Pejman Yousefzadeh

Because loneliness might be lethal:

… Just as we once knew that infectious diseases killed, but didn’t know that germs spread them, we’ve known intuitively that loneliness hastens death, but haven’t been able to explain how. Psychobiologists can now show that loneliness sends misleading hormonal signals, rejiggers the molecules on genes that govern behavior, and wrenches a slew of other systems out of whack. They have proved that long-lasting loneliness not only makes you sick; it can kill you. Emotional isolation is ranked as high a risk factor for mortality as smoking. A partial list of the physical diseases thought to be caused or exacerbated by loneliness would include Alzheimer’s, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and even cancer—tumors can metastasize faster in lonely people.

Behold. (Via Jacob Levy. And yes, sleeping more and having less stress in one’s life would also be helpful.)

But I guess there is a first time for everything:

Thomas Frieden, director of the US Centers for Disease Control, warns “nightmare bacteria” with a “fatality rate as high as 50 percent” and a high resistance to antibiotics could soon become a public health crisis. A coordinated international effort to prevent that outcome is imperative.

He was referring to carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, commonly referred to as CREs, which are normally found in human intestines. As discussed by this primer issued by the CDC, these bacteria have been known to spread outside the intestines and cause infections—something that usually happens in nursing homes intensive care units, and rehabilitation centers, and usually affects elderly patients and/or those with compromised immune systems. Many of these patients are receiving care that includes having their skin breached with IVs, ports and catheters, which help in the spread of CREs.

CRE infections can be life-threatening, and as indicated by their name, cannot be treated even with carbapenem, which is a class of antibiotics that is used only when other antibiotics have failed, and which must be administered in hospitals, oftentimes intravenously. Even worse, Frieden points out, there is a way for CREs to spread their resistance to antibiotics to other bacteria, which may mean that a host of infections once considered easily curable might require hospitalization and intensive treatments to avoid patient deaths.

Frieden and the CDC tell us that we have “a limited window of opportunity” to do something about CREs. While CREs are currently confined to hospital and other care settings in the United States, the worry is that they may spread to the general population. If that happens, we will be in trouble, as CREs can be very hard to detect. Additionally, as the Wired story I linked to in this paragraph points out, we have to worry not just about CREs, but also other carbapenem-resistant bacteria that are not Enterobacteriaceae. The story references this finding on carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii, which over the past fourteen years has become eight times less susceptible to carbapenem treatments. These superbugs, along with CREs, can pose a severe risk to the general population.

Read it all … if you are feeling brave, that is.

Discussing a new initiative to map the human brain, thus possibly discovering how to cure diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, the president dubbed himself “Scientist-in-Chief.” I like Barack Obama’s brain-mapping initiative well enough; it costs $100 million, which is cheap for government work and which could save us a lot of money down the road if it actually leads to advances in curing neurological diseases. At the same time, I can’t help but think that an actual “Scientist-in-Chief” wouldn’t be willing to suggest that vaccines cause autism.

But maybe that’s just me.

Additionally, I would have to think that a “Scientist-in-Chief” would actually care about facts, but again, I am let down; this time by the president’s insistence that 40% of gun sales lack background checks. Glenn Kessler points out that the claim just isn’t true:

There are two key problems with the president’s use of this statistic: The numbers are about two decades old, yet he acts as if they are fresh, and he refers to “purchases” or “sales” when in fact the original report concerned “gun acquisitions” and “transactions.”  Those are much broader categories of data.

As we noted before, the White House said the figure comes from a 1997 Institute of Justice report, written by Philip Cook of Duke University and Jens Ludwig of the University of Chicago.

 This study was based on data collected from a survey in 1994, the same year that the Brady Act requirements for background checks came into effect. In fact, the questions concerned purchases in 1993 and 1994, and the Brady Act went into effect in early 1994 — meaning that some, if not many, of the guns were bought in a pre-Brady environment.

