Plastics

on my main blog, I wrote about plastics may be behind obesity.

UK Mail article HERE.

Hospice notes

UKMail says fewer terminally ill cancer patients die in hospitals in the US than in Europe.

Yes, probably because we have hospice care.

So why the kerfuffle about all those end of life expenses that need to be cut by living wills?

Dirty little secret: The patients died but they had a chance to live. and the article laments all these dying patients who spent time in ICU in the last six months of their life.

Well, duh, they weren't terminal...

So if you have cancer, but they treat your pneumonia because you haven't hit the terminal stage yet, the bioethicists moan and groan you are wasting taxpayer money.

Roman parasites

Some articles noted that despite all their irrigation and sewage technology, that Romans were found to have lots and lots of worms.

Archeology paper here

Piers Mitchell of Cambridge University....in a press release. He thinks that the warm communal waters of the bathhouses, which may have been changed infrequently, could have contributed to the spread of parasitic worms. The Romans also used human excrement from the public latrines as a crop fertilizer. And the widespread use of garum, a condiment made from uncooked, fermented fish parts, may have contributed to the increase of fish tapeworm eggs during the Roman period. “It seems likely that while Roman sanitation may not have made people any healthier, they would probably have smelt better,” Mitchell said. 

The obvious is not noted: That without the clean water and sewage system, a lot more people might have died of diarrhea at an early age...so the presence of parasites might imply they lived to be adults. Until we have an estimate of the death rate, we don't know.

The dirty little secret is that people can live with the parasites quite nicely, and do. But they die of more deadly diseases that are spread by dirty water (e.g. typhoid, dystentary).

in the medieval world of Europe, urbanization was quite deadly because of lack of water and sanitation.

the study was done at Portus, an artificial port of Rome, not actually in Rome itself.

(De Agostini Picture Library/Bridgeman Images)

Portus, now some two miles from the Mediterranean shoreline, was built by the Romans in the 1st century A.D. to be their main maritime port. A 16th-century fresco in the Vatican Palace shows an idealized reconstruction of Portus’ grand architectural and engineering features

Hmm... I was not aware that Rome built an artificial port.

I was aware that Rome was built on the Tiber and had swamps nearby (and that malaria was imported from Egypt causing a high mortality from the local mosquitos)..

But I always assumed they had a natural port, Ostia. Well they did: Portus was sort of an extension of it to make it easier for ships.

From Wikipedia:

Claudian phase[edit]Rome's original harbour was Ostia. Claudius constructed the first harbour on the Portus site, 4 km (2.5 mi) north of Ostia, enclosing an area of 69 hectares (170 acres), with two long curvingmoles projecting into the sea, and an artificial island, bearing a lighthouse, in the centre of the space between them. The foundation of this lighthouse was provided by filling one of the massive Obelisk ships, used to transport anobelisk from Egypt to adorn the spina of Vatican Circus, built during the reign of Caligula.

The harbour thus opened directly to the sea on the northwest and communicated with the Tiber by a channel on the southeast.

The object was to obtain protection from the prevalent southwest wind, to which the river mouth was exposed. Though Claudius, in the inscription which he caused to be erected in AD 46, boasted that he had freed the city of Rome from the danger of inundation, his work was only partially successful: in AD 62 Tacitus speaks of a number of grain ships sinking within the harbour during a violent storm. Nero gave the harbour the name of "Portus Augusti".^[1]

....
n AD 103 Trajanconstructed another harbour farther inland—a hexagonal basin enclosing an area of 39 hectares (97 acres), and communicating by canals with the harbour of Claudius, 

but it silted up during the dark ages

Ostia also silted up.

It's done with mirrors

 Another article (on Gizmodo this time) about how "experts" are saying that cancer screening doesn't save lives.

For example, a 30 year follow-up to a colon cancer study showed that for every 10,000 patients who were screened for colon cancer, 128 died of the disease, while the rate of death due to colon cancer was 192 out of every 10,000.
 Those numbers indicate that screening is critical. It causes mortality due to colon cancer to plummet.
But another set of numbers is less encouraging. Of the group of unscreened patients, 7111 out of 10,000 had died by the time of the follow-up. Of the screened group 7109 had died—making for a difference of two people.

the article then goes on to blame the "stress" of treatment, the "stress" of false positive results.

