Some good news.

"We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women's lives," a Komen statement said.

Nice to see that people power can still make a difference on occasion in this corporate oligarchy of ours.

Update Oops, not so fast. Greg Sargent and Sara Kliff are both skeptical about whether Komen's statement is anything more than a PR move.

Then there's this:

In addition to pulling funds from Planned Parenthood for The Susan G. Komen Foundation also decided to stop funding embryonic stem cell research centers making it fully transparent the organization has evolved from non-political non-profit to a partisan advocacy organization.

That means the loss of $3.75 million to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, $4.5 million to the University of Kansas Medical Center, $1 million to the U.S. National Cancer Institute, $1 million to the Society for Women’s Health Research, and $600,000 to Yale University. That’s a loss of nearly $12 million dollars in research money to eradicate breast cancer this year alone.

I hate when my optimism, scarce as it is, is so misplaced.

As the years-long drought in Texas subsides, I feel this would be a good time to remind everyone that water is not only precious, but scarce.

Indeed, Africa is seeing some of the worst droughts in recorded history. Drought doesn't only affect humanity, afflicting us with thirst, famine, and war, but wildlife too. And while the famine in Somalia (not directly water-related, but...) has been declared "over", countries like Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone face dismal prospects for the near future.

David Brown | Washington | February 2

WaPo - The number of people who die annually of malaria is roughly double the current estimate, with a huge overlooked death toll in adults who, according to conventional teaching, rarely die of the tropical disease. That’s the conclusion of a new study that, if widely accepted, could affect billions of dollars of charitable spending and foreign aid in the developing world. The new estimate is likely to spur increased competition for global health spending, which has stalled in the economic downturn.

The report, published in the Lancet, describes malaria as a problem not only far bigger than thought `but also declining rapidly because of better prevention and treatment.

@MikeBloomberg tweets:

Politics has no place in health care. Join me in standing with #PlannedParenthood: http://bit.ly/y2HHjl

The post on his own website he links there says "Mike Bloomberg will match every donation to the Planned Parenthood Breast Health Fund dollar-for-dollar up to $250,000."

Nice one.

A good backgrounder on the Komen Foundation/Planned Parenthood controversy is here.

Pam Belluck | Jan 31

NYT - In a decision that is inflaming passions on both sides of the abortion debate, the world’s largest breast cancer organization, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, is cutting off its financing of breast cancer screening and education programs run by Planned Parenthood affiliates.

A spokeswoman for the Komen foundation, Leslie Aun, told The Associated Press that the main factor in the decision was a new rule adopted by Komen that prohibits grants to organizations being investigated by local, state or federal authorities. Ms. Aun told The A.P. that Planned Parenthood was therefore disqualified from financing because of an inquiry being conducted by Representative Cliff Stearns, Republican of Florida, who is looking at how Planned Parenthood spends and reports its money.

This is beyond outrageous, in my opinion...

Jim Salter | January 24

AP - A crude new method of making methamphetamine poses a risk even to Americans who never get anywhere near the drug: It is filling hospitals with thousands of uninsured burn patients requiring millions of dollars in advanced treatment — a burden so costly that it’s contributing to the closure of some burn units.

So-called shake-and-bake meth is produced by combining raw, unstable ingredients in a 2-liter soda bottle. But if the person mixing the noxious brew makes the slightest error, such as removing the cap too soon or accidentally perforating the plastic, the concoction can explode, searing flesh and causing permanent disfigurement, blindness or even death.

January 18

BBC - A rising proportion of abortions worldwide are putting women's health at risk, researchers say.

The World Health Organization study suggests global abortion rates are steady, at 28 per 1,000 women a year.

However, the proportion of the total carried out without trained clinical help rose from 44% in 1995 to 49% in 2008.

The Lancet, which carried the report, said the figures were "deeply disturbing".

Yuan Yuan | December 26

Beijing Review - General practitioners are considered key to improving public medical services

Du Xueping, Director of the Yuetan Community Healthcare Center in downtown Beijing's Xicheng District, has been involved in China's general practitioner (GP) trial program since it began.

As an important part of the country's medical reform, the introduction of a national GP system has been planned for almost 20 years. The Yuetan center is one of the first clinics in the country to trial the system.

"The trial program started in this center in 1994 and I came here in 1995," said Du, who used to be a cardiovascular specialist at Beijing's prestigious Fuxing Hospital.

