Most people are familiar with the “placebo effect” – people who believe they are being treated for an ailment can show improvement or be cured, even if the treatment consists of sugar pills. This is the hurdle pharmaceutical companies must clear when testing a new drug. To be proven effective, a drug must be shown to be more effective than a placebo. Apparently the bar is getting higher.

Steve Silberman reports in Wired that placebos are statistically getting stronger and more effective:

“Last November, a new type of gene therapy for Parkinson’s disease, championed by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, was abruptly withdrawn from Phase II trials after unexpectedly tanking against placebo. A stem-cell startup called Osiris Therapeutics got a drubbing on Wall Street in March, when it suspended trials of its pill for Crohn’s disease, an intestinal ailment, citing an “unusually high” response to placebo. Two days later, Eli Lilly broke off testing of a much-touted new drug for schizophrenia when volunteers showed double the expected level of placebo response.

It’s not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late ’90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time.

It’s not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It’s as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.”

This is a problem for Big Pharma, who are spending millions designing drugs that are not as effective as the astonishing curative power of belief in a sugar pill. Silberman described the effect in a CNBC interview on Monday:

With billions at stake, drug companies are apparently tinkering with a pill’s color, shape, name and labeling in the hope of building a better, more effective um… placebo. Again from the article:

“The most important ingredient in any placebo is the doctor’s bedside manner, but according to research, the color of a tablet can boost the effectiveness even of genuine meds—or help convince a patient that a placebo is a potent remedy.”

Hmmmm…

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” – Philip K. Dick

“The controlling of medical costs in countries such as Britain through rationing, and the health consequences thereof, are legendary. The stories of people dying on a waiting list or being denied altogether read like a horror script … People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.”
- Editorial from the Investor’s Business Daily

“I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived.”
- Stephen Hawking responding to the editorial

Folks, I think a reasonable case can be made that the current reforms suggested won’t reign in costs to the levels that we need to prevent us from falling further into debt.

But these scare tactics about rationing and death panels are intellectually bankrupt and need to stop.

On this I hope we can all agree.

I’ve been genuinely intrigued at how much fiction and reality have been intersecting recently.

See, there’s this film called MOON and it follows the story of a guy working on the far side of the moon who figures out that there’s a lot more to his mission than collecting the natural resource Helium-3. It’s a fantastic piece of science fiction cinema and if you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favor and catch it while it’s still in theatres.

But after seeing it I discovered that not only is the energy source they talked about in the movie real, but it’s clean, supposedly economically viable and extremely plentiful on the moon’s surface.

More at True/Slant.

We’ve been hearing about cellulosic ethanol for several years now, generally with the caveat that were at least a few years, and a few scientific breakthroughs, away from it coming to market and helping wean us from foreign oil. Unlike corn, which breaks down into the sugars necessary to be processed into ethanol relatively easily, cellulose is a hardy material that takes time and energy to break down. Its upside is that there happens to be more cellulose present than any other organic molecule on the planet. This is why millions upon millions of dollars has been poured into cellulosic ethanol research, genetically modifying naturally occurring enzymes to break it down faster and looking for ways to bring the price per gallon down closer to the price of gasoline.

Unlike corn, which takes land out of food production, is inefficient as far as how much energy it takes to produce and is a high maintenance crop, finding raw material for a cellulosic plant is easy. Wood chips from sawmills, the kudzu scourge spreading through the hot and humid Southeast, agricultural waste and even up to 80 percent of what ends up in our landfills could be used to make cellulosic ethanol.  Thankfully, the millions of dollars in research and development have begun to bear fruit.

A gas station near Ottawa is the first in the world to begin selling a cellulosic blend, called CE-10, to the public. Iogen, the company behind the demonstration plant that produced the fuel, plans to build its first full scale cellulosic ethanol plant in Saskatchewan. It has reached an agreement with the local government and Royal Dutch Shell to convert an old Mill site to their purposes, with the government even agreeing to purchase any green energy produced at the site. The running demonstration plant only has the capacity to produce about 3 million liters of ethanol each year, using wheat straw agricultural waste, while the new plant will be able to pump out about 75 million liters. It will make use of a more diverse feed stock, including agricultural waste from other crops, grasses native to nearby areas and even wood chips from area mills.

