Well, not really of course, but nonetheless. If there was any way to do this, it could work.

I read recently about a creative researcher, Dr. Corina Amor, who may have insight into curing old age¹, allowing all of us to live to 130 or so.

Let’s say it worked and we could get this out to everyone on the planet. Suddenly all the geezers at the top of the game would be looking sixty, seventy, eighty years into the future.

It’s not just their grandchildren who’d have to deal with Florida being underwater and the entire Midwest USA being a dried up flatland of blowing dust. And India and China and Europe and Africa all dealing with similar and equivalent and worse catastrophes. It would become their personal future all of a sudden.

And they’re the ones with the power to actually try to steer us away from disaster.

I bet a lot of them would suddenly see the value of doing that, even at the cost of 1.2% less profit on the quarterly shareholder report.

Wouldn’t that be nice.

We’re reaching the end of the line. The US Supreme Court looks forward to turning women (back) into livestock.

If you don’t control your own reproduction, you are livestock.

Too many Supremes and a shitload of Republicans want women in that position. They haven’t yet reached the Taliban zone where they want women penned up, but give them time.

Meanwhile, what is the left concerned about? In the perfect words of Helen Lewis,

The right has declared a war on women. The left has responded by declaring a war on saying “women.”

So half of humanity is shoved into body slave status, but the important thing is the feelings of a few thousand people who have the time to worry about their gender identity.

That is the end of the line. When nobody, anywhere, on any side of politics, has a clue which way is up.

That too many people are even bigger idiots than I thought.

Really. That’s not just the frustration talking. Consider the whole “Okay. it’s over. We’re done” mentality.

Hello? Would anyone dream of saying, “I’m tired of all this gravity shit. I’m jumping off this here cliff and you try to stop me.” And then, half way down, saying, “See? I’m doing fine.”

Nor did people and their governments get to that point after implementing sensible public health measures.

There’s no 100% vaccine mandate (with exceptions for the medically exempt).

There’s no mandate for building ventilation good enough to prevent viral spread.

[Edited to add, forgot a major one, :redface: ] Germicidal UVC lighting everywhere it can reduce viral loads.

There’s no mandate to mask up everywhere that people are within two meters of each other, and triply so when indoors.

No. Instead vaccine and mask mandates are being ditched everywhere by everyone all together. As if there’s some kind of global airborne miasma that destroys the neurons needed to understand anything. As for building ventilation, that never became important enough to mandate so there’s nothing in progress that could be ditched.

Accurate testing of prevalence and genotypes has gone right out. We’re supposed to do our own risk assessments and carry the entire load of infectious disease prevention individually (even though this is a social issue of transmission from person to person). But the tools to understand the risk are removed.

Note: none of those things are life-changing lockdowns. They’re just public health measures that improve our chances if we have to live with this particular virus. Instead of dying with it.

And also note, I’m not arguing any of this because I’m concerned only about vulnerable people. This affects everybody, including us immortals who’ve come through the last two years with minimal losses.

I’m boggled that we can stampede into spreading disease far and wide when we know so little about it.

One thing we do know is that the more sick humans there are to incubate new variants, the more variants we’ll have. The more variants, the more reinfections and the more new and worse forms of the disease. (Until a universal vaccine exists and is mandated for everyone not medically exempt.)

We have no idea, yet, of the long term burden of downstream disease. We’ve only had two years. There’s no way to know the number of excess dementias, heart attacks, strokes, and sudden diabetes ten years from now or twenty years from now. We don’t know whether the chance of long covid goes up with each reinfection. Now that we’ve decided to have millions of human petri dishes, instead of as few as possible, it’s guaranteed that new variants will make reinfections happen.

We’ve taken on a thousand unknown risks of mass disabling events because, the hell with it, masks are icky.

It’s insane.

In the high and far off times, people figured out that cholera and typhoid are spread by open sewers. If they had thought then like we apparently do now they would have said, “Ahh, screw it. Closed sewers cost too much. We’ll just live with it.”

By which, of course, they mean they hope they will live. And somebody else does the dying.