"At the time, people didn't understand why I gave up a job in a big hospital to work in a small community center," Du said. "Even now, few people would choose to work in a community healthcare center. But based on my experience, community healthcare centers are actually more important for people's health than big hospitals."

Tofino, BC | December 16

CBC - Bottles, cans and lumber from the tsunami that devastated Japan in March began washing up on British Columbia shores this week, more than a year earlier than oceanographers had initially predicted.

Winds and currents have carried the items -- emblazoned with Japanese characters -- nearly 21,000 kilometres across the Pacific Ocean. They began washing up in the Tofino area on Vancouver Island's west coast earlier this week.

Jean-Paul Froment, a longtime area resident, says he's used to seeing things wash up on the beach, but has never seen such a large quantity of debris at once.

Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney--the perfect dynamic duo for our times, if not end times.
A Batman and Robin for the 1%. Defenders of truth, justice, and a Gulag Archipelago filled with child janitors and the fandango of the foreclosed.

If you're rooting for President Obama, or just plain enjoy the guilty pleasure of watching a Real Housewives of the Neo-Confederacy, your dream contest has arrived. Even

November 25

New Vision - A very rare strain of AIDS virus previously found only among a few people in Cameroon has most probably spread outside the West African country, according to a case reported by The Lancet on Friday.

The first identified infection with the so-called "group N" strain of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was found in 1998 in a Cameroonian woman who had progressed to AIDS.

Since then, more than 12,000 HIV-infected patients living in Cameroon have been tested for group-N infection, but only 12 cases, including two couples, have ever been found.

David Brown | Geneva | November 23

WaPo - The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which underwrites AIDS treatment for about half the people getting it in developing countries, announced Wednesday that it will make no new grants for the next two years because of the worldwide economic downturn.

The Geneva-based organization says it will continue to support about 400 AIDS treatment and prevention programs in more than 100 countries for now, but it will not pay for them to add patients or increase services.

“We cannot at the moment encourage in good faith an expansion of these programs,” Christoph Benn, the fund’s director of external relations, said Wednesday after a two-day meeting in Ghana of the board’s directors.

In May of 2009, as President Barack Obama prepared to replace retiring Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court, he let something terrible slip--something that could threaten the very fabric of our civilization! He would try and pick a new judge for our highest court that possessed "empathy," or the ability to identify “with people’s hopes and struggles” when making decisions that would intimately affect their lives.

In other words, slightly different than how Justice Clarence Thomas does it, which generally involves applying lessons learned from all-expenses covered, first-class corporate speaking gigs and serial viewing of the wacky antics of Long Dong Silver.

Yesterday, Congress began to look into how we can take some common-sense steps to curb the sales of firearms to criminals those mentally unfit for firearms ownership. The Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism held hearings on the Fix Gun Checks Act – a product of a nationwide, grassroots campaign led by Mayors Against Illegal Guns (for whom I consult) and Omar Samaha, whose sister was murdered at Virginia Tech in 2007.

I suppose eventually Joe Paterno will reveal what he was thinking when confronted with allegations of child rape by a graduate assistant in 1998. He claims he was only told of fondling and horseplay, but Mike McQueary (who has his own complicity to answer for) testified that he specifically mentioned anal rape.

At 84, it's conceivable that Paterno has learned to filter that effectively, to hear ugly truths as less-ugly euphemisms. We all learn coping mechanisms and for someone who both lived his life in a regimented, authoritarian organization (and led it for most of that time) as well as being a man who clearly spent a lot of time in church, another authoritarian patriarchal hierarchy, perhaps he's trained himself to ignore the underside of both.

Although when it comes to the specific date of our mass death, Harold Camping might as well be talking Chinese nuclear development with Herman Cain, it seems a little bit harder to doubt his general prognostication of doom in the weeks after 56 exotic animals were released into the countryside by the owner of a "private zoo" in Ohio.

Just before he shot himself to death.

If you don't know the whole story by now, to quickly summarize: In a scene that Director Emeritus of the Columbus, Ohio Zoo and television personality Jack Hanna compared to "Noah's Ark", endangered Bengal tigers, grizzly bears, monkeys, and a variety of other animals - 49 in all - were killed en masse by law enforcement.

When Teabaggers talk about the high price of public employees, I wonder if this is who they mean?

