The prospect of a bird flu outbreak may be panicking people around the globe, but it's proving to be very good news for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other politically connected investors in Gilead Sciences, the California biotech company that owns the rights to Tamiflu, the influenza remedy that's now the most-sought after drug in the world.Rumsfeld served as Gilead (Research)'s chairman from 1997 until he joined the Bush administration in 2001, and he still holds a Gilead stake valued at between $5 million and $25 million, according to federal financial disclosures filed by Rumsfeld.
oops there it is, oops there it is, 1ll-33t modernist humanism at its nekkid best...,
The forms don't reveal the exact number of shares Rumsfeld owns, but in the past six months fears of a pandemic and the ensuing scramble for Tamiflu have sent Gilead's stock from $35 to $47. That's made the Pentagon chief, already one of the wealthiest members of the Bush cabinet, at least $1 million richer.
Rumsfeld isn't the only political heavyweight benefiting from demand for Tamiflu, which is manufactured and marketed by Swiss pharma giant Roche. (Gilead receives a royalty from Roche equaling about 10% of sales.) Former Secretary of State George Shultz, who is on Gilead's board, has sold more than $7 million worth of Gilead since the beginning of 2005.
Another board member is the wife of former California Gov. Pete Wilson.
"I don't know of any biotech company that's so politically well-connected," says analyst Andrew McDonald of Think Equity Partners in San Francisco.
What's more, the federal government is emerging as one of the world's biggest customers for Tamiflu. In July, the Pentagon ordered $58 million worth of the treatment for U.S. troops around the world, and Congress is considering a multi-billion dollar purchase. Roche expects 2005 sales for Tamiflu to be about $1 billion, compared with $258 million in 2004.
Rumsfeld recused himself from any decisions involving Gilead when he left Gilead and became Secretary of Defense in early 2001. And late last month, notes a senior Pentagon official, Rumsfeld went even further and had the Pentagon's general counsel issue additional instructions outlining what he could and could not be involved in if there were an avian flu pandemic and the Pentagon had to respond.
As the flu issue heated up early this year, according to the Pentagon official, Rumsfeld considered unloading his entire Gilead stake and sought the advice of the Department of Justice, the SEC and the federal Office of Government Ethics.
Those agencies didn't offer an opinion so Rumsfeld consulted a private securities lawyer, who advised him that it was safer to hold on to the stock and be quite public about his recusal rather than sell and run the risk of being accused of trading on insider information, something Rumsfeld doesn't believe he possesses. So he's keeping his shares for the time being.
My new born suffers from "the cholic".
The doctor has said it is actually a case of acid reflux and it's "finally" being recognized as such. The doctor also said there is a rising incidence of acid reflux/cholic and she believes it is because new parents are being told that it's safer for newborns to have them sleep on their backs vs. sleeping on their stomachs.
This change in sleeping habits is because of the fear of SIDS.
Meanwhile, older mothers are saying that doctors are full of it, because babies sleep better on their stomachs. Additionally, sleeping on the back helps promote acid reflux, just like it does for some adults.
All I know is, the first day, my kid slept in the hospital bassinet on his back and it was flat. The next few days in the hospital, the bassinet bottom was raised so that the head was elevated higher than his feet.
When we got him home, the cholic started. After speaking with the doctor and having him examined, it was determined that he was suffering from acid reflux.
Now we have a choice between sleeping on his stomach and taking something like Zantac after over the counter drugs failed.
I find this interesting...
More later...
Diagnosed with liver cancer, August Wilson continues to write
By MICHAEL KUCHWARA
AP DRAMA WRITER
NEW YORK -- Even after a diagnosis in June of inoperable liver cancer, August Wilson has continued to work on "Radio Golf," the final play in his epic 10-work cycle about the black experience in 20th-century America.
"He completed another draft of the play in early July," his assistant, Dena Levitin, said Friday in an interview from Seattle where the 60-year-old Wilson lives with his wife, costume designer Constanza Romero, and their daughter, Azula.
News of Wilson's illness was first disclosed Friday in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "It's not like poker, you can't throw your hand in," the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright told the paper. "I've lived a blessed life. I'm ready." He said he has a life expectancy of three to five months.