People have lost their fear of disease. It only took about two generations without major deadly infections. That comes as a surprise to me. I thought people understood cause and effect. But, no. Apparently, if you’re not in immediate and personal danger of dying, it’s Somebody Else’s Problem. And a SEP field, as Douglas Adams astutely pointed out, is the only proven way to make anything invisible.

Years ago, 1990s?, I read an article about attitudes to vaccination. In places like Bangladesh, where they actually had to contend with actual disease, people were overwhelmingly in favor of it. More than 85% of the respondents were incredulous you could have any other attitude. (This was before extremists started spreading paranoia about Western contamination.) It was only in well-to-do parts of the wealthier countries that people had the luxury of fantasizing about what vaccines would do to their precious bodily fluids.

The loss of healthy fear towards something that can kill you has made too many people incapable of understanding where a lethal threat fits into the scheme of things. You see sentences like, “But the extent of the European lurch toward mandatory measures has also prompted unease and questioning over loss of freedom.”

The mind reels. Do they not understand that your freedom ends where your threat to my life begins?

(Rights, unlike people, are not all equal. Some depend on others. Some are a precondition for everything else. There is not one single freedom that can be enjoyed if you’re dead. Of course it’s more complicated than one right always being first. The link goes on about the intricacies.)

Public health measures to prevent the spread of disease take precedence over people’s convenience every single time.

Mask wearing, social distancing, and temporary lockdowns are all merely inconvenient. There is no, absolutely no, rights-based argument to make against them.

Contact tracing does raise privacy issues. But there again: you can’t enjoy privacy when you’re dead. Privacy is a secondary consideration. It must be respected to the extent possible while the primary public health priorities are achieved. For instance, we’re horrified the government could be using our cell phones for location data to track covid contacts, as they did in South Korea. That is nonsense. Location tracking to save your life is a Good Thing. It should be done from the start to the end of a pandemic. After that the data should be expunged.

What should not be done is using that data to sell us fast food, or to store it forever to target political ads at us, or to deny us jobs based on some AI bullshit model of who we are based on where we’ve been. And yet, we put up calmly with the latter while throwing fits about lifesaving temporary public health tracking. Commercial tracking, which should be illegal, has made us allergic to lifesaving tracking. It’s insane. And I suspect it’s all because we feel powerless against corporations but not the government.

Vaccination is the third major public health measure, and it does intersect with the basic right to control your own body. When two foundational rights conflict — the right not to be harmed and the right to control your own body — then the scale of the harm on each side is important.

Vaccines can cause nanoscale harm. Things like sore arms, a day of lethargy, or even super-rare blood clots which can be effectively dealt with if doctors know they should look for that. Compared to the megascale harm from disease — death, long term disability, sickness for millions — there is no contest at all . The greatest good of the greatest number is the right criterion to apply when the difference is so stark. Vaccine mandates are justified to bring the cost of non-vaccination home to anti-vaxxers. As are mandates that limit them from any place where they could potentially spread the disease they’ve refused to prevent.

There is zero place for any “unease and questioning over the loss of freedom.” [Ed. note: idiots.]

So long as you avoid politics, there are some interesting things going on in the great wide world.

Sagiv-Barfi and Levy led the work on a possible cancer treatment that involves injecting two immune-stimulating agents directly into solid tumors.

The bottom line is this: 87 out of 90 mice were cured — as in they had no cancers after treatment. The three that weren’t did respond to a second treatment. These results are phenomenal.

Yes, humans don’t always respond as well as mice, etc., etc., etc. Even with all the caveats, these results are phenomenal.

What’s equally phenomenal is that the treatment does not cause the whole immune system to go into overdrive, which has caused problems, even fatalities, in some immunotherapies. It just kicks the responsible immune cells already in the tumor into recognizing the culprits. And then those T4 cells kill that cancer wherever it’s found in the body.

There’s no need to design proteins, culture patients’ cells, or do any other fancy, expensive and customized-to-each-patient procedures.

The treatment also worked on mice genetically engineered to develop solid tumors.

It was tested only on solid cancers, not, for instance, leukemia.

