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U.S. hoping to quell school violence
By Ben Feller, AP Education Writer | October 10, 2006 WASHINGTON --Compelled to respond to a spike in school violence, the Bush administration is hoping that a high-profile summit will get the word out about safety. President Bush called for Tuesday's conference after three shooting rampages in two weeks unnerved the nation. Communities in Colorado, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are still grieving. Bush is expected to offer sympathy at the event and to encourage people to ask questions at home about whether their schools are prepared for emergencies.
Submitted by Prometheus 6 on October 9, 2006 - 12:02pm.
on Health | News
[W]hen it comes to gun legislation, the experts are ignored as the gun lobby scores victory after victory. Consider that President Bush signed a law that permits the destruction of gun check records within 24 hours (despite criticism from a Government Accountability Office report); let the federal assault weapons ban expire (despite evidence that it lowered the rate at which assault weapons were used in crime); is backing bills that prevent law enforcement from putting corrupt gun dealers out of business (over the objection of police groups); and restricted the ability of police to use crime gun trace data (again despite police objections). Time to Talk Guns A summit on school violence must look at the role of weapons. Monday, October 9, 2006; A16 THE SLAUGHTER of five girls in a Pennsylvania classroom, closely following school shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin, has prompted President Bush to call a national summit on school violence. It is right that the nation not just mourn the heartbreak of last week's shootings but that its leaders and other citizens talk about how to prevent such tragedies. How useful tomorrow's conversation will be, however, depends on the administration's willingness to have all voices heard. And that must include those calling for a more rational approach to gun control.
According to psychiatrist Jennifer Harris, quoted in the January/February issue of Psychotherapy Networker, "Many clinicians find it easier to tell parents their child has a brain-based disorder than to suggest parenting changes."...What was once a somber, heart-wrenching decision for a parent and something children often resisted -- medicating a child's mind -- has now become a widely used technique in parenting a belligerent child. A Rush to Medicate Young Minds By Elizabeth J. Roberts Sunday, October 8, 2006; B07 I have been treating, educating and caring for children for more than 30 years, half of that time as a child psychiatrist, and the changes I have seen in the practice of child psychiatry are shocking. Psychiatrists are now misdiagnosing and overmedicating children for ordinary defiance and misbehavior. The temper tantrums of belligerent children are increasingly being characterized as psychiatric illnesses.
Submitted by Prometheus 6 on October 6, 2006 - 10:01am.
on Health
Marijuana is looking a lot like asperin nowadays...they keep finding more utility in its chemistry. Marijuana may stave off Alzheimer's
Fri Oct 6, 2006 8:34 AM ET
By Andy Sullivan WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Good news for aging hippies: smoking pot may stave off Alzheimer's disease. New research shows that the active ingredient in marijuana may prevent the progression of the disease by preserving levels of an important neurotransmitter that allows the brain to function. Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute in California found that marijuana's active ingredient, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, can prevent the neurotransmitter acetylcholine from breaking down more effectively than commercially marketed drugs.
Submitted by Prometheus 6 on September 26, 2006 - 9:23am.
on Economics | Health
Just buy out the whole tobacco industry and divert the whole profit into the various state govenments that depend on these settlements to balance thei budgets. Tobacco Makers Lose Key Ruling on Latest Suits
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON and MELANIE WARNER In a legal blow to the tobacco industry, a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled yesterday that people who smoked light cigarettes that were often promoted as a safer alternative to regular cigarettes can press their fraud claim as a class-action suit. Judge Jack B. Weinstein of Federal District Court in Brooklyn found “substantial evidence” that the manufacturers knew that light cigarettes were at least as dangerous as regular cigarettes.
Submitted by Prometheus 6 on September 23, 2006 - 12:55pm.
on Health | Tech
Slime-riding strategy developed for intestinal robot
18:43 22 September 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Tom Simonite A snail-inspired robot could ride gut mucus (Image: Dimitra Dodou)AdvertisementA robot that glides along a layer of mucus inside the human intestine could make medical examinations like colonoscopies less painful for patients, say Dutch scientists. They are working on a snail-inspired robot that should be far gentler on the gut's delicate lining. Several research groups around the world are working on robots that can remotely explore the intestine but most of these use using tiny legs to pull themselves along (see Worm-inspired robot crawls through intestines).
