In Vitro Meat
In Vitro Meat
By RAIZEL ROBIN, New York Times Magazine, December 11, 2005
In July, scientists at the University of Maryland announced the development of bioengineering techniques that could be used to mass-produce a new food for public consumption: meat that is grown in incubators.
The process works by taking stem cells from a biopsy of a live animal (or a piece of flesh from a slaughtered animal) and putting them in a three-dimensional growth medium - a sort of scaffolding made of proteins. Bathed in a nutritional mix of glucose, amino acids and minerals, the stem cells multiply and differentiate into muscle cells, which eventually form muscle fibers. Those fibers are then harvested for a minced-meat product.
Scientists at NASA and at several Dutch universities have been developing the technology since 2001, and in a few years' time there may be a lab-grown meat ready to market as sausages or patties. In 20 years, the scientists predict, they may be able to grow a whole beef or pork loin. A tissue engineer at the Medical University of South Carolina has even proposed a countertop device similar to a bread maker that would produce meat overnight in your kitchen.
There are still several major hurdles to clear, like figuring out a way to get stem cells to proliferate cheaply enough that meat could be mass-produced. But if in vitro meat becomes viable, the environmental and ethical consequences could be profound. The thought of beef grown in the lab may turn your stomach, but in vitro meat would avoid many of the downsides of factory farming, most notably pollution: in the United States, livestock produce 1.4 billion tons of waste each year. What's more, once a meat-cell culture exists, it could function the way a yeast or yogurt culture does, so that meat growers wouldn't need to use a new animal for each set of starter cells - and the meat industry would no longer be dependent on slaughtering animals.
Read the entire article
Monday, December 12, 2005
Sunday, December 11, 2005
Study Finds That Medical Research is Often Wrong
Study Finds That Medical Research is Often Wrong
Study Finds That Medical Research is Often Wrong
Associated Press, Thursday, July 14, 2005
New research highlights a frustrating fact about science: What was good for you yesterday frequently will turn out to be not so great tomorrow.
The sobering conclusion came in a review of major studies published in three influential medical journals between 1990 and 2003, including 45 highly publicized studies that initially claimed a drug or other treatment worked.
Subsequent research contradicted results of seven studies ? 16 percent ? and reported weaker results for seven others, an additional 16 percent.
That means nearly one-third of the original results did not hold up, according to the report in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.
"Contradicted and potentially exaggerated findings are not uncommon in the most visible and most influential original clinical research," said study author Dr. John Ioannidis, a researcher at the University of Ioannina in Greece.
Ioannidis examined research in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and Lancet ? prominent journals whose weekly studies help feed a growing public appetite for medical news.
Read the entire article
Study Finds That Medical Research is Often Wrong
Associated Press, Thursday, July 14, 2005
New research highlights a frustrating fact about science: What was good for you yesterday frequently will turn out to be not so great tomorrow.
The sobering conclusion came in a review of major studies published in three influential medical journals between 1990 and 2003, including 45 highly publicized studies that initially claimed a drug or other treatment worked.
Subsequent research contradicted results of seven studies ? 16 percent ? and reported weaker results for seven others, an additional 16 percent.
That means nearly one-third of the original results did not hold up, according to the report in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.
"Contradicted and potentially exaggerated findings are not uncommon in the most visible and most influential original clinical research," said study author Dr. John Ioannidis, a researcher at the University of Ioannina in Greece.
Ioannidis examined research in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and Lancet ? prominent journals whose weekly studies help feed a growing public appetite for medical news.
Read the entire article
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Six Keys to Safer Hospitals
Six Keys to Safer Hospitals
Six Keys to Safer Hospitals
A set of simple precautions could prevent 100,000 needless deaths every year.
By Donald M. Berwick, M.D.
Newsweek, December 12, 2005
Sometime soon, I will need a new right knee. If all goes well, it will be quite a relief. An artificial joint can be a modern miracle, the alternative to decades of pain and hobbling. Here's the problem. Instead of helping me, health care might kill me. In 1999, the Institute of Medicine shocked the nation with an authoritative report on hospital errors. The report concluded that up to 98,000 Americans each year die in hospitals, not from the diseases that brought them there but from injuries caused by their medical care: preventable bleeding or infections, a medication mix-up, a respirator tube put in the wrong way and a lot more. I have climbed Mount Rainier five times. Each time I made that tough trek, my risk of dying was about 100 times smaller than the risk I will face on the operating table.
Even if the surgery doesn't kill me, it may still cause needless harm. The reason I need a new knee is that I have osteoarthritis?the result of a botched and unnecessary knee operation 30 years ago, when I was a naive and trusting medical student. What could go wrong this time? My postoperative pain may not be adequately controlled. I may receive the wrong dose of blood thinner, causing bleeding in my stomach. Someone may overlook the little patch of pneumonia on my routine postoperative chest X-ray, causing me to remain on a respirator in the intensive-care unit for several days. Or the hospital may fail to take steps that could prevent the pneumonia in the first place.
Fortunately, hospitals are beginning to realize that it doesn't have to be this way. On Dec. 14, 2004, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., launched the 100,000 Lives Campaign, a broad national effort to achieve the most urgent reforms. Mainstream leadership groups like the American Medical Association, the American Nurses Association and the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations immediately signed on to the campaign. Several federal agencies?including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Veterans Health Administration and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality?pledged support as well.
We have identified six basic measures that could save as many as 100,000 lives a year if even 2,000 hospitals adopted them. It's surprising to learn that these standards aren't already the norm?but the norms may finally be changing. Nearly 3,000 American hospitals have enrolled in our 100,000 Lives Campaign over the past year, and more than half are reporting their monthly death rates so that we (and they) can track progress. That takes courage in a world where hospitals, fearing blame and lawsuits, too often feel the need to hide their mistakes.
What exactly will it take to improve the quality of care? Here are the prescriptions that we and our partners are advancing. You don't have to be a doctor to understand them.
1 PREVENT RESPIRATOR PNEUMONIA
VAPs, or ventilator-associated pneumonias, are often deadly lung infections that people on respirators can get (after surgery, for example). A few simple maneuvers, like elevating the head of the hospital bed and frequently cleaning the patient's mouth, can eliminate them. Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz, Calif., just celebrated one full year without a single VAP?a result most doctors would have thought impossible.
2 PREVENT IV-CATHETER INFECTIONS
Central-line infections occur when bacteria contaminate catheters that deliver food and medicine intravenously. Dr. Peter Pronovost of Johns Hopkins University recently reported that 70 hospitals in Michigan, California, Iowa and Indiana cut their central-line infections by half, saving an estimated $165 million from complications to boot. How did they do it? They made it easy for doctors and nurses to wash their hands between patients, adopted simple procedures for changing the bandages around the catheters and made absolutely sure that no catheter remained in a vein even one hour longer than needed.
3 STOP SURGICAL-SITE INFECTIONS
Surgical-site infections are a major cause of complications and deaths after operations. Last year Mercy Health Center in Oklahoma City operated on 1,200 consecutive patients without a single wound infection?by adopting a series of simple preventive measures. These include giving the right antibiotics at the right time during surgery, enforcing strict hand-washing and avoiding shaving the surgery site before the operation (clipping hair avoids nicking the skin and is safer).
4 RESPOND RAPIDLY TO EARLY-WARNING SIGNALS
A nurse or visitor is often the first person to notice that a patient is in trouble. By setting up special rapid-response teams, hospitals can ensure that these critical warnings are never missed or ignored. Busy physicians may resent the false alarms, but lives are saved when hospitals take nurses' concerns seriously and respond within minutes. Australian researchers have found that rapid-response teams may be able to cut hospital death rates by 20 percent or more. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is testing an even more innovative way to use rapid-response teams. The staff trains patients' visiting family members to call for assistance whenever they sense trouble. The new protocol, dubbed Condition H (for "Help"), has already saved lives.
5 MAKE HEART-ATTACK CARE ABSOLUTELY RELIABLE
The scientifically correct treatments for heart attacks could save far more lives if we used them reliably. The 100,000 Lives Campaign simply asks hospitals to ensure that every patient gets every medication and treatment recommended by the American College of Cardiology and other expert bodies. These measures include aspirin and a beta blocker on arrival and a stent or clot buster promptly after admission. McLeod Regional Medical Center in Florence, S.C., has cut the death rate among its heart-attack patients from 10 per-cent (the U.S. average) to about 4 percent. All the hospital had to do was ensure 100 percent reliability.
6 STOP MEDICATION ERRORS
Medication errors kill tens of thousands of patients a year, yet many are easily prevented. One secret is to "reconcile" medications whenever patients move from one care setting to another?from hospital to home, or even from one place to another within a hospital. The reconciliation protocol assigns a doctor or nurse at every step to check and recheck: are the medicines the patient gets after the transfer exactly the ones planned before the transfer? If not, the mistake gets corrected right away.
How much difference are we making through these efforts? We don't yet know whether the campaign will save 100,000 lives in its first year. Talk is cheap; changing the culture of a hospital is hard. But I've got a stake in it. When I close my eyes on the operating table so that a surgical team can implant my shiny new pain-free titanium knee, I know exactly what I want: safe, effective care, without a single complication.
BERWICK is president and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (ihi.org) and clinical professor of pediatrics and health-care policy at Harvard Medical School. For more information, visit health.harvard.edu/NEWSWEEK.
Read the entire article at the original source
Six Keys to Safer Hospitals
A set of simple precautions could prevent 100,000 needless deaths every year.
By Donald M. Berwick, M.D.
Newsweek, December 12, 2005
Sometime soon, I will need a new right knee. If all goes well, it will be quite a relief. An artificial joint can be a modern miracle, the alternative to decades of pain and hobbling. Here's the problem. Instead of helping me, health care might kill me. In 1999, the Institute of Medicine shocked the nation with an authoritative report on hospital errors. The report concluded that up to 98,000 Americans each year die in hospitals, not from the diseases that brought them there but from injuries caused by their medical care: preventable bleeding or infections, a medication mix-up, a respirator tube put in the wrong way and a lot more. I have climbed Mount Rainier five times. Each time I made that tough trek, my risk of dying was about 100 times smaller than the risk I will face on the operating table.
