I got an email today from Phillip Coticelli at Africa Fighting Malaria pointing to a study by Donald Roberts (PDF), showing that DDT has a repellent effect in addition to its toxicity. The key finding is that that three out of five DDT-resistant Aedes aegypti mosquitoes avoid huts sprayed with DDT. Roberts argues that this is a reason for preferring DDT to alternative pesticides such as dieldrin. A few points about this are worth making
* First, it’s good to see AFM acknowledging the fact of pesticide resistance, which primarily accounts for the abandonment of large-scale attempts to eradicate malaria-carrying mosquitoes with pesticides. The libel put out by people like Steven Milloy and AFM founder Roger Bate[1], in which it is suggested that the failure of the eradication program was due to a mythical ban on DDT imposed at the behest of environmentalists, who callously caused millions of deaths, depends critically on ignoring resistance.
* Second, although the study is new, the claim is not. Roberts has been arguing the importance of repellent and irritant effects for a long time. And while the reporting of this study suggests that these benefits are unique to DDT, other work by Roberts has found that permethrin and deltamethrin are just as effective in this respect.
How does this relate to the general debate over the use of hut spraying as a strategy to fight malaria?
I added a link to it on my daily links list where Liz Losh saw it and then included it in a blog post “Just Say Know” discussing all sorts of parody videos and sites related to drug use including the artist-created fictional drug Web site Havidol, and this video:
These are some great parodies. Work in the field of health communication looks at the effects of health campaigns, but tends to focus on serious ones. I wonder what type of work may be going on in the domain of parody viral videos online for similar purposes.
David Denby didn’t like “Sicko” very much. In the New Yorker, he writes:
“Hauling off seriously ill people to a military base where they won’t receive treatment is a dumb prank.”
Okay – I’m not the biggest Michael Moore fan in the world, and I can see how this might rub some people the wrong way.
“Why not tell us what really happened on the trip – for instance, what part Cuban officials played in receiving the American patients?”
Actually, that might not be a bad idea.
“Moore winds up treating the audience the same way that, he says, powerful people treat the weak in America – as dopes easily satisfied with fairy tales and bland reassurances.”
Seems harsh – this is clearly supposed to be a piece of entertaining propaganda – but, again, I can see the point.
“A shift to the left, or, at least, to the center, has overtaken Michael Moore, yielding an irony more striking than any he turns up: the changes in political consciousness that Moore himself has helped produce have rendered his latest film almost superfluous.”
Er, how’s that again? In polls, a majority are in favor of universal health care, so there’s no need to build grass-roots pressure anymore? Same for getting out of Iraq, I suppose.
I am reduced to nicking stuff from Harry Hutton . Oh well. But I couldn’t resist the two quotes from Mark Steyn that he links to. The evils caused by socialized medicine have limits :
bq. Does government health care inevitably lead to homicidal doctors who can’t wait to leap into a flaming SUV and drive it through the check-in counter? No.
That’s a relief. But we shouldn’t get complacent :
bq. … the unloveliness of any British city after six in the evening – the dolly birds staggering around paralytic, the pools of “pavement pizza”, the baying yobboes gagging for a shag and hurling bollards through the bus shelters to impress the crumpet – is a natural consequence of what happens when the state relieves the citizen of primal responsibilities.
As of yesterday, Indonesia has suffered more confirmed human deaths (72) from the avian flu than any other country. (Here are World Health Organization statistics.) In February, Indonesia stopped sending samples of the flu to the WHO. They wanted to prevent drug companies from developing and patenting vaccines that they (and other poor countries) could not afford. In a February story (that I missed at the time), the NY Timesreported:
Dr. David L. Heymann, chief of communicable diseases at the [WHO], who negotiated in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, with the health minister, thanked Indonesia for drawing attention to the problem and said he had been assured that it “would not hold the W.H.O. hostage to the virus,” wire service reports from Indonesia said.
…
Dr. Heymann said that a fund to buy vaccine for poor countries could be discussed at the March meeting and that his agency would help Indonesia eventually develop its own vaccine factories.
At the end of March, Indonesia and the WHO reached an agreement according to which Indonesia would resume sharing samples with the WHO, on the condition that “not share virus samples with commercial vaccine makers without permission from the source country”.
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Britain’s largest drugs company, is in talks with the World Health Organisation (WHO) about a proposal for a subsidised mass vaccination programme against avian flu for developing countries, The Times has learnt.
