Police in This City Have Shot More than 90 Dogs Since 2011

It is interesting to see that police departments also have an "unequal" performance when it comes to shooting dogs.  See this article in "The Blaze" written by Elizabeth Kreft:  Police in This City Have Shot More than 90 Dogs Since 2011 | Video | TheBlaze.com.  In some cities, the rate of dog shootings is very low, in other cities, the rates are very high.  That could be due to differences in police training, or could be differences in the area's pet preferences.  For example, are there more pit bulls in buffalo as a percentage of population than New York, where more people have little yorkies, or miniature poodles?  It is very difficult to determine the source of the problem from the few statistics that are maintained and provided.

It is not surprising that so many of the dog-shooting situations seem to involve police actions for drug-enforcement.  If police departments didn't have to enforce the bans on "recreational" drugs, they would have very little to do.  Much of their activity, even during routine traffic stops, involves searching for illegal drugs or use of alcohol (DUI). The war on drugs has forced illegal drug dealers to handle large amounts of money, and caused them to carry weapons and keep attack dogs for protection.  That, in turn, requires the police to also be more heavily armed, and forces them to be more alert and aggressive when approaching suspects.  A fierce, barking dog increases the confusion level during the confrontation and actually increases the chances of making a more serious mistake (like shooting a human suspect).

It is also interesting that apparently it is easier to get statistics from the police departments concerning the number of dogs shot than it is to get similar numbers for how many HUMANS that the police have shot.  I think that every time any police, FBI, Homeland Security, Coast Guard employee fires a weapon in the line of duty (other than training), the purpose of the shooting should be recorded and reported in a Federal, public-accessible database.  That information is essential for proper management of our law-enforcement resources.  Do we need better training?  Better or different types of weapons?  Changes in procedures?

We really do need to call a "truce" on the war on drugs that has gone on for far too long.  When prohibition ended, it allows a reduction in the costs for FBI and police, and eliminated a huge amount of graft and corruption in those departments.  Yes, the effect was that we had more alcoholics on the road, and more families destroyed by alcoholism.  It was not a simple decision.  De-escalating the drug war is a good first step.  By decriminalizing marijuana in some states, we might be able to see if that reduces the amount of drug-related crime in those states?  Or will it lead to more crime and will more people switch to more dangerous forms of "illegal" recreational drugs?  For 50 years, the police and right-wingers have said that marijuana was a "gateway" drug that leads people to harder drugs -- this will be an opportunity for the country to see if that was true.

 

New therapies give hope to Alzheimer’s patients | UTSanDiego.com

Article in today's Union Tribune about Alzheimer's disease, and some promising drug trials to cure or slow the progress of early Alzheimer's disease.



New therapies give hope to Alzheimer’s patients | UTSanDiego.com

I just saw this article on Scientific American.
I think we are starting to realize more and more the complexity of the organisms that live in our gut.  This article is almost counterintuitive concerning the artificial sweetteners.

Here is a link to it:  http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sugar-substitutes-linked-to-obesity/

Here is the text of the article:

Sugar Substitutes Linked to Obesity

Artificial sweeteners seem to change the microbiomes of our guts

Sep 17, 2014 |By Alison Abbott and Nature magazine

This is the first work to suggest that sweeteners might be exacerbating metabolic disease. 
Credit: Joel Penner via flickr

The artificial sweeteners that are widely seen as a way to combat obesity and diabetes could, in part, be contributing to the global epidemic of these conditions.

Sugar substitutes such as saccharin might aggravate these metabolic disorders by acting on bacteria in the human gut, according to a study published by Nature this week (J. Suez et al. Naturehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature13793; 2014). Smaller studies have previously purported to show an association between the use of artificial sweeteners and the occurrence of metabolic disorders. This is the first work to suggest that sweeteners might be exacerbating metabolic disease, and that this might happen through the gut microbiome, the diverse community of bacteria in the human intestines. “It’s counter-intuitive — no one expected it because it never occurred to them to look,” says Martin Blaser, a microbiologist at New York University.

The findings could cause a headache for the food industry. According to BCC Research, a market-research company in Wellesley, Massachusetts, the market for artificial sweeteners is booming. And regulatory agencies, which track the safety of food additives, including artificial sweeteners, have not flagged such a link to metabolic disorders. In response to the latest findings, Stephen Pagani, a spokesman for the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in Parma, Italy, says that, as with all new data, the agency “will decide in due course whether they should be brought to the attention of panel experts for review”.