Even if the surgery doesn't kill me, it may still cause needless harm. The reason I need a new knee is that I have osteoarthritis?the result of a botched and unnecessary knee operation 30 years ago, when I was a naive and trusting medical student. What could go wrong this time? My postoperative pain may not be adequately controlled. I may receive the wrong dose of blood thinner, causing bleeding in my stomach. Someone may overlook the little patch of pneumonia on my routine postoperative chest X-ray, causing me to remain on a respirator in the intensive-care unit for several days. Or the hospital may fail to take steps that could prevent the pneumonia in the first place.
Fortunately, hospitals are beginning to realize that it doesn't have to be this way. On Dec. 14, 2004, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., launched the 100,000 Lives Campaign, a broad national effort to achieve the most urgent reforms. Mainstream leadership groups like the American Medical Association, the American Nurses Association and the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations immediately signed on to the campaign. Several federal agencies?including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Veterans Health Administration and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality?pledged support as well.
We have identified six basic measures that could save as many as 100,000 lives a year if even 2,000 hospitals adopted them. It's surprising to learn that these standards aren't already the norm?but the norms may finally be changing. Nearly 3,000 American hospitals have enrolled in our 100,000 Lives Campaign over the past year, and more than half are reporting their monthly death rates so that we (and they) can track progress. That takes courage in a world where hospitals, fearing blame and lawsuits, too often feel the need to hide their mistakes.
What exactly will it take to improve the quality of care? Here are the prescriptions that we and our partners are advancing. You don't have to be a doctor to understand them.
1 PREVENT RESPIRATOR PNEUMONIA
VAPs, or ventilator-associated pneumonias, are often deadly lung infections that people on respirators can get (after surgery, for example). A few simple maneuvers, like elevating the head of the hospital bed and frequently cleaning the patient's mouth, can eliminate them. Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz, Calif., just celebrated one full year without a single VAP?a result most doctors would have thought impossible.
2 PREVENT IV-CATHETER INFECTIONS
Central-line infections occur when bacteria contaminate catheters that deliver food and medicine intravenously. Dr. Peter Pronovost of Johns Hopkins University recently reported that 70 hospitals in Michigan, California, Iowa and Indiana cut their central-line infections by half, saving an estimated $165 million from complications to boot. How did they do it? They made it easy for doctors and nurses to wash their hands between patients, adopted simple procedures for changing the bandages around the catheters and made absolutely sure that no catheter remained in a vein even one hour longer than needed.
3 STOP SURGICAL-SITE INFECTIONS
Surgical-site infections are a major cause of complications and deaths after operations. Last year Mercy Health Center in Oklahoma City operated on 1,200 consecutive patients without a single wound infection?by adopting a series of simple preventive measures. These include giving the right antibiotics at the right time during surgery, enforcing strict hand-washing and avoiding shaving the surgery site before the operation (clipping hair avoids nicking the skin and is safer).
4 RESPOND RAPIDLY TO EARLY-WARNING SIGNALS
A nurse or visitor is often the first person to notice that a patient is in trouble. By setting up special rapid-response teams, hospitals can ensure that these critical warnings are never missed or ignored. Busy physicians may resent the false alarms, but lives are saved when hospitals take nurses' concerns seriously and respond within minutes. Australian researchers have found that rapid-response teams may be able to cut hospital death rates by 20 percent or more. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is testing an even more innovative way to use rapid-response teams. The staff trains patients' visiting family members to call for assistance whenever they sense trouble. The new protocol, dubbed Condition H (for "Help"), has already saved lives.
5 MAKE HEART-ATTACK CARE ABSOLUTELY RELIABLE
The scientifically correct treatments for heart attacks could save far more lives if we used them reliably. The 100,000 Lives Campaign simply asks hospitals to ensure that every patient gets every medication and treatment recommended by the American College of Cardiology and other expert bodies. These measures include aspirin and a beta blocker on arrival and a stent or clot buster promptly after admission. McLeod Regional Medical Center in Florence, S.C., has cut the death rate among its heart-attack patients from 10 per-cent (the U.S. average) to about 4 percent. All the hospital had to do was ensure 100 percent reliability.
6 STOP MEDICATION ERRORS
Medication errors kill tens of thousands of patients a year, yet many are easily prevented. One secret is to "reconcile" medications whenever patients move from one care setting to another?from hospital to home, or even from one place to another within a hospital. The reconciliation protocol assigns a doctor or nurse at every step to check and recheck: are the medicines the patient gets after the transfer exactly the ones planned before the transfer? If not, the mistake gets corrected right away.
How much difference are we making through these efforts? We don't yet know whether the campaign will save 100,000 lives in its first year. Talk is cheap; changing the culture of a hospital is hard. But I've got a stake in it. When I close my eyes on the operating table so that a surgical team can implant my shiny new pain-free titanium knee, I know exactly what I want: safe, effective care, without a single complication.
BERWICK is president and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (ihi.org) and clinical professor of pediatrics and health-care policy at Harvard Medical School. For more information, visit health.harvard.edu/NEWSWEEK.
Read the entire article at the original source
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Science and Religion at John Templeton Foundation
Science and Religion at John Templeton Foundation
"The mission of the John Templeton Foundation is to pursue new insights at the boundary between theology and science through a rigorous, open-minded and empirically focused methodology, drawing together talented representatives from a wide spectrum of fields of expertise. Using 'the humble approach,' the Foundation typically seeks to focus the methods and resources of scientific inquiry on topical areas which have spiritual and theological significance ranging across the disciplines from cosmology to healthcare. In the human sciences, the foundation supports programs, competitions, publications, and studies that promote character education and the exploration of positive values and purpose across the lifespan. It supports free enterprise education and development internationally through the Templeton Freedom Awards, new curriculum offerings, and other programs that encourage free-market principles."
Learn more about the John Templeton Foundation
"The mission of the John Templeton Foundation is to pursue new insights at the boundary between theology and science through a rigorous, open-minded and empirically focused methodology, drawing together talented representatives from a wide spectrum of fields of expertise. Using 'the humble approach,' the Foundation typically seeks to focus the methods and resources of scientific inquiry on topical areas which have spiritual and theological significance ranging across the disciplines from cosmology to healthcare. In the human sciences, the foundation supports programs, competitions, publications, and studies that promote character education and the exploration of positive values and purpose across the lifespan. It supports free enterprise education and development internationally through the Templeton Freedom Awards, new curriculum offerings, and other programs that encourage free-market principles."
Learn more about the John Templeton Foundation
Identity in an infinitely expanding universe
Identity in an infinitely expanding universe
Identity in an infinitely expanding universe
Laurance Doyle and Reed Harris
Adapted from the Christian Science Sentinel, February 3, 2004
Astrophysicist Laurance R. Doyle is a principal investigator at the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in Mountain View, California. SETI?s mission is to explore and explain the nature and prevalence of life in the universe. Dr. Doyle?s peer-reviewed projects track questions such as, How many stars have planets and how many of these planets might support life? The following excerpted comments are from a recent webcast discussion on spirituality.com, moderated by spiritual healer and speaker Reed Harris.
Laurance Doyle: Where science runs into a conflict with the sacred is in not accepting a limited version of the Source?a limited version of the Creator, a limited version of Mind. You can?t convince a scientist who works with googleplexes and galaxies and accelerating universes, much less quantum probabilities, that God is a tribal god that will fight. In the scientific community, a colleague of mine said, ?You?re not trying to mix religion and science, are you?? I said, ?Oh, no, no, no. I?m trying to make religion scientific.? And he goes, ?Okay. That?s okay.? So that?s acceptable?to make things scientific.
The philosophy I have of science is that you?re doing science when you take the evidence of intelligence above the evidence of the senses. The earth used to be thought to be flat. Well, it took evidence of intelligence to say it was round, because the senses say it?s flat. Same thing with the sun going around the earth, or the earth going around the sun. Bertrand Russell, the mathematician/philosopher, once said that physics is based on the assumption that things are as they appear, and then [the physicist] proceeds to prove that things are not as they appear.
So nothing changes when you realize the earth is round, except your perspective. When you rise higher, you see that it was round all the time?During the Renaissance, suddenly the sun didn?t go around the earth; the earth started going around the sun. Nothing changed. We just discovered a deeper reality.
?The universe is huge?I mean really, really big.?
The universe is huge?I mean, really big. I was trying to get a feel for that. I thought, ?Okay, if all humanity held hands and jumped in the ocean, it would rise a tenth of an inch.? Now that?s pitiful. And you could fit a million earths inside the sun if you dropped them in. You could fit a hundred million suns inside Betelgeuse?the giant star in Orion. With ten thousand years? worth of counting, you could count all the stars in [our own] galaxy. And there are trillions of galaxies. So what good am I?
Then I started reading about the spiritual nature of man [in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy], and I thought, ?Okay, what is this saying? Maybe it?s saying my identity isn?t material. Maybe it?s saying I?m an idea. Now what good is that?? Well, suddenly I thought, ?Wait a second, if I?m an idea, I?m unique in the entire universe.? If you had the only diamond in this room, people would probably come over and see it. But if you had the only diamond in Massachusetts, people would come from all around to see it.
Now what if you had the only diamond in creation?[it would be] infinitely valuable. Well, I was thinking, ?Gosh, I?m the diamond.? And so are you?you are one of a kind in the universe. The person sitting next to you is an infinitely valuable one-of-a-kind person?.
?I started reading the universe.?