Ginny Townsend, 41, took a job in January as a nursing assistant in the state-run home for veterans here. Technically, she works for a private company that supplies some employees to the veterans home under a [Michigan] state contract. She makes $10 an hour, about half the wage of the public employees working at the facility.

RH Reality Check, By Amanda Marcotte, November 6

The personhood amendment being voted on in Mississippi this week is important for two major reasons. The first has received lots of coverage here at RH Reality Check and some liberal news sources: because it’s about criminalizing all women of reproductive age, and could do things like ban birth control and open criminal investigations on miscarriages.

The other reason that we should all be paying attention to Mississippi is the results of the election will be an excellent measure of how far right the Christian right has gone when it comes to sex.

Vertex Pharmaceuticals' ivacaftor reduced pulmonary flare-ups by 55% compared with a placebo. For now it applies to those with a certain genetic mutation, but the pool of patients could grow.

Los Angeles Times, By Amina Khan, November 2

All her life, Lindsay Shipp knew that she was dying. As a baby, she would cry after eating, and salt collected on her forehead. The diagnosis was cystic fibrosis, an incurable genetic disease that, at the time, meant a life expectancy of 18 years.

The disease, which affects 30,000 people in the United States, hinders the movement of salt in the body. Because of this, the pancreas fails soon after birth, patients cannot properly digest food, and their airways fill with mucus, leaving them vulnerable to lung infections and other problems. The current average life expectancy is now 37.

Look, I'm glad to see Obama signing an executive order calling for a study of big pharma price gouging. But that's not how you do it. You order the study without any fanfare--not in secret but without fanfare, without calling a press conference--and then when the conclusions are out that's when you hammer them by signing an executive order. Again, very weak actions by a very weak president.

. . . better fly to China, or Thailand or visit those damned cheese-eating surrender monkeys in France who have tEh soshulized medicines because you are not going to get it here.

Look, this is serious shit and I'm not making light of it. But the moron in the article quoted as saying, "Anybody who is sure they know the answer to this question is probably kidding themselves," said Peter Lurie, a senior adviser in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Office of the Commissioner, who works on public health issues, including drug shortages."

This is nuts. If you're seventy years old and a man and need to get a boner well, we have lots of drugs for you. But if your an elderly woman and sick, well, screw you. Find a rich husband I guess. Actually, this problem has a simple answer morally, but politically it is hard: the answer is to force the big pharma to oversupply critical, lifesaving drugs. Use regulations, legislation, fuck, use drones if need be.

This is just another big problem being slipped under the carpet by the shiny freedom bombing of peeps like Gaddafi and Awlaki. It's easier to kill than to heal.


Update: Oct 31 (Bloomberg)- Obama Order Targets Drug Price 'Gouging,' Easing Shortages     ~ eds

French Condom Ad

Jezebel, October 27

The UN recently issued a report that declares that countries that restrict access to either abortion or contraception are violating a woman's human rights. The report also declares it Officially Messed Up when a woman is prosecuted for taking illegal drugs or drinking during her pregnancy, because it's her body and the state has no right to it. The Pope, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Rick Perry now agree: The UN sucks.

The report, authored by Arnand Grover, reasons that because sexual and reproductive health are part of a woman's overall health and people have a right to health, women therefore have a right to access to abortion and contraception.

Oct 25

BBC - A US government medical committee has recommended the human papillomavirus vaccine for boys, to tackle the spread of the sexually-transmitted virus.

While the vaccine has been available to boys before, the vote means that injections are now likely to be covered under medical insurance.

Officials said a lower than expected rate of vaccination in girls encouraged them to reconsider the policy.

In boys, the vaccine protects against cancers associated with the virus.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice, which advises the Centers for Disease Control, voted unanimously on Tuesday to recommend the vaccine for males ages 11 and 12.

Paul Harris | New York | October 22

The Observer - Nearly 7 billion people now inhabit planet but projections that number will double this century have shocked academics

The United Nations will warn this week that the world's population could more than double to 15 billion by the end of this century, putting a catastrophic strain on the planet's resources unless urgent action is taken to curb growth rates, the Observer can reveal.

That figure is likely to shock many experts as it is far higher than many current estimates. A previous UN estimate had expected the world to have more than 10 billion people by 2100; currently, there are nearly 7 billion.