MetaFilter posts tagged with medicine and disease

Are We About to Eliminate AIDS?

andoatnp — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 23:40:53 -0800

What if we could rid the world of AIDS? The notion might sound like fantasy: HIV infection has no cure and no vaccine, after all. Yet there is a way to completely wipe it out - at least in theory. What's more, it would take only existing medical technology to do the job.

Here's how it works. If someone who is HIV positive takes antiretroviral-drug therapy they can live a long life and almost never pass on the virus, even through unprotected sex. So if everyone with HIV were on therapy, there would be little or no transmission. Once all these people had died, of whatever cause, the virus would be gone for good. It's a simple idea, but the obstacles to implementing it worldwide are enormous. Persuading everyone with HIV to start therapy purely for public health reasons could be ethically dubious. To identify everyone who is HIV positive would require such widespread testing that some may feel it breached their civil liberties. Then there is the question of who would fund such a massive undertaking.

Much much more in the article.

retrovirally transforming pancreatic cells from adult mice into insulin-producing beta cells

kliuless — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:51:39 -0800

Scientists Repurpose Adult Cells - "Scientists have transformed one type of fully developed adult cell directly into another inside a living animal, a startling advance that could lead to cures for a variety of illnesses and sidestep the political and ethical quagmires associated with embryonic stem cell research." [nature abstract, nature writeup, audio announcement]

Superbugs

homunculus — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 22:16:02 -0800

Superbugs. "The new generation of resistant infections is almost impossible to treat."

Rachel Carson

homunculus — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 23:20:21 -0800

Rehabilitating Carson: "Why do some people continue to hold Rachel Carson responsible for millions of malaria deaths?" A reply: Contra John Quiggin and Tim Lambert, DDT is usually the most cost-effective anti-malaria treatment, and remains scandalously underused More on the debate, including links to the authors' replies to Bate: Big Tobacco and the war on science

Mental Illness Might Be Caused By Microbes

amyms — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 23:05:11 -0800

Are you batshitinsane? Viruses and/or bacteria may be the cause.

Retrospectacle on the Plague

McLir — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 13:46:24 -0800

Retrospectacle on the Plague. Shelley Batts is a neuroscience PhD candidate who writes the great blog Retrospectacle [Prev]. She's recently posted a series on the bubonic plague: It's real and perceived causes (1 2), the bizarre medical garb doctors used, and modern cases of Yersinia pestis* infection in the U.S. and the world.

Anti-depressants, Serotonin and Depression

OmieWise — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 08:12:07 -0800

"Researchers found that failing to publish negative findings inflated the reported effectiveness of all 12 of the antidepressants studied." See also: Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature. NEJM paper referenced. (Subscription required) Older: Antidepressants Versus Placebos: Meaningful Advantages Are Lacking,
but, Small Effects Are Not Trivial From a Public Health Perspective.

RIP Robin Prosser

homunculus — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 12:03:14 -0800

Robin Prosser was a former concert pianist and systems analyst who suffered from an autoimmune disease similar to lupus for over 20 years. The disease left her in constant pain and made her allergic to most pharmaceutical painkillers. Only medical marijuana brought her relief, but last spring the DEA seized her medicine. Unable to cope with the chronic pain any longer, she committed suicide on October 18th. [Via Andrew Sullivan.]

Bacterial marketing: the other Oskar Schindler

goodnewsfortheinsane — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 18:20:23 -0800

Upon the Nazi invasion of Poland, pediatrician Eugeniusz Łazowski and his friend Stanisław Matulewicz fabricated a fake typhus epidemic to save Polish Jews from the Nazis. Knowing that typhus-infected Jews would be summarily executed, non-Jews were injected with the harmless Proteus OX19, which would generate false positives for typhus. Anglicising his name to "Eugene Lazowski", the doctor moved to the United States after the war. He lived and worked in Chicago from 1958, and passed away in late 2006 at the vernerable age of 92, in Eugene (!), Oregon. Oddly little is written about Lazowski and Matulewicz on the web; although apparently there has been work on a documentary titled "A Private War" by a filmmaker named Ryan Bank. So feel free to add supporting links if you are aware of any.

Many of World’s Poor Suffer in Pain

homunculus — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 13:15:36 -0800

Drugs Banned, Many of World’s Poor Suffer in Pain "Millions of people die in pain because they cannot get morphine, which is legal for medical use in most nations." [Via TalkLeft.]

Diseases of the Skin

youngergirl44 — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 21:57:55 -0800

Diseases of the Skin by Gary M. White & Neil H. Cox. All you ever wanted to know about how bad your skin could be - full of images. Possibly NSFW, as some groin photos are included.

Hemispherectomy

Gyan — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 09:15:05 -0800

Living with half a brain - hemispherectomy, probably the most radical procedure in neurosurgery

How rare!

Pretty_Generic — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 20:44:36 -0800

Glaucoma [w/Flash audio. NB: mouse-over bottom-left for Elvis. Obviously]

Mind if I fart?

Eekacat — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 17:29:08 -0800

Physicians and scientists around the world even go as far as to state that smoking leads to premature death. Don’t we all know someone who smokes constantly, even heavily, yet is still living — or has lived — to the mature age of eighty, ninety, and older? Furthermore, the MDs and PhDs state that smoking causes cancer and emphysema. If this diagnosis were definitive, wouldn’t these afflictions affect all smokers equally, rather than the small percentage that it actually does affect?

EpidemicFilter

Gyan — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 21:52:16 -0800

If Smallpox Strikes Portland ...

The Access to Essential Medicines Campaign

stonerose — Sun, 01 Dec 2002 06:27:44 -0800

The Access to Essential Medicines Campaign is an initiative by Medecins Sans Frontieres that seeks to "lower the prices of existing medicines in developing countries, to bring abandoned drugs back into production, to stimulate research and development for neglected diseases that primarily affect the poor, and to overcome other barriers to access." HIV is one target disease. The Campaign's press releases, press clips and reports on HIV give a good picture of recent developments. In light of this evidence, does anyone care to step up and defend "big pharma" and the governments of the wealthy North? Have we/they "done enough"? What would "doing enough" look like, given the scope of the crisis?

WolfDaddy — Thu, 26 Sep 2002 11:57:30 -0800

For years, it's been observed that some people infected with HIV never develop full-blown AIDS. Now American and Chinese scientists think they know why. But remember kids, barebacking is still dangerous, and a cocktail is not a cure. Maybe this research will change all that.