A team led by Eran Elinav of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, fed mice various sweeteners — saccharin, sucralose and aspartame — and found that after 11 weeks, the animals displayed glucose intolerance, a marker of propensity for metabolic disorders.

To simulate the real-world situation of people with varying risks of these diseases, the team fed some mice a normal diet, and some a high-fat diet, and spiked their water either with glucose alone, or with glucose and one of the sweeteners, saccharin. The mice fed saccharin developed a marked glucose intolerance compared to those fed only glucose. But when the animals were given antibiotics to kill their gut bacteria, glucose intolerance was prevented. And when the researchers transplanted faeces from the glucose-intolerant saccharin-fed mice into the guts of mice bred to have sterile intestines, those mice also became glucose intolerant, indicating that saccharin was causing the microbiome to become unhealthy.

Elinav’s team also used data from an on­going clinical nutrition study that has recruited nearly 400 people in Israel. The researchers noted a correlation between clinical signs of metabolic disorder — such as increasing weight or decreasing efficiency of glucose metabolism — and consumption of artificial sweeteners.

But “this is a bit chicken-and-egg”, says Elinav. “If you are putting on weight, you are more likely to turn to diet food. It doesn’t necessarily mean the diet food caused you to put on weight.”

So his team recruited seven lean and healthy volunteers, who did not normally use artificial sweeteners, for a small prospective study. The recruits consumed the maximum acceptable daily dose of artificial sweeteners for a week. Four became glucose intolerant, and their gut microbiomes shifted towards a balance already known to be associated with susceptibility to metabolic diseases, but the other three seemed to be resistant to saccharin’s effects. “This underlines the importance of personalized nutrition — not everyone is the same,” says Elinav.

He does not yet propose a mechanism for the effect of artificial sweeteners on the micro­biome. But, says Blaser, understanding how these compounds work on some species in the gut might “inspire us in developing new therapeutic approaches to metabolic disease”.

Yolanda Sanz, a nutritionist and vice-chair of the EFSA’s panel on dietetic products, nutrition and allergies, says that it is too soon to draw firm conclusions. Metabolic disorders have many causes, she points out, and the study is very small.

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on September 17, 2014.

Justices rule on contraception coverage | UTSanDiego.com

It appears that the right-wingers on the US Supreme Court, in the interest of "freedom of religion" decided to jam their religion down everyone else's throat.

Justices rule on contraception coverage | UTSanDiego.com:  Here is a link to the actual decision: http://www.scribd.com/doc/231968582/Burwell-v-Hobby-Lobby


So now employees who work for right-wing companies will no longer be able to get coverage for birth control.  Of course men will still be able to get drugs to help them with impotency such as viagra.  All of this is to support the right-wing desire for members of their religion to have more babies. The one thing the world doesn't need is MORE babies.  Catholics want more babies, Mormons want more babies, Muslims want more babies, Hasidic Jews want more babies.  They all want more children to help spread their "only true" religions.  We need incentives to people to reduce the number of children --particularly in the US.  One child born in the US consumes many times the world's scarce resources than a child born in almost any other country.

One thing that the Obama administration could do is make it easier to obtain birth control pills.  It no longer makes sense for women to have to go to a doctor to obtain prescriptions for birth control pills unless they have medical symptoms that could contribute to problems (high blood pressure, for example).  The FDA should authorize pharmacies to be able to issue birth control pills based upon a few simple procedures.  For example,

The patient would fill out a form on a terminal at the pharmacy and answer a series of questions about their health.  Based upon the answers to the questions, the terminal would request the patient to have blood pressure taken, temperature taken, provide a blood sample (finger prick), or a urine sample.  When the pharmacy receives acceptable response back from those tests, the prescription would be issued.  If the patient has vital signs that are in "marginal category" the software may require repeated blood pressure, or fluid samples in order to obtain refills of the prescription.  If answers to questions or lab tests are in "abnormal" category, the patient would be referred, of course, to a physician.

There are many other drugs in that category.  It never made sense to me to require prescriptions for toenail fungus treatments for example.  I believe that by using technology and allowing pharmacies to work directly with patients to manage a little of their own healthcare we could dramatically reduce the cost of healthcare in the US.