Both of the immune-stimulating agents have already been used in humans, one is already an approved treatment, so the regulatory slog is likely to be less sloggy than normal.

Can’t wait!

Ronald Levy and Idit Sagiv-Barfi, Stanford.

(Steve Fisch)

Eradication of spontaneous malignancy by local immunotherapy, by Idit Sagiv-Barfi, Debra K. Czerwinski, Shoshana Levy, Israt S. Alam, Aaron T. Mayer, Sanjiv S. Gambhir and Ronald Levy. Science Translational Medicine 31 Jan 2018: Vol. 10, Issue 426, eaan4488
DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aan4488

There is no controversy about vaccines. They work. The diseases they prevent are horrible. The vaccines themselves are about as harmless as it’s possible to be and still exist in the real world. For instance, Diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis, DTaP: fewer than one person in one million has serious complications. “Serious” means any reaction that requires medical attention, even if it’s temporary, such as high fever or a bad allergic reaction. Measles-mumps-rubella, MMR: fewer than one in one million with serious complications; inactivated polio, IPV: even fewer than the previous; shingles: none reported yet so “being monitored.” (Source: CDC)

As for the generated “controversy” about vaccines, it deserves as much attention as people who plan to fly by flapping their arms. It is nonsense. Yes, science and medicine have both been wrong about some very important things in the past, and they will be again. Vaccination is not one of them. The evidence in favor of it is beyond overwhelming. End of story. That is, it’s the end of the scientific and medical story.

Politically, it’s not the end of the story because there’s no law saying we always have to be rational. If I want to jump off a roof while flapping my arms and kill myself, I can do that.

But not vaccinating differs from the personal choice to be an idiot in one very important respect: it’s not just personal. It can take other people down with it. And there are laws against that.

So which law counts? The one that says I get to decide about my own medical treatments, or the one that says I can’t damage people?

Before the current measles outbreak, the comments on news sites would have fit comfortably into this Onion article. Now that there is an outbreak because so many people avoided vaccination, or had it avoided for them if they’re children, people feel vulnerable. Suddenly the comments are calling for these horrible parents to be jailed. Suddenly a lot of people are clear on the fact that vaccination is not a purely individual thing. Now they’re going nuts in the opposite direction, from loony libertarian straight to jackbooted totalitarian.

Both are wrong, obviously, because neither works, obviously. The only solution is a balancing act between the different rights.

I know that’s the last thing most people want to hear. It’s much easier to be simple and wrong than go to all the trouble of thinking things through. But the sad fact is that there’s no other way to get to what works. Luckily, in this case it’s not even difficult.

The right to make your own medical decisions is rather worthless if anybody can kill you at any time. The right not to be harmed by others takes precedence over all other rights because they are all meaningless if that one is not respected.

So the balancing act is quite easy: the public health issue of not infecting others with contagious diseases takes precedence over anyone’s personal medical choices.

This is yet one more example of the fact that rights are not equal, that there’s a hierarchy of rights, and that some are more essential than others. Some rights have to take precedence over others or else they all become meaningless.

Therefore the medical and public health requirements for vaccination take precedence over any non-medical objections. There can’t be allowances for religious or philosophical objections. It means the whole US has to follow the lead of Mississippi and West Virginia and have only medically necessary exemptions from vaccination.

A plague doctor. 1819

Wellcome Images

That said, though, the idea is to have as high a vaccination rate as possible. It’s not to beat people up for ignorance. So resources need to be directed toward the actual goal, vaccination, and not squandered on useless, resentment-building exercises like jailing recalcitrant parents. Yes, it’s important to stop the Onion mindset of “I Don’t Vaccinate My Child Because It’s My Right To Decide What Eliminated Diseases Come Roaring Back.” Even more important is to see that they get vaccinated, no matter what the voices in their heads are telling them.

Sometimes it takes very little to achieve that goal. For instance, in one health district [update-2015-02-04: near Duchesne, Utah], registering a philosophical objection to vaccination required nothing more than a tick mark in a box. Receiving the vaccination on the other hand cost $25. When the public health officials were trying to figure out how to get more people vaccinated, one bright worker noted that they should invert the incentives. So the vaccination was given free, but expressing a philosophical objection required payment of $25 for “administrative costs.” Which isn’t even a lie.

