded swine flu? Need to update your wardrobe with some stylish and tailored work solutions? You can do both with the Haruyama Trading Co.’s dapper new anti-flu business suit. That, or you could smear yourself in toothpaste, which isn’t exactly the best look for the workplace.
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haveeru.com.mv
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Like a really bad joke that won’t go away, the swine flu has reared its exaggerated head, now in India, after that country reported its first death attributed to the multi-appellated disease. Hundreds of Indians rushed to get tested in the western city of Pune, even causing fights among those in line at a hospital.
Posted on Aug 5, 2009
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Flickr / CarbonNYC
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than 1 million Americans have contracted swine flu this year. That figure dwarfs the 27,717 confirmed and probable U.S. cases, but it also means the odds of surviving the disease—127 people have died—are much better than previously thought.
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HotWikiBR
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It’s been 40 years since we’ve had a flu pandemic on our hands, but after roughly 30,000 swine flu cases spread across multiple regions of the world, the WHO held an emergency meeting and took the plunge. Try not to feel alarmed.
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time.com
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Cholera, the scourge of centuries past, has infected 100,000 people in Zimbabwe, dwarfing the body count of the much better publicized swine flu and demonstrating once again the dramatic and tragic inequality of health care in many parts of the developing world.
Posted on May 27, 2009
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Wikimedia Commons / USDHS
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This will come as no surprise to Ron Paul (remember him?), but it looks like swine flu may be no worse than your garden-variety influenza virus, according to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.
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Flickr/The Pug Father
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After infecting perhaps hundreds of people and killing scores in Mexico, eight cases of swine flu have been diagnosed in the U.S.—six in California and two in Texas.
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By Marie Cocco — Peace is not at hand, at least not as Americans define it. Yet peace has been breaking out all over.
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Flickr / mknobil
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World AIDS Day turns 20 today, and while we still don’t have a vaccine, researchers continue to make lifesaving breakthroughs. A team at the World Health Organization in Geneva recently came up with a “thought experiment” that, according to a mathematical model, could end the AIDS epidemic in Africa in only a decade.
Posted on Dec 1, 2008
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Thinking of whipping up another tuna casserole? You may change your mind after reading this convincing expose by Jane M. Hightower, a San Francisco doctor.
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google.org/flutrends
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While worries over Google’s “big brother” surveillance practices still worry many, a softer, more health-conscious side of the search giant is partnering with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The tool, “Google Flu Trends,” uses the aggregate regional data obtained from flu-related searches to predict epidemics weeks before they can be diagnosed by traditional measures.
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By Ellen Goodman — A cohort of entrepreneurs and scientists is the cutting edge of the Personal Genome Project. In an act of altruism and/or exhibitionism, the PGP-10 have put their medical records, traits and genetic codes on the Web where all the scientists, paparazzo and peeping Toms can see them.
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Friends’ and relatives’ memories of microbiologist Bruce E. Ivins, who apparently committed suicide last week as he became a top suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks, differ greatly from the image of him invoked by the stories that have emerged about his threatening behavior in recent months.
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thecommonwealth.org
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The United States is in far worse shape when it comes to HIV infection rates than researchers previously thought, according to a new study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that attributes the whopping 40 percent adjustment to more precise research methods.
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AP file photo / Brian Branch-Price
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The apparent suicide of 62-year-old scientist Bruce E. Ivins on Tuesday shook up his co-workers at the military biodefense labs in Maryland where he’d worked for nearly two decades. But the significance of his death extended beyond personal tragedy when it emerged that Ivins was about to be prosecuted by the Justice Department for alleged involvement in the anthrax attacks of 2001.
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Flickr / acnatta
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Twenty-six percent of adult New Yorkers are infected with the virus that causes genital herpes. That’s seven points above the national average. A new study by the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene found that the disease is more common among women, African-Americans and gays.
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urbansemiotic.com
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If ever there was irrefutable evidence that abstinence education doesn’t quite work, this is it. A new study from the Centers for Disease Control finds that at least one in four U.S. teenage girls is infected with a sexually transmitted disease.
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eb.com
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It turns out a little echinacea might go a long way toward preventing a cold and reducing the duration of a cold, especially when combined with vitamin C. A new study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases analyzed 14 other studies and flies in the face of other research that has showed no positive effect from echinacea.
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Finally, some good news in the world (relatively speaking): AIDS scientists at the United Nations are ready to announce that they have been overestimating the scale of the viral epidemic for quite some time now, and that the spread of AIDS has actually been decelerating over the last decade.
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By Eugene Robinson — Not only are Rudy Giuliani’s figures about prostate cancer survival rates in the United States and Britain wildly misleading, but he’s also wrong on his general point: that a single-payer system, of the kind that Republicans call “socialized” medicine, inevitably would deliver inferior care.
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By Eugene Robinson — In slamming Clinton-style reforms, “America’s mayor” uses data in a way that shows disregard for the truth. Does that remind you of any other famous politician? Maybe the one in the Oval Office?
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checksinthemail.com
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When Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control, went before Congress to testify on the effects of global warming on Americans’ health, she was about 10 pages lighter than planned. According to a source within the CDC, the White House “eviscerated” Gerberding’s prepared remarks, slashing 10 of the original 14 pages.
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A promising AIDS vaccine developed by Merck has proven unsuccessful in a major international trial. It’s a huge setback, not just because this particular vaccine was further along than others, but because it used a new strategy shared by a number of alternatives.
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By Marie Cocco — When the National Guard helicoptered her husband, Mark, to Staten Island to work as a wireless technician setting up a communications network for thousands of emergency workers who were descending upon Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001, Jeanmarie DeBiase did not know this would begin the unraveling.
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About a year ago, the president came down with an unconfirmed case of Lyme disease, the White House has said. Spokesman Scott Stanzel said the ailment wasn’t disclosed to the public because Bush had already had his physical and “It’s not uncommon for the president to have tick bites when he’s out biking.” That’s just gross.
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Guantanamo Prisoner’s Case Demonstrates Unfairness of Military Commissions
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