Who really pays for health care? It might surprise you!

I found this article by Jay Hancock very interesting.

Who really pays for health care? It might surprise you | Cincinnati.com | cincinnati.com

The article was published in a lot of City newspapers.  The facts he mentions didn't surprise me, because I think I understood most of them conceptually.  However it did confirm my beliefs.



It is clear that the Government & Employers have been paying for most of our medical care for years, so Obamacare really didn't make much change, except for forcing people who weren't paying their fair share to start paying also.



The real problem is the actual cost of the medical care is so much higher in the US than any other country in the world.  We need to figure out ways to reduce that cost without affecting the quality of health care. As an engineer, I like to break the cost down to its basic elements and then see what can be done to "value engineer" each component.  All of those little components where we have waste, fraud or abuse in our system adds up to huge numbers in the overall system.



Some of the big cost components are:

1. Fraud --We have heard estimates of huge amounts of fraud in medical claims.  These include insurance fraud of many different types.

2. Conflicts of Interest -- Medical providers, whether doctors, drug companies, or hospitals all have a profit motive to sell more of their product or service whether it is needed or in the best interest of the patient.

3. Hypochondria -- We have a lot of people now who request, or insist on additional medical care based upon incomplete knowledge of their health situation, which is often influenced by marketing from drug companies

4. Ineffective treatments -- Even though there are new and improved treatments for many diseases, doctors continue to perform or prescribe treatments that are less effective or more expensive

5. Barriers to "self help" -- Patients with many symptoms could, in fact, diagnose their own medical problems with very high accuracy and prescribe their own remedies for minor problems.  However, our US system of delivering medical care is "tilted" to require everyone to go to a doctor for almost every problem.  This increases the overall medical costs, and sometimes actually delays getting the proper care.

Examples of this include:

• We go to doctors because when a doctor prescribes a medicine, it is covered by insurance, vs paying for an over-the-counter medication at a drug store.
• We go to the doctor because we find it hard to get the facts we need to help us diagnose our problem.  However, now there is a wealth of knowledge available on-line...but can we trust it?
• We go to a doctor because the medication we need for a simple problem is sold "by prescription only." It doesn't make a lot of sense why some medications are only sold by prescriptions--for example topical treatments for toenail fungus

Auto Immune Syndromes

I just read that Venus Williams is suffering from a disease called Sjogren's syndrome.  but still won the Dubai tennis tournament.  I looked upSjogren's syndrome on Wikipedia.  It is a difficult disease to diagnose and treat.  It doesn't sound like we know the cause, and there is apparently no cure.  Because one of the symptoms is fatigue, I also looked up Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and Fibromyalgia which in some ways seems similar.  Apparently all three of these diseases are more prevalent in women, and we don't know the cause or have a cure.   There are some common symptoms among the three syndromes, but there are enough differences to allow them to be classified as separate diseases.  I wonder if there are other syndromes that are also similar.  According to Wikipedia A syndrome:  In medicine and psychology, a less specific definition of syndrome is used, which describes a collection of symptoms and findings without necessarily tying them to a single identifiable pathogenesis.  Is there a common cause for this type of syndrome?  Is it genetic?  Or is it a viral infection?  Or both:  for example a viral infection triggers an immune response which becomes self-destructive due to a genetic mutation?



From searching on the internet, it appears that each of these syndromes have their own support organizations, which consists of other patients sharing with each other.  Each also appears to have fund-raising to help with patients and research.  The research seems to be fragmented, and studying the unique properties and symptoms of each syndrome.  It doesn't appear that there is any organization, including NIH, or the equivalent in other countries, sponsoring research into the possible common cause, treatment or cure of these type of syndromes.  



I wonder if it would make sense to map the DNA of individuals with these various syndromes and see if there are common genetic markers that indicate a possible contributing cause of the syndromes.  If the FDA had continued to allow "23 and me" to collect specimens, maybe it would help. It seems to me that the world really does need an immense database of DNA to be able to identify unique differences that could contribute to causing rare syndromes such as this.  

An excerpt from Michio Kaku's "The Future of the Mind" | MSNBC

An excerpt from Michio Kaku's "The Future of the Mind" | MSNBC:



Michio Kaku was on the Daily Show in Feb 2014 concerning the brain.