You know how that story ends. The number of objectors plummeted. The vaccination rates climbed above the medically essential 95% of the population, and the problem was solved, at least from the standpoint of public health. And that’s the first priority.

I just saw this:

The backstory is that 23andMe pioneered direct-to-consumer genetic tests starting in 2006. It asked consumers to spit in a tube and send it in, and sent back a detailed summary of their risks for common diseases like macular degeneration. But then in 2013 the U.S. Food & Drug Administration banned the test out of concern that the information wasn’t accurate.

That put a big crimp in 23andMe’s business, but it didn’t end it. As Forbes points out, the real business here is mining this data.
…

Since it was founded in 2006, 23andMe has collected data from 800,000 customers and it sells its tests for $99 each.

…

…23andMe’s real business isn’t selling $99 tests, but selling access to data that it has managed to crowdsource as cleverly as Facebook has gathered other personal details. To some observers, that’s pretty worrisome. In 2013, journalist Charles Seife, writing in Scientific American, called 23andMe intentions “terrifying.”

As the FDA frets about the accuracy of 23andMe’s tests, it is missing their true function, and consequently the agency has no clue about the real dangers they pose. The Personal Genome Service isn’t primarily intended to be a medical device. It is a mechanism meant to be a front end for a massive information-gathering operation against an unwitting public.

Seife’s worry is that the consents customers agree to when they donate their DNA could turn out to be meaningless. Once you are hooked, companies like Google and Facebook often change their privacy policies to expose more and more of your data. Why should DNA be any different?…

According to the Fox Foundation, 23andMe actually gave its testing service away to Parkinson’s patients. That helped it assemble enough of them to create a useful resource it could sell to Genentech to start mining.

What’s the saying? If you’re not being paid, you’re the product. That’s bad enough when they’re high frequency trading thin slices of your mind. When they’re selling someone’s sorrow, pain, and suffering, when they’re selling people’s own DNA, it’s downright disgusting.

If we had a government, there’d be a law against selling people this way.

As things are, I’m betting the high and mighty in DC are fine with it so long as they get their cut of the data. As things are, we’re going to find out one day our own souls got sold to the company store, and the sign for refunds leads to nothing but a phone tree.

This is not to minimize the real suffering of the real people who have contended with the real disease in the First World. It is a horrifying disease wherever it occurs.

No, this post is about what I’ve been seeing in the news here. When the disease was limited to Africa, it wasn’t seeing much at all in the US. Thousands died, and there was hardly a blip. What I did see seemed mostly to question whether there was any point in sending medical aid.

Now that there have been about seven cases here (the two Samaritan’s Purse health workers, Thomas Duncan, his two nurses, a freelance journalist in Nebraska, and the Doctors Without Borders physician there’s currently a flap about)– now that there have been cases here, the country is hysterical.

(artist unknown. NASA)

A school in Maine put a teacher on administrative leave after parents “expressed concern” — meaning panicked — that she could have been exposed because she visited Dallas with one Ebola patient in quarantine in a hospital that she never visited.

I’ve heard of a caller to emergency services complaining about a pilot running around loose who’d been to West Africa, which later turned out to be the same place in the caller’s small mind as Western Europe. And, yes, that’s funny, but it’s also bad. While that drivel is going on, the dispatcher and the ambulance (they sent out an ambulance?!) can’t respond to actual emergencies.

People of West African extraction are being shunned because, because what? They’re catching it by quantum juju from people 5000 miles away whom they’ve never met? White Africans, interestingly enough don’t seem to be seen as quite as susceptible to magical infection.

Most recently, a bunch of governors saw a great opportunity to get out in front of the hysteria and Doooo Something. Let’s quarantine everybody, sick or not, who’s ever been near West Africa. So when a selfless altruist like Kaci Hickox returns, a woman who’s a nurse for Doctors Without Borders and has treated Ebola patients and actually knows something about the disease, when she returns she becomes a political plaything for Chris Christie and Andrew Cuomo (bipartisanship!) to score points with ignorant voters by dumping her into a senseless quarantine.