Digging deeper, we found that the survey sample was just 251 people. (The survey was done by telephone, using a random-digit-dial method, with a response rate of 50 percent.) With this sample size, the 95 percent confidence interval will be plus or minus six percentage points.

Moreover, when asked whether the respondent bought from a licensed firearms dealer, the possible answers included “probably was/think so” and “probably not,” leaving open the possibility the purchaser was mistaken. (The “probably not” answers were counted as “no.”)

When all of the “yes” and “probably was” answers were added together, that left 35.7 percent of respondents indicating they did not receive the gun from a licensed firearms dealer. Rounding up gets you to 40 percent, although as we noted before, the survey sample is so small it could also be rounded down to 30 percent.

Moreover, when gifts, inheritances and prizes are added in, then the number shrinks to 26.4 percent. (The survey showed that nearly 23.8 percent of the people surveyed obtained their gun either as a gift or inherited it, and about half of them believed a licensed firearms dealer was the source.)

Cook and Ludwig, in a lengthier 1996 study of the data for the Police Foundation, acknowledged the ambiguity in the answers but gave their best estimate as a range of 30 to 40 percent for transactions in the “off-the-books” secondary market. (The shorter 1997 study cited by the White House does not give a range but instead says “approximately 60 percent of gun acquisitions” involved a licensed dealer.)

Meanwhile, note the phrasing in the original report — “acquisitions” and “transactions,” which included trades, gifts and the like. But Obama spoke of “gun purchases,” and his tweet referred to “gun sales.”

Better “Scientists-in-Chief,” please.

America’s most officious meddler mayor is back:

Now listen up, if you can.

Mayor Bloomberg — who has already cracked down on smoking, junk food, trans fats, salt and super-sized drinks — is embarking on a new crusade: preventing New Yorkers from going deaf.

Hizzoner’s health officials are planning a social-media campaign to warn young people about the risk of losing their hearing from listening to music at high volume on personal MP3 players, The Post has learned.

“With public and private support, a public-education campaign is being developed to raise awareness about safe use of personal music players … and risks of loud and long listening,” said Nancy Clark, the city Health Department’s assistant commissioner of environmental-disease prevention.

The campaign, which will cost $250,000, is being financed through a grant received from the Fund for Public Health, the Health Department’s fund-raising arm.

Of course, it’s plenty dumb to listen to extra loud music and podcasts, and risk losing one’s hearing as a consequence. But why must the mayor of New York once again play Metropolitan/National Nanny regarding the issue?

Bloomberg is weird in other ways as well, He seems to believe that homeless shelters in New York city are being overrun by rich people looking for a roof over their heads. Because of course, if you park your private jet in New York, the first thing you think of is not your favorite room at the Waldorf. No, the first thing you think of is securing your preferred spot at the homeless shelter of your choice.

To be fair to Bloomberg, he does have his virtues. For example, he accepts that government has no right whatsoever to force you to exercise.

At least, he accepts that for the moment.

Huge.

Doctors announced on Sunday that a baby had been cured of an H.I.V. infection for the first time, a startling development that could change how infected newborns are treated and sharply reduce the number of children living with the virus that causes AIDS.

The baby, born in rural Mississippi, was treated aggresively with antiretroviral drugs starting around 30 hours after birth, something that is not usually done. If further study shows this works in other babies, it will almost certainly change the way newborns of infected mothers are treated all over the world. The United Nations estimates that 330,000 babies were newly infected in 2011, the most recent year for which there is data, and that more than 3 million children globally are living with H.I.V.

If the report is confirmed, the child born in Mississippi would be only the second well-documented case of a cure in the world, giving a boost to research aimed at a cure, something that only a few years ago was thought to be virtually impossible.

The first person cured was Timothy Brown, known as the “Berlin patient,’’ a middle-aged man with leukemia who received a bone-marrow transplant from a donor genetically resistant to H.I.V. infection.

“For pediatrics, this is our Timothy Brown,’’ said Dr. Deborah Persaud, associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and lead author of the report on the baby. “It’s proof of principle that we can cure H.I.V. infection if we can replicate this case.’’

