Swine flu: One killer virus, three key questions : Nature News –This is a deadly dull report until you get near the end and read about this experimentation. If these labs were not constantly breached, I’d be happier.

A deadly line-up of viruses is locked up in the computer-controlled safes at the Jean Mérieux/INSERM biosecurity level four (BSL-4) facility in Lyon, France, including Ebola, Nipah, Lassa, Hendra and Marburg. And in the next few weeks, scientists working there are planning to manufacture a new resident. They hope to test whether the highly transmissible pandemic H1N1 virus could reassort with its deadlier cousin, the H5N1 avian flu, to make a virus with the worst properties of both.

Over the summer, Lina’s team has been using the BSL-4 facility to investigate the likelihood that pandemic H1N1 will acquire resistance to the front-line antiviral drug oseltamivir (Tamiflu) through reassortment, and how easily these reassortments might spread. Resistance can emerge by spontaneous mutation, but given that seasonal H1N1 is already resistant to the drug and spreads easily, reassortment is perhaps the most likely way that pandemic H1N1 will acquire resistance — especially as seasonal H1NI and pandemic H1N1 are the same subtype. Since the start of the pandemic, Tamiflu-resistant strains have sporadically appeared in several countries but none has yet gained a foothold. That they haven’t arisen more often or spread more easily may be because there is little seasonal H1N1 circulating, as pandemic H1N1 is outcompeting it — a large number of co-infections are needed for transmissible reassortments to arise.

Washington Post- Nov. 17, 2009:

The nation’s economic crisis has catapulted the number of Americans who lack enough food to the highest level since the government has been keeping track, according to a new federal report, which shows that nearly 50 million people — including almost one child in four — struggled last year to get enough to eat.

At a time when rising poverty, widespread unemployment and other effects of the recession have been well documented, the report released Monday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture provides the government’s first detailed portrait of the toll that the faltering economy has taken on Americans’ access to food.

The magnitude of the increase in food shortages — and, in some cases, outright hunger — identified in the report startled even the nation’s leading anti-poverty advocates, who have grown accustomed to longer lines lately at food banks and soup kitchens.

In other parts of the world, it’s become acceptable for governments to simply ignore drug patents in order to produce more of necessary drugs in times of health scares. However, the US has mostly shied away from doing that, as the myth of patents as some great encouragement for innovation remains deeply rooted (and, oh yeah, pharmas are big campaign funders). However, with growing concern over the lack of supply for swine flu vaccines, there is some talk over whether or not the US will consider importing generic Tamiflu, even though the drug is still under patent in the US. There are approved generics, which are chemically identical, that are made elsewhere, such as India. However, importing it into the US, while it could save lives, is bound to be massively controversial. However, again, if we’re going to have a moral discussion about intellectual property, can someone please explain the moral argument for not being able to use generic drugs in this instance?

Of course someone will point out that the current flu scare is overblown and not many people are actually dying. Hence the purpose of my title: How many deaths are enough before we finally do something?

I’m going to trying something different with the comments.

In order to comment you have to give me a number. If you think the protection of patents outweighs human life, then put something like “everyone would have to die before we fix our patent system.” If you think life is more important, then put zero. Of course any number in between is welcome.

Since our current system doesn’t work what with continually rising costs that are unsustainable, millions uninsured, the country’s financial health in bad shape and on and on, what should we do? With so many aspects and facets to the problem to consider, which ones are most important?

From minor tweaks to scrapping it all and starting over, where do you stand?

Look at the question from two perspectives. First, what would you do if you could wave a magic wand and start over without politicians being involved? In other words, the health care system of your dreams.

Second, given where we are and the idiotic political realities of the US these days, what are the politically and monetarily feasible changes to what we now have that you would like to see?

(Click photo to enlarge.)

I saw this yesterday at the Airport, with the version in French being right beside this poster.

Huffington Post – 10-21-09:

Christina Turner feared that she might have been sexually assaulted after two men slipped her a knockout drug. She thought she was taking proper precautions when her doctor prescribed a month’s worth of anti-AIDS medicine.

Only later did she learn that she had made herself all but uninsurable.

Turner had let the men buy her drinks at a bar in Fort Lauderdale. The next thing she knew, she said, she was lying on a roadside with cuts and bruises that indicated she had been raped. She never developed an HIV infection. But months later, when she lost her health insurance and sought new coverage, she ran into a problem.