By looking at my identity as an idea, as spiritual, instead of material, I found it: ?Gosh, I?m infinitely valuable!? And you know what that did? It evaporated competition in graduate school. It gave me confidence because I could always say, ?But I?m myself.? I mean, there?s a guy smarter than I am at physics; there?s a guy who?s a better observer; there?s a guy who?s better at signal detection; this guy can calculate three times faster than I can. But I?m a Laurance, and there has never been another one, and there never will be another me as good as me.
Online question: ?What caused you to first suspect that there?s a connection between science and religion from your work in astrophysics??
Laurance: I grew up with training in metaphysics in the Christian Science Sunday School, so I had a metaphysical view of things already. But the sheer scale of things in the universe made me have to reexamine my identity. If you examine yourself as a material person, the universe is so huge, and so old, that you begin to feel negligible. So I had to look to the teachings that I grew up with in Christian Science, one of which was what Christ Jesus said: that the Creator of the universe was ?my Father.? What an idea!
I began to connect with the universal Cause itself, and that?s when I realized my spiritual nature. That?s when the spiritual nature of things made me connect. I started reading the universe. Instead of saying, ?That?s the color of this nebula? or ?That?s a planet out there,? I began to read it, like you read a book. You don?t look at wood pulp and ink, you read the ideas. The ideas flow from Mind [God]. And you can read stars, and the ideas of their grandeur flow from Mind.
Once I began reading the universe in a spiritual way, that?s when I found my connection.
?Questioning is a gift.?
In other words, it?s important to look at the blackboard and see the numbers, but you have to read them. Pretty soon, it dawns on you that there?s a Principle behind those numbers, and it?s independent of the chalk, and it?s profoundly orderly and harmonious?.
Reed Harris: What?s the difference between people for countless millennia memorizing religious dogma and your study of Christian Science?
Laurance: [Television interviewer] Bill Moyers asked Isaac Asimov, ?What?s your definition of science?? Asimov said, ?Science is when you compare your thoughts with those of the universe to see if they match.? That?s the mitigating factor in science. You can be the world?s expert, but if the data does not back it up, if you cannot demonstrate the truth of it?you have no final authority. The final authority in science is what the universe has to say about the subject.
I think that?s the difference between dogma and belief. A scientist at no point encounters the dogma, or shouldn?t [accept the dogmatic response]??I?m sorry, that?s just the mystery. You?re going to have to accept that on blind belief.? That is anathema to science. The scientific process is, question, question, question, and only truth will survive. That?s the fundamental difference between the practice of science and [religious] dogma of the past. I?m really grateful we?re in a scientific age, because the truth will survive this questioning. Questioning is a gift. It?s a present to us to determine what the truth is. I encourage questioning. Don?t believe what I?m saying, by the way, on this show. Question it, investigate it, and check it out. I wouldn?t expect anything less from a scientist.
Online question: ?What is so scientific about your Christianity??
Laurance: What?s scientific about it is that you have to work it. You have to demonstrate that the harmony that?s at the truth of Christianity is also the truth about the universe, and can affect your life?make it more healthy, more harmonious, can solve problems, international problems, as well as your own personal problems. And you can do it with scientific precision. Communing with the harmony that is the source of the universe?this infinite Mind?and realizing your identity as the creation of this harmonious Mind, restores harmony in your life. It?s experimentally verifiable. And once again, don?t take my word for it. There are experiments you can do to demonstrate this for yourself.
??science is a simple three-letter word, law.?
?I think of Christ Jesus as a scientist. I don?t believe in miracles in the sense of setting aside the laws of the universe momentarily. [Jesus] has to have had a deeper understanding of the real laws of the universe in order to have demonstrated the healing of things that quickly. He must have understood that order at the deepest level. For Christ Jesus to be the founder of Christianity, he had to have been the founder of a scientific method.
Reed: If I take a look at the word Christian or Christianity, and I boil that down?what?s left is a four-letter word, love. And if I take a look at the word science, to me, it?s about looking for something that?s repeatable, replicable, reliable?What I get when I boil down the word science is a simple three-letter word, law. So, to me, Christian Science is not so much about one religion, or one small private point of view, as it is about the Science and the law of love. Mary Baker Eddy has a very interesting [comment] about Jesus in Science and Health: ?Jesus of Nazareth was the most scientific man that ever trod the globe. He plunged beneath the material surface of things, and found the spiritual cause.?
Online question: ?Is it hard to relate to the universe in spiritual terms when you?re a scientist??
Laurance: No?Johannes Kepler was the discoverer of celestial mechanics and modern optics. He was one of the ?giants? whose shoulders Newton [said he] stood on when he did his work. So here?s Kepler, around 1602: ?God wanted to have us recognize these laws when He created us in His image, so that we should share in His own thoughts. In doing so, our knowledge is of the same kind as the divine, is unique and eternal, a reflection of the mind of God. That mankind shares in it is because man is an image of God. For these secrets are not of the kind whose research should be forbidden. Rather they are set before our eyes like a mirror so that by examining them we observe to some extent the goodness and wisdom of the Creator.? Well, I would say this guy is in a state of bliss, investigating the order of the universe, and clearly seeing a [spiritual] cause.
But that?s not just a Renaissance trait. That?s also a modern trait. The best scientists have recognized that the order has to have a source?an infinite Mind. Albert Einstein was asked his view of religion??My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior Spirit, who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe forms my idea of God. One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science measured against reality is primitive and childlike. And yet, it is the most precious thing we have.??Now if that?s Einstein?s humility, any scientist [has] to at least be that humble?at least I do.
?[Scientists] are looking for the order and Principle of the universe.?
Online question: ?Does one have to use material means in order to examine scientifically??
Laurance: In order to examine scientifically, one has to use intelligence. Consciousness is what does the examining, what does the experiment - it's intelligence that is the investigative part. The idea of matter being intelligent is not valid. Once again, it's not the investigation of matter that is the scientific process. It's looking beyond that. It's looking through the matter, and resolving it into the ideas that are the substance of what is really going on.
If someone says that scientists are materialists, I would have to strongly disagree. They are not examining matter. They are looking for the order and Principle of the universe. They?re not just believing the appearance [of things]. You?re doing science when you ?plunge beneath the material surface of things, and find the spiritual cause.?
From reading what Mary Baker Eddy had to say about the nature of matter a hundred years ago, I would say that nothing that's been discovered in quantum physics in the modern age contradicts any of that. It's interesting that she talks of all being "infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation" and [of] the substantiality of ideas. I found when I thought of myself as that identity - as an idea rather than a material construct - that something landed with me there. I've been able to hold that concept of myself [in prayer] and be healed of illnesses. There's something right about that.
Read at the original source
Identity in an infinitely expanding universe
Laurance Doyle and Reed Harris
Adapted from the Christian Science Sentinel, February 3, 2004
Astrophysicist Laurance R. Doyle is a principal investigator at the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in Mountain View, California. SETI?s mission is to explore and explain the nature and prevalence of life in the universe. Dr. Doyle?s peer-reviewed projects track questions such as, How many stars have planets and how many of these planets might support life? The following excerpted comments are from a recent webcast discussion on spirituality.com, moderated by spiritual healer and speaker Reed Harris.
Laurance Doyle: Where science runs into a conflict with the sacred is in not accepting a limited version of the Source?a limited version of the Creator, a limited version of Mind. You can?t convince a scientist who works with googleplexes and galaxies and accelerating universes, much less quantum probabilities, that God is a tribal god that will fight. In the scientific community, a colleague of mine said, ?You?re not trying to mix religion and science, are you?? I said, ?Oh, no, no, no. I?m trying to make religion scientific.? And he goes, ?Okay. That?s okay.? So that?s acceptable?to make things scientific.
The philosophy I have of science is that you?re doing science when you take the evidence of intelligence above the evidence of the senses. The earth used to be thought to be flat. Well, it took evidence of intelligence to say it was round, because the senses say it?s flat. Same thing with the sun going around the earth, or the earth going around the sun. Bertrand Russell, the mathematician/philosopher, once said that physics is based on the assumption that things are as they appear, and then [the physicist] proceeds to prove that things are not as they appear.
So nothing changes when you realize the earth is round, except your perspective. When you rise higher, you see that it was round all the time?During the Renaissance, suddenly the sun didn?t go around the earth; the earth started going around the sun. Nothing changed. We just discovered a deeper reality.
?The universe is huge?I mean really, really big.?
The universe is huge?I mean, really big. I was trying to get a feel for that. I thought, ?Okay, if all humanity held hands and jumped in the ocean, it would rise a tenth of an inch.? Now that?s pitiful. And you could fit a million earths inside the sun if you dropped them in. You could fit a hundred million suns inside Betelgeuse?the giant star in Orion. With ten thousand years? worth of counting, you could count all the stars in [our own] galaxy. And there are trillions of galaxies. So what good am I?
Then I started reading about the spiritual nature of man [in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy], and I thought, ?Okay, what is this saying? Maybe it?s saying my identity isn?t material. Maybe it?s saying I?m an idea. Now what good is that?? Well, suddenly I thought, ?Wait a second, if I?m an idea, I?m unique in the entire universe.? If you had the only diamond in this room, people would probably come over and see it. But if you had the only diamond in Massachusetts, people would come from all around to see it.
Now what if you had the only diamond in creation?[it would be] infinitely valuable. Well, I was thinking, ?Gosh, I?m the diamond.? And so are you?you are one of a kind in the universe. The person sitting next to you is an infinitely valuable one-of-a-kind person?.
?I started reading the universe.?
By looking at my identity as an idea, as spiritual, instead of material, I found it: ?Gosh, I?m infinitely valuable!? And you know what that did? It evaporated competition in graduate school. It gave me confidence because I could always say, ?But I?m myself.? I mean, there?s a guy smarter than I am at physics; there?s a guy who?s a better observer; there?s a guy who?s better at signal detection; this guy can calculate three times faster than I can. But I?m a Laurance, and there has never been another one, and there never will be another me as good as me.
Online question: ?What caused you to first suspect that there?s a connection between science and religion from your work in astrophysics??