Submitted by Prometheus 6 on September 23, 2006 - 10:16am.
on Big Pharma | Health
Here's the report. You can read it online or order a printed copy or pdf.
The panel called for a moratorium on consumer advertising of newly approved classes of drugs until they have been on the market long enough for unrecognized side effects and risks to emerge. Packaging for new types of medications should also carry a special symbol, such as the black triangle required in Britain, to alert patients that the drug's safety profile would not be fully known until it had been more widely studied, the report said. The FDA should reevaluate safety and effectiveness data of such new drugs within five years after initial approval, the panel added, and the agency needs new powers to impose fines and requirements on drugmakers. In addition, the report called for the agency to have authority to place a wider range of restrictions on drugs it deems risky.
FDA Told U.S. Drug System Is Broken
Expert Panel Calls For Major Changes
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 23, 2006; A01 The federal system for approving and regulating drugs is in serious disrepair, and a host of dramatic changes are needed to fix the problem, a blue-ribbon panel of government advisers concluded yesterday in a long-awaited report. The analysis by the Institute of Medicine shined an unsparing spotlight on the erosion of public confidence in the Food and Drug Administration, an agency that holds sway over a quarter of the U.S. economy. The report, requested by the FDA itself, found that Congress, agency officials and the pharmaceutical industry share responsibility for the problems -- and bear the burden for implementing solutions.
Submitted by Prometheus 6 on September 17, 2006 - 9:25am.
on Health
How Ready-to-Eat Spinach Is Only Part of the E. Coli Problem
A food safety expert says it likely came from processing the produce right in the fields, a practice that's become much more common
By ALICE PARK When the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a warning to consumers on Thursday about E coli contamination in bagged spinach, it didn't come as a surprise to Michael Doyle. So far, 50 people have fallen ill and one death has been connected to the dangerous E coli 0157:H7 bacterial infection, and the director of food safety at the University of Georgia says that outbreaks like this one will only continue if produce manufacturers don't change their practices.
Infant Mortality Is Decreasing in Puerto Ricans and Blacks
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA Gains among blacks and Puerto Ricans drove infant mortality rates to a record low in New York City last year, and narrowed a persistent disparity between those groups and whites, city officials reported yesterday. In 2005, 6 out of every 1,000 babies born in the city died before reaching their first birthdays, according to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The most recent national figure available, for 2004, was 6.8 per 1,000; New York City has had lower infant mortality than the nation as a whole for several years.
Submitted by Prometheus 6 on September 14, 2006 - 10:29pm.
on Health | News
E. Coli Cases Traced to Bagged Spinach
By ANDREW BRIDGES
Associated Press Writer
7:17 PM PDT, September 14, 2006 WASHINGTON — An outbreak of E. coli in eight states has left at least one person dead and 50 others sick, federal health officials said Thursday in warning consumers nationwide not to eat bagged fresh spinach. The death occurred in Wisconsin, where 20 others were also sickened, said Dr. David Acheson of the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. The outbreak has sickened others -- eight of them seriously -- in Connecticut, Idaho, Indiana, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon and Utah.
Speaking as one of those stupid-ass Black men that didn't pay enough attention to his own case, I strongly advise you not to be one of those stupid-ass Black men that don't pay enough attention to his own case. Which reminds me to attend to my own case... "Because glycemic and blood pressure control in this population are poor, measures to improve medical care and ensure regular dilated eye examination to detect vision-threatening diabetic retinopathy may reduce morbidity from the disease."
Diabetic ills studied in black people NEWARK, N.J., Sept. 11 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists say a six-year study of African-Americans with type 1 diabetes showed progression of diabetes-related eye disease was high. The research by Dr. Monique Roy of the New Jersey Medical School and Mahmoud Affouf of Kean University showed the rapid progression of diabetic retinopathy was related to poor blood glucose control and high blood pressure.
Submitted by Prometheus 6 on September 11, 2006 - 9:36am.
on Health | War
Just my opinion as a New Yorker. Here's a clip. There are more at the show's web site.
Buildings Rise From Rubble While Health Crumbles
By ANITA GATES “I looked, and I just saw this wall of black and gray coming at me,” remembers Ron Baumann, a New York City police officer who was at ground zero five years ago today. He is referring to the overwhelming cloud of smoke and dust that enveloped the streets of Lower Manhattan as the two World Trade Center towers collapsed. “Dust to Dust: The Health Effects of 9/11,” a powerful and persuasive one-hour documentary on the Sundance Channel tonight, analyzes that cloud (“a devastating toxic soup containing more than 2,500 contaminants”) and addresses its devastating legacy for the thousands of workers and others who breathed it in.
Congo's Capital Gains New Hospital, Thanks to U.S. Basketball Star
By Beth Duff-Brown
Associated Press
Monday, September 4, 2006; A12 KINSHASA, Congo, Sept. 3 -- Two hospitals, named for two mothers. One is mired in the past; the other represents beaten-down Congo's hopes for a better future. The 2,000-bed Mama Yemo, named after the mother of Mobutu Sese Seko, the country's late autocratic leader, was once the pride of Central Africa. Now the public facility is in such bad shape that patients must bring their own medicine and are not allowed to go home until they pay their bills. Across town stands the new Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital, financed in part by Dikembe Mutombo, a child of Kinshasa who became a National Basketball Association star and is now with the Houston Rockets. It, too, is named for a mother -- Mutombo's. She died in 1997, as rebels were ousting Mobutu and this city, now with 6.5 million people, had erupted in violence that prevented her from getting to a hospital. Biamba Marie Mutombo was 64.
With methamphetamine ravaging small towns, Wyoming and other rural states have also been fighting a persistent drug problem. And while it may be a mystery to some why the least-populated part of the country leads the nation in the percentage of young people drinking to excess, it is no surprise to many people in Wyoming or Montana. Teenagers, police officers and counselors offer the same reason: the boredom of the big empty.
Boredom in the West Fuels Binge Drinking
By TIMOTHY EGAN CODY, Wyo. — Barely five people per square mile live on the high, wind-raked ground of Wyoming; the entire state is a small town with long streets, as they say. The open space means room to roam and a sense of frontier freedom. It also means that on any given night, an unusually high percentage of young people here are drinking alcohol until they vomit, pass out or do something that lands them in jail or nearly gets them killed. “Had a kid, drunk, flipped his car going 80 miles an hour, and that killed him; and another kid, drunk, smashed his boat up against the rock just a couple months ago, killing two; and then there was this beating after a kegger — they clubbed this kid to death,” said Scott Steward, the sheriff here in Park County, recounting casualties that followed long nights of hard drinking by high school students.
We've long known you can split the embryo in half when it's like four cells and normal development can continue. WHat gets me is the difference between the stem cell debate in the USofA and that which took place in Europe. Europe's concern wasn't where the cells came from, it was about how much of a human (and which parts) can you swap out without changing the person into a different one. Now THAT'S a worthy debate.
New Method Makes Embryo-Safe Stem Cells
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 24, 2006; Page A03 Scientists have for the first time grown colonies of prized human embryonic stem cells using a technique that does not require the destruction of embryos, an advance that could significantly reshape the ethical and political debates that have long entangled the research.
Submitted by Prometheus 6 on August 17, 2006 - 8:56am.
on Health
Two years ago, Walker said, while giving a lecture to 500 AIDS physicians from around the country, he asked if any had a patient who fit that definition. "Over half the hands went up. So I thought, 'It has to be true,' " he recalled Wednesday.
AIDS Study Focuses on 'Elite Controllers'
In Unusual Cases, People Are Infected With the Virus but Do Not Become Ill
By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 17, 2006; A08 ...Elite controllers are people infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) whose bodies have kept the microbe at undetectable levels in their bloodstreams without treatment. They probably account for about 1 out of 300 people infected with HIV but have been largely invisible to AIDS researchers because they do not get sick, do not qualify for clinical studies and in many cases have very little contact with the health-care system.