Quarantine is for CONTAGIOUS people. It’s a useless waste of money and resources applied to any traveller some bozo happens to have fantasies about. Quarantine can be a medical necessity. It needs to be done on medical grounds. When it’s nothing but jerks lashing out in panic, it’s not only insane, it’s actually counterproductive and increases the spread of disease. (So much for Christie’s and Cuomo’s “leadership.”)

So, that’s the “Keep Calm” part. What about the “Carry On” part?
Are there things that could sensibly be done to help the situation? Why, yes. Yes, there are.

Number One. (This should be in bold all-caps, but I’ve done that already. Must ration myself.) The US needs to get itself an actual healthcare system. Using disease as a profit center for Big Medicine and Big Insurance just isn’t working.

When Thomas Duncan fell ill in Dallas everybody knows what happened next. After his first emergency room visit, he was sent home. Now, note this: Ebola is not contagious until after the patient has run a fever for some time, a day or so, when the virus starts being secreted in body fluids. (The main research paper so far on contagiousness: Bausch et al., 2007. Discussion in Science.)

So if the emergency room had actually worked, he went early enough that there would have been just about no chance he’d been contagious. But the emergency room didn’t work. What hasn’t been mentioned loudly enough is that he had no insurance. Stories about grievously ill uninsured people turned away from emergency rooms in the USA go on forever. There’s even a name for it: “patient dumping.” Some of them die, just like Thomas Duncan. But, this being the First World, most of them aren’t contagious. That was the only part Texas Presbyterian Hospital forgot. They needed a big sign in the physicians’ break room: “CAUTION. Do not kick out patients with incurable contagious diseases! Could have lethal Bad Publicity consequences!”

There’s the first culprit: a profit-oriented “health” system. If we really want to reduce the chances of catching Ebola from random strangers, then we need a health care system that encourages people to get help whenever they feel ill. Nor can it expect them to self-diagnose first so that hospitals see only “real emergencies.” And then the system has to actually treat them for whatever ails them.

Number Two in the list of useful things to do is to help deal with the problem at its source. (In fact, this is Number One, but this post is about first world problems.) They need many things to stem the disease in West Africa: Information distributed everywhere by trusted health workers on how not to transmit the disease. How best to treat ill family members. (There’s a surprising amount that could be done with that, as demonstrated by the knowhow and astonishing strength of the Liberian nurse who took care of her whole family and managed to save most of them.) How to reduce chance of infection. Contact tracing. Enough transport for sick people so they’re not crammed eight to an ambulance. Enough field hospitals and enough beds so contagious patients can be properly cared for.

Would that take money? Yes. But it’s peanuts compared to what it’ll cost if the disease continues to spread. And it’s not as if panic is cheap. (Panic is a total waste, but it’s not cheap.) Would the money have to be spent in Africa? Yes. Get over it.

Notice something about useful actions against Ebola: They involve admitting that fear is not useful. They involve restraining automatic reactions. They involve huge amounts of tedious work. They offer no excuse to lash out at anybody. They’re no fun.

Eight members of a team trying to raise awareness about Ebola have been killed by villagers using machetes and clubs in Guinea, officials say.

From the BBC.

“[M]any villagers are suspicious of official attempts to combat the disease. … The motive for the killings has not been confirmed, but the BBC’s Makeme Bamba in Guinea’s capital, Conakry, says many villagers accuse the health workers of spreading the disease.

Others still do not believe that the disease exists.

Last month, riots erupted in Nzerekore, 50 km (30 miles) from Wome, after rumours that medics who were disinfecting a market were contaminating people.

When I was a toddler, I was sure the trees made the wind. (They move around, and you feel wind. ‘S obvious, right?) It’s easy to confuse cause and effect when you don’t know anything.

But then you learn. Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is hell.

The Witches’ Well near Edinburgh Castle. Commemorates over 300 women burned at the stake there.

