December 17th, 2010 → 11:08 pm @ Seth Mnookin
There hasn’t been a whole lot written in the American press about the story of an unidentified German doctor who walked out of surgery when he saw a swastika on the arm of his already anesthetized patient. (According to The Telegraph‘s translation of an article in the German daily Suddeutsche Zeitung, the doctor said, “I can’t operate on this man. I am Jewish.” The BMJ‘s translation has a slightly more poetic ring to it–“I cannot operate on this man. I am a Jew”–but their piece is also stuck behind a typically absurd medical journal paywall.)
The unidentified surgeon found a colleague to take his place, and while he was the subject of a lot of public criticism, he was not reprimanded. (more…)
Post Categories: Germany & medical ethics
December 17th, 2010 → 7:10 pm @ Seth Mnookin
The past several years have seen a dramatic rise in the number of pertussis (more commonly known as whooping cough) cases in areas around the country. California has been especially hard hit: Already this year, ten children there have died after being infected. Nine of them were under two months old, the age at which the first dose of the pertussis vaccine is administered. (According to the California Department of Public Health (pdf), there were 7,297 pertussis infections in the state through November 30. That’s the most number of cases since 1947, which was before the pertussis vaccine was put into widespread use.)
One side effect of these outbreaks has been increased awareness that teenagers and adults need regular pertussis boosters–and that even those fully people who are fully vaccinated are not necessarily immune. (No vaccine is 100 percent effective. There’ll be more on that in a later post.) Recently, a pair of fully vaccinated teenagers in Washington, DC were diagnosed with whooping cough. As a result, the parents of children at the Sidwell Friends School–including, I assume, President and Mrs. Obama, whose two daughters are enrolled there–received the following e-mail: (more…)
Post Categories: California & Obama & pertussis & Washington DC
December 17th, 2010 → 12:03 pm @ Seth Mnookin
One of the unexpected bonuses of writing The Panic Virus was working with Kevin Hartnett, an incredibly talented writer who helped me with just about every facet of my book. For a couple of years now, Kevin has been working with the online books/arts/culture/etc magazine The Millions; this year, he asked me to contribute one of the site’s “Year in Reading” features.
My piece ran today — it’s a (very) brief essay about my love for Richard Stark’s Parker novels and Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe books*. (For a wonderful introduction to Stark, check out The Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson’s obit/essay on Donald Westlake. Stark was one of Westlake’s many pseudonyms.) There are lots of other great “Year in Reading” essays as well, ranging from Joanna Smith Rakoff to the booming-voiced Richard Nash to The Hours author Michael Cunningham to Allegra Goodman, whose remarkable book Intuition was another one of my favorite reads of ’10.
* The Boston Globe‘s brilliant Hiawatha Bray pointed out that I’d initially given Wolfe authorship over his creator. (Thanks, Hiawatha.) That also gets to several things I should have noted earlier: My policy will be to always indicate where I have made corrections to initial posts; if I’m lucky — and this indicates that I will be — I’ll have readers that are many times smarter than I am; I’ll depend on said readers to let me know when I’ve screwed up; and the comments policy is still a work in progress. Right now, I need to approve all comments. My intention is not to limit debate or discussion, but to keep things civil…and to limit spam pitches for bodily enhancements and illegal pharmaceuticals. I’ll write more about this as it evolves.
Post Categories: Donald Westlake & Kevin Hartnett & Nero Wolfe & Richard Stark & The Millions
December 14th, 2010 → 8:07 pm @ Seth Mnookin
I’m not sure how I missed this, but this is an excellent interview by Left Brain/Right Brain‘s Kevin Leitch with UC-Davis prof Cecilia Giulivi, the lead author of the aforementioned JAMA piece on mitochondria and autism. It offers a fairly convincing rebuttal to anti-vaccers arguing that the JAMA study provides more ammunition to the charge that somehow, someway, vaccines are to blame:
KL: Do you think, based on available science (including your paper) that vaccines cause autism?
CG: We do not have any evidence for this in our study. Our study was cross-sectional not longitudinal so it cannot point to any cause (not just vaccines), meaning we do not have any data supporting one way or another.
Post Categories: JAMA & LB/RB & mitochondrial autism & vaccines
December 14th, 2010 → 12:19 pm @ Seth Mnookin
On Saturday, The Huffington Post published a story titled Autism Research: Breakthrough Discovery on the Causes of Autism. The piece was about a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association titled “Mitochondrial Dysfunction in Autism,” which, according to the HuffPo‘s Mark Hyman, “discovered a profound and serious biological underpinning of autism.”
This is a big deal because if scientists can identify a biological mechanism that causes autism, they’re that much closer to determining a cure. (Indeed, the study received plenty of attention from all sorts of blogs.) It’s also notable because the vaccines-cause-autism crowd has as of late claimed that vaccines damage mitochondria–and therefore cause autism. But Hyman’s claim is not supported by the actual data presented in the paper he wrote about. (more…)
Post Categories: alternative medicine & Andrew Wakefield & Huffington Post & JAMA & mitochondrial autism & vaccines
December 13th, 2010 → 1:09 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Last week Patricia Callahan and Trine Tsouderos, two science reporters at the Chicago Tribune, published an excellent article debunking the notion that Lyme disease is a chronic condition that causes physical ailments ranging from backaches to an inability to concentrate. The Trib‘s headline does a pretty good job at summing up the story:*
Chronic Lyme disease: A dubious diagnosis. There’s little good evidence that chronic Lyme disease exists. Yet doctors are treating it with drugs that put patients and the public at risk.
Post Categories: Age of Autism & Blog & Chronic Lyme disease & Medical manufactroversies & SafeMinds & Skepchicks & Trine Tsouderos
December 5th, 2010 → 10:26 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Welcome to the blog at SethMnookin.com. We’ll have things up and running soon, with plenty of updates, archives, and more…
Post Categories: Blog