The march of progress continues, with a number of large companies making big investments into these technologies. Last year GM purchased a large share of Coskata, a big player in the emerging cellulosic ethanol industry, who claims to have developed a process that simplefies the complex and costly process of breaking down cellulose and brings the cost of production down to being competitive with gasoline. There are as many as two dozen companies with plans to build plants similar to Iogen’s, but the economic downturn is effecting their ability to finance these projects. Coskata is hoping to get some stimulus money, in the form of loan guarantees, to help finance its plant, with an estimated production of 50-100 million gallons a year.

As President Obama often says, if we intend to be a leader in the green energy industry of tomorrow, we need to move boldly in that direction today. Now is not the time to let companies who wish to lead us in there falter because of financing problems. Some are talking about a new stimulus bill, which most people reasonably see as a terrible idea, that would focus on these kinds of projects and job creation. The first should have done so, and I have little confidence that a new one would make it through congress without being similarly unfocused and pork laden.

We don’t get too many of these chances, where we can kill three birds with one stone. Job creation, independence from foreign oil and environmental progress can all be had with some smart funding priorities. Lets hope the administration recognizes this in time.

In America, we tend to laud the optimist and shun the pessimist. Not surprisingly, we are inundated with bromides about positive thinking and self-affirmation. But, turns out, all that stuff might not work. A new study published in Psychological Science argues that forcing positive thoughts can have negative consequences.

I’ve always thought self affirmations were a load of crap. Of course, I get itchy anytime someone tries to convince me that the world is roses and bunny rabbits. It’s my personality. But apparently, I’m not alone. In fact, the positive-thinking study found that:

[U]nfavorable thoughts about ourselves intrude very easily, especially among those of us with low self-esteem — so easily and so persistently that even when a positive alternative is presented, it just underlines how awful we believe we are.

The paper provides support for newer forms of psychotherapy that urge people to accept their negative thoughts and feelings rather than try to reject and fight them. In the fighting, we not only often fail but can also make things worse. Mindfulness and meditation techniques, in contrast, can teach people to put their shortcomings into a larger, more realistic perspective. Call it the power of negative thinking.

In other words, we need to learn to cope. Trying to force ourselves to be positive and happy just makes us realize how negative and unhappy we actually are. That’s not to say we should mope around and drink all day. But it is saying we shouldn’t feel bad for not being happy. Being functional is good enough.

And isn’t that wisdom for our new age?

The first confirmed death in the US.

Fron CNN:

A child in Texas has become the first fatality from swine flu in the United States, the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday.

“I can confirm the very sad news out of Texas that a child has died of the H1N1 virus,” the CDC’s Dr. Richard Besser said.

“As a parent and a pediatrician, my heart goes out to the family.”

He said the child was about 2 years old.

However, to put this all in perspective…

Common seasonal flu kills 250,000 to 500,000 people every year worldwide, far more than the current outbreak of swine flu.

So it doesn’t make the child’s death any less tragic, but some proper context is appropriate since the normal flu is always deadly.

More as it develops…

UPDATE:
The title of the post has changed to reflect the fact that the child was from Mexico and travelled to the US for treatment.

Sorry for any confusion.

There’s been a lot of talk about this little virus the past couple days, so I figured it might be helpful to connect everybody with some more stories that could help you sort the wheat from the chaff.

And away we go…

• Officials in Mexico are scrambling to find the source of the infection, and it points directly to the story about a pig farm we talked about earlier today.
• CBS reports that the Department of Homeland Security is setting some guidelines for a swine flu quarantine. Fingers crossed we won’t have to use them.
• Dems are jumping on the possibly pandemic as a way to show that they’re offering leadership.
• Two deaths in L.A. county were thought to possibly be related to outbreak, but later were proven not to be.
• The CDC thinks there will be at least some American deaths from the flu with 68 reported cases so far.
• Michele Bachmann actually links swine flu outbreaks to Democratic control. Too bad she’s wrong. Otherwise it totally could have become a campaign issue!
• Including Mexico and the US, 7 countries have reported cases but only the ones in Mexico have proven fatal so far.
• A debate is starting about whether or not this should even be called swine flu because people think they could catch it from pork products.
• And to that point, The Ag Secretary has already stopped calling it swine flu and is not talking about the “2009 H1N1 virus outbreak.”
• A vaccine is on its way, but it could still take a few months to grow.
• Will this outbreak be extremely fatal? David Dobbs doesn’t think so and has some numbers to back it up.