Wikimedia

It’s right here on planet Earth.

Current genomic work shows it’s mutating quite rapidly. So far, none of those mutations has changed how it’s transmitted — that is, only by direct physical contact — but high mutation rates in viruses mean you never really know what they’ll be able to do next.

Which is why articles like this, by a doctor affiliated with Stanford University, no less!, are jaw-droppingly stupid. His main point is that there are plenty of lethal and far more widespread diseases such as malaria and AIDS. So when the WHO estimates five hundred million dollars to contain this Ebola outbreak, all that spending would be a waste of money when there are other more pressing priorities.

No. It means that the fights against malaria and HIV are horribly underfunded. Using the atrocious lack of money for one set of diseases as an excuse to ignore another disease is called compounding the error, not solving it.

The consequence will be that Ebola is not contained, that tens of thousands or many more will suffer and die, and (if you’re the sort of person who worries only about yourself) that the virus keeps merrily mutating until one day controlling it may not even be an option. Then, you who felt too safe to worry about it may die no matter how much money you decide is worth spending then.

The consequence is that tremendous people working to actually do something about this awful and incurable disease have to spend their time drumming up funds instead of, you know, working to actually do something about this horrible disease.

The consequence is that people with the stamina to work against hopeless odds, in heat, packed into layers of sealed plastic, because everything they do can change their life to death in one unnoticed heartbeat — the consequence is that those people have to report scenes like this:

The new patients sometimes arrive eight to an ambulance, those with suspected cases and those with probable cases all mixed together.

That increases infections. That increases the number of people needed encased in plastic in the heat to feed and bathe the patients and carry out and disinfect the dead bodies.

The consequence is that we’ll be seeing the following horrors more and more, maybe even right in your face one day, until enough of us realize that hanging on to money is not the most important thing in the world.

Health workers prepare to remove abandoned corpse in Duwala market, Monrovia, Liberia. Aug 17, 2014.

(Reuters/2Tango)

 

Trying to enforce quarantine in West Point, Liberia. Aug. 22, 2014. (Very counterproductive. Quarantine order later lifted.)

(Guardian)

The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed.

Even more so if it costs anyone who’s already comfortable.

From Krugman, this priceless proof They are always, always, trotting out the same claptrap. Spending anything for the common good is weak, namby-pamby, woolly-minded unwillingness to face hard choices.

[W]hat The Economist said, in 1848, about proposals for a London sewer system:

Suffering and evil are nature’s admonitions; they cannot be got rid of; and the impatient efforts of benevolence to banish them from the world by legislation, before benevolence has learned their object and their end, have always been more productive of evil than good.

Sewers are socialism!

It wasn’t until the Great Stink made the Houses of Parliament uninhabitable that the sewer system was created.

The sad thing is our modern Great Stinks and Great Warmings will be so bad by the time they reach our well-insulated elites that we’ll be neck-deep in the Big Muddy and there’ll be nothing to do but hope we float.

It’s true of the pill. If that’s not obvious to you, you’re not paying attention. Or you have an agenda. One that does not include making the lives of girls healthier and easier. That’s been made clear by loads of people. Just one example, Violet at Reclusive Leftist in several posts.

What I want to add is: REMEMBER IN NOVEMBER!

Do not vote for the Current Occupant. Do not vote for him, no matter what. Do not enable your own abuse.

Seriously.

Obama does the classic abuse crap. Slam! Oh, quit yer snivelling. Where ya gonna go? (A bit of time goes by.) Gee, honey, I’ll do better, just give me one more vote. Slam! (Rinse and repeat.)

For those of us favored enough to be safe from direct hits, the line is “The other guy will beat the kids up even worse.”

Do you know what that’s called? Extortion.

When it happens to someone else, we’re all super-clear that the victim should leave. Get the hell out. Stop putting up with it. GO!

But when it happens to us, suddenly we’re the ones on the floor with a broken jaw saying to ourselves, “God help me, if I leave, what’ll happen to us? What’ll I do? Somebody else’ll beat us up even worse.”

