brain damage discussion

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actually, this is not new. 30 Years ago, I took a couple months of psychiatry residency (and dropped out when I needed surgery).

They knew back then that a large percentage of people in jail had positive findings of brain damage, often from poor prenatal care, abuse/ head injuries in the past, and low grade lead poisoning, either from eating paint chips or from pollution before they took lead out of gasoline.

and they were just starting to use PET scans to see the damage in real time.

They also knews that LSD and other drugs caused permanent brain changes, and that Temporal lobe epilepsy caused both visions (St Paul, anyone?) and violent outbursts.

When I recovered from surgery I took a job at an institution for the profoundly retarded, at that time when the intellectually disabled were being discharged to the community. (and don't correct me and tell me that I shouldn't use the word "retarded": I am so old that I remember when we used the word "moron" and "imbicile" instead of moderate and severely mentally retarded).

Many of the mildly retarded had already been discharged by the time I took the job, and the nurses remarked that, alas, many of them ended up in jail, either for petty theft or for temper tantrums/violent outbursts. The problem was so bad that the state made special sections for these prisoners, to protect them from the real criminal predators.

The only treatment in the past was to fill these folks up with anti psychotic medications, which sedated them.

But the powers that be decided we needed to stop these "unneeded" medicines, so we were busy weaning them off of medicines and restraints and even protective equipment such as helmets that protected their heads from falls or head banging behavior.

But one doctor who worked in these institutions put out a newsletter suggesting anti seizure medicines for violent outbursts, and voila, it worked on many (but not all) of our violent patients.

Before I started to work there, most of the "mild" cases had been sent to the community, often with little supervision, and alas many of them ended up in jail.

Being naive many of them were horribly abused by other prisoners.

So will Kanye tell Trumpie maybe we should start treating people with these problems in jail, so they can be released?

Or will the civil rights folks, who were behind the "deinsitutionalization" lawsuits, but who never followed up to make sure community services could keep them safe, complain? They  already have pretty well made it impossible to save lives of the depressed via shock treatment, often oppose "forced medicine" for hallucinating schizophrenics, made it almost impossible to hospitalize the mentally ill whose families are in despair over their problems,  or have the police remove those who wander the streets talking to themselves in a delusional state, yet if we try to help the mentally ill, point out clockwork orange that we are harming the prisoners?

The abuse of people in psychiatry in the past was real, but one who never worked with the really dangerous mentally ill can appreciate how bad their behavior can be.

One thing that one needs to remember: there is a difference between use and abuse.

A medicine that allows you to cope and work and interact with your family is a medicine.

A medicine that leads you to addictive behavior, neglect of family in order to get high, or to hurt others is abuse.

Corruption in the Chinese pharmacutical industry

from StrategyPage. the article is about China's economic and military status but contains this:

The increased censorship and restrictions on what the media can report go beyond the economy. Corruption and fear of embarrassment also play a role. Current examples are how the secret police are handling Chinese victims of yet another “dangerous food and drugs” scandal.

Many of the victims of Changsheng Biotechnology, the second largest supplier of vaccines in China, are seeking compensation from the government for injuries suffered from bad vaccines.

In July Changsheng was accused of selling unsafe medicines and getting away with it by bribing government inspectors to ignore evidence of poor quality control that resulted in ineffective vaccines.

This is the latest of many such scandals involving dangerous food products or medicines. It is why the government has been so energetic in its anti-corruption campaign but also evidence that the “war on corruption” was not going as well as the government was reporting.

This latest incident was so scary that even North Korea refused to buy low cost medicines from China because of the growing popular belief (in China and North Korea) that too many Chinese made drugs were probably ineffective.

Latest fad: The New Jersey diet

...............

every year there is another "magic" diet.

The problem of obesity is world wide now. Why?
well, here in the Philippines, whereas in the past kids worked in the fields they now take a tricycle to school.
And their parents now have handplows and threshers that make growing rice less work intensive.
And of course, even if you can't afford the 75 peso hamburger at McD or the 50 peso hamburger at jolibee, you can buy two for 25 pesos at the kiosk at the night market.

And women don't have 6 kids anymore (the fertility rate is down: most women have two or three kids).

And what no one wants to discuss: Estrogens in plastic and phytoestrogen in the envirtonment, and  estrogen from birth control pills.

which induces the gene for metabolic syndrome.

Of course, I am superstitious: My Austrian aunt, who is tiny because of the starvation of the WWI era, visited her home village in the 1930s and told everyone there was going to be another war.
This was when Hitler was not being taken seriously, so my mom asked her how she came to that conclusion. And she replied: because all the peasant women were getting fat, because they sensed a war was coming.

Hmm...

Typhus in the homeless

NBC Los Angeles reports that Flea Borne typhus has been diagnosed among the homeless in Los Angeles.