So that’s it for now. If you have any stories, drop them in the comments below, but please use URL shorteners like Tr.im or TinyURL.com so the link isn’t huge.

More as it develops…

A Smithfield Foods farm could be linked to the outbreak.

Grist has more…

Is Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork packer and hog producer, linked to the outbreak? Smithfield operates massive hog-raising operations Perote, Mexico, in the state of Vera Cruz, where the outbreak originated. The operations, grouped under a Smithfield subsidiary called Granjas Carroll, raise 950,000 hogs per year, according to the company Web site.

On Friday, the U.S. disease-tracking blog Biosurveillance published a timeline of the outbreak containing this nugget, dated April 6 [...]

Residents [of Perote] believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak. According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to “flu.” However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms. It was unclear whether health officials had identified a suspected pathogen responsible for this outbreak.

Now, as anybody who has ever passed by a corporate pig farm will tell you, they’re awful, awful, places. And often, they have these open-pit lagoons of pig feces that literally just sit there and allow any type of nastiness to breed in it. That includes drug resistant strains of staph infection and other forms of super bacteria that literally feed on the medication that was once used to stop it. And too often these lagoons aren’t properly protected and the waste gets into rivers and other water supplies. Disgusting stuff.

And, by the way, if you think I’m picking on Smithfield Foods, I’m not. Their record is atrocious when it comes to waste management, and if it resulted in the current outbreak you can be sure there will be hell to pay when this all shakes out.

More as it develops…

The news about the flu is scary enough, but to think that the leader of the free world may have been exposed to this newly mutated virus is disturbing.

To be clear, this hasn’t been confirmed and the man in the picture isn’t the one who died, but that is the same museum Obama was in when he greeted the man.

So I realize that the title isn’t entirely accurate, just read this from Bloomberg:

The first case was seen in Mexico on April 13. The outbreak coincided with the President Barack Obama’s trip to Mexico City on April 16. Obama was received at Mexico’s anthropology museum in Mexico City by Felipe Solis, a distinguished archeologist who died the following day from symptoms similar to flu, Reforma newspaper reported. The newspaper didn’t confirm if Solis had swine flu or not.

And here’s what Mexico is doing to try and contain it…

The Mexican government is distributing breathing masks to curtail the disease’s spread. There is no vaccine against the new strain of swine flu, health authorities said.

Museums, theaters and other venues in the Mexico City area, where large crowds gather, have shut down voluntarily and concerts and other events canceled to help contain the disease. Two professional soccer games will be played tomorrow in different Mexico City stadiums without any fans, El Universal newspaper reported. Catholic masses will be held, the newspaper said, although church officials urged worshipers to wear breath masks and to avoid contact.

Schools will likely remain closed next week, Calderon said in the Oaxaca speech. The decree allows Calderon to regulate transportation, enter any home or building for inspection, order quarantines and assign any task to all federal, state and local authorities as well as health professionals to combat the disease.

Again, very scary stuff and I’ll try to keep everybody up to date with what’s going on.

O.k., this story is just cool:

Earlier this month, Wilson thought of a tweet (the name for a post to the social networking site) and poof, his computer read his mind and sent the darn thing. At just 23 characters, Wilson’s message, “using EEG to send tweet,” was done with a computer setup that interprets brain waves.

Well, it wasn’t that simple. You have to be hooked to a device which reads brain waves and stare at a screen containing the alphabet:

All the letters come up, and each one of them flashes individually … And what your brain does is, if you’re looking at the ‘R’ on the screen and all the other letters are flashing, nothing happens. But when the ‘R’ flashes, your brain says, “Hey, wait a minute. Something’s different about what I was just paying attention to.” And you see a momentary change in brain activity.

And so the computer knows that’s the letter you want.

Sure, it’s hardly a practical way to write. But it does have exciting applications for those suffering from total paralysis. And, come on, tweeting with your mind? Welcome to the twenty-first century.

