Obesity and Falling off the Edge of the Known World

By: | May 19, 2011

When my husband and I moved to a suburb of Vancouver eleven years ago, many of our friends ribbed us wildly about our decision. Instead of living in a leafy urban neighborhood, a short walk from a good cappuccino, an organic fruit and veg store, and a pilates studio, we had, it seemed, forsaken civilization and migrated to the far barrens of Carland. Our friends could barely place our neighborhood on their mental maps, although it was a mere 20 minutes on the Skytrain–Vancouver’s rapid transit system–from where they lived. Others got hopelessly lost when they tried to drive here, even though the route was relatively straightforward, simple and entirely lacking in freeways. It was as if we had fallen off the edge of the known world.

But in spite of all the jokes, I’ve grown to love this peaceful suburban life. It’s quiet here. The air is clean. And I love the way kids play ball hockey in some of our streets. So I was a little puzzled this week to read that some researchers now view the suburbs as “sick zones” that promote diabetes and as “obesogenic environments” that actively encourage many North Americans to forego exercise and pack on the pounds. Continue reading →

Drugging Our Way Out of the HIV Epidemic

By: | May 18, 2011

When antiretroviral drug cocktails hit the scene in 1996, they were so effective they became known as ‘the Lazarus drug.’ Many AIDS patients recovered seemingly overnight. Over the past 15 years, these drugs have saved the lives of millions of people infected with HIV. Several new studies suggest antiretrovirals could save millions more if we start using them for prevention as well as treatment.

Last July, researchers reported that a vaginal gel laced with an antiretroviral called tenofovir reduced HIV acquisition among South African women by 39% overall and by 54% in women who used the gel faithfully. Then, in November, a separate team of researchers reported that an oral antiretroviral pill taken daily reduced the risk of HIV infection among men who have sex with men by 44%. This year, on May 11, researchers announced the results of another study. They found that HIV-infected individuals — both men and women — who took antiretroviral drugs were a whopping 96% less likely to pass the virus on to their partners than individuals who didn’t take the drugs. The results are preliminary, but Myron Cohen, the HIV researcher who led the study and spoke on Monday at the New York Academy of Sciences, said he is confident that the large effect will hold.

These fantastic results beg the question: Can we drug our way out of the HIV epidemic? Continue reading →

Guest Post: Invisible Mother

By: | May 17, 2011

A study published last week in Archives of Disease in Childhood is the latest in a long line of research to provide evidence for the benefits of breastfeeding. In the study, researchers analyzed data collected through the Millenium Cohort Study, a long-term investigation of child development that includes a large sample of babies born in the U.K. in 2000-2001.

Parents of more than 9,500 children were surveyed about infant feeding when their children were 9 months old. Then, when their children were 5 years old, the parents completed the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), a well-known survey designed to identify behavior problems such as anxiety, hyperactivity, and lying and stealing.

The researchers found that mothers who breastfed their babies for at least 4 months were less likely to report that their children had serious behavior problems at age 5.

How much less likely? Media accounts of the research tended to focus on the finding that 16.1 percent of children who were formula-fed had behavior problems, compared with only 6.5 percent of children who were breastfed.

That’s a dramatic difference, suggesting that formula-fed babies are two and a half times more likely to develop behavior problems. No wonder one reporter suggested that “a woman who chose to bottle-feed would have to be a real boob”, a phrase that caused me to suck in my breath in shock—I like a bad pun as much as the next person, but wow, that does not move the conversation forward.
Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Newton #1

By: | May 16, 2011

Socrates (according to Plato) is explaining to a follower, Glaucon, an overly-complex but famous metaphor.  Prisoners who have been raised in a cave sit chained facing a wall, which is lit only by the fire behind them.  For the prisoners, says Socrates, reality is “only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another.”   And if a prisoner does leave the cave, “his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities.”

Isaac Newton, quoted by a biographer:  “I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Abstruse Goose must be the first person in the history of mankind to say that Newton answers Socrates.  And I think I get it, at least emotionally:  let’s bust outa here and oh lordy! whammo! will you look at that!

