Kids, Don’t Try This At Home

Unlike the United States, Great Britain has official censors that are empowered to decide which advertisements are acceptable and which are not. For the most part I’ve always thought this was an absurd arrangement, especially since the Advertising Standards Authority tends to be hypersenstive.

On the other hand, I cannnot fathom why a health organization would want to run an ad like this. A woman with a plastic bag over her head — yeah, that’s an image I want my five year old running across.

And You Thought HMOs Were Heartless

The British National Health Service recently announced and odd treatment schedule for patients suffering from age-related macular degeneration, which is the leading cause of blindness in developed countries.

The NHS has decided that it will only approve treatment for macular degeneration once the disease is present in both eyes, and then it will only treat the eye that has been damaged the least with no treatment being recommended for the other eye.

Treatment for macular degeneration is widely available in the United States, Canada and most European countries, but apparently the British health system balks at the cost.

Source:

Outrage over blindness guidelines. The BBC, June 13, 2002.

Cholera Gives Up Its Secrets In Mice

Cholera still sickens about 300,000 people every year, mostly in developed countries with poor water treatment systems. Efforts to create a vaccine for the disease have been always been stymied. But results from a cholera model in mice appears to offer a clue as to why that is so.

Researchers at Tufts University infected one group of mice with a cultured strain of the cholera bacteria and a second group of mice with a strain of the bacteria taken from the feces of cholera patients.

The strain taken from patients was as much as 700 times more infectious than the cultured strain. Moreover, when the patient strain was placed in a culture, within 18 hours it reverted to the relatively low-infectious version.

The implication is that the cholera bacteria has evolved a behavior usually seen in complex parasites such as malaria that use different forms for transmission between individuals than they have for infecting individuals once they are in the body (cholera has two chromosomes where most bacteria only have a single chromosome which may play a role in the transformation it makes once inside its hosts).

Since vaccines for cholera have focused on causing an immune response to the cultured form of the bacteria, they likely have failed to cause an immune response to the infectious form of the bacteria.

If the results in mice also hold for human beings, then researchers might be able to finally create an effective vaccine by targeting the proteins of the infectious form of the disease.

Source:

Cholera needs guts to survive. Tom Clarke, Nature, June 6, 2002.

Cholera bacterium’s quick change revealed. Deborah MacKenzie, New Scientist, June 2, 2002.

Newspapers Aren’t Going Anywhere

This claim by Dave Winer is just silly,

I was interviewed today by a Japanese wire service. They asked if weblogs spelled the end of newspapers. I said they didn’t have to, if the professional news organizations adopted the technology.

Weblogs don’t have a chance of spelling the end of newspapers. Winer makes a big deal out of this story where a person posted photos of illegal dumping on his web site and the story subsequently was picked up by a local newspaper.

Does Winer think that reporters go out on patrol like Batman looking for stories to report on? No, they get their leads and story ideas from people like this guy. In my spare time I’m always pushing for the local newspaper or the student newspaper to run stories about things that I care about that I’m certain the editors there no nothing about (and I succeed most of the time — which is a lot of fun when the student paper ends up scooping the local Newhouse rag).

What I would like to see, however, is something else that Winer recommended recently — transcripts. I’d love it if the local paper or even the student paper would include a link to transcripts of city council meetings alongside their story about the meeting. Some federal agencies are now posting transcripts of their press conferences on the web (which has embarassed more than one reporter whose summary of a press conference was questionable), and I think we need a lot more of that.

Finally, Winer includes this odd article by Edward Champion which makes the incorrect claim that “people are starting to reject newspapers.” But the article that Champion cites doesn’t warrant that conclusion.

A Pew Research Center poll found the number of people who said they read a newspaper on the previous day had fallen to 41 percent in 2002 from 47 percent in 2000. I’m not sure how helpful a metric this is, however. There are a number of polls that ask people whether they read a newspaper at least five days a week, and those numbers have tended to be pretty stable in the high 40s for several years now. Certainly newspapers are getting killed by problems generating sufficient ad revenue (and, until recently, high newsprint prices), but the readership is still there.

If anything, I suspect weblogging increases the market for newspapers. Five years ago I used to surf the web to supplement my newspaper habit. Now I buy a newspaper to serve as an offline news source for those times when I’m not near my computer (or during Windows NT’s interminable reboot periods).

Television news, on the other hand, has become a wasteland. Only 32 percent of Americans told Pew that they regularly watch one of the nightly network news shows and that’s with the 9/11 attacks. I suspect that without 9/11 that figure would have been significantly lower. Regardless, at those levels of viewership, it is questionable how long all three network broadcasts will last. At some point the temptation for network affiliates to substitute syndicated programs for the network news broadcasts will be too great.

Chomsky’s Linguistic Theories

As much as I detest Noam Chomsky, I don’t agree at all with Glenn Reynolds’ claim that Chomsky’s linguistic theories are failing. Reynolds claims,

IT’S NOT JUST NOAM CHOMSKY’S POLITICS THAT ARE DISCREDITED: His linguistic opinions aren’t faring so well either.

But that assessment is based entirely on this story about the role of “uh” and “um.” Chomsky argues that those are not words and are not properly part of language at all. A couple of researchers at Stanford and the University of California at Santa Cruz disagree, arguing that “uh” and “um” tend to be used in ways that send consistent cues to listeners and are therefore part of language.

Frankly, their logic isn’t all that convincing to this non-linguist, but even if theyre are correct, that doesn’t seem to detract from the central point of Chomsky’s linguistic theory that the capacity for language is innate rather than an artifact of culture.

There is a lot of debate over the specifics, and a lot of animosity toward Chomsky within linguistics and he has a habit of saying things about how this capacity for language evolved (i.e., he’s come close to denying that it evolved at all), but he’s certainly right on the big picture.

Now if we could just get him to stop using language to make ridiculous claims like: we should take Osama bin Laden at his word or that tens of thousands of people died from the U.S. attack on a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant or that efforts to hold public schools accountable is a right wing corporate plot against America’s children.

Cholera Gives Up Its Secrets In Mice

Cholera still sickens about 300,000 people every year, mostly in developed countries with poor water treatment systems. Efforts to create a vaccine for the disease have been always been stymied. But results from a cholera model in mice appears to offer a clue as to why that is so.

Researchers at Tufts University infected one group of mice with a cultured strain of the cholera bacteria and a second group of mice with a strain of the bacteria taken from the feces of cholera patients.

The strain taken from patients was as much as 700 times more infectious than the cultured strain. Moreover, when the patient strain was placed in a culture, within 18 hours it reverted to the relatively low-infectious version.

The implication is that the cholera bacteria has evolved a behavior usually seen in complex parasites such as malaria that use different forms for transmission between individuals than they have for infecting individuals once they are in the body (cholera has two chromosomes where most bacteria only have a single chromosome which may play a role in the transformation it makes once inside its hosts).

Since vaccines for cholera have focused on causing an immune response to the cultured form of the bacteria, they likely have failed to cause an immune response to the infectious form of the bacteria.

If the results in mice also hold for human beings, then researchers might be able to finally create an effective vaccine by targeting the proteins of the infectious form of the disease.

Source:

Cholera needs guts to survive. Tom Clarke, Nature, June 6, 2002.

Cholera bacterium’s quick change revealed. Deborah MacKenzie, New Scientist, June 2, 2002.