Month: June 2003

Mayo Clinic Study: Death Rate Among Anorexia Nervosa Patients Exaggerated

A Mayo Clinic study that looked at mortality rates among patients with anorexia nervosa over a period of 60 years concluded that people diagnosed with the disorder die at the same rate as people who do not have the disorder. This contradicts both previous clinical studies as well as many commonly cited claims that the death rate for people with the disorder is extremely high.

The commonly repeated claim is that individuals with anorexia nervosa have a mortality rate that is an astounding 12 times higher than the general population. But, as an epidemiologist with the Mayo Clinic points out, that is because previous studies were generally conducted in hospital settings where individuals with the most advanced cases of the disorder would be overrepresented.

Searching medical records, the Mayo Clinic identified 208 patients who met the criteria for an anorexia nervosa diagnosis between 1935 and 1989. The researchers found that those patients had the same death rate as the general population.

Mayo Clinic epidemiologist Joseph Melton said that,

Although our data suggest that overall mortality is not increased among community patients with anorexia nervosa in general, these findings should not lead to complacency in clinical practice because deaths do occur.

Patrick Sullivan, a professor of psychiatry and genetics at the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill, wrote in an editorial accompanying the study that what it showed was that anorexia nervosa symptoms occurred along a spectrum. Those with the most severe cases — such as those requiring hospitalization — may indeed have a higher mortality rate, but it is important to make distinctions between the degree of severity of the disease rather than lumping all cases in with the most severe and claiming that anyone with the disorder has a 12 times higher mortality rate.

Source:

Death rate for eating disorder not unusual. Brad Evenson, National Post (Canada), March 12, 2003.

Absurd Prison Sentence for Couple in False Rape Extortion Scam

Jessica Langshaw, 20, and her boyfriend, Raul Umana, 28, had a neat little scam that left them with more than $500,000 in profits before they were caught. But it was what happened after they were caught that was just as outrageous.

The scam worked like this. Langshaw would get to know men whom she’d meet over Internet chat room (and a few she knew personally). Then she’d tell the marks that unless they gave her money, she would file sexual assault charges against them.

Over a period of 8 months, Langshaw targeted 8 men in this way and she and her boyfriend collected more than $500,000 from this blackmail scheme.

She was finally caught during a routine meeting of different California law enforcement agencies. Langshaw’s name was mentioned and several law enforcement officials realized they all had rape reports filed by the young woman.

According to Ed Ward, Langshaw was charged with 6 felony counts of extortion, 5 felony counts of postal threats, and 3 perjuries and false reports of rape. Her boyfriend was charged with 9 counts of extortion, 8 threats, three counts of perjury and 3 false reports of rape.

Rather than go to trial, District Attorney Jan Scully reached a plea bargain with the couple which isn’t surprising. But the plea bargain involved Langshaw spending only 1 year in jail and Umana spending less than 2 years in jail. For filing numerous false reports of rape and extortion for material gain that is a ridiculously low sentence. Surely the District Attorney could have obtained a better plea bargain that for attempting to subvert the criminal justice system for personal profit.

The result is just mind boggling.

Source:

It’s almost official: Abuse U.S. Courts for power and profit. Ed Ward, NewsWithViews.Com, April 28, 2003.

Bite-sized items from here and there. KnoxNews.Com, April 22, 2003.

In Praise of dtSearch

A few years ago I plugged DtSearch.Com’s excellent indexing and searching program dtSearch Desktop. In the July 2003 issue of Wired Brian Lam picks dtSearch Desktop 6.11 as the best (if, still, expensive) program to index and then search data on your hard drive for Windows-based users. Lam illustrates just how good the program is,

This hard disk detective is the most powerful document search tool on the market. use the Stemming search if you want to crunch all grammatical variations. Need help with typos? A Fuzzy search may come in handy. The app is also capable of doing some amazing phonetic and thesaurus-based searches. When I looked up “mucus,” Desktop 6.11 picked out a document titled “booger.”