Turner, 45, who used to be a health insurance underwriter herself, said the insurance companies examined her health records. Even after she explained the assault, the insurers would not sell her a policy because the HIV medication raised too many health questions. They told her they might reconsider in three or more years if she could prove that she was still AIDS-free.

The Times – October 19, 2009:

That exercise is the key to losing our collective weight is something that we know so deep in our cultural guts that to question it would be ridiculous.

Except that is what the most cutting-edge obesity researchers are now doing. The recent studies show that the benefits of exercise for weight loss have been overstated. This idea is shocking. It goes so far against the orthodoxy that it is not something many can accept. And certainly for governments and the food industry that places them under so much pressure, it is too much to swallow.

But, as Professor Boyd Swinburn, director of the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention, says: “This is provocative in many ways . . . but my concern is that if we put the emphasis on exercise we are unlikely to tackle the obesity problem as we are not driving at the root cause.”

The idea that exercise will help to shed pounds is fairly recent — emerging at the same time that obesity began to boom in the 1980s.

Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan told an audience in Memphis he believes the H1N1 flu vaccine was developed to kill people, a witness said.

Farrakhan, 76, spoke for nearly three hours Sunday at a gathering to observe the religious group’s Holy Day of Atonement, which also marked the 14th anniversary of the Million Man March in Washington, the (Memphis) Commercial Appeal reported, citing a source who attended the speech.

“The Earth can’t take 6.5 billion people. We just can’t feed that many. So what are you going to do? Kill as many as you can. We have to develop a science that kills them and makes it look as though they died from some disease,” Farrakhan said, adding that many wise people won’t take the vaccine.

“The black community has become toxic and must cleanse and restore peace from within,” Farrakhan said.

Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said today the Obama administration is officially reversing the federal stance on medical marijuana and ordering authorities not to arrest or charge any users and suppliers who conform to state laws.

In guidelines issued today, Justice Department officials are telling prosecutors and federal drug agents that they have more important things to do than to arrest people who obey state laws that allow some use or sale of medical marijuana.

The move clarifies what some critics had said was an ambiguous position of the Obama administration on the controversial issue, especially in the battleground state of California, where authorities have raided numerous clinics and made arrests over the years. Some of those California raids followed Obama’s inauguration in January, after, as a presidential candidate, he had pledged to stop them.

The new guidelines note that federal law enforcement agencies have limited resources and that they need them for more pressing priorities.

The maker of a life-saving radiation therapy device has patched a software bug that could cause the system’s emergency stop button to fail to stop, following an incident at a Cleveland hospital in which medical staff had to physically pull a patient from the maw of the machine.

The bug affected the Gamma Knife, a device resembling a CT scan machine that focuses radiation on a patient’s brain tumor while leaving surrounding tissue untouched. A patient lies down on a motorized couch that glides into a chamber, where 201 emitters focus radiation on the treatment area from different angles. The patient wears a specialized helmet screwed onto his skull to ensure that his head doesn’t move and expose the wrong part of the brain to the machine’s pinpoint tumor-zapping beams.
[...]
When the hospital called the company that makes the Gamma Knife, it learned that there was a “known software bug problem” affecting the unit’s couch sensors. Known, anyway, to the company, Stockholm-based Elekta AB.

“Elekta was aware of the software ‘bug’ at the time of the December 2008 event and had implemented actions to correct the ‘bug’ in a future software release,” says Thomas Valentine, director of quality assurance and regulatory affairs for the Elekta’s U.S. arm, in an e-mail.

Since then, he adds, “The ‘bug’ has been corrected in software upgrades that have been implemented to all of the affected sites in the U.S. The U.S. NRC was notified of the completed status of software upgrades to correct the identified ‘bug’.”

We don’t know why “bug” is in quotes; surely this wasn’t a feature.

And then there was this:

The chief executive of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center said Thursday that he regretted the “circumstances” that subjected 206 patients to radiation overdoses and laid out reforms made since the hospital discovered that a CT scanner had been set erroneously for 18 months.

Amid the health care overhaul debate, one big question has been where to come up with about $1 trillion in funding to change the system. One idea that has been suggested is a junk food tax — and, in particular, a tax on soda.Public health advocates say drinking soda is directly linked to obesity, which is partly responsible for skyrocketing health care costs.At the Mace Market in a suburb of Davis, Calif., west of Sacramento, shiny bags of potato chips and candy bars line the shelves. Brightly lit, humming refrigerators are packed with bottles of soda.

Found by John Stec.