Black leaders urge shared health knowledge
By DANIEL YEE
Associated Press Writer
ATLANTA (AP) -- Although an avid tennis player and very trim at age 58, Terrell Slayton Jr. has a host of chronic conditions - including diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. But he knows that many other black men in his community don't even know the status of their health.
"Even the most learned among us sometimes, for whatever reason, don't get that checkup as often as we should," said Slayton, who has learned to balance regular exercise and a medication schedule with his busy role as Georgia's assistant secretary of state.
A program created by former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher and a group of the city's top leaders - the 100 Black Men of Atlanta Inc. - is aimed at raising health awareness among black men. They are working to first educate themselves about their own health so they can teach others and serve as role models.
"I started the program ... to take advantage of the fact these men are leaders in the community - they were in a position not only to improve their own health but to influence the health of other people," said Satcher, now interim president of the Morehouse School of Medicine and member of the 100 Black Men group.
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More at that link.
Rafael Palmerio is back from his suspension for taking steroids.
I think that the powers that be of baseball knew that McGuire, Sosa, Barry Bonds, and others were "doing something" and they didn't care because of the balls that were leaving the park, which made the game more exciting.
If grown men want to take drugs that may shorten their lives, shrink their testicles, and possibly cause depression, so be it. Let them do it. I don't care. Just make it legal for people 21 and above and let the pro sports of baseball, football, and basketball deal with it.
Congress shouldn't be involved in this and they wouldn't be involved except that it gives those pompus media hounds a chance to have their mugs on television.
WASHINGTON, July 28 (Reuters) - Leaders of a U.S. House of Representatives panel were to meet privately Thursday in the second of a series of sessions to reduce farm spending by $3 billion, with some lawmakers fearing cuts could target the food stamp program that helps poor families buy groceries.
tsk, tsk, tsk, full monty here; and some folks ack like they don't understand my emphasis on food security...,
For the past couple months, I've been trying to maximize fruit and vegetable consumption within the Nulan household. Well so, I buy a bunch of bananas every few days as part of this regimen. Anyway, I accidentally picked up a bunch of organic bananas at my local HyVee store yesterday. They were conspicuously large and unlike the regular bananas about ready ripeness-wise for eating. {the usual suspects were all bright green and looked at least a couple days from table ready}
I didn't find out they were organic until I looked at them just a minute ago, and they had a little *organic* sticker on them. So I peel and bite one of these barnaynays and KAPOW!!!!, discover that I haven't eaten a real banana in years. It was so sweet, firm in texture, and like I said above, conspicuously large - that I was shocked by the difference in flavor intensity between it and the high-yield agro product I've grown accustomed to.
From now on, I'll be doing vastly more careful shopping and testing the difference between organic and mass agro produce. If this banana was not merely a fluke, but instead the rule concerning the differences, then the often mulled engagement with gardening, farmer's market co-oping and emphasis on organic produce just went to the top of my priority list.
Cobb's piece here on marketing;
set off a cognitive avalanche;
Compulsive gambling, attendance at sporting events, vulnerability to telephone scams and exuberant investing in the stock market may not seem to have much in common. But neuroscientists now have uncovered a common thread.Such behaviors, they say, rely on brain circuits that evolved to help animals assess rewards important to their survival, like food and sex. Researchers have found that those same circuits are used by the human brain to assess social rewards as diverse as investment income and surprise home runs at the bottom of the ninth inning.
And, in a finding that astonishes many people, they found that the brain systems that detect and evaluate such rewards generally operate outside of conscious awareness. In navigating the world and deciding what is rewarding, humans are closer to zombies than sentient beings much of the time.
The findings, which are gaining wide adherence among neuroscientists, challenge the notion that people always make conscious choices about what they want and how to obtain it. In fact, the neuroscientists say, much of what happens in the brain goes on outside of conscious awareness.
“The idea has been around since Freud,” said Dr. Gregory Berns, a psychiatrist at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. “Psychologists have studied unconscious processing of information in terms of subliminal effects, memory and learning,” he said, “and they have started to map out what parts of the brain are involved in such processing. But only now are they learning how these different circuits interact”.
