In 1995, only a year after South Africa’s first democratic election, I was working at a community centre in Nyanga, a shanty-town alongside Cape Town’s international airport. The centre had started a project which aimed to give HIV-positive single mothers a safe place to live and work.

My self-appointed task was to assist with setting up income generation projects. I had a “real” job during the week and would arrive early on Saturday mornings to a queue of toddlers and tiny children waiting to be picked up and swung. Little happy, snotty faces with upstretched arms taking their turns and then running to the back of the line to have another go.

And every one of them HIV-positive.

One day a child, late to be swung, came running too quickly and slipped. She fell hard on the concrete and scraped her arm and leg. Blood flowed and she began to howl. I stooped to pick her up and a nurse grabbed me, pulling me back.

“No,” she said, her face sad, “let her mother pick her up,” indicating the blood and cuts on my hands from where I’d injured myself working on my car.

That was the moment that the death sentence implied by AIDS hit home. None of these children would live more than another few years. Full story »

I find myself in the uncomfortable position of waiting for someone to die–someone that I don’t know and will never meet. That person has to die so that someone I know can live. Because I don’t know the donor, it seems not a matter of 2-1=1, but rather it’s 1-1=1. That equation came to me and I can’t shake it. The anonymity of the “relationship” skews the math.

My mom’s friend, I’ll call her Joan, needs a kidney. About a week ago Joan got the phone call that she had moved to the top of the donation list. Mom is Joan’s transportation once the call comes that a kidney is available. Since the call we’ve been waiting and making plans: someone to take care of Joan’s cats, someone to get Mom’s beagle to the kennel, contingency plans for making the trip if it’s snowing. Mom has her bag packed—so does Joan. It’s rather like a pregnant woman getting ready for the trip to the hospital.

Except for that death part. Full story »

A President Who Reads

In a recent White House email, with “You Tell Me” in the subject line, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Nancy-Ann De Parle sent out an open request for ideas on ways the President can put Americans back to work without waiting for Congressional approval. Since Congress has refused to offer the President anything but hate-speech since the Koch Party took over, opening a dialogue with the American people directly seems like a reasonable strategy. Here’s what I suggested: Full story »

“Prices are set on the margin,” goes a general statement in economics and finance.  It sounds a bit glib as an explanation for the current abject state of the global economy.  How for the “want of a nail” could the battle be lost?

Think of an airplane consisting of 100 seats which only breaks even on the cost for a single journey once there are 65 paying customers on board.  The blue seats in the image below are the 64 patiently waiting to start their travels.  The red chair waits for the 65th customer.

The 65th passenger

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by Chip Ainsworth

Shortly after finishing his three-month, 3,312-mile run from the coast of Oregon to the Rhode Island shore, Glenn Caffery visited his physician and complained that his feet were numb.

“What’d you expect?” the doctor replied.

Caffery, a 49-year-old data management teacher at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, lives in Leyden, a small town in the Connecticut River Valley that borders Vermont. His cross-country pilgrimage was to raise awareness about the Alzheimer’s disease that killed his father at age 68.

“He was diagnosed at 55,” said Caffery, “but it was symptomatic at least two years prior to that.”

On May 19, Caffery stuck his foot into the Pacific Ocean and began his long, arduous journey across Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Minnesota on toward the Northeast and into New England. On Aug. 17, surrounded by friends and family, he splashed into the Atlantic Ocean at Misquamicut Beach in Rhode Island.
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by Emily West

If you want a more intelligent pet than a dog, try a pig. Pigs learn tricks quickly. They have even figured out video games. Scientists have compared pig intelligence to that of a 3-year-old child.

In factory farms, pigs have been observed going insane and committing cannibalism.

Factory farming should be illegal.

In factory farms, corporations raise thousands of animals in a confined area. Chickens spend their lives in about one square foot of space. Once they reach full size, they die in slaughterhouses that process thousands of animals each day. Factory farmers ignore animal health and welfare in favor of a cheap steak. Around 98 percent of America’s meat comes from factory farms.
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That headline probably sounds like the dumbest thing anybody ever said, doesn’t it? In truth, though, I mean it as a profound compliment. Let me explain why.

Today is LiveStong Day and it’s also Susan Komen Race for the Cure Day here in Denver. Earlier this morning, roughly 50,000 people participated in the Race for the Cure over at Pepsi Center, and annually there are about 130 such races worldwide. For context, here’s the Wiki intro.

Since its inception in 1982, Komen has invested nearly $2 billion^[2] for breast cancer research, education, advocacy, health services and social support programs in the U.S.,^[3] and through partnerships in more than 50 countries.^[4][5]  Full story »

I spent yesterday in Houston on business. Excuse me, I meant “bidniss.” I had to do some interviews with physicians around town, so I spent a good bit of time in the rent-a-car driving from airport to center, center to next center, center back to airport, etc. And sitting in traffic on the freeway. And turning around and trying to find the exit I missed because accurate road signs aren’t the city’s top priority. Or a medium priority. Or even a low priority.

Anyhow, before this trip, I don’t believe I had ever heard a radio advertisement for anything testosterone related. Ever. But by golly, yesterday I heard dozens. Literally, dozens. I found a sports talk station as I was rolling out of the Hertz lot and I just left it on (because I like sports and also, it’s far less brain-damaging than music radio is these days) and honest to sweet baby Jesus, there were at least two testosterone spots in every commercial break. Full story »

My editor does not want me to post this blog. That should tell you something about the sensitivity around the topic I am about to discuss.

First, some background. Not too long ago I wrote a post in which I observed that pudgy Southern teen girls often grow up to be pudgy women. I expected some reaction, but I didn’t expect the reaction I got, which was to get pelted from every angle. The right and the left. Men and women. Old and young.  It was as if I spit into the ocean and caused a tsunami.