Laurance: I grew up with training in metaphysics in the Christian Science Sunday School, so I had a metaphysical view of things already. But the sheer scale of things in the universe made me have to reexamine my identity. If you examine yourself as a material person, the universe is so huge, and so old, that you begin to feel negligible. So I had to look to the teachings that I grew up with in Christian Science, one of which was what Christ Jesus said: that the Creator of the universe was ?my Father.? What an idea!
I began to connect with the universal Cause itself, and that?s when I realized my spiritual nature. That?s when the spiritual nature of things made me connect. I started reading the universe. Instead of saying, ?That?s the color of this nebula? or ?That?s a planet out there,? I began to read it, like you read a book. You don?t look at wood pulp and ink, you read the ideas. The ideas flow from Mind [God]. And you can read stars, and the ideas of their grandeur flow from Mind.
Once I began reading the universe in a spiritual way, that?s when I found my connection.
?Questioning is a gift.?
In other words, it?s important to look at the blackboard and see the numbers, but you have to read them. Pretty soon, it dawns on you that there?s a Principle behind those numbers, and it?s independent of the chalk, and it?s profoundly orderly and harmonious?.
Reed Harris: What?s the difference between people for countless millennia memorizing religious dogma and your study of Christian Science?
Laurance: [Television interviewer] Bill Moyers asked Isaac Asimov, ?What?s your definition of science?? Asimov said, ?Science is when you compare your thoughts with those of the universe to see if they match.? That?s the mitigating factor in science. You can be the world?s expert, but if the data does not back it up, if you cannot demonstrate the truth of it?you have no final authority. The final authority in science is what the universe has to say about the subject.
I think that?s the difference between dogma and belief. A scientist at no point encounters the dogma, or shouldn?t [accept the dogmatic response]??I?m sorry, that?s just the mystery. You?re going to have to accept that on blind belief.? That is anathema to science. The scientific process is, question, question, question, and only truth will survive. That?s the fundamental difference between the practice of science and [religious] dogma of the past. I?m really grateful we?re in a scientific age, because the truth will survive this questioning. Questioning is a gift. It?s a present to us to determine what the truth is. I encourage questioning. Don?t believe what I?m saying, by the way, on this show. Question it, investigate it, and check it out. I wouldn?t expect anything less from a scientist.
Online question: ?What is so scientific about your Christianity??
Laurance: What?s scientific about it is that you have to work it. You have to demonstrate that the harmony that?s at the truth of Christianity is also the truth about the universe, and can affect your life?make it more healthy, more harmonious, can solve problems, international problems, as well as your own personal problems. And you can do it with scientific precision. Communing with the harmony that is the source of the universe?this infinite Mind?and realizing your identity as the creation of this harmonious Mind, restores harmony in your life. It?s experimentally verifiable. And once again, don?t take my word for it. There are experiments you can do to demonstrate this for yourself.
??science is a simple three-letter word, law.?
?I think of Christ Jesus as a scientist. I don?t believe in miracles in the sense of setting aside the laws of the universe momentarily. [Jesus] has to have had a deeper understanding of the real laws of the universe in order to have demonstrated the healing of things that quickly. He must have understood that order at the deepest level. For Christ Jesus to be the founder of Christianity, he had to have been the founder of a scientific method.
Reed: If I take a look at the word Christian or Christianity, and I boil that down?what?s left is a four-letter word, love. And if I take a look at the word science, to me, it?s about looking for something that?s repeatable, replicable, reliable?What I get when I boil down the word science is a simple three-letter word, law. So, to me, Christian Science is not so much about one religion, or one small private point of view, as it is about the Science and the law of love. Mary Baker Eddy has a very interesting [comment] about Jesus in Science and Health: ?Jesus of Nazareth was the most scientific man that ever trod the globe. He plunged beneath the material surface of things, and found the spiritual cause.?
Online question: ?Is it hard to relate to the universe in spiritual terms when you?re a scientist??
Laurance: No?Johannes Kepler was the discoverer of celestial mechanics and modern optics. He was one of the ?giants? whose shoulders Newton [said he] stood on when he did his work. So here?s Kepler, around 1602: ?God wanted to have us recognize these laws when He created us in His image, so that we should share in His own thoughts. In doing so, our knowledge is of the same kind as the divine, is unique and eternal, a reflection of the mind of God. That mankind shares in it is because man is an image of God. For these secrets are not of the kind whose research should be forbidden. Rather they are set before our eyes like a mirror so that by examining them we observe to some extent the goodness and wisdom of the Creator.? Well, I would say this guy is in a state of bliss, investigating the order of the universe, and clearly seeing a [spiritual] cause.
But that?s not just a Renaissance trait. That?s also a modern trait. The best scientists have recognized that the order has to have a source?an infinite Mind. Albert Einstein was asked his view of religion??My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior Spirit, who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe forms my idea of God. One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science measured against reality is primitive and childlike. And yet, it is the most precious thing we have.??Now if that?s Einstein?s humility, any scientist [has] to at least be that humble?at least I do.
?[Scientists] are looking for the order and Principle of the universe.?
Online question: ?Does one have to use material means in order to examine scientifically??
Laurance: In order to examine scientifically, one has to use intelligence. Consciousness is what does the examining, what does the experiment - it's intelligence that is the investigative part. The idea of matter being intelligent is not valid. Once again, it's not the investigation of matter that is the scientific process. It's looking beyond that. It's looking through the matter, and resolving it into the ideas that are the substance of what is really going on.
If someone says that scientists are materialists, I would have to strongly disagree. They are not examining matter. They are looking for the order and Principle of the universe. They?re not just believing the appearance [of things]. You?re doing science when you ?plunge beneath the material surface of things, and find the spiritual cause.?
From reading what Mary Baker Eddy had to say about the nature of matter a hundred years ago, I would say that nothing that's been discovered in quantum physics in the modern age contradicts any of that. It's interesting that she talks of all being "infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation" and [of] the substantiality of ideas. I found when I thought of myself as that identity - as an idea rather than a material construct - that something landed with me there. I've been able to hold that concept of myself [in prayer] and be healed of illnesses. There's something right about that.
Read at the original source
Monday, December 05, 2005
Tangled Strands in Fight Over Peru Gold Mine
Tangled Strands in Fight Over Peru Gold Mine
The Cost of Gold | Treasure of Yanacocha
Tangled Strands in Fight Over Peru Gold Mine
By JANE PERLEZ and LOWELL BERGMAN, The New York Times, October 25, 2005
SAN CERILLO, Peru - The Rev. Marco Arana drove his beige pickup over the curves of a dirt road 13,000 feet high in the Andes. Spread out below lay the Yanacocha gold mine, an American-run operation of mammoth open pits and towering heaps of cyanide-laced ore. Ahead loomed the pristine green of untouched hills.
Then, an unmistakable sign that this land, too, may soon be devoured: Policemen with black masks and automatic rifles guarding workers exploring ground that the mine's owner, Newmont Mining Corporation, has deemed the next best hope.
"This is the Roman peace the company has with the people: They put in an army and say we have peace," said Father Arana as he surveyed the land where gold lies beneath the surface like tiny beads on a string.
Yanacocha is Newmont's prize possession, the most productive gold mine in the world. But if history holds one lesson, it is that where there is gold, there is conflict, and the more gold, the more conflict.
Newmont, which has pulled more than 19 million ounces of gold from these gently sloping Peruvian hills - over $7 billion worth - believes that they hold several million ounces more. But where Newmont sees a new reserve of wealth - to keep Yanacocha profitable and to stay ahead of its competitors - the local farmers and cattle grazers see sacred mountains, cradles of the water that sustains their highland lives.
The biggest issue is the one looming over every modern industrial gold mine: What happens when the ore that lured the miners here is gone?
Over 13 years, Newmont has moved mountains for gold - 30 tons of rock and earth for every ounce. By the time it is through, the company will have dug up a billion tons of earth. Much of it will be laced with acids and heavy metals.
Three years ago, after Newmont acknowledged that 36,700 fish were missing from a river contaminated by the mine, the World Bank hired an American geochemist, Ann Maest, to study the streams and canals flowing from the mine.
In the short term, she concluded, the water was safe for human use. But long term, she said in an interview, the company's own tests show that all the components are in place for the huge piles of rock to leak acids that will pollute surface and groundwater.
The only preventive, she said, would be 'perpetual treatment.'
Mr. Hinze, who was recently appointed head of Newmont's North American operations, insists that the company's plan for closing the mine will take care of long-term treatment and cleanup.
"We plan on being here a very long time," he said.
Newmont has yet to put aside money for long-term treatment, though it says it will comply with a Peruvian government requirement due to take effect in 2007. But to pay for cleanups, the company needs to keep profits high. To keep profits high, it needs to keep finding and mining more gold. Yet increasingly, the unmovable reality is that to keep mining more gold, it has to make peace with the people who will be here long after the miners leave.
Read the entire article
The Cost of Gold | Treasure of Yanacocha
Tangled Strands in Fight Over Peru Gold Mine
By JANE PERLEZ and LOWELL BERGMAN, The New York Times, October 25, 2005
SAN CERILLO, Peru - The Rev. Marco Arana drove his beige pickup over the curves of a dirt road 13,000 feet high in the Andes. Spread out below lay the Yanacocha gold mine, an American-run operation of mammoth open pits and towering heaps of cyanide-laced ore. Ahead loomed the pristine green of untouched hills.
Then, an unmistakable sign that this land, too, may soon be devoured: Policemen with black masks and automatic rifles guarding workers exploring ground that the mine's owner, Newmont Mining Corporation, has deemed the next best hope.
"This is the Roman peace the company has with the people: They put in an army and say we have peace," said Father Arana as he surveyed the land where gold lies beneath the surface like tiny beads on a string.
Yanacocha is Newmont's prize possession, the most productive gold mine in the world. But if history holds one lesson, it is that where there is gold, there is conflict, and the more gold, the more conflict.