In the latest issue of the journal Psychological Science, the researchers taunted subjects with the story of a waiter who was surrounded by gourmet food but not allowed a taste. Some of the subjects were encouraged to go beyond polite listening and actually imagine this poor waiter, to have real empathy with his situation. And then everybody was shown pictures of expensive stuff. Those who had put themselves in the shoes of the waiter, had suffered all that self-control as he had, wanted that stuff, no matter the price.

Yes, we are hardwired to have a limited amount of self control. The theory is that, when our ancestors were struggling to survive in the wild, those who had lower self control could not be satiated by a little bit of food and were more likely than their stoic neighbors to head out and get more — thus increasing the chances those low self control types lived longer.

Evolutionarily speaking, Gordon Gekko was right. Greed is good. Of course, in a land of plenty, greed is a little less useful. Especially if you’re talking about boxes of cookies. Or, you know, mortgage-backed securities. I guess the trick should be to lose control in smaller ways. But that’s easier said than done, isn’t it?

Mounting evidence suggests a supervolcano located in modern-day Siberia may have killed 90% of life on Earth by wrecking havoc on the planet’s climate. The event happened 250 million years ago at the end of the Permian era.

The theory is the supervolcano’s magmas intruded on massive coal fields and turned the volcano into the world’s largest carbon burning plant, spewing out 100,000 gigatons of carbon. Reaction with salt deposits may have also shot methyl chloride into the atmosphere, causing the ozone layer to effectively collapse. The volcano remained active for 200,000 years, so the timeframe for this climate destruction remains unclear.

Global warming has been an increasingly popular theory as to what caused the Permian mass extinction. The question is, can our own carbon spewing ways lead to a similarly drastic result? In total, humanity is responsible for the emission of about 8 gigatons of carbon a year. But I’m guessing our planet and climate are quite different from that found 250 million years ago. Nevertheless, the research is fascinating.

Yes. If we catch MS earlier, it may be reversible.

From New Scientist:

Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease in which the fatty myelin sheath that wraps around nerve cells and speeds up their rate of transmission comes under attack from the body’s own defences. [...]

For the first time, some of the disability associated with the early stages of multiple sclerosis appears to have been reversed. The treatment works by resetting patients’ immune systems using their own stem cells.

While randomised clinical trials are still needed to confirm the findings, they offer new hope to people in the early stages of the disease who don’t respond to drug treatment.

Having seen the effects of MS firsthand in a few people during my lifetime, this is incredibly encouraging news, especially since we have an administration that believes in the efficacy of common sense research free from the the limits of religion.

However, check out the last question/answer around 4:15 of this video.

All I can say is…it’s about time.

I’ve never understood the claim that somebody disclosing their sexuality would destroy troop morale, especially when it has been well documented that members of our military have served as openly gay and yet admired by their fellow soldiers.

Add to that the fact that openly gay soldiers serve in every single first world military in the world and you have a situation that clearly favors honesty and transparency.

Simply put, “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” is completely outdated and it’s about time we get rid of it once and for all.

Done and done.

Spooky, but I totally want one.

(h/t: TechCrunch)

A new study published in Pediatrics has found that those who take virginity pledges are just as likely to have sex as their non-pledging peers and are more likely not to use birth control.

Instead of comparing pledge-takers with the general teenage population, this new study used a refined methodology that controlled for the likelihood that a teenager would delay sex. So, while other studies have found that those who take virginity pledges are more likely to delay sex than the general teenage population, this current study found that the pledge-takers don’t end up delaying sex any longer than peers who are similarly likely to delay sex but who haven’t taken a pledge.

Basically, some teenagers are likely to delay sex for a variety of reasons. Taking a virginity pledge doesn’t prolong that delay. And worse, there is a correlation between pledge taking and the failure to use birth control.

That last bit is, intuitively, not surprising. Virginity pledges portray premarital sex as a sin. We tend to sneak around or be impulsive about things that make us feel guilty. We tend to take more reasonable approaches to things that don’t make us feel guilty.

What this study didn’t control for (and what I don’t think can be controlled for) is whether or not the pledge takers would have approached premarital sex with a high level of guilt and the same aversion to birth control even if they hadn’t take a pledge. What comes first? The view that premarital sex is a sin? Or the pledge?

I have a feeling that this study won’t change the minds of those who believe virginity pledges are worthwhile.

