ch.annel2-i.s-n.ow-a.ngry

Found on EOTAW:

According to this study, the average American adult fills nine prescriptions a year.  Someone in her fifties: 13.

Wow, just wow. 

More than half of U.S. doctors now favor switching to a national health care plan and fewer than a third oppose the idea, according to a survey published on Monday.

“Many claim to speak for physicians and represent their views. We asked doctors directly and found that, contrary to conventional wisdom, most doctors support national health insurance,” said Dr. Aaron Carroll of the Indiana University School of Medicine, who led the study.

“As doctors, we find that our patients suffer because of increasing deductibles, co-payments, and restrictions on patient care,” said Dr. Ronald Ackermann, who worked on the study with Carroll. “More and more, physicians are turning to national health insurance as a solution to this problem.”

So, you say being a debt-slave for your body is just as bad as being a debt-slave to your bling? Nah, can’t be.  My fiancée can’t get her school’s clinic to bill her insurance company for squat, despite her insurance coming from her father who is a doctor. Who works at a very nice hospital.

The United States has no single organized health care system. Instead it relies on a patchwork of insurance provided by the federal and state governments to the elderly, poor, disabled and to some children, along with private insurance and employer-sponsored plans.

Many other countries have national plans, including Britain, France and Canada, and several studies have shown the United States spends more per capita on health care, without achieving better results for patients.

Well, Bush says that just plain isn’t the case so ya better listen up. It’s totally better to give businesses 30% of what you spend on healthcare instead of 3% to the government. It makes so much economic sense to enrich those denying you healthcare.

Justice Scalia said jurors would probably not be in a position to weigh the benefits and dangers of medical devices as well as agency experts. A jury, he wrote, “sees only the cost of a more dangerous designed, and is not concerned with its benefits; the patient who reaped those benefits are not represented in court.”

But they all paid HUGE FUCKING BUCKS for these devices, even the people that die or are seriously injured from the equipment being mis-designed. Lawsuits are pretty much the only recourse people have in these instances, but those HUGE FUCKING BUCKS are buying their way out of any sort of oversight.

In this case, the Bush administration had taken the side of the medical-device industry, arguing argued that there would be “serious undermining of F.D.A.’s approval authority and its balancing of the risks and benefits” if juries could second-guess the agency.

But models for reform are out there. Hospitals that don’t use the fee-for-service model, like those run by the Veterans Health Administration, are already getting better results for less money. They closely track their performance — that is, the health of their patients — and motivate employees to improve it.

As I’ve written before, there is nothing wrong with devoting a large chunk of our economy to medical care. Since the 1950s, doctors have made incredible progress against diseases that were once inevitably fatal. That progress is probably the finest human achievement of the last half century.

If we weren’t wasting so much money on overtreatment, it would be a lot easier to repeat the achievement over the next half century.

On a completely unrelated note, I have no idea why Reuters has it in their “terms of use” that you are not allowed to link to or quote their news stories (which is actually illegal but whatever), considering the more eyeballs that see their website the more ad money they get.

“About 253,000 Pixar Sarge die-cast toy cars with lead paint were also recalled. Lead has been linked to health problems in children, including brain damage.

Earlier this month Mattel’s Fisher-Price unit recalled about 1.5 million preschool toys made by China-based contract manufacturer Lida Toy Co. because the paint on the toys might contain excessive amounts of lead. The global recall included products based on popular preschool characters from ‘Sesame Street’ and ‘Dora the Explorer.’”

Seriously, what is a safe amount of lead in paint on children’s toys?

Oh, right, NONE.

“Like mercury, another heavy metal, lead is a potent neurotoxin which accumulates in soft tissues and bone over time.”

Seriously, US media, this kind of information took me like 5 seconds to look up. All you have to do is find it, then fact-check it. Even dictionary.com mentions it’s toxic.

“lead poisoning or plumbism, intoxication of the system by organic compounds containing lead. These enter the body by respiration (of dust, fumes, or sprays) or by ingestion of food or other substances that contain lead. Lead poisoning, formerly a leading occupational hazard in industrialized countries, can be an acute episode but is usually a chronic, cumulative disease brought about by continuous exposure.”

And I’m quite sure Reuters employs much better sources of information like Lexis-Nexis or whatever the current shit-hot for-pay vetted information systems are employed today.

Oh! A paragraph on the dangers of lead. Sort of.

“Nancy Nord, acting chairwoman of the CPSC, said the new recall was made especially large to prevent injuries from the toys.

“‘There is absolutely no excuse for lead to be found in toys entering this country,’ she said. ‘It is totally unacceptable and it needs to stop. This agency is going to take whatever action it needs to take to address that problem aggressively.’”

The CPSC is the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.

So I wonder, exactly, what percentage of toys that Mattel currently has on shelves this 18.5 million toys recalled represents?

So, there’s a type of therapy that’s been around about 100 years now, called bacteriophage (I love it when I know a word my spellcheck does not) therapy. A bacteriophage is a virus that eats bacteria that cause sickness. Say strep throat or “flesh-eating bacteria” (Necrotizing Fasciitis), this virus when injected will infect the bacteria they are tailored to survive off of, and, like a bacterial aids, cause them to product more bacteriophage and then die. When they run out of bacteria, they die off.

However, as good as they may be, like any drug, they have to be developed at great expense and patented to have money made off of them. Coincidentally enough, this bacteriophage therapy was pioneered in Stalinist Russia, in Stalin’s home country of Georgia. My guess is that this therapy will be ignored until we can tailor the bacteriophage’s genes and then patent those genes, or until a socialist country picks up on this idea. Honestly, I’m not sure either scenario is a great one. The first, it will be cripplingly expensive. The second, well, the way the US is going, we’ll have to perform illegal actions to get to those countries and get treatment, should antibiotics continue failing.

And, by the way, anyone who is squeamish about the idea of intentionally infecting oneslf with a virus, they are already inside you. They live in the guts of animals and in pickled vegetables and packed meats. And in drinking water. Oh my yes.