Newmont, which has pulled more than 19 million ounces of gold from these gently sloping Peruvian hills - over $7 billion worth - believes that they hold several million ounces more. But where Newmont sees a new reserve of wealth - to keep Yanacocha profitable and to stay ahead of its competitors - the local farmers and cattle grazers see sacred mountains, cradles of the water that sustains their highland lives.
The biggest issue is the one looming over every modern industrial gold mine: What happens when the ore that lured the miners here is gone?
Over 13 years, Newmont has moved mountains for gold - 30 tons of rock and earth for every ounce. By the time it is through, the company will have dug up a billion tons of earth. Much of it will be laced with acids and heavy metals.
Three years ago, after Newmont acknowledged that 36,700 fish were missing from a river contaminated by the mine, the World Bank hired an American geochemist, Ann Maest, to study the streams and canals flowing from the mine.
In the short term, she concluded, the water was safe for human use. But long term, she said in an interview, the company's own tests show that all the components are in place for the huge piles of rock to leak acids that will pollute surface and groundwater.
The only preventive, she said, would be 'perpetual treatment.'
Mr. Hinze, who was recently appointed head of Newmont's North American operations, insists that the company's plan for closing the mine will take care of long-term treatment and cleanup.
"We plan on being here a very long time," he said.
Newmont has yet to put aside money for long-term treatment, though it says it will comply with a Peruvian government requirement due to take effect in 2007. But to pay for cleanups, the company needs to keep profits high. To keep profits high, it needs to keep finding and mining more gold. Yet increasingly, the unmovable reality is that to keep mining more gold, it has to make peace with the people who will be here long after the miners leave.
Read the entire article
"Better Final Days " - The need for more effective care
Better Final Days
The end of life need not be filled with extreme medical costs and intensive care.
By Shannon Brownlee, Schwartz Senior Fellow, The New America Foundation
Los Angeles Times, November 26, 2005
Whenever Americans stop to think about how they want to die, most conclude that they don't want to spend their last days in a hospital bed. They don't want to be stuck in an intensive care unit unnecessarily, or hooked up to machines if they can possibly avoid it. And they do not want a lot of tests and procedures, especially painful ones, if undergoing them won't improve their chances of surviving--or at least make their passing a little easier.
But that's exactly the sort of high-tech death thousands of elderly patients with chronic illnesses are suffering, depending on which hospital they find themselves in during the last two years of life. A landmark study, published by a team of Dartmouth University researchers in the journal Health Affairs last week, looked at the care received by Medicare recipients who died in 226 California hospitals between 1999 and 2003.
The study found huge variations in the amount of care being delivered in different hospitals to similar, chronically ill patients. Let's look first at UCLA Medical Center, a hospital that is renowned for its geriatric services. The average Medicare recipient who died there spent 19 days in the hospital during the last two years of life, 11 of them in the ICU. He saw a doctor in the hospital 52 times, and Medicare paid $71,922 for his care.
At Garfield Medical Center in Monterey Park, the average patient fared worse: He spent 23 days in the hospital, saw a doctor a whopping 92 times and cost Medicare $106,254.
But if that same patient had lived instead near UC Davis, he would have been hospitalized for just over 11 days, been in the ICU for about seven days and seen one-quarter the number of doctors for a cost to Medicare of $55,323.
Did the extra care make these chronically ill patients live longer or better? Probably not, according to a previous study by the Dartmouth team. That study, published in 2003 in the Annals of Internal Medicine,/i>, concluded that Medicare patients in higher-spending regions "receive more care than those in lower-spending regions but do not have better health outcomes."
Hospitals will correctly argue that there's no way to know ahead of time which patients are likely to recover with aggressive treatment and which are in their last few months of life. And academic medical centers such as UCLA will say they provide more care because they attract sicker patients.
But are the hospitals that are spending the most any better at helping patients get well? Most patients would agree that all those days in the hospital, doctor visits and often unpleasant tests and treatments would be worth it if it actually made a difference in the quality and length of their lives. But a growing body of research suggests that it does not. And more spending does not mean that hospitals are better at delivering proven treatments, like pneumonia vaccines or beta blockers for patients admitted to the hospital with a heart attack. In fact, patients in hospitals delivering the most intensive care were often less likely to get tests and treatments that are known to work, according to the latest California study as well as previous research.
What's more, winding up in those intensive-care hospitals may actually increase a patient's chances of dying by as much as 2% to 6%. That's because hospitals, for all their power to deliver lifesaving treatments, can also be dangerous places where every drug, every treatment, every test carries the risk of error and harm.
Americans have come to believe that more healthcare equals better health. But what these studies show is that's not always true. And as anybody who has spent time in an ICU can tell you, a lot of treatment for terminal conditions can certainly make a misery of a patient's final few weeks of life.
Certainly hospitals such as Garfield and UCLA, and the doctors who work in them, generally don't think they are delivering excess care--or that they are failing to provide needed care. But doctors and hospitals are paid more for doing more, not for doing better. They often profit from giving excess care and lose money when they provide some kinds of care that really makes a difference, such as monitoring a heart failure patient once he goes home.
Those who study healthcare also note that the supply of medical resources--not how sick the patients are--often determines what care patients get. The more beds a hospital has, the more patients will be hospitalized, and the more MRI machines a hospital buys, the more scans will be ordered. And as much as Americans like being able to see their specialists, having more specialists involved can complicate care.
How can this problem be fixed? Patients and their distraught families cannot possibly be expected to decide what kind of care is appropriate. It's up to insurers, Medicare and Congress to restructure the financial incentives to make sure that good care pays.
Whenever payers begin talking about cutting costs, Americans begin worrying about rationing. It would be rationing if hospitals or insurers were to withhold effective care in order to save money. This isn't about denying elderly patients treatment that could help them; it's about not inflicting expensive treatments that aren't likely to improve or substantially prolong their lives.
Before Americans broach the topic of rationing, we ought first to make our hospitals deliver better care more efficiently. If every hospital in the country were to hit the benchmark of those that keep unneeded care down and quality up, it would reduce Medicare costs by 30%.
The Dartmouth group is working on a similar study of hospitals across the nation. Acting on its findings could go a long way toward averting the fiscal train wreck that is facing Medicare in the next 50 years, when costs are projected to rise to $2.67 trillion. It might also make the end of life a little easier for millions of Americans.
Read at the original source
The end of life need not be filled with extreme medical costs and intensive care.
By Shannon Brownlee, Schwartz Senior Fellow, The New America Foundation
Los Angeles Times, November 26, 2005
Whenever Americans stop to think about how they want to die, most conclude that they don't want to spend their last days in a hospital bed. They don't want to be stuck in an intensive care unit unnecessarily, or hooked up to machines if they can possibly avoid it. And they do not want a lot of tests and procedures, especially painful ones, if undergoing them won't improve their chances of surviving--or at least make their passing a little easier.
But that's exactly the sort of high-tech death thousands of elderly patients with chronic illnesses are suffering, depending on which hospital they find themselves in during the last two years of life. A landmark study, published by a team of Dartmouth University researchers in the journal Health Affairs last week, looked at the care received by Medicare recipients who died in 226 California hospitals between 1999 and 2003.
The study found huge variations in the amount of care being delivered in different hospitals to similar, chronically ill patients. Let's look first at UCLA Medical Center, a hospital that is renowned for its geriatric services. The average Medicare recipient who died there spent 19 days in the hospital during the last two years of life, 11 of them in the ICU. He saw a doctor in the hospital 52 times, and Medicare paid $71,922 for his care.
At Garfield Medical Center in Monterey Park, the average patient fared worse: He spent 23 days in the hospital, saw a doctor a whopping 92 times and cost Medicare $106,254.
But if that same patient had lived instead near UC Davis, he would have been hospitalized for just over 11 days, been in the ICU for about seven days and seen one-quarter the number of doctors for a cost to Medicare of $55,323.
Did the extra care make these chronically ill patients live longer or better? Probably not, according to a previous study by the Dartmouth team. That study, published in 2003 in the Annals of Internal Medicine,/i>, concluded that Medicare patients in higher-spending regions "receive more care than those in lower-spending regions but do not have better health outcomes."
Hospitals will correctly argue that there's no way to know ahead of time which patients are likely to recover with aggressive treatment and which are in their last few months of life. And academic medical centers such as UCLA will say they provide more care because they attract sicker patients.
But are the hospitals that are spending the most any better at helping patients get well? Most patients would agree that all those days in the hospital, doctor visits and often unpleasant tests and treatments would be worth it if it actually made a difference in the quality and length of their lives. But a growing body of research suggests that it does not. And more spending does not mean that hospitals are better at delivering proven treatments, like pneumonia vaccines or beta blockers for patients admitted to the hospital with a heart attack. In fact, patients in hospitals delivering the most intensive care were often less likely to get tests and treatments that are known to work, according to the latest California study as well as previous research.
What's more, winding up in those intensive-care hospitals may actually increase a patient's chances of dying by as much as 2% to 6%. That's because hospitals, for all their power to deliver lifesaving treatments, can also be dangerous places where every drug, every treatment, every test carries the risk of error and harm.
Americans have come to believe that more healthcare equals better health. But what these studies show is that's not always true. And as anybody who has spent time in an ICU can tell you, a lot of treatment for terminal conditions can certainly make a misery of a patient's final few weeks of life.
Certainly hospitals such as Garfield and UCLA, and the doctors who work in them, generally don't think they are delivering excess care--or that they are failing to provide needed care. But doctors and hospitals are paid more for doing more, not for doing better. They often profit from giving excess care and lose money when they provide some kinds of care that really makes a difference, such as monitoring a heart failure patient once he goes home.
Those who study healthcare also note that the supply of medical resources--not how sick the patients are--often determines what care patients get. The more beds a hospital has, the more patients will be hospitalized, and the more MRI machines a hospital buys, the more scans will be ordered. And as much as Americans like being able to see their specialists, having more specialists involved can complicate care.