The team sounds impressive, mostly because there are actual scientists in this group and not just a bunch of industry lobbyists.

Steve Benen says it best…

I realize that it’s a testament to Bush’s presidency that I get so excited about a new president talking about science is such a progressive way, but I can’t help but feel encouraged about this reality-based rhetoric.

Indeed.

Steven Chu is the pick and his background is beyond impressive.

From Wash Post:

President-elect Barack Obama has chosen Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who heads the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to be the next energy secretary, and he has picked veteran regulators from diverse backgrounds to fill three other key jobs on his environmental and climate-change team, Democratic sources said yesterday. [...]

Chu, the son of Chinese immigrants, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997 for his work in the “development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.” But, in an interview last year with The Washington Post, Chu said he began to turn his attention to energy and climate change several years ago. “I was following it just as a citizen and getting increasingly alarmed,” he said. “Many of our best basic scientists [now] realize that this is getting down to a crisis situation.”

He sought and won the top job at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2004, leaving the Stanford University faculty to focus on energy issues. Chu was in London last night and unavailable for comment, but the physicist has been, in the words of his Web site, on a “mission” to make the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory “the world leader in alternative and renewable energy research, particularly the development of carbon-neutral sources of energy.”

My only question…is the guy a good manager? Because while he may be smart as hell, just having a smart guy in there isn’t enough. He has to manage and navigate government bureaucracy, and that’s a whole different ball game.

We shall see.

Welcome to reality South Africa.

From CNN:

South Africa has an estimated 5.5 million people living with the HIV virus — the highest total of any country in the world and more than one-sixth of the global total. About 1,000 South Africans die each day of the disease and complications like tuberculosis. Even more become infected because prevention messages haven’t worked.

And yet for years, [President Thabo] Mbeki’s government downplayed the extent of the crisis. Mbeki himself doubted the link between HIV and AIDS. His health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang openly mistrusted conventional AIDS drugs and instead promoted the value of lemons, garlic, beetroot and the African potato.

So how many lives could have been saved had Mbeki not denied the link?

A shocking, shameful amount…

A new study by Harvard researchers estimates that the South African government would have prevented the premature deaths of 365,000 people earlier this decade if it had provided antiretroviral drugs to AIDS patients and widely administered drugs to help prevent pregnant women from infecting their babies.

The question now: does this level of willful ignorance warrant criminal prosecution?

Because not only is the evidence overwhelming that HIV causes AIDS, it’s also overwhelmingly obvious that lemons, garlic, beetroot and the African potato do nothing to stop it.

But perhaps the shame that Mbeki and his cohorts will feel for the rest of their lives will be prison enough.

The nation has been clamoring for a solution on this and Bush finally decided to address it in this hour of need when healthcare workers are being inhumanely forced to give their patients information about birth control and artificial insemination.

The horror!

But it doesn’t just stop there…as the LA Times reveals:

It also seeks to cover more employees. For example, in addition to a surgeon and a nurse in an operating room, the rule would extend to “an employee whose task it is to clean the instruments,” the draft rule said.

But wait…it gets better. Because while you may have guessed this already, Bush is making this rule to apply to institutions that get federal funding…

Health and Human Services Department officials said the rule would apply to “any entity” that receives federal funds. It estimated 584,000 entities could be covered, including 4,800 hospitals, 234,000 doctor’s offices and 58,000 pharmacies.

Here’s why this is troubling…

Last year, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology said a “patient’s well-being must be paramount” when a conflict arises over a medical professional’s beliefs.

In calling for limits on “conscientious refusals,” ACOG cited four recent examples. In Texas, a pharmacist rejected a rape victim’s prescription for emergency contraception. In Virginia, a 42-year-old mother of two became pregnant after being refused emergency contraception. In California, a physician refused to perform artificial insemination for a lesbian couple. (In August, the California Supreme Court ruled that this refusal amounted to illegal discrimination based on sexual orientation.) And in Nebraska, a 19-year-old with a life-threatening embolism was refused an early abortion at a religiously affiliated hospital.

Now, the reality is that once this is put into play (around December 20), the Obama administration will simply overturn it a month later. But what a pitiful move by Bush. He had all this time to do this and he waited until the very last minute so one of the first things Obama does is anger the religious right.

Way to be a uniter George.