Never again pretend you don’t know how abuse victims feel.

And for yourselves: Get the hell out. Stop putting up with it. GO!

Do not vote for Obama in November. It doesn’t matter who the Republicans run. It doesn’t matter if one of them becomes President for four years. The only thing that matters right now is not being part of your own destruction.

Get it through your heads that you will not be bullied, and you will not be held hostage, and you will not knuckle under to extortion.

Do not buy the story that you have no choice. Vote for somebody else, anybody else. Or nobody. Follow Plan B and get rid of the lying, two-faced, pandering toady.

Update: I wrote a post pointing it out back when, but BAR puts it more clearly: Obama: the lesser evil or the more effective evil?

But the most lucid summary of all is Vastleft’s:

I just saw this, and I’m so excited I can barely contain myself. This is like being there at the discovery of penicillin.

MIT researchers have found a way to cure viral diseases, any viral diseases, from common colds through dengue and up to HIV. (Press release, PLoS One research article.) This is one huge, massive, “Wow!”

Rider drew inspiration for his therapeutic agents, dubbed DRACOs (Double-stranded RNA Activated Caspase Oligomerizers), from living cells’ own defense systems.

When viruses infect a cell, they take over its cellular machinery for their own purpose — that is, creating more copies of the virus. During this process, the viruses create long strings of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA), which is not found in human or other animal cells. …

Rider had the idea to combine a dsRNA-binding protein with another protein that induces cells to undergo apoptosis (programmed cell suicide) — launched, for example, when a cell determines it is en route to becoming cancerous. Therefore, when one end of the DRACO binds to dsRNA, it signals the other end of the DRACO to initiate cell suicide.

And here’s the result:

What that shows is DRACO did not damage healthy cells at all. That’s the top row of each set of images. Infected cells, the bottom row, died without treatment (the lower left images in each set), and were indistinguishable from healthy ones with treatment (the lower right images).

Can you imagine? We could just laugh at viruses! Ebola? Hahahaha! (As I say, I’m a mite over-excited.)

I no longer remember to which kind blog I owe the enormous boon of finding Dr. Grumpy. At least once a day, sometimes oftener, his comments on life, neurology, and everything are laugh out loud funny. Today he’s on about insurance companies (go read the whole thing, it’s impossible to do it justice) and he manages to make even that funny. He needs to start a blog on death and taxes.

Doctor Grumpy in the House: Annie’s Song

If you don’t want bureaucrats between you and your doctor- TOO BAD. They’ve been there for years. THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO DON’T HAVE THIS PROBLEM ARE PAYING CASH FOR EVERYTHING! …

So what happens to you the way it works NOW, with your non-government insurance?

You come to me for some neurological issue, which requires further work-up. So I order, say, an MRI and MRA of your head.

Annie gets the order, and calls Bozo Insurance, Inc. (BII) to schedule it. BII refuses, saying they want more information. So they fax us a 5 page “pre-auth” form, which Annie spends 20 minutes filling out and faxes back. Then they say the form wasn’t enough, and they also want copies of your office notes, so we send those, too (yup, when you joined BII you agreed that they can read your medical records).

[A] few days go by. BII will claim they never got our fax. Or that we filled the form out wrong. Or that they don’t cover Capricorns when the moon is in Pisces. And we don’t know this until Annie calls back after a few days, because they’re hoping we forgot about it.

Eventually they’ll deny the whole thing, on the grounds that you don’t meet criteria for an MRI and MRA. …

[T]hey tell me I can appeal this via “peer-to-peer” review. Which means I need to personally call their “physician reviewer” to argue with them as to why I want the study.

So, during my insanely busy day at the office I have to call them. I’m promptly put on hold for 10 minutes, before finally reaching the reviewer. This person is a doctor- but NOT necessarily in my specialty. [And so it goes. Dr. Grumpy is an artist, so the story has an ending, but in the real world there is none. It just goes on and on.] …

So how did I get on this tangent? Because yesterday I was walking by Annie’s office, and heard her losing it over the speaker phone. And, as always, she was totally awesome.