Except AG has a sneaky little mouseover balloon that says, “Y’all lying and getting me pissed.”  That, I don’t get.  Does anybody?

http://abstrusegoose.com/356

Getting Under a Mummy’s Skin

By: | May 13, 2011

Years ago, when her young son was going through a mummy phase, Eve Lowenstein wound up reading a lot of mummy books. A dermatologist and one-time molecular biologist, she was soon hooked on paleopathology, the study of ancient diseases. Her obsession would long outlive her son’s.

At first, just curious, she sat down to do a quick scan of the scientific literature to find out what mummies had revealed about skin diseases. “It turned into a year-and-a-half project,” says Lowenstein, who practices dermatology in Brooklyn, New York. She found mummy studies of more than 100 skin-related diseases, from leprosy and scurvy to cancer and diabetic foot ulcers. In 2004, she published a comprehensive review of these so-called ‘paleodermatoses‘ — several of which, she discovered, had been misdiagnosed.
Continue reading →

Science Metaphors (cont.): Running Open Loop

By: | May 11, 2011

In the continuing quest to find meaning in life, or if not meaning, at least a few good rules, I turn as usual to science.   Science offers the phrase, “running open loop.” Open loop is an engineering term meaning a system that runs without feedback, without a self-governor, without correcting itself.   A closed-loop sprinkler system has a ground-water sensor to tell it when to stop watering the lawn.  An open loop sprinkler keeps sprinkling while the lawn washes down the hill.  With this particular metaphor, however, science is not much help. Continue reading →

Battling the Beetles

By: | May 10, 2011
Healthy whitebark pine forest, Wind River Mountains

On a cold, clear June morning high in Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains, Jesse Logan stopped on a snow-covered hillside and pointed with his ski pole to a large pine tree. A few of its needles were turning red, a sign of trouble. About a dozen people gathered around him on the snow to listen.

“We got a live one?” a man asked hopefully, pointing out the green needles at the top of a tree with a foot-wide trunk.

“It’s dead and gone, John,” Logan, a trim man with narrow, dark brown eyes, a neat gray goatee, and the self-contained manner of a traditional rural westerner, replied. “It ain’t gonna be green long.”

Until he retired in 2006, Logan ran the beetle research unit for the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Utah. For thirty years, Logan had investigated the relationship between trees and pest insects that plague them, combining sophisticated mathematical modeling of insect – plant warfare and boots-on-the-snow field observations.

Mountain pine beetles

On this morning, he was teaching a group of amateur wilderness enthusiasts and conservationists how to size up the health of a long-lived conifer called the whitebark pine, as part of an effort to scientifically assess the health of the tree’s namesake ecosystem. Whitebark pines, which can grow up to sixty feet tall and have whitish trunks, anchor the high-altitude forest of the Rocky Mountains and the Cascades, growing in cold, windswept locations too harsh for other evergreens. Whitebark pine provides essential support to this ecosystem, which is located just below the timberline, creating soil where there was rock, shade where there was sun, and cover for wildlife where there was none. The deep green carpet of whitebark pine that covers the West’s high country is so important it’s been called the “rooftop of the Rockies.”

Today, however, the whitebark pine is in trouble, and the rooftop of the Rockies is crumbling.
Continue reading →

Our biochemical romance: Osama bin Laden and DNA

By: | May 9, 2011

Last week, officials said that DNA from multiple family members was used to confirm that its years-long hunt for Osama bin Laden had ended in success.

But even as politicians criticized President Obama’s decision not to release photos of the dead bin Laden, nobody questioned the assertion that, thanks to DNA, US officials are “99.9” percent certain that the man they shot and killed in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, was the long-sought al Qaeda leader.

Instead, Republicans and Democrats alike hailed the DNA evidence as “conclusive,” proving “beyond the shadow of a doubt” that the dead man was bin Laden, and the public took them at their word.

Continue reading →