"My hunch is that most decisions are made subconsciously, with many subtle gradations of awareness," Dr. Berns said. "For example, I'm vaguely aware of how I got to work this morning. But consciousness seems reserved for more important things."
Dr. P. Read Montague, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, says the idea that people can get themselves to work on automatic pilot raises two questions: How does the brain know what it must pay conscious attention to? And how did evolution create a brain that could make such distinctions?
The answer emerging from experiments on animals and people is that the brain has evolved to shape itself, starting in infancy, according to what it encounters in the external world.
As Dr. Montague explained it, “Much of the world is predictable: buildings usually stay in one place, gravity makes objects fall, light falling at an oblique angle makes long shadows and so forth. As children grow, their brains build internal models of everything they encounter, gradually learning to identify objects and to predict how they move through space and time.”
As new information flows into it from the outside world, the brain automatically compares it to what it already knows. If things match up - as when people drive to work every day along the same route - events, objects and the passage of time may not reach conscious awareness.
But if there is a surprise - a car suddenly runs a red light --- the mismatch between what is expected and what is happening --- instantly shifts the brain into a new state. A brain circuit involved in decision making is activated, again out of conscious awareness. Drawing on past experience held in memory banks, a decision is made: hit the brake, swerve the wheel or keep going. Only a second or so later, after hands and feet have initiated the chosen action, does the sense of having made a conscious decision arise.
Dr. Montague estimates that 90 percent of what people do every day is carried out by this kind of automatic, unconscious system that evolved to help creatures survive. Animals use these circuits to know what to attend to, what to ignore and what is worth learning about. People use them for the same purposes which, as a result of their bigger brains and culture, include listening to music, eating chocolate, assessing beauty, gambling, investing in stocks and experimenting with drugs - all topics that have been studied this past year with brain imaging machines that directly measure the activity of human brain circuits.
The two circuits that have been studied most extensively involve how animals and people assess rewards. Both involve a chemical called dopamine. The first circuit, which is in a middle region of the brain, helps animals and people instantly assess rewards or lack of rewards.
The circuit was described in greater detail several years ago by Dr. Wolfram Schultz, a neuroscientist at Cambridge University in England, who tracked dopamine production in a monkey's midbrain and experimented with various types of rewards, usually squirts of apple juice that the animal liked.
Dr. Schultz found that when the monkey got more juice than it expected, dopamine neurons fired vigorously. When the monkey got an amount of juice that it expected to get, based on previous squirts, dopamine neurons did nothing. And when the monkey expected to get juice but got none, the dopamine neurons decreased their firing rate, as if to signal a lack of reward.
Scientists believe that this midbrain dopamine system is constantly making predictions about what to expect in terms of rewards. Learning takes place only when something unexpected happens and dopamine firing rates increase or decrease. When nothing unexpected happens, as when the same amount of delicious apple juice keeps coming, the dopamine system is quiet.
“In animals,” Dr. Montague said, “These midbrain dopamine signals are sent directly to brain areas that initiate movements and behavior. These brain areas figure out how to get more apple juice or sit back and do nothing. In humans, though, the dopamine signal is also sent to a higher brain region called the frontal cortex for more elaborate processing.”
Dr. Jonathan Cohen, a neuroscientist at Princeton, studies a part of the frontal cortex called the anterior cingulate, located in back of the forehead. “This part of the brain has several functions,” Dr. Cohen said, “including the task of detecting errors and conflict in the flow of information being processed automatically.”
Brain imaging experiments are beginning to show that when a person gets an unexpected reward - the equivalent of a huge shot of delicious apple juice - more dopamine reaches the anterior cingulate. When a person expects a reward and does not get it, less dopamine reaches the region. And when a person expects a reward and gets it, the anterior cingulate is silent.
“When people expect a reward and do not receive it, their brains need a way to register the fact that something is amiss, in order to recalibrate expectations for future events,” Dr. Cohen said. “As in monkeys, human dopamine neurons project to areas that plan and control movements,” he said. “Fluctuating levels of dopamine make people get up and do things, outside their conscious awareness.”