,,,The scope of the outbreak is hard to assess because it could take one to two weeks to detect, meaning the full extent of the number of infections is likely unknown at this time. The outbreak follows a Tuberculosis outbreak in the same area along numerous staph infections reported.

a lot of these people are mentally ill or addicts, and in the past you could arrest them and put them either in jail or in an asylum. But now the ACLU decided it was against their civil rights.

Sigh.

wayback machine: DDT stopped the typhus epidemic in post war Naples.
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magic, deity or an alive "nature" did it?

LATimes discussing the latest Nobel Prize. 

I'll have to read about what it actually was about later, but the firstparagraph in the article says:

 

Since the dawn of life on our planet, 3.7 billion years ago, nature has used the power of evolution to create a vast diversity of molecules with an ever-increasing array of chemical capabilities.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Science awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday to three scientists who have harnessed that power and sped it up, allowing them to create never-before-seen chemical reactions in a process called directed evolution.

uh, nature is not able to do anything. the "breakthru" of Darwin was that things just happened due to chance, with no plan at all.

the "power" of evolution is a meaningless phrase. It merely suggests that evolution is a force, no just randomness that sort of just happens.

IF you think Nature did these things, you assume something is directing these things: i.e. God.

the forbidden word that Darwin's followers preferred to ignore and censor.

And if Nature did these things, you have to assume there is a plan behind life, and things are not just random.

CSI 1850 Smallpox?

From Fox, 

A PBS documentary reveals the identity -- and an artist's digitally created image -- or the woman whose well-preserved body was found in a metal coffin in Queens seven years ago. (Impossible Factual/Joe Mullins)

When a backhoe unearthed a woman's body, some thought it was a recent crime.

But it turns out that she died in the 1850s but was buried in an iron coffin that slowed her decomposition.

A testament to the coffins’ effectiveness, Peterson’s skin was intact to the point that she appeared to have been deceased for only a week.

Warnasch noted that “smallpox lesions covered her body.” Initially he was concerned by this: “The body was so well preserved that I would not have been shocked if the smallpox virus had survived.”

Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that the smallpox had degraded to a nonthreatening level. An autopsy revealed that the disease had infected Peterson’s brain and most likely killed her.

so how long could the virus live? This article discusses. Some anecdotes suggest 100 plus years, but it could have been a coincidence since small pox was around back then.

what if you saved a life and noboday cared?

how about if you saved 16 million lives?


My friend in Zimbabwe lost her college aged niece a couple months ago. She was ready to start college but died unexpectedly of an infection.

Sigh.

but the miracle was that she lived that long, because she was born of an HIV positive mother, in the days before the disease was recognized and easily diagnosed, let alone treated. Most of these children died in childhood of ordinary childhood diseases.

Her father died of HIV about that time, again in the days when there was no treatment available, and what treatment was around in the west was very very expensive, too expensive even for the African middle class.

But things changed when GWB decided to spend money to save these lives.

From PJMedia:

WASHINGTON -- The George W. Bush initiative to combat HIV/AIDS in Africa has saved more than 16 million lives so far, according to a new administration report on the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.

That includes 14 million men, women, and children on lifesaving drugs and 2.2 million babies born HIV-free to HIV-positive mothers.

The program has also helped 6.4 million orphans and caregivers, and provided 15.2 million men and boys with circumcision to lower the risk of HIV transmission.

Additionally, a quarter of a million medical personnel have been trained to improve care for HIV and other outbreaks.

In his 2003 State of the Union address, Bush announced the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, as "seldom has history offered a greater opportunity to do so much for so many." "As our nation moves troops and builds alliances to make our world safer, we must also remember our calling, as a blessed country, is to make the world better,"

Bush said then. "Today, on the continent of Africa, nearly 30 million people have the AIDS virus, including 3 million children under the age of 15. There are whole countries in Africa where more than one-third of the adult population carries the infection. More than 4 million require immediate drug treatment. Yet across that continent, only 50,000 AIDS victims -- only 50,000 -- are receiving the medicine they need."

At the time, the cost for life-saving antiretroviral treatment had dropped from $12,000 a year to under $300 a year, "which places a tremendous possibility within our grasp," Bush said. Bush had asked Congress for $15 billion over the next five years to treat 2 million HIV patients and prevent 7 million new infections. That was the birth of PEPFAR.

this gets little publicity in the USA because Bush was a Republican, and the press is a Democratic echo box, and never sees anything good about Bush (or Trump).

the docs at the hospital where I used to work were involved in the program, and the public health sister that I worked with ran a clinic outside the capital to monitor the medicine (until Mugabe demolished the clinic and  much of the suburb in revenge LINK)

No I didn't work with this: I left my second African stint in the early 1980s. I suspect we had cases, because we had a couple cases of kaposi's sarcoma etc. but it was not recognized then, and people often died of trivial infections that we attributed to the low protein malnutrition that was common.