Submitted by Prometheus 6 on August 10, 2006 - 9:02am.
on Health
Fat Factors
By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG In the 30-plus years that Richard Atkinson has been studying obesity, he has always maintained that overeating doesn’t really explain it all. His epiphany came early in his career, when he was a medical fellow at U.C.L.A. engaged in a study of people who weighed more than 300 pounds and had come in for obesity surgery. “The general thought at the time was that fat people ate too much,” Atkinson, now at Virginia Commonwealth University, told me recently. “And we documented that fat people do eat too much — our subjects ate an average of 6,700 calories a day. But what was so impressive to me was the fact that not all fat people eat too much.”...
One year ago, the idea that microbes might cause obesity gained a foothold when the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana created the nation’s first department of viruses and obesity. It is headed by Nikhil Dhurandhar, a physician who invented the term “infectobesity” to describe the emerging field. Dhurandhar’s particular interest is in the relationship between obesity and a common virus, the adenovirus. Other scientists, led by a group of microbiologists at Washington University in St. Louis, are looking at the actions of the trillions of microbes that live in everyone’s gut, to see whether certain intestinal microbes may be making their hosts fat.
ptcruiser sent me a couple of links I sat on for a while. It looked familiar. Hypertension has long been known to be an important risk factor for cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). Although hypertension is a health problem that affects all ethnic groups, hypertension has been shown to be particularly prevalent in African-Americans. Blacks in the U.S. are 2-4 times more likely than whites in the U.S. to develop hypertension by age 50 (Roberts and Rowland,1981). The reasons for the excess risk in African-Americans are not known. Numerous genetic and environmental factors have been hypothesized to contribute to the excess risk, but their relative contributions are still a matter of debate (Saunders, 1991). However, one thing is clear and universally accepted: socioeconomic status (whether measures are by education, occupation, or income) and hypertension tend to be inversely associated, for both Blacks and Whites (Tyroler, 1986). This has led to the suggestion that unrelieved psychosocial stress, generated by environments in which African-Americans live and work, is primarily responsible for their heightened susceptibility to hypertension. In the early/mid 1970's, numerous studies demonstrated that "high effort" coping (i.e., sustained cognitive and emotional engagement) with difficult psychological stressors produce substantial increases in heart rate and systolic blood pressure. Increases were shown to persist only as long as individuals actively worked at trying to eliminate the stressor. The effects were seen in a variety of different environments. Some of these studies were controlled laboratory experiments (Obrist et al., 1978), while others were field-based studies of "real life" stressors (Kasl and Cobb, 1970; Cobb and Rose, 1973; Harburg et al., 1973). This body of research led to a commentary by Syme (1979). Syme observed that persons of lower socioeconomic status (especially Blacks in these positions) by definition face more difficult psychosocial environmental stressors than more economically privileged individuals. He proposed that prolonged, high effort coping with difficult psychosocial stressors could be the explanation of both the inverse association between socioeconomic status and hypertension typically observed in U.S. communities and the increased risk for this disorder in Black Americans. This was the beginning of what later became known as the "John Henryism Hypothesis."
Submitted by Prometheus 6 on July 30, 2006 - 4:27am.
on Health
Professor Dandekar, head of the university’s department of medical microbiology and immunology, said that gut-associated lymphoid tissue accounted for 70 per cent of the body’s immune system, and that restoring its function was crucial to destroying the virus.
HIV hides itself in the intestines to beat drugs
By Sam Lister, Health Correspondent
HIV can avoid the powerful drugs that sufferers take to destroy it by hiding in their guts, scientists have discovered. The scientists found that the virus that causes Aids took hold in intestinal tissue of patients receiving antiretroviral therapy (ARV). There it continued to replicate and suppress the immune system even though blood samples showed that the drugs were working.
Submitted by Prometheus 6 on July 27, 2006 - 6:49am.
on Health
It's too early in the morning and I'm only half way through my coffee. Otherwise I'd go find a reminder for you. But you can probably find it yourself. Dig out the old stuff on the minor paranoid panic this past winter. Find the articles where they explain that Tamiflu was the best shot at protection, but it was still problematic. Find the articles that said the virus would have to mutate to before it could spread human-to-human. Find the articles that said the real problem with flu vaccines is you have to see the actual pathogen before you can develop an effective vaccine. Drug Maker Says New Bird Flu Vaccine Is Much Stronger
By DENISE GRADY
Submitted by Prometheus 6 on July 25, 2006 - 7:01pm.
on Health
Reasearch is probably funded by McDonalds™.