How can this problem be fixed? Patients and their distraught families cannot possibly be expected to decide what kind of care is appropriate. It's up to insurers, Medicare and Congress to restructure the financial incentives to make sure that good care pays.
Whenever payers begin talking about cutting costs, Americans begin worrying about rationing. It would be rationing if hospitals or insurers were to withhold effective care in order to save money. This isn't about denying elderly patients treatment that could help them; it's about not inflicting expensive treatments that aren't likely to improve or substantially prolong their lives.
Before Americans broach the topic of rationing, we ought first to make our hospitals deliver better care more efficiently. If every hospital in the country were to hit the benchmark of those that keep unneeded care down and quality up, it would reduce Medicare costs by 30%.
The Dartmouth group is working on a similar study of hospitals across the nation. Acting on its findings could go a long way toward averting the fiscal train wreck that is facing Medicare in the next 50 years, when costs are projected to rise to $2.67 trillion. It might also make the end of life a little easier for millions of Americans.
Read at the original source
Thursday, November 03, 2005
Series shows more than science involved in defining disease
The Seattle Times: Series shows more than science involved in defining disease
Series shows more than science involved in defining disease
By Michael R. Fancher, Seattle Times executive editor, June 26, 2005
A woman is healthy one day, but the next day she has a life-threatening disease. Nothing in her physical condition has changed. How can this be?
The answer to this riddle involves billions of dollars in health-care costs and likely touches the life of everyone reading this newspaper. It's what The Seattle Times calls becoming "Suddenly Sick," the title of a five-part series beginning today.
The woman is healthy one day, diseased the next because the definition of the disease has changed, even though her health hasn't. The series says that every time the definition for a disease is expanded, the market for drugs expands by millions of consumers and billions of dollars.
Most of us typically think of disease in black and white; you have it or you don't. For diseases such as cancer or tuberculosis, a clear determination can be made, and it is scientifically based.
But for such diseases as hypertension, obesity and osteoporosis, the determination is based on boundaries and definitions.
"We found that with the so-called 'lifestyle diseases,' forces other than science affect where the lines are drawn," said Times Managing Editor David Boardman.
"How the line is drawn and who drew it has implications for individuals and society in general," he added.
Reporter Susan Kelleher first started thinking about those implications several years ago at a medical conference in Toronto. Health-care experts were debating how to set the boundaries that define osteoporosis, with huge financial consequences for insurance companies, physicians, researchers and, especially, pharmaceutical companies.
She became fascinated by the politics of osteoporosis and what she would come to realize was the "guidelines industry," the slippery science of defining diseases.
"I had spent 10 years covering health care and I was oblivious to it," she said.
Those years included being the lead reporter on The Orange County Register's Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of a fertility clinic at the University of California, Irvine. Doctors there stole eggs from infertile patients and used them for other women who needed donor eggs to get pregnant.
The guidelines industry wasn't that kind of "gotcha" investigation. Kelleher said she knew it was important, but the story didn't crystallize immediately.
She would think about it when she saw "scare-you stories" in women's magazines and other media. Those stories warn of the growing risks of diseases but seldom ask, "Who says so?"
She would think about it as more and more television commercials pushed the preventive value of new drugs. There didn't seem to be much skepticism to a system so driven by pharmaceutical companies.
She thought about the riddle — you go to sleep one night and wake up with a disease. What happened overnight?
Over time, Kelleher would gather string for the story, exploring thousands of pages of documents from the Food and Drug Administration, searching patents and examining financial records of pharmaceutical companies.
"It's like a puzzle. It's probably the most complicated story that I've ever done," she said.
Boardman said a pattern emerged as Kelleher and reporter Duff Wilson, now with The New York Times, explored various aspects of the guidelines system. The numbers always moved in the same direction, with the boundaries of disease — and the market for drugs — expanding.
"We never saw an opposite example," Boardman said.
"Suddenly Sick" reveals how the system works. There are good intentions throughout the system to help people live healthier and longer. But, there is also growing discomfort among some medical practitioners at how much influence the drug industry has obtained.
"It's a huge factor in escalating health-care costs," Boardman said.
Worst of all, the series points out, people may be taking medications that have greater risks than the underlying condition for which they are prescribed.
Kelleher believes the series will arm readers with information they can use in managing their own health care.
"When you fully understand the way things work," she said, "you automatically ask different questions."
Read at the original source
Series shows more than science involved in defining disease
By Michael R. Fancher, Seattle Times executive editor, June 26, 2005
A woman is healthy one day, but the next day she has a life-threatening disease. Nothing in her physical condition has changed. How can this be?
The answer to this riddle involves billions of dollars in health-care costs and likely touches the life of everyone reading this newspaper. It's what The Seattle Times calls becoming "Suddenly Sick," the title of a five-part series beginning today.
The woman is healthy one day, diseased the next because the definition of the disease has changed, even though her health hasn't. The series says that every time the definition for a disease is expanded, the market for drugs expands by millions of consumers and billions of dollars.
Most of us typically think of disease in black and white; you have it or you don't. For diseases such as cancer or tuberculosis, a clear determination can be made, and it is scientifically based.
But for such diseases as hypertension, obesity and osteoporosis, the determination is based on boundaries and definitions.
"We found that with the so-called 'lifestyle diseases,' forces other than science affect where the lines are drawn," said Times Managing Editor David Boardman.
"How the line is drawn and who drew it has implications for individuals and society in general," he added.
Reporter Susan Kelleher first started thinking about those implications several years ago at a medical conference in Toronto. Health-care experts were debating how to set the boundaries that define osteoporosis, with huge financial consequences for insurance companies, physicians, researchers and, especially, pharmaceutical companies.
She became fascinated by the politics of osteoporosis and what she would come to realize was the "guidelines industry," the slippery science of defining diseases.
"I had spent 10 years covering health care and I was oblivious to it," she said.
Those years included being the lead reporter on The Orange County Register's Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of a fertility clinic at the University of California, Irvine. Doctors there stole eggs from infertile patients and used them for other women who needed donor eggs to get pregnant.
The guidelines industry wasn't that kind of "gotcha" investigation. Kelleher said she knew it was important, but the story didn't crystallize immediately.
She would think about it when she saw "scare-you stories" in women's magazines and other media. Those stories warn of the growing risks of diseases but seldom ask, "Who says so?"
She would think about it as more and more television commercials pushed the preventive value of new drugs. There didn't seem to be much skepticism to a system so driven by pharmaceutical companies.
She thought about the riddle — you go to sleep one night and wake up with a disease. What happened overnight?
Over time, Kelleher would gather string for the story, exploring thousands of pages of documents from the Food and Drug Administration, searching patents and examining financial records of pharmaceutical companies.
"It's like a puzzle. It's probably the most complicated story that I've ever done," she said.
Boardman said a pattern emerged as Kelleher and reporter Duff Wilson, now with The New York Times, explored various aspects of the guidelines system. The numbers always moved in the same direction, with the boundaries of disease — and the market for drugs — expanding.
"We never saw an opposite example," Boardman said.
"Suddenly Sick" reveals how the system works. There are good intentions throughout the system to help people live healthier and longer. But, there is also growing discomfort among some medical practitioners at how much influence the drug industry has obtained.
"It's a huge factor in escalating health-care costs," Boardman said.
Worst of all, the series points out, people may be taking medications that have greater risks than the underlying condition for which they are prescribed.
Kelleher believes the series will arm readers with information they can use in managing their own health care.
"When you fully understand the way things work," she said, "you automatically ask different questions."
Read at the original source
The hidden big business behind your doctor's diagnosis
The hidden big business behind your doctor's diagnosis
The hidden big business behind your doctor's diagnosis
By Susan Kelleher and Duff Wilson, Seattle Times staff reporters, June 26, 2005
You walk into your doctor's office for a physical exam and step on the scale. Last year, the doctor said you were overweight. Now he says you are obese — at the same weight.
A nurse takes your blood pressure. You have hypertension — with the same previously healthy reading you've had for years.
The doctor scans your wrist bone. You have a condition called "osteopenia" — with the same bone density that was fine last time you were measured.
You mention you are not enjoying sex as much as you used to. Diagnosis: a new kind of sexual dysfunction.
You leave the office with a head full of worry and a fistful of new prescriptions, joining more than 40 percent of Americans who take one or more prescribed drugs daily in the effort to stave off more serious trouble.
You are suddenly sick, simply because the definitions of disease have changed. And behind those changes, a Seattle Times examination has found, are the companies that make all those newly prescribed pills.
The Times found that:
• Pharmaceutical firms have commandeered the process by which diseases are defined. Many decision makers at the World Health Organization, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and some of America's most prestigious medical societies take money from the drug companies and then promote the industry's agenda.
• Some diseases have been radically redefined without a strong basis in medical evidence.
• The drug industry has bolstered its position by marketing directly to the health-conscious consumer, leading younger and healthier people to consider themselves at risk and to start taking medications.
Every time the boundary of a disease is expanded — the hypertension threshold is lowered by 10 blood-pressure points, the guideline for obesity is lowered by 5 pounds — the market for drugs expands by millions of consumers and billions of dollars.
The result? Skyrocketing sales of prescription drugs. Soaring health-care costs. Escalating patient anxiety. Worst of all, millions of people taking drugs that may carry a greater risk than the underlying condition. The treatment, in fact, may make them sick or even kill them.
Dartmouth Medical School researchers estimate that during the 1990s, tens of millions more Americans were classified as having hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes or obesity simply because the definitions of those diseases were changed.
Today, three of every four Americans technically have at least one of those diseases. But millions of them are not truly sick and may never be, even without medication. The Dartmouth researchers said it was unknown whether those people would benefit from early detection and treatment, while it is "an open question" whether branding them diseased and feeding them drugs may be causing significant physical or psychological harm.