The number of things people do to increase their dopamine firing rates is unlimited, neuroscientists are discovering. Several studies were published last year looking at monetary rewards and dopamine. “Money may be abstract but to the brain it looks like cocaine, food, sex or anything a person expects is rewarding,” said Dr. Hans Breiter, a neuroscientist at Harvard. “People crave it.”
“Some people seem to be born with vulnerable dopamine systems that get hijacked by social rewards. The same neural circuitry involved in the highs and lows of abusing drugs is activated by winning or losing money, anticipating a good meal or seeking beautiful faces to look at,” Dr. Breiter said.
They Keep Gambling
For example, scientists now know that dopamine circuits are activated by cocaine. “People become addicted when their reward circuits have been hijacked by the drug,” Dr. Montague said.
“Winning in gambling can also hijack the dopamine system,” Dr. Berns said. “Many people visit a casino, lose money , and are not tempted to go back. But compulsive gamblers seem to have vulnerable dopamine systems,” he said. “The first time they win, they get a huge dopamine rush that gets embedded in their memory. Then they keep gambling, and the occasional dopamine rush of winning overrides their conscious knowledge that they will lose in the long run.”
Other experiments show that reward circuits are activated when young men look at photos of beautiful women, and that these same circuits are defective in women with eating disorders like bulimia. Bulimics say they are addicted to vomiting because it gives them a warm, positive feeling. In most people, music activates neural systems of reward and emotion. Older people with age-related impairments to the frontal cortex often do poorly on gambling tasks and, several experiments show they are more prone to believe misleading advertising.
Neuroscientists say that part of the mass appeal of live sporting events is their inherent unpredictability. When a baseball player with two outs at the bottom of the ninth inning hits a home run to win the game, thousands of spectators simultaneously experience a huge surge of dopamine. People keep coming back, as if addicted to the euphoria of experiencing unexpected rewards.
“One of the most promising areas for looking at unconscious reward circuits in human behavior concerns the stock market,” Dr. Montague said. “Economists do not study people, they study collective neural systems in people who form mass expectations. For example, when the Federal Reserve unexpectedly lowered interest rates twice last year, the market went up,” he said. “When it lowered interest rates on other occasions and investors knew the move was coming, markets did not respond.”
“Economists and neuroscientists use the same mathematical equations for modeling market behavior and dopamine behavior,” Dr. Montague said. “Neuroscience may provide an entirely new set of constructs for understanding economic decision making.”
An FDA Advisory Panel has approved their assertion..,
both contrary to known genetic fact, and baseline ethical understanding..,
that blackness is substantially more than shared cultural identity - and they're intent on telling you what you think. Cause it's an equally well-established fact that if you repeat a lie often enough and for long enough, it becomes a truth in consensus reality...,
Craving a banana split when you know you are lactose intolerant.
And LactAid does no damn good.
Pfizer, NAACP Unite to Impact Black Health Care and AIDS Prevention
A DVD promoting HIV/AIDS prevention among black women is one of the first national projects developed in an unprecedented collaboration between the NAACP and Pfizer Inc., the world’s largest drug company.
Pfizer, according to NAACP executives, will also serve as the exclusive sponsor of the Health Fair at the NAACP's national convention in July, providing free health screenings and health information to the more than 12,000 blacks expected to be in attendance.
The three-year, $1 million partnership between Pfizer and the nation’s oldest civil rights organization formalizes a long-standing relationship and will now accelerate distribution of health-care research and development of national advocacy programs for black Americans, officials said.
“This partnership is important because racial and ethnic health disparities disproportionately impact African-Americans,” Lucy Perez, national health director for the NAACP’s Health Advocacy Division, told BlackAmericaWeb.com last week.
Presented without comment.
Study: Risks Remain for Teens Who Pledge Abstinence
By Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 18, 2005; 8:05 PM
Teenagers who take virginity pledges -- public declarations to abstain from sex -- are almost as likely to be infected with a sexually transmitted disease as those who never made the pledge, an eight-year study released yesterday found.Although young people who sign a virginity pledge delay the initiation of sexual activity, marry at younger ages and have fewer sexual partners, they are also less likely to use condoms and more likely to experiment with oral and anal sex, said the researchers from Yale and Columbia universities.