OK, at the bottom of the page before you post a blog there is a small box that says “Check to allow comments.” If you check that box, as I do, and write about controversial topics in provocative ways, as I do, then you shouldn’t whine (even though I do.) Full story »

Cross-posted from Truthout.

Republican assaults on social service programs have finally yielded some significant advances, with the Obama Administration offering to push the eligibility age for Medicare up from age 65 to 67. Also, as part of a bargain to raise the debt ceiling, the administration offered to dial down cost-of-living increases in Social Security benefits.

But it’s Medicaid, which, as the health provider of last resort for the most vulnerable segment of society, has long been a tempting target for Republicans. To remind the young, to whom Medicaid and Medicare tend to blend together, up to speed, the former is a program jointly funded by the state and federal governments that pays for medical care for those who can’t afford it. Full story »

by Guy Saperstein

As we think ahead toward 2012, ponder this: Consider the possibility that we would be better off if John McCain had won in 2008. Heresy?

Yes, but think about a few important points.

Although TARP was passed during Bush’s Presidency, it really was the beginning of Obama’s term, as it could not have passed without Obama’s strong public support and, indeed, as many books, such as Joseph Stiglitz’ Firefall, have outlined, he was intimately involved in the decisions which led to TARP, particularly the decision to pay Wall Street 100 cents on the dollar for toxic assets at a time when the private market was paying 20 cents, and decisions not to put strings and conditions on the money, such as requiring that 80% of the TARP money be lent out, not used for mergers and acquisitions, which have now enabled even greater concentration in the banking industry, thus putting the economy at even greater risk in the future. Full story »

As I predicted four years ago on the Fourth of July, little has changed. This year’s fireworks and barbecues offer only a brief respite from the problems of the nation, how they are worsening, and how those who are supposed to address them remain mere chanters of their respective ideologies.

Four years ago, I predicted that the cost of federal elections would continue to rise, that the role of money would increase dramatically. I did not predict — or even dream it could happen — the outcome of the Supremes’ consideration of Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission that deepened the hole in which corporate money could hide while paying for “electioneering communications.”

Sadly, I did not predict that more than 30,000 journalists would lose their jobs in the past four years, lessening the ability of the press to hold government accountable. To me, corporations are now essentially the American government; more journalists, not fewer, trained in the same accounting chicanery that allowed Enron to flourish, are necessary to hold corporate government accountable, too.
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Okay, this is brilliant. I never heard of it until this morning and now I learn that there’s apparently a whole movement afoot, with a project and everything.

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It’s not like a major theme, usually, but writers of near future science fiction usually have one or two major disease outbreaks as one of the plot devices, even if it isn’t a major factor in the story. It’s always fun to speculate on the future, and it’s a good bet that there will be something along the lines of the Kansas City Flu, or the Helsinki Virus, both of which have figured in someone’s novel. Or it could have been the Kansas City Virus and the Helsinki flu. It’s fun to make up catastrophic disease names, and it’s so easy—pick a location, any location, really, and put it in front of the words “flu” or “virus”, and suddenly you’ve got a plausible near-future event. Hey, look, the Seattle flu wiped out one third of humanity. Who knew? But it wasn’t nearly as deadly as the Capetown virus, which took out the other two-thirds.

All good speculative fun, in its own weird way. The problem is that life often has a tendency to imitate art. So now we have this new form of e. coli bacteria (technically, Escherichia coli O104:H4 (STEC O104:H4)) that has killed a number of people in Germany and elsewhere (17 dead, and over 1,600 ill so far, and counting). And, contrary to earlier reports, it appears that the bacteria did not come from cucumbers in Spain. In fact, no one seems to know where it does come from. Full story »

Dr. Jack Kevorkian has died at the age of 83.

Kevorkian, who claimed he had helped about 130 people to kill themselves between 1990 and 1999, died at William Beaumont hospital in Michigan, close friend Mayer Morganroth said.

Nicknamed Dr Death, Kevorkian came to prominence in 1990 when he used his homemade “suicide machine” in his rusted Volkswagen van to inject lethal drugs into an Alzheimer’s disease patient who sought his help.

He had been hospitalised since last month with pneumonia and kidney problems, Morganroth said. An official cause of death had not been determined, but Morganroth said it was likely to have been pulmonary thrombosis. Full story »

Everything starts somewhere. For us, getting in shape started with bread pudding.

“I don’t think it’s normal to eat that much bread pudding,” I said. “I wonder if anybody else celebrates International Bread Pudding Day?”

“I’m still not convinced that holiday exists,” said Nancy, “But it is winter in Connecticut, and you need your winter fat.”

“Har, har. My feet are cold. Do I have socks on? I don’t think I can move.”

And I didn’t move for hours. I sat there like a gorged tick. Later that evening, I was able to push myself upright and stagger to bed. I’m lying. I staggered to the refrigerator for a few more bites of bread pudding. Hey, IBP day only comes once a year. The next morning everything had changed. Full story »

A neophyte freshman representative from Kansas who slipped into Congress on the strength of hundreds of thousands of dollars of donations from heavyweight industries does not want you and me to see a product-safety database compiled by a federal consumer agency.

In 2008, Congress passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act. Among its mandates: Consumers will have access to a public database to report and learn about hazards posed by unsafe products. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has compiled that database, and it’s ready to launch next week.

But Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) doesn’t want consumers to see it. He does not want them to see “reports of defective products from a wide range of sources, including consumers, health-care providers, death certificates and media accounts,” reports Lyndsey Layton of The Washington Post. He does not want consumers to change how they make purchasing decisions. He does not want them to see a database that is “limited to complaints about safety and does not deal with product reliability or performance,” reports Layton.
Full story »