The medical profession's term for these people is "the worried well." They are otherwise healthy people who have risk factors, such as high blood pressure or high cholesterol, but may never suffer a heart attack or stroke.
Dr. Alfred Berg, chairman of family medicine at the University of Washington and a past chairman of a federal task force that fights drug-industry influence on disease and treatment guidelines, said the best advice for many people at risk of so-called "lifestyle diseases" is to simply change their lifestyles.
"Diet and exercise and righteous living — but nobody wants to hear that," Berg said.
Instead, he says, a "commercial prevention" industry has emerged, focused on selling drugs to people who don't really need them but who can pay for them.
"We have a system that nobody but Big Pharma is happy with," says Dr. John Kitzhaber of The Foundation for Medical Excellence in Portland, who was Oregon's governor from 1995 to 2003.
But the drug companies can't do it alone. They need, and receive, support from much of the world's medical establishment.
Treatment guidelines established by international and national health organizations instruct physicians on diagnosis and treatment of disease and are meant to be scientifically pristine. But many of those groups lack any process for preventing or disclosing conflicts of interest.
The Times found that for a broad spectrum of diseases, the experts writing the treatment guidelines had drug-company ties ranging from research contracts to consultancies to stock ownership.
Berg's group, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, flatly prohibits any conflicts of interest, either in money or previous research. As a result, it is consistently more conservative in its recommendations than other medical guideline-writing groups and pushes fewer drugs.
Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, a Dartmouth medical professor and editor of Effective Clinical Practice, a journal of the American College of Physicians, agrees that his profession shares the blame for what he sees as an overdose of preventive medicine.
The problem begins, he said, with the expanding definitions of disease.
"You can't tell me that three-quarters of my population is sick before I start," he said. "That just doesn't pass the laugh test.
"Our business is in a hard place right now," Welch said. "A lot of docs know it's not right."
Read at the original source
The hidden big business behind your doctor's diagnosis
By Susan Kelleher and Duff Wilson, Seattle Times staff reporters, June 26, 2005
You walk into your doctor's office for a physical exam and step on the scale. Last year, the doctor said you were overweight. Now he says you are obese — at the same weight.
A nurse takes your blood pressure. You have hypertension — with the same previously healthy reading you've had for years.
The doctor scans your wrist bone. You have a condition called "osteopenia" — with the same bone density that was fine last time you were measured.
You mention you are not enjoying sex as much as you used to. Diagnosis: a new kind of sexual dysfunction.
You leave the office with a head full of worry and a fistful of new prescriptions, joining more than 40 percent of Americans who take one or more prescribed drugs daily in the effort to stave off more serious trouble.
You are suddenly sick, simply because the definitions of disease have changed. And behind those changes, a Seattle Times examination has found, are the companies that make all those newly prescribed pills.
The Times found that:
• Pharmaceutical firms have commandeered the process by which diseases are defined. Many decision makers at the World Health Organization, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and some of America's most prestigious medical societies take money from the drug companies and then promote the industry's agenda.
• Some diseases have been radically redefined without a strong basis in medical evidence.
• The drug industry has bolstered its position by marketing directly to the health-conscious consumer, leading younger and healthier people to consider themselves at risk and to start taking medications.
Every time the boundary of a disease is expanded — the hypertension threshold is lowered by 10 blood-pressure points, the guideline for obesity is lowered by 5 pounds — the market for drugs expands by millions of consumers and billions of dollars.
The result? Skyrocketing sales of prescription drugs. Soaring health-care costs. Escalating patient anxiety. Worst of all, millions of people taking drugs that may carry a greater risk than the underlying condition. The treatment, in fact, may make them sick or even kill them.
Dartmouth Medical School researchers estimate that during the 1990s, tens of millions more Americans were classified as having hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes or obesity simply because the definitions of those diseases were changed.
Today, three of every four Americans technically have at least one of those diseases. But millions of them are not truly sick and may never be, even without medication. The Dartmouth researchers said it was unknown whether those people would benefit from early detection and treatment, while it is "an open question" whether branding them diseased and feeding them drugs may be causing significant physical or psychological harm.
The medical profession's term for these people is "the worried well." They are otherwise healthy people who have risk factors, such as high blood pressure or high cholesterol, but may never suffer a heart attack or stroke.
Dr. Alfred Berg, chairman of family medicine at the University of Washington and a past chairman of a federal task force that fights drug-industry influence on disease and treatment guidelines, said the best advice for many people at risk of so-called "lifestyle diseases" is to simply change their lifestyles.
"Diet and exercise and righteous living — but nobody wants to hear that," Berg said.
Instead, he says, a "commercial prevention" industry has emerged, focused on selling drugs to people who don't really need them but who can pay for them.
"We have a system that nobody but Big Pharma is happy with," says Dr. John Kitzhaber of The Foundation for Medical Excellence in Portland, who was Oregon's governor from 1995 to 2003.
But the drug companies can't do it alone. They need, and receive, support from much of the world's medical establishment.
Treatment guidelines established by international and national health organizations instruct physicians on diagnosis and treatment of disease and are meant to be scientifically pristine. But many of those groups lack any process for preventing or disclosing conflicts of interest.
The Times found that for a broad spectrum of diseases, the experts writing the treatment guidelines had drug-company ties ranging from research contracts to consultancies to stock ownership.
Berg's group, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, flatly prohibits any conflicts of interest, either in money or previous research. As a result, it is consistently more conservative in its recommendations than other medical guideline-writing groups and pushes fewer drugs.
Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, a Dartmouth medical professor and editor of Effective Clinical Practice, a journal of the American College of Physicians, agrees that his profession shares the blame for what he sees as an overdose of preventive medicine.
The problem begins, he said, with the expanding definitions of disease.
"You can't tell me that three-quarters of my population is sick before I start," he said. "That just doesn't pass the laugh test.
"Our business is in a hard place right now," Welch said. "A lot of docs know it's not right."
Read at the original source
Selling sickness: the pharmaceutical industry and disease mongering
Selling sickness: the pharmaceutical industry and disease mongering
Selling sickness: the pharmaceutical industry and disease mongering
By Ray Moynihan, Iona Heath, and David Henry, April 13, 2002
"A lot of money can be made from healthy people who believe they are sick. Pharmaceutical companies sponsor diseases and promote them to prescribers and consumers. Ray Moynihan, Iona Heath, and David Henry give examples of 'disease mongering' and suggest how to prevent the growth of this practice
There's a lot of money to be made from telling healthy people they're sick. Some forms of medicalising ordinary life may now be better described as disease mongering: widening the boundaries of treatable illness in order to expand markets for those who sell and deliver treatments. 1 2 Pharmaceutical companies are actively involved in sponsoring the definition of diseases and promoting them to both prescribers and consumers. The social construction of illness is being replaced by the corporate construction of disease.
Whereas some aspects of medicalisation are the subject of ongoing debate, the mechanics of corporate backed disease mongering, and its impact on public consciousness, medical practice, human health, and national budgets, have attracted limited critical scrutiny. "
Read the entire article
Selling sickness: the pharmaceutical industry and disease mongering
By Ray Moynihan, Iona Heath, and David Henry, April 13, 2002
"A lot of money can be made from healthy people who believe they are sick. Pharmaceutical companies sponsor diseases and promote them to prescribers and consumers. Ray Moynihan, Iona Heath, and David Henry give examples of 'disease mongering' and suggest how to prevent the growth of this practice
There's a lot of money to be made from telling healthy people they're sick. Some forms of medicalising ordinary life may now be better described as disease mongering: widening the boundaries of treatable illness in order to expand markets for those who sell and deliver treatments. 1 2 Pharmaceutical companies are actively involved in sponsoring the definition of diseases and promoting them to both prescribers and consumers. The social construction of illness is being replaced by the corporate construction of disease.
Whereas some aspects of medicalisation are the subject of ongoing debate, the mechanics of corporate backed disease mongering, and its impact on public consciousness, medical practice, human health, and national budgets, have attracted limited critical scrutiny. "
Read the entire article
Pharmaceuticals In Our Water Supplies
Pharmaceuticals In Our Water Supplies
Pharmaceuticals In Our Water Supplies
Are “Drugged Waters” a Water Quality Threat?
By Arizona Water Resource, July-August 2000, Volume 9, Number 1
Developed to promote human health and well being, certain pharmaceuticals are now attracting attention as a potentially new class of water pollutants. Such drugs as antibiotics, anti-depressants, birth control pills, seizure medication, cancer treatments, pain killers, tranquilizers and cholesterol-lowering compounds have been detected in varied water sources.
Where do they come from? Pharmaceutical industries, hospitals and other medical facilities are obvious sources, but households also contribute a significant share. People often dispose of unused medicines by flushing them down toilets, and human excreta can contain varied incompletely metabolized medicines. These drugs can pass intact through conventional sewage treatment facilities, into waterways, lakes and even aquifers. Further, discarded pharmaceuticals often end up at dumps and land fills, posing a threat to underlying groundwater.
Farm animals also are a source of pharmaceuticals entering the environment, through their ingestion of hormones, antibiotics and veterinary medicines. (About 40 percent of U.S.-produced antibiotics are fed to livestock as growth enhancers.) Manure containing traces of such pharmaceuticals is spread on land and can then wash off into surface water and even percolate into groundwater.
Along with pharmaceuticals, personal care products also are showing up in water. Generally these chemicals are the active ingredients or preservatives in cosmetics, toiletries or fragrances. For example, nitro musks, used as a fragrance in many cosmetics, detergents, toiletries and other personal care products, have attracted concern because of their persistence and possible adverse environmental impacts. Some countries have taken action to ban nitro musks. Also, sun screen agents have been detected in lakes and fish.
Researchers Christian G. Daughton and Thomas A. Ternes reported in the December issue of “Environmental Health Perspectives” that the amount of pharmaceuticals and personal care products entering the environment annually is about equal to the amount of pesticides used each year.