Hopefully these negotiations will be fruitful. It seems as though Indonesia has played the game successfully – but what a dangerous game they were forced to play.
Last June I wrote about my friend Havi Carel and her battle with the lung disease Lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM). Havi has an article in today's Independent about LAM and about what it is like to live with a terminal illness and how that changes your relationship to others, indeed, to everything.
Last time I wrote I invited you to sponsor Havi on a bike-ride to raise money for LAM Action which supports patients and raises money for research. This time Kate Gamez and Becky Tunstall are running the London Marathon for LAM Action – so please click on one of their names if you want to sponsor them.
I used to give blood, less often than I probably should have done, but willingly, and without much personal cost. Needles don’t bother me (as long as I am the victim) and whereas I’d feel tired at the end of the day, that was about it. There’s nothing special about my blood, and I’m sure it’s a drop in the ocean, but a recent conversation about why I no longer give blood has prompted me to wonder whether I should start again.
Today is World Aids Day, and UN AIDSreports that another 14.000 children, women and men will become infected with HIV today. This year is 25 years ago that the first case was reported. In those 25 years, there has been a gigantic difference in the impact of HIV/AIDS on the affluent societies versus the poor societies, especially in sub-Saharan African. The life expectancy in some African countries such as Botswana and Swaziland is now well below 35 years. And even these statistics do not reveal the grim reality of children who are growing up without adults, in what social scientists now call ‘childheaded households’. How can a 12 year old girl feed her younger siblings? If there are no neighbours or organisations supporting them, it is likely that her only short-term survival option is prostitution. Long-term survival is something these children simply cannot contemplate.
The theme of this World Aids Day is accountability – not only of individuals who are having unsafe sex (especially those who are infecting others through unwanted sex), but also of religious leaders discouraging the use and promotion of condoms, political leaders of rich societies who don't give enough money to fight the epidemic, and political leaders in severely HIV/AIDS-affected countries, such as Doctor Beetroot, who are misinforming the population. But World Aids Day is also the day when we should thank the many men and women who are fighting this ugly disease, from grassroots awareness activities up to diplomatic action at the highest level, often in difficult circumstances.
Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen has responded to my claim that, once societies have achieved a certain threshold level, continued growth in output doesn’t matter that much (and that inequalities among such societies matter little, certainly when set beside the absolute poverty of the global poor). Tyler writes:
bq. Just as the present appears remarkable from the vantage point of the past, our future may offer comparable advances in benefits. Continued progress might bring greater life expectancies, cures for debilitating diseases, and cognitive enhancements. Millions or billions of people will have much better and longer lives. Many features of modern life might someday seem as backward as we now regard the large number of women who died in childbirth for lack of proper care. Most of all, economic growth limits and mitigates tragedies. It is a simple failure of imagination to believe that human progress has run its course.
I think what is most striking about what Tyler writes here is the way in which he runs together human progress and economic growth, as if they were the same thing. I’ll leave to one side any moralized or perfectionist thoughts about human progress and just notice that there’s a basic distinction to be made between scientific and technological development and economic growth in the sense of increased per capita GDP. Capitalism’s advocates have always had a tendency to equate progress with increased output, but there are other possibilities, chief among them being that output remains constant and people become progressively freed from burdensome toil. Jerry Cohen has some trenchant observations about Max Weber’s enslavement to a Tyler-like view towards the end of his _Karl Marx’s Theory of History_ (p. 321 and thereabouts). If the passage were online, I’d link. But you should all own a copy anyway.
The other thing to note is the way Tyler holds out the carrot of the benefits of medical technology, including “cognitive enhancements”. If scientific progress can come apart from growth in GDP I could just suggest that giving up on growth in one sense doesn’t necessarily require us to forgo such future benefits. (And I could also point to a list of societies that have innovated in medical technology despite not being at the front of economic development: the British invention of MRI scanning in the 1970s being a case in point.) But it is worth noting that the really great advances in longevity (so far) have mainly come from improvements in diet and public health and rather less from hi-tech. Maybe Tyler thinks that all this will change in the future and that we need to incentivize innovators now so that the benefits of “cognitive enhancements” trickle down to ordinary Westerners and then to the global poor. I’m unconvinced.
Review: Jacob Hacker, The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement and _How You Can Fight Back_. Available from Powells , from Amazon .
In his ethnography (PDF) of Grover Norquist’s weekly breakfast meetings, Thomas Medved tells us how Newt Gingrich sold reluctant conservatives attending the meeting on Medicare reform. [click to continue…]
This Nature editorial reports the alarming news that six international health workers face execution in Libya on bogus charges of spreading HIV. As the editorial points out, despite the absence of any real improvement in its human rights record, Libya is being treated as a Beacon of Light by both the US and EU because it has backed off its previous support for terrorism and WMDs. It should be made clear to the Gaddafi regime that murdering health workers is on a par with terrorism as a crime against the international community.
I recently heard some figures about the number of Dutch women who receive spinal puncture anaesthesia when giving birth. The figure would be around 15 percent. This is probably the lowest percentage among all affluent countries. According to the same newspaper article, in Belgium the figure would be 70%, as it is probably also in many other European countries.
The exact figures don’t matter: this post is about the remarkable low percentage of women who receive spinal puncture anaesthesia in the Netherlands. I think these low figures are a scandal. Why? Because in the Netherlands most women have effectively no choice to give birth with effective painkillers. The figures are not low because there is no demand; rather, the figures are low because there are so many barriers, that it is effectively impossible for most women to choose to give birth without suffering immense pain. [click to continue…]
Kieran’s post about his book on organ donation gives me a hook to write something about the other end of the system, about organ recipients and the institutions which are supposed to match them up with donated organs. More specifically, how one such institution, the Kaiser HMO of Northern California, quite spectacularly failed several thousand people who were depending on them, by not matching them up. The story has been around since early May, when it was broken by Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber in the Los Angeles Times (cached here), since confirmed by an investigation by Medicare/Medicaid. It doesn’t seem to have gotten all that much attention among the blogs, but it’s outrageous, and deserves, for that reason alone, to be better known.
(I was hoping to end my guest-blogging here by kvetching about econophysics, which is merely trivial; but that will have to wait until next week, back at my own blog.)
Thomas Medvetz has just published an article in Politics and Society (my favourite academic journal) that deserves a wide readership; he’s given me permission to post it temporarily. The piece is about the role that Grover Norquist’s Wednesday meetings play in cementing the conservative movement and indeed, in an important sense, in constituting its identity (Medvetz attended fourteen of these meetings and interviewed several key figures separately). Readers who aren’t familiar with current debates in sociology shouldn’t be put off by the initial theoretical discussion – the points that Medvetz makes in the main part of the article are clear, and easily understood. He’s claiming that these meetings serve a key function in creating a cohesive conservative community, centered on agreement over those things that aren’t open for discussion – babies (abortion), guns and taxes. It also helps conservatives frame issues for wider debates, and constitute themselves as distinct from the wider Republican party – participants frequently criticize centrist Republicans, or those who are too willing to bow to their constituents rather than sticking to conservative principal. Finally, the meetings are a point of exchange among movement conservatives themselves, and between the conservative movement and elected officials – both have something to gain from the other.
Medvetz backs up his story with juicy ethnographic details. His account of the debate over Medicare (beginning on the bottom of p.354) is a highly valuable piece of political history. A Heritage Foundation fellow denounced the forthcoming legislation as a massive expansion in government. The White House, aware that this was in the offing (and that conservatives were highly suspicious of the legislation), sent Doug Badger to make the positive case for the legislation. He and Newt Gingrich claimed that the legislation should be seen as an important incremental step towards privatizing healthcare and dismantling the welfare state. Gingrich’s argument that the healthcare bill was a victory for conservatism seemed to win his audience over. This account is a lovely illustration of Jacob Hacker’s argument about the new politics of welfare state entrenchment. It also serves as a capsule account of what the conservative movement has become today. Great stuff – go read it.
Havi Carel, a philosopher at the University of the West of England in Bristol who has formerly taught at the Australian National University and the University of York, England, has recently been diagnosed with LAM, a very rare lung disease. She’s taking part in the Bristol Bike Ride (24 miles) on 25 June 2006 to raise money for LAM Action, the UK LAM organisation, and she would really welcome your support. Money that is raised will support research for this under-funded and under-researched disease.
All donations are secure and sent electronically to LAM Action. If you are a UK taxpayer, Justgiving will automatically reclaim 28 per cent Gift Aid on your behalf, so your donation is worth even more.