Hope is not a plan

In the June, 2005 issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry, Turner et al examine the assertion that psychiatric evacuations from war zones are primarily due to combat stress responses. They looked at psychiatric evacuations from Iraq of British forces from the start of the buildup until half a year past the end of formal hostilities.

They discovered that 69% of evacuees were noncombatants and 85% of evacuations were some form of depression related to being away from home. Only 3% were combat stress reactions.

Which all suggests that being homesick is harder, psychologically, than being shot at.

PubMed link

The Federal government plans to archive DNA samples from suspects detained by Federal authorities, following new rules instituted by DoJ in January of this year. This represents as change from previous policy, which only allowed archiving of DNA samples from convicts.

Naturally, this is upsetting to many, including folks from the ACLU. Carol Fredrickson, legislative office director for that group, made two good points, one of which I hadn't thought of before:

"DNA is far more than a simple fingerprint.

"The huge backlog of rape kits waiting to be tested will continue to grow as the government collects DNA from hundreds of thousands or even millions of individuals arrested or detained."

The former point will be more and more true as we gain more understanding about the genetic basis of many medical conditions and medical proclivities. Will your insurance company be able to issue a claim for access to DNA collected when you were held by the Park Service after failing to acquire a proper camping permit? Can they then change your rates based on that information?

The second point is very important. Have we checked to make sure we have the capacity to process all the new samples this will produce? Will evidence from violent crimes get absolute priority over processing the latest sample taken from a would-be illegal border crosser?

For the moment, we'll just have to wait and see how it's managed. A similar policy went into effect in California with the passage of Prop 69 in 2004. You can check on its status at the Office of the Attorney General by clicking here. According to their third quarter 2006 report, they have 827,066 samples on file, received 50,947 submissions in that quarter and have achieved 2,949 hits since their inception, aiding 3,191 investigations. According to the January, 2007 monthly report, they were able to cut their sample backlog from 176,220 to 158,546 and had 261 hits in that month. Given that they did that backlog clearance along with covering an additional 19,000 samples that came in that month, it looks good for them to be up to speed by 2008.

Of course, there's no indication if or how this may be impinging on other forensic DNA lab tasks.

al Jazeera article

In Spring of 2006, Kaiser Permanente got caught dumping a patient in downtown Los Angeles, well over ten miles from the medical facility she'd been in and from her own home.

Now, Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center appears to have done Kaiser one better, dumping a paraplegic patient on the street. Apparently, Hollywood Pres has been accused of this before. This time, witnesses actually recorded the license plate number of the truck from which the man was dumped.

It's good to see increasing intolerance for this kind of behavior.

Now that AIDS profiteer Matthias Rath has dropped his harassing libel suit against the Guardian and columnist Ben Goldacre, the Guardian is once again free to report on Rath's malice in Africa and in general on the shocking failure of the South African government to deal appropriately with the AIDS pandemic.

As the Guardian reports, South Africa was ripe for infestation by scam artists like Rath based on the government's AIDS denialism and its unfortunate view that the choice between drugs that work and other practices that don't was somehow an extension of old anticolonial battles. I'd like to once again quote something very important that Barack Obama said in 2006:

"On the treatment side the information being provided by the minister of health is not accurate," he told reporters outside an AIDS clinic in Cape Town's Khayelitsha township.

"It is not an issue of Western science versus African science, it is just science and it's not right."

Indeed.

Unfortunately, the South African government has been letting its people die by using this, of all things, as a venue to shrug off "Western" influences. Curiously, this has meant repeated intrusions by Western scam artists -- apparently, you're accepted as long as you're promoting nonsense. Consider folks like Michael Hart Jones, who was trying to set up a goat-serum AIDS cure scam. And, of course, Rath, who used incredibly unethical methods to screw up AIDS care in South Africa:

In time, MSF learned that Rath Foundation workers had infiltrated Aids clinics in Khayelitsha. A nurse and the manager of the bustling Ubuntu clinic, Nompumelelo Mantangana, says she discovered that some of the foundation's employees were paying health staff to pass on the names of HIV-positive patients: "We stopped that but not before it did a lot of damage."

She says the Rath Foundation played on the fact that many people came to the clinic only once they were sick, and that ARVs tended to make them feel worse before their health began to recover. "They said, come off the ARVs and take the multivitamins and you will feel better. And you do - but it doesn't mean you are getting well. Eventually you get sick again," she says.

But then, if you're already unethically leading people away from life-saving treatments, it's hard to imagine it being a big stretch to take the extra step and actually steal them away from effective clinics.

For more, read the full Guardian article on the topic, and applaud the Guardian for standing behind Goldacre in the face of this harassing and frivolous lawsuit.

This year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is a split between Harald zur Hausen, who discovered that human papilloma virus (for which there is now a vaccine) causes cancer, and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier, who discovered HIV.

All three made tremendous contributions to preventing human illness and death, and are very deserving of this recognition.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2008