More importantly, to my mind, dtSearch is the only program I’ve ever found that a) I could actually afford and b) could handle all of the data I threw at it. I’ve tried pretty much every program like this out there (including Enfish wish Lam lists has his “Best Buy” at only $100, but which I’ve never had anything but trouble with) and this is the only one I’ve found that won’t choke when you start to throw 30 or 40 gigabytes of data at it. DtSearch is also nice in that when it returns a list of documents you can view the documents right there in its built-in browser without having to launch the app (and yes, I’ve seen this in other personal knowledgement software, but again it actually works seamlessly in dtSearch).

In fact, dtSearch is the third part of my three-prong personal knowledge management solution. Between dtSearch, Conversant, and hours of using and getting a better handle on Google, it usually takes me no more than few seconds to get my hands on exactly the information I need.

I’m in the process right now of pretty much ditching all of the paper in my life — literally every piece of paper at work and home is getting, scanned, PDF-ed and indexed (more on that project later). DTSearch runs rings around this data — type in a project I worked on last month and I’m looking instantly at all of the e-mails, memos, invoices, etc. associated with that project. Just a few keystrokes and I can drill down to my heart’s content.

The only drawback is still the price — $200 is still quite a lot of money, but it will pay for itself many times over if, like me, you have large amounts of data to manage and you always seem to need to find documents right now.

(Note: all of the above only applies to Windows.

Interpol Honors Mugabe’s Police Chief

In mid-May the Daily Telegraph (London) carried a story that really illustrated just how tolerant multilateral international institutions are of even the most brutal of thugs. The item concerned British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw condemning an honor bestowed upon Zimbabwe’s police chief, Augustin Chihuri.

Chihuri is one of the members of Zimbabwe’s political elite who is theoretically barred from travelling to Europe. But it came out in early May that Interpol had offered Chihuri an honorary title as vice-president of Interpol.

Straw sent a letter saying, in part,

I believe that the decision to reward Chihuri in this way was wrong. Had we been asked we would have said so.

It is an insult to the people who have suffered at the hands of the Zimbabwean police and other state security apparatus in that country.

At the end of May, Chihuri announced he would resign his honorary title.

Of course even more disturbing is that Chihuri has worked for the last six years on Interpol’s Executive Committee.

For its part, Interpol says it is completely a political and that, “Article 3 of the Interpol constitution forbids it from becoming involved in any activities of a political nature.”

So apparently the human rights abuse and other crimes being carried out in Zimbabwe are simply just another political dispute.

Source:

Straw condemns Interpol honour for Mugabe’s police chief. Daily Telegraph (London), May 11, 2003.

Zimbabwe police commissioner resigns honorary Interpol title. Press Release, Interpol, May 30, 2003.

Great Britain Considering a Domestic Violence Registry

The BBC reports that Great Britain is considering creating a domestic violence registry similar to its national sexual offender registry.

The registry would track anyone who was sentenced to jail six months or more for an act of domestic violence, and require such individuals to report with police when they move. According to the BBC,

The decision on whether to tell a woman of her partner’s violent past would be made after a risk assessment by police and social services.

It’s not clear if this registry will only list men convicted of domestic violence or if the BBC is just being sloppy with its language.

Source:

Domestic violence register ‘planned’. The BBC, May 26, 2003.

Argentina Judge Bans Contraception

Argentine judge Cristina Garzon De Lascano ruled in May that oral contraceptives and intrauterine devices should be banned because they constitute abortion. According to the BBC, de Lascano ordered the destruction of all existing stocks of such medications and devices.

This is not the first time de Lascano has made controversial rulings related to reproductive health. In 2001, she ordered a ban on the morning-after pill, and in February ruled that Argentina’s laws protecting women’s reproductive health could not be applied in Cordoba province. She was overruled by a higher court on that last decision.

The BBC reported that Argentine health minister Gines Gonzalez Garcia vowed to fight to reverse de Lascano’s latest judgment, characterizing it as,

. . . absurd and based on the plea of religious fundamentalists, without consulting a single a medical academic at the Health Ministry.

Abortion is illegal in Argentina, but an estimated 400,000 women have abortions every year anyway.

Sources:

Argentine contraceptive ban ‘absurd’. The BBC, May 24, 2003.