Fat stem cells turn into muscle in US experiment Tue Jul 25, 2006 01:27 AM ET By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Stem cells taken from human fat can be transformed into smooth muscle cells, offering a way to treat many kinds of heart disease, gastrointestinal and bladder ills, U.S. researchers reported on Monday. While the experiment does not quite offer a way to turn a pot belly into a flat stomach, the researchers said the transformed cells contracted and relaxed just like smooth muscle cells. These cells help the heart beat and blood flow, push food through the digestive system and make bladders fill and empty, the researchers reported.
Submitted by Prometheus 6 on July 24, 2006 - 9:20pm.
on Health
I am unsure how sympathetic to be. Obesity Surgery Often Leads to Complications, Study Says
By ROBERT PEAR WASHINGTON, July 23 — Four of every 10 patients who undergo weight-loss surgery develop complications within six months, the federal government said Sunday. The number of such surgical procedures has been rising rapidly, along with the incidence of obesity, which now afflicts 30 percent of adults in the United States, health officials said. Obesity surgery is helping thousands of Americans lose weight and reduce the risk of diabetes and other life-threatening diseases, said Dr. Carolyn M. Clancy, director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a unit of the Public Health Service. But she added, “This study shows how important it is for patients to consider the potential complications.”
Bush Administration Plans Medicare Changes
By ROBERT PEAR WASHINGTON, July 16 — The Bush administration says it plans sweeping changes in Medicare payments to hospitals that could cut payments by 20 percent to 30 percent for many complex treatments and new technologies. The changes, the biggest since the current payment system was adopted in 1983, are meant to improve the accuracy of payment rates. But doctors, hospitals and patient groups say the effects could be devastating. Federal officials said that biases and distortions in the current system had created financial incentives for hospitals to treat certain patients, on whom they could make money, and to avoid others, who were less profitable.
Submitted by Prometheus 6 on July 11, 2006 - 11:33am.
on Health | Religion
...The researchers used psychological questionnaires and found that 22 of the 36 volunteers had a “complete” mystical experience after taking psilocybin – far more than the four who reported this type of experience after taking Ritalin. More than one-third of the volunteers said that their encounter with psilocybin was the single most spiritually significant experience in their lifetimes – no person given Ritalin said the same. Experts say the study is the most rigorous study of psilocybin’s potential to elicit spiritual feelings because it is the first to use an active control. ...However, more than 20% of the participants described their psilocybin sessions as dominated by negative feelings such as anxiety. And while psilocybin appears to mimic the brain signalling-chemical serotonin, its precise action on mind function remains elusive. Magic mushrooms really cause 'spiritual' experiences
05:01 11 July 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Roxanne Khamsi “Magic” mushrooms really do have a spiritual effect on people, according to the most rigorous look yet at this aspect of the fungus's active ingredient.
We got Christian monks running a lab developing drugs based on African herbology. In India, though... India claims to have found 5,000 U.S. patents on medicinal plants, 80 percent of them from India. Half of these patents should never have been given to the American drug developers, according to India's government. Europe has also granted a patent to use neem extract for its antiseptic properties. Millions of Indians have a neem tree growing in their gardens. They pick off a twig each morning to use as a toothbrush. It cost millions of dollars to fight the neem patent, which was repealed in 2005. "The big firms want to not pay anything, and want to have a shorter path (to new drugs)," says V.K. Gupta, director of the Indian government's National Institute of Science, Communication and Information Resources.