Annie: “I’m calling because you people denied an MRI on a stroke patient?”

Pinhead: “Before we discuss this, I have to inform you that this is a recorded line.”

Annie: “Oh, good, hopefully someone will actually be listening to me then. Thus far it hasn’t happened.”

Pinhead: “Let me look up the tracking number… Okay. I have to inform you that we are unable to approve this study. Your doctor will need to make a peer-to-peer call.”

Annie: “Oh, now THAT’s a surprise.”

Pinhead: “What do you mean?”

Annie: “Is this line really being recorded?”

Pinhead: “Yes. It’s to improve customer satisfaction.”

Annie: “Oh, goody, because I’m sure not satisfied, and neither is the doctor, or the patient. Your company, and whoever is listening, never approves anything. In fact I can say that 100% of the time you require peer-to-peer review.”

Pinhead: “We do this to save our customers money on unnecessary testing.”

It goes downhill from there, but at least you’re laughing all the way. That’s also not like real life.

Dr. Grumpy, single payer, health, reform

The facts of the cost control debate are crystal clear: Countries with universal, accessible health care (note that I didn’t say “health insurance”) have per capita costs that are about half those of the US. ( e.g. Klein, Krugman, Somerby also has links to original data.) Should I repeat that? Our system of health care for people who pay costs twice as much as health care for everybody.

It’s that simple. The data are out there. So why are they invisible? Why doesn’t Obama point that out in his many TV appearances? He talks about cost control, but makes it seem it’s so complicated we need a 1000-page bill for it and over four years to implement. Why isn’t the simple fact a small enough sound bite for the chattering classes?

I think we’re up against more than interests vested in obfuscation. All the vested interests in the world aren’t enough to explain why people are so willing to believe it when the facts are so blazingly simple.

I think we’re up against a fundamental sense, a lizard brain thing, that says you can’t possibly get something unless someone else loses it. Win-win is counterintuitive. Lose-lose is even more counterintuitive. If my money is not being spent on those no-goods, then I must have more left at the end, right? And when that falls flat, when the whole damn economy is suffering because we refuse to have universal health care, then the problem is, obviously!, that too much money is still somehow being spent on no-goods.

The facts are eclipsed by the inability to understand them.

That has a practical application. It means that in this health reform debate we’re having nationally, the point to hammer home is not only that compassion and cost control go together, as Krugman has pointed out. The corollary is even more important. Lack of compassion does not lead to savings. Lack of compassion leads to trillions in wasted money.

The ads we should be running should show fiscal “conservatives” clutching a single dollar bill while setting fire to a sea of burning hundreds.

health care, reform, cost control, zero sum

Have you had the experience when hiking of shifting your way-too-heavy pack a bit and it feels better for a while? I feel like doing that just now. Enough with the hopelessness of getting real health care reform during our one opportunity in a generation. Enough with so-called Democrats, whether they’re warming chairs in the Oval Office or on Capitol Hill. Let’s talk about swine flu, and, specifically, face masks. Should you or should you not stock up on face masks?

The CDC–. Wait, I’ll start over. Even if you feel the government is not your friend, the CDC really does know about face masks. Honest. The CDC starts the discussion at what are known as N95 masks. These are rated to stop 95% of airborne particles and droplets that are larger than 0.3 microns in size. As you can see in the picture, these are reasonably formidable, thick, stuffy-to-breathe-through face masks.

The good news is that aerosolized droplets exhaled or sneezed out are mostly larger than 0.5 microns. The bad news is that if the particle floats long enough to evaporate the associated water, a “naked” flu virus is on the order of 100 nanometers. That’s 0.1 microns. Now, a bare virus doesn’t survive, but if it retains, say, half its water droplet, it might well be smaller than 0.3 microns. In other words, it’ll pass through the mask as easily as you can pass through a doorway.

Note that I’m not even addressing the issue of the space between the mask and your face. This is all assuming you have a perfect fit with no gaps which are, say a tenth of a millimeter big. A tenth of a millimeter is 100 microns. Picture how big that looks to a 0.5 micron droplet.
Read more »