Concern about the water quality impacts of these chemicals first gained prominence in Europe, where for over a decade scientists have been checking lakes, streams, and groundwater for pharmaceutical contamination. American officials and scientists are taking note, with two recent U.S. professional organizations — the National Ground Water Associations and the American Chemical Society — addressing the issue at their annual meetings this summer.
What risk does chronic exposure to trace concentrations of pharmaceuticals pose to humans or wildlife? Some scientists believe pharmaceuticals do not pose problems to humans since they occur at low concentrations in water. Other scientists say long-term and synergistic effects of pharmaceuticals and similar chemicals on humans are not known and advise caution. They are concerned that many of these drugs have the potential of interfering with hormone production. Chemicals with this effect are called endocrine disrupters and are attracting the attention of water quality experts.
To some scientists the release of antibiotics into waterways is particularly worrisome. They fear the release may result in disease-causing bacteria to become immune to treatment and that drug-resistant diseases will develop.
Scientists generally agree that aquatic life is most at risk, its life cycle, from birth to death, occurring within potentially drug-contaminated waters. For example, anti-depressants have been blamed for altering sperm levels and spawning patterns in marine life. Most studies of pharmaceutical and pharmaceutically active chemicals in water have mostly focused on aquatic animals.
Read the entire article
Pharmaceuticals In Our Water Supplies
Are “Drugged Waters” a Water Quality Threat?
By Arizona Water Resource, July-August 2000, Volume 9, Number 1
Developed to promote human health and well being, certain pharmaceuticals are now attracting attention as a potentially new class of water pollutants. Such drugs as antibiotics, anti-depressants, birth control pills, seizure medication, cancer treatments, pain killers, tranquilizers and cholesterol-lowering compounds have been detected in varied water sources.
Where do they come from? Pharmaceutical industries, hospitals and other medical facilities are obvious sources, but households also contribute a significant share. People often dispose of unused medicines by flushing them down toilets, and human excreta can contain varied incompletely metabolized medicines. These drugs can pass intact through conventional sewage treatment facilities, into waterways, lakes and even aquifers. Further, discarded pharmaceuticals often end up at dumps and land fills, posing a threat to underlying groundwater.
Farm animals also are a source of pharmaceuticals entering the environment, through their ingestion of hormones, antibiotics and veterinary medicines. (About 40 percent of U.S.-produced antibiotics are fed to livestock as growth enhancers.) Manure containing traces of such pharmaceuticals is spread on land and can then wash off into surface water and even percolate into groundwater.
Along with pharmaceuticals, personal care products also are showing up in water. Generally these chemicals are the active ingredients or preservatives in cosmetics, toiletries or fragrances. For example, nitro musks, used as a fragrance in many cosmetics, detergents, toiletries and other personal care products, have attracted concern because of their persistence and possible adverse environmental impacts. Some countries have taken action to ban nitro musks. Also, sun screen agents have been detected in lakes and fish.
Researchers Christian G. Daughton and Thomas A. Ternes reported in the December issue of “Environmental Health Perspectives” that the amount of pharmaceuticals and personal care products entering the environment annually is about equal to the amount of pesticides used each year.
Concern about the water quality impacts of these chemicals first gained prominence in Europe, where for over a decade scientists have been checking lakes, streams, and groundwater for pharmaceutical contamination. American officials and scientists are taking note, with two recent U.S. professional organizations — the National Ground Water Associations and the American Chemical Society — addressing the issue at their annual meetings this summer.
What risk does chronic exposure to trace concentrations of pharmaceuticals pose to humans or wildlife? Some scientists believe pharmaceuticals do not pose problems to humans since they occur at low concentrations in water. Other scientists say long-term and synergistic effects of pharmaceuticals and similar chemicals on humans are not known and advise caution. They are concerned that many of these drugs have the potential of interfering with hormone production. Chemicals with this effect are called endocrine disrupters and are attracting the attention of water quality experts.
To some scientists the release of antibiotics into waterways is particularly worrisome. They fear the release may result in disease-causing bacteria to become immune to treatment and that drug-resistant diseases will develop.
Scientists generally agree that aquatic life is most at risk, its life cycle, from birth to death, occurring within potentially drug-contaminated waters. For example, anti-depressants have been blamed for altering sperm levels and spawning patterns in marine life. Most studies of pharmaceutical and pharmaceutically active chemicals in water have mostly focused on aquatic animals.
Read the entire article
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
We use caffeine to make up for a sleep deficit that is largely the result of using caffeine
Caffeine - the world's most popular psychoactive drug
Caffeine
By T.R. Reid, National Geographic, January 2005
Slurped in black coffee or sipped in green tea, gulped down in a soda or knocked back in a headache pill, caffeine is the world's most popular psychoactive drug.
It's hardly a coincidence that coffee and tea caught on in Europe just as the first factories were ushering in the industrial revolution. The widespread use of caffeinated drinks—replacing the ubiquitous beer—facilitated the great transformation of human economic endeavor from the farm to the factory. Boiling water to make coffee or tea helped decrease the incidence of disease among workers in crowded cities. And the caffeine in their systems kept them from falling asleep over the machinery. In a sense, caffeine is the drug that made the modern world possible. And the more modern our world gets, the more we seem to need it. Without that useful jolt of coffee—or Diet Coke or Red Bull—to get us out of bed and back to work, the 24-hour society of the developed world couldn't exist.
"For most of human existence, your pattern of sleeping and wakefulness was basically a matter of the sun and the season," explains Charles Czeisler, a neuroscientist and sleep expert at Harvard Medical School. "When the nature of work changed from a schedule built around the sun to an indoor job timed by a clock, humans had to adapt. The widespread use of caffeinated food and drink—in combination with the invention of electric light—allowed people to cope with a work schedule set by the clock, not by daylight or the natural sleep cycle."
Czeisler, who rarely consumes any caffeine, is a bundle of wide-awake energy in his white lab coat, racing around his lab at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, grabbing journal articles from the shelves and digging through charts to find the key data points. "Caffeine is what's called a wake-promoting therapeutic," he says.
"Caffeine helps people try to wrest control away from the human circadian rhythm that is hardwired in all of us," says Czeisler. But then a shadow crosses the doctor's sunny face, and his tone changes sharply. "On the other hand," he says solemnly, "there is a heavy, heavy price that has been paid for all this extra wakefulness." Without adequate sleep—the conventional eight hours out of each 24 is about right—the human body will not function at its best, physically, mentally, or emotionally, the doctor says. "As a society, we are tremendously sleep deprived."
In fact, the professor goes on, there is a sort of catch-22 at the heart of the modern craving for caffeine. "The principal reason that caffeine is used around the world is to promote wakefulness," Czeisler says. "But the principal reason that people need that crutch is inadequate sleep. Think about that: We use caffeine to make up for a sleep deficit that is largely the result of using caffeine."
Get the whole story in the pages of National Geographic
Caffeine
By T.R. Reid, National Geographic, January 2005
Slurped in black coffee or sipped in green tea, gulped down in a soda or knocked back in a headache pill, caffeine is the world's most popular psychoactive drug.
It's hardly a coincidence that coffee and tea caught on in Europe just as the first factories were ushering in the industrial revolution. The widespread use of caffeinated drinks—replacing the ubiquitous beer—facilitated the great transformation of human economic endeavor from the farm to the factory. Boiling water to make coffee or tea helped decrease the incidence of disease among workers in crowded cities. And the caffeine in their systems kept them from falling asleep over the machinery. In a sense, caffeine is the drug that made the modern world possible. And the more modern our world gets, the more we seem to need it. Without that useful jolt of coffee—or Diet Coke or Red Bull—to get us out of bed and back to work, the 24-hour society of the developed world couldn't exist.
"For most of human existence, your pattern of sleeping and wakefulness was basically a matter of the sun and the season," explains Charles Czeisler, a neuroscientist and sleep expert at Harvard Medical School. "When the nature of work changed from a schedule built around the sun to an indoor job timed by a clock, humans had to adapt. The widespread use of caffeinated food and drink—in combination with the invention of electric light—allowed people to cope with a work schedule set by the clock, not by daylight or the natural sleep cycle."
Czeisler, who rarely consumes any caffeine, is a bundle of wide-awake energy in his white lab coat, racing around his lab at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, grabbing journal articles from the shelves and digging through charts to find the key data points. "Caffeine is what's called a wake-promoting therapeutic," he says.
"Caffeine helps people try to wrest control away from the human circadian rhythm that is hardwired in all of us," says Czeisler. But then a shadow crosses the doctor's sunny face, and his tone changes sharply. "On the other hand," he says solemnly, "there is a heavy, heavy price that has been paid for all this extra wakefulness." Without adequate sleep—the conventional eight hours out of each 24 is about right—the human body will not function at its best, physically, mentally, or emotionally, the doctor says. "As a society, we are tremendously sleep deprived."
In fact, the professor goes on, there is a sort of catch-22 at the heart of the modern craving for caffeine. "The principal reason that caffeine is used around the world is to promote wakefulness," Czeisler says. "But the principal reason that people need that crutch is inadequate sleep. Think about that: We use caffeine to make up for a sleep deficit that is largely the result of using caffeine."
Get the whole story in the pages of National Geographic
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
90 tons of earth and rock must be excavated to extract enough gold to make a 3-ounce ring
Tangled Strands in Fight Over Peru Gold Mine
The Cost of Gold | Treasure of Yanacocha
Tangled Strands in Fight Over Peru Gold Mine
By JANE PERLEZ and LOWELL BERGMAN, The New York Times, October 25, 2005
SAN CERILLO, Peru - The Rev. Marco Arana drove his beige pickup over the curves of a dirt road 13,000 feet high in the Andes. Spread out below lay the Yanacocha gold mine, an American-run operation of mammoth open pits and towering heaps of cyanide-laced ore. Ahead loomed the pristine green of untouched hills.
Then, an unmistakable sign that this land, too, may soon be devoured: