Might This Offer Insight Into Why the Cost of Medical Care Has Increased So Much More Than Inflation

How could it not?

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All-Too-Rare Good News

Occasionally we get unalloyed good news.  Today is a case in point.  Guiness is good for you.

Antioxidant compounds in the Guinness are responsible for the health benefits because they decrease harmful cholesterol gathering on the artery walls.

That is truly a winner.

Vaccines

My thoughts on vaccines:

1.  I am not a physician.

2.  I have gladly had all vaccines I am aware of appropriate to my age and circumstances.  I have never refused a vaccine recommended to me, and I have sought several out.

3.  When rearing our children, my wife and I assured that our children had all vaccines as and when recommended by their pediatrician.

4.  To the best of my knowledge and belief, my young grandson has had all vaccines as and when recommended by his pediatrician.

5.  As a general rule, vaccines are highly beneficial to populations receiving them, and those vaccines successfully running FDA’s gantlet are extremely unlikely to harm any given individual.  The odds of being harmed by a vaccine are far less than those of winning the lottery, and winning the lottery is so remote as to make the lottery a tax on arithmetic ignorance.

6.  But vaccines may have seriously harmful effects on small percentages of recipients.  By a small percentage, I mean a number consisting of a decimal point with several zeros to its right before any integers occur.

7.  Given that the US population is well over 300 million, when you multiple even that small percentage times the total population, you will come up with some people who are adversely affected.  That’s simple arithmetic.

8.  But each of us makes a decision for ourselves and for our children, not for the population as a whole.  And present technology does not allow us to know in advance who is susceptible to harm.   So we have to decide based on the general odds, odds that in my opinion make the call a no-brainer.

9.  Vaccines are a reverse lottery in which, for statistical purposes, everyone wins.  Regrettably, there are a losers in real life, but their numbers are not statistically significant.  I wish we could know in advance who those losers will be, but we can’t.

10.  Despite the remoteness of harm, I am reluctant to compel people to be vaccinated or have their children vaccinated.  Some circumstances might warrant compulsion, depending on the disease’s virulence, transmissibility, and consequences.  I am not personally convinced the standard is met with measles.

11.  My view is that anyone who does not vaccinate their children against measles is a fool, but we cannot outlaw all forms of foolishness.

Possible New Antibiotic

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are increasingly common and scary.  At last, we have some potential good news.  Researchers have found teixobactin, a new antibiotic that works well now and the effectiveness of which should last longer than that of many others.  Now, if only someone can afford to get this through the FDA gantlet, countless lives may be saved.

Off Switch for Pain?

Scientists seem to have discovered an off switch for pain.  If this pans out, it’s hard to overstate the suffering it will relieve.  This is especially so since the war on drugs manifests itself in part as a war on physicians who treat people with chronic pain.

Good News and Bad News

The good news is that chocolate helps reverse age-related memory loss.  The bad news is that, if you eat enough chocolate to help with your memory, you’ll be causing a lot of other problems.  Alas.

Light to Moderate Alcohol Consumption Improves Memory

According to a new study by the Framingham Heart Study Offspring Cohort.  Excessive alcohol consumption, of course, is still a bad thing.

A Quick and Cheap Way to Test for Ebola in the Offing

James Collins, a synthetic biologist at Boston University, says he’s been able to print the ingredients for simple DNA experiments on paper, freeze dry them, and use them as much as a year later. It could lead to cheap diagnostic tests for viruses like Ebola.

Extremely good news.  Let’s hope it pans out.

Digital Implants You May Expect to See in Coming Years

Implantable smartphones, chips that monitor things such as blood sugar, pills that can report your status to your doctor, implantable birth control that can be turned on and off, implantable electronic keys, brain-computer interfaces, meltable bio-batteries, nano devices providing treatment or alleviating pain, and implantable ID chips.

These things offer the potential for much good and also for Orwellian nightmares.  My guess is we’ll get both, but the latter for sure.  Imagine what North Korea could do to its citizenry with some of this stuff.

African Ebola-Containment Standards Higher Than American Standards

According to the leader of a group treating Ebola patients in Liberia:

When Samaritan’s Purse health workers treat patients in Liberia, they wear two pairs of gloves and spray themselves with disinfectant twice before leaving the isolation ward. They have a three-foot “no touch” policy and hold safety meetings every day.

In U.S. hospitals — such as Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, which has had three cases of Ebola — workers don’t have to hose down their gear and are told it’s OK for gloves to expose their wrists.

“If you slip, and you touch your skin on the wrist, you’re going to get Ebola,” said Isaacs, who has worked on-the-ground disaster relief in countries like Haiti, the Philippines and Bosnia.

This may have some bearing to an exchange of comments on one of my earlier posts.  I questioned whether perhaps inadequacy of protocol was as possible as breach of protocol in the Dallas nurse’s illness.  Invisible Mikey said the protocol was OK because it had worked in the past.  I’m still not qualified to have an opinion, but this sort of thing makes you wonder.