Traditional cures get new protection
India catalogs ayurvedic treatments to combat their patenting by Western drug companies
- Suzanne Marmion, Chronicle Foreign Service
Saturday, July 8, 2006
"The brand-name drug industry has found a major new loophole," Stabenow said in an interview. "The way things stand now, even if the FDA finds that a petition was frivolous and rejects it, [the drug companies] can get hundreds of millions of dollars of profits from the delay." She and others point to the example of Wellbutrin XL, a hot-selling antidepressant that was facing the prospect of competition from cheaper generics late last year. By the time Biovail Corp., the drug's maker, filed a citizen petition with the FDA, raising concerns about the safety of its potential rivals, Impax Laboratories Inc. and several other companies had already gone through much of the FDA application and review process for their generic versions of the drug. Impax was looking forward to getting a tentative approval that would bring it considerably closer to making and selling its competing drug. But because of the citizen petition, the FDA has yet to act, and Biovail still has the market for Wellbutrin XL to itself. Impax is fuming, as are many others in the generic drug industry.
Petitions to FDA Sometimes Delay Generic Drugs
Critics Say Companies Misusing Process
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 3, 2006; A01
A procedure designed to alert the Food and Drug Administration to scientific and safety issues is getting a hard look from members of Congress, who say they are concerned that it may be getting subverted by the brand-name drug industry. Some at the FDA, as well as leaders in the generic drug industry, complain that "citizen petitions" -- requests for agency action that any individual, group or company can file -- are being misused by brand-name drugmakers to stave off generic competition.
Submitted by Prometheus 6 on June 24, 2006 - 9:07am.
on Health
U.S. Blacks Hear Better Than Whites, women better than men
21:43:30 EDT Jun 23, 2006 (HealthDay News) - Listen up, America: A new study finds that blacks have better hearing than whites, and women of all races tend to hear better than men. Researchers at the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health also found that, even with significant advances in hearing technology, Americans' hearing levels remain stuck at where they were about 30 years ago. The Cincinnati-based team studied the results of hearing tests administered across the United States between 1999 and 2004. Results of the study were presented at a recent meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Providence, R.I.
Submitted by Prometheus 6 on June 24, 2006 - 8:48am.
on Health
Healing Monks of Ewu
Daily Champion (Lagos)
EDITORIAL
June 23, 2006
Posted to the web June 23, 2006
Lagos
A milestone was reached May 30 when monks at the Benedictine Monastery in Ewu, Edo State, officially opened their new state-of-the-art Laboratory for the production of herbal drugs. Simultaneously, they launched perhaps the first quarterly journal of African medicines, The Herbal Doctor. The PAX Herbal Laboratories, commissioned by Governor Lucky Igbinedion, is the brain-child of Fr. Anselem Adodo and his band of Christian monks numbering more than 33 who come from 15 Nigerian tribes and 12 states. Monastries are usually erroneously associated only with prayers, fasting and other austerities and deprivations that are supposed to bring monks and nuns closer to God. Which all may be true.
Quote of note: Although the study did not attempt to determine the cause of this disparity, Kirsner noted that blacks and Hispanics have less access to medical care.
Skin cancer deadlier in minorities
Melanoma is more common in white non-Hispanics than in Hispanics or blacks. But it is more likely to be deadly when it occurs in Hispanics and blacks, a new UM study suggests.
By JACOB GOLDSTEIN
[email protected]
The deadliest form of skin cancer is far more common among whites than among Hispanics or blacks -- but when it occurs, the disease is more likely to progress undetected in Hispanics and blacks, according to a new analysis of nearly 1,700 cases of melanoma in Miami-Dade County.
Make AIDS tests routine
June 20, 2006 WITH ALL the progress that has been made treating AIDS in the United States, each year 40,000 Americans become infected with the virus that causes the disease. More than half of them acquire the disease from people who are not aware they are carrying HIV. Of the slightly more than 1 million Americans with HIV, about 25 percent do not know they are infected and can infect others. To address this lethal ignorance, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said it will recommend more and broader testing this summer. Testing that is more routine, especially with the new rapid tests that give results within 20 minutes, would seem an obvious choice. But, going back to the time when an AIDS diagnosis was a virtual death sentence and there was severe stigmatizing of those with the disease, testing was recommended mainly for high - risk groups or in areas with high incidence, and only after pre-test counseling.
All this testing reminds me too much of trying to address unemployment with job training. It works often enough to give you things to point out, but doesn't root out the problem. I've had both gay friends and IV drug users friends that died for AIDS complications, so I take this quite seriously. And no, I'm not about to start moralizing or minimizing. But neither am I going to make everyone happy.
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