"The sad story is that kids who are trying to preserve their technical virginity are, in some cases, engaging in much riskier behavior," said lead author Peter S. Bearman, a professor at Columbia's Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy. "From a public health point of view, an abstinence movement that encourages no vaginal sex may inadvertently encourage other forms at sex that are at higher risk of STDs."
The findings are based on the federally funded National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a survey begun in 1995 that tracked 20,000 young people from high school to young adulthood. At the start of the project, the students were 12 to 18 years old and agreed to detailed, sexually explicit interviews. They were re-interviewed in 1997 and again in 2002, when 11,500 also provided urine samples.
...
Conservative academics said the paper overlooked earlier important findings about adolescents who take virginity pledges, most notably that they have fewer pregnancies and out-of-wedlock births.
"It's hugely successful on those variables," Rector said. "Bearman has focused in on the one variable he thinks can show they [pledgers] don't do better."
Right now in California, there is a health care crisis. It is a crisis of supply. It is also an extraordinary opportunity, and I am perplexed about it.
The simple fact is that California has a nursing shortage. We are 21,000 nurses short, which places us 49th out of 50 states. Over at Monster.com I found 405 openings for RNs in Los Angeles alone. On the radio yesterday they were talking about how the Phillipines is one of the greatest outsourcers of medical personnel in the world. So what I want to understand is how it happens that Americans are not interested or are unwilling to do nursing.
How does it happen that, especially as regards black Americans, the abundant opportunities in health care are not being exploited? Let me say it plainly, if you believe that black America has an unemployment problem, the answer is written in capital letters (and in blood). Get your black butt into medical school!
HIV Infection Rate Among Blacks Doubles Updated: Friday, Feb. 25, 2005 - 7:08 PMBy JEFF DONN
Associated Press WriterBOSTON (AP) - The HIV infection rate has doubled among blacks in the United States over a decade while holding steady among whites _ stark evidence of a widening racial gap in the epidemic, government scientists said Friday.
Other troubling statistics indicate that almost half of all infected people in the United States who should be receiving HIV drugs are not getting them.
From David Whitman:
As might be expected, green advocates criticized the Bush bill and its regulatory heir, the Clean Air Interstate Rule, for failing to go far enough or fast enough in reducing pollution. But in a novel twist, environmentalists have also asserted that Clear Skies is actually weaker than the existing Clean Air Act—and would thus allow millions of tons of added pollution and inflict tens of thousands of needless deaths during the next decade. John Kerry summed up the conventional wisdom on the left during his second debate with President Bush by observing that Clear Skies is “one of those Orwellian na- mes. . . . If they just left the Clean Air Act all alone the way it is today—no change—the air would be cleaner than it is if you passed the Clear Skies Act.” In fact, this oft-repeated green bromide turns out to be false. But the dispute over the bill's impact is only part of the story of how the perfect has become the enemy of the good in the clean air wars. The battle over Clear Skies has shaped up as a classic Washington tale of a creditable endeavor hopelessly mismanaged by its sponsor, demagogued by its opponents, and tainted from the start by the administration's well-earned reputation as handmaidens of industry. The resulting gridlock could delay attempts to clean up the environment and cost thousands of Americans their lives.
Ummmm....
I'm lazy.
Can someone point out the details of the study concerning Blacks belief about AIDS?
I was just told that the study was not a country-wide, but a study of opinions done in one city.
I haven't talked about spirituality much here. I think Craig has that subject on lock. Easily. But besides that while I consider myself a Believer, I am definitely NOT a modern Christian. I believe that faith is a crock and easily used by people who have the breath of the Spirit...but absolutely NOTHING more. Whenever I read the New Testament, what I see is Jesus consistently rolling his eyes at the idiocy of his discipiles.
And don't get me started on Paul.
But yet and still I recognize the strength and power of people to use the Spirit in wondrous ways. To say that the power of prayer has been understudied is an understatement. My father, also a critic, sent this to me.