Ah, but the dirty little secret is: These people are often older and have comorbidities (lots of things wrong with them)

So they die of something else.

When the anti cholesterol medicines came out, a similar finding was found: If you take it, your heart attack rate is slightly lower, but the death rate was the same.

In one study, the reason for the difference was death by violence/accident/suicide/homicide.

Another study was done, and the death rate was the same due to cancer of the colon deaths.

The Docs joked that since they'd rather die of a heart attack than cancer, why take the medicine?

Similar problem here.

Another dirty little secret is that the numbers sound impressive, but they are low risks for the actual patient.

then there is the "GIGO" problem: garbage in, garbage out.

What’s more, the researchers did a review of 10 meta-analyses of cancer screening studies. These meta-analyses combined the results from several studies to give an overall picture of the research done on screening for different cancers. Only three showed a reduction in mortality due to specific cancers. Not one showed a reduction in overall mortality.

a lot of these studies include those where there are a lot of drop outs, or the population was not representative of normal folks. In others, the numbers weren't significant.

Finally, not mentioned: that many cancers metastasize early, when it is too small to detect from screening. So early diagnosis of a young women with aggressive hormone dependent breast cancer might not make a difference, since it has already spread.

This might not be true of an elderly  person with slow growing cancer, who will die of something else.

And finally a dirty little secret: Malpractice suits are one reason that doctors were forced to order a lot of tests that didn't make a difference.

I was once sued for not ordering a test that wasn't being done because it was being done experimentally 500 miles away, the lawyer argueing that I should have known that the test was available.

Ironically, what saved me in that malpractice suit was sex: The lawyer was caught sleeping with the 16 year old daughter of one of his "expert" witnesses, and the sister of the deceased who knew her sister didn't keep follow up appointments, knew that the husband suing for "wrongful death" had a bimbo on the side, which made his wife ignore the growing cancer as a way of passive suicide...

Ancient ulcers

Scientist have found HPylori in the stomach of Otzi the iceman...

The scientists found a potentially virulent strain of bacteria, to which Ötzi's immune system had already reacted. "We showed the presence of marker proteins which we see today in patients infected with Helicobacter," said the microbiologist. A tenth of infected people develop further clinical complications, such as gastritis or stomach ulcers, mostly in old age. "Whether Ötzi suffered from stomach problems cannot be said with any degree of certainty," says Zink, "because his stomach tissue has not survived and it is in this tissue that such diseases can be discerned first. Nonetheless, the preconditions for such a disease did in fact exist in Ötzi."

Yes, and it was important

Improbable research usually links to papers about absurd reseach, but today's link is about the morbidity caused by diarrhea in soldiers serving in Iraq: probably because two of the four authors had absurd names. (Riddle and Tribble).

ah but it is a major problem... and they also link to another paper about the problem of constipation.

Well, some people attribute Napoleon's loss at Waterloo to his hemorrhoids (a complication of constipation).
or maybe not:

As detailed in Phil Mason’s book “Napoleon’s Hemorrhoids: And Other Small Events That Changed History,” some scholars believe the French military leader suffered a painful bout of hemorrhoids on the morning of the Battle of Waterloo that prevented him from riding his horse to survey the battlefield as was his custom and could have contributed to his defeat. However, Waterloo expert Alasdair White told the New York Times that the story is “an absolute myth” concocted by Napoleon boosters because they “cannot believe that the great man lost, so there must have been something wrong with him.”

social networks are important to health

Related to the previous post on suicide is a study that having a "social network" is important.

The more social ties people have at an early age, the better their health is at the beginnings and ends of their lives, according to a new study. The study is the first to definitively link social relationships with concrete measures of physical well-being such as abdominal obesity, inflammation, and high blood pressure, all of which can lead to long-term health problems, including heart disease, stroke and cancer