I’m old enough to remember back in the 1980s when people were terrified that a mere mosquito bite could infect them with HIV. Even after we got over that fear, there was still the worry that we would never be in a position to allow people to live with HIV/AIDS, let alone cure the condition.

Nowadays, people with HIV are able to take drug cocktails to ensure that the disease never progresses. I’m sure that there are side effects that are less than fun, but it beats getting sick and dying. And people like Magic Johnson and Andrew Sullivan are alive and well, long past what was thought to be their expiration date. And thank God for that, and for all the others who are able to live with HIV—emphasis on the word “live”—in much the same way that one is able to live with any other chronic but manageable illness.

And now, we might have a method to cure people infected with the virus. That was considered unthinkable not so long ago. For all of humanity’s failings, its ability to contend with and overcome crises is a marvel to behold.

Christian Caryl:

Which United States president will go down in history as the greatest humanitarian to have served in the office? The Republican Herbert Hoover is often known as the “Great Humanitatarian” for his work administering famine relief in post-World War I Europe (and Bolshevik Russia) in the 1920s — but he did all that before he actually became president. Others might make the case for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democrat who succeeded Hoover in the White House, whose New Deal initiatives relieved poverty and sickness on a grand scale within the United States.

But I’d suggest that there’s one president whose contribution dwarfs all the others. Unlike Hoover, he launched his program while he was in office, and unlike FDR, he received virtually no votes in return, since most of the people who have benefited aren’t U.S. citizens. In fact, there are very few Americans around who even associate him with his achievement. Who’s this great humanitarian? The name might surprise you: it’s George W. Bush.

I should say, right up front, that I do not belong to the former president’s political camp. I strongly disapproved of many of his policies. At the same time, I think it’s a tragedy that the foreign policyshortcomings of the Bush administration have conspired to obscure his most positive legacy — not least because it saved so many lives, but because there’s so much that Americans and the rest of the world can learn from it. Both his detractors and supporters tend to view his time in office through the lens of the “war on terror” and the policies that grew out of it. By contrast, only a few Americans have ever heard of PEPFAR, the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which President Bush announced in his State of the Union address in 2003.

Team Obama is planning to cut PEPFAR, as Caryl notes. This is incomprehensible, given that PEPFAR funding makes up a minuscule portion of the budget, and yields so much good for so little cost. The following paragraph is worth excerpting as well:

“Bush did more to stop AIDS and more to help Africa than any president before or since,” says New York Times correspondent Peter Baker, who’s writing a history of the Bush-Cheney White House that’s due to appear in October. “He took on one of the world’s biggest problems in a big, bold way and it changed the course of a continent. If it weren’t for Iraq, it would be one of the main things history would remember about Bush, and it still should be part of any accounting of his presidency.”

There is quite a lot of bad news out there in the world, so any chance to focus on good news ought to be seized with relish:

Two studies of malnourished children offer the first major new scientific findings in a decade about the causes and treatment of severe malnutrition, which affects more than 20 million children around the world and contributes to the deaths of more than a million a year. Merely giving children a cheap antibiotic along with the usual nutritional treatment could save tens of thousands of lives a year, researchers found.

The studies, in Malawi, led by scientists from Washington University in St. Louis, reveal that severe malnutrition often involves more than a lack of food, and that feeding alone may not cure it.

The antibiotic study found that a week of the medicine raised survival and recovery rates when given at the start of a longer course of a tasty “therapeutic food” made from peanut butter fortified with milk powder, oil, sugar and micronutrients. Malnourished children are prone to infections, and the drugs — either amoxicillin or cefdinir — were so helpful that researchers said medical practice should change immediately to include an antibiotic in the routine treatment of severe malnutrition.

“This is ready for prime time,” said Dr. Indi Trehan, an author of the study. The study was published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. The senior author is Dr. Mark J. Manary, an expert on malnutrition and one of the pioneers in using the fortified peanut butter, which researchers say has saved countless lives.

Because of the results, the World Health Organization expects to recommend broader use of antibiotics in guidelines on treating malnutrition that are to be issued next month, said Zita Weise Prinzo, a technical officer in the group’s nutrition department. A week’s worth of drugs costs only a few dollars, so governments and donors are likely to accept the idea, researchers say.

The second study shows, for the first time, that an imbalance in bacterial populations in the gut may contribute to a severe form of malnutrition called kwashiorkor.

More on this story here. This is very encouraging news.

I am not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV, but I have had loved ones go to the hospital to undergo significant surgical procedures. The aftermath of those surgeries presented said loved ones with significant rehabilitation demands which were made all the more daunting because of the post-operative pain involved.

When said loved ones—and any other patient, for that matter—experiences that pain, s/he is supposed to tell a doctor, who then adjusts pain medication accordingly. The rule set down by physicians is that you aren’t supposed to try to be a hero; if you are in pain, you are supposed to say so, and you are supposed to get the appropriate amount of medication for your pain as a consequence. That certainly was the rule when I had gum recession surgery this past October. I was instructed to take medication to proactively suppress the pain, not to chase pain by skimping on my medication—only to take it when I couldn’t bear the discomfort.

Of course, different people are differently medicated and need different doses of medication. I received a prescription for oxycodone when I had my procedure, but I didn’t have to take a single pill; ibuprofen was more than sufficient to do the job in managing whatever discomfort I felt. And of course, physicians are supposed to be careful about how and what they prescribe, since we don’t want to turn patients into addicts.

But it would be best to leave these kinds of decisions to the doctor and his/her patient. So when an officious, meddling busybody decides that he is in the best position to decide who gets painkillers and who doesn’t, and when said officious, meddling busybody declares that it is okay if some people “suffer” as a consequence of his decision, I tend to get more than a little upset. And you should get more than a little upset too.

Dealing with physical pain as the result of a particular ailment retards one’s ability to recover from that ailment. Michael Bloomberg ought to know that. Banning sixteen ounce soda sales was a stupid enough thing for him and his administration to do—especially since people could simply purchase two eight ounce sodas in order to get around the ban. But this decision is … well, look at the title of this post.

While anything can happen between now and December 21st, I am reasonably confident in my prediction that the planet will not come to an end tomorrow, notwithstanding what various lunatics have interpreted the Mayans as saying. We’ll all still have to go to work, pay our bills, deal with various annoying people and get stuck in traffic, so perhaps there are some of us who will wish that the Earth would get consumed in a massive fireball, annihilated by an asteroid, or rent asunder by an earthquake, but those people are, alas, out of luck.

In short order, of course, we will obsess over the many people who gave away all of their possessions and spent every dime they had anticipating The Day Humanity Snuffed It. Get ready, gentle readers. Stories about those people are being prepared as I write this.

Which makes you wonder: What if half the mental energy that had been devoted to seriously—not jokingly, not ironically, seriously—worrying about the faux-Mayan-predicted apocalypse had been spent addressing an actual, honest-to-goodness issue crying out for human attention? Walter Russell Mead informs us that thanks to the existence of drug-resistant strains, tuberculosis is making a comeback. Tuberculosis! Blessedly, it is rare in the United States, but it is here and it could get a whole lot worse. Abroad, these new drug-resistant strains are a real worry. And since we do not vaccinate for TB, as Mead points out, the problem is compounded tremendously.

I daresay that there are a number of readers who would agree with me that the recurrence of TB could have used some human attention. And yet, valuable amounts of brainpower and focus was wasted worrying about misinterpretations of the Mayan calendar. Paradoxically, by obsessing as we have about a false apocalypse, we are giving actual dangers to humanity a fighting chance to manifest themselves in what could be truly awful ways.

Or, to paraphrase some song lyrics: It’s not the end of the world as you or I or anyone else knows it. But that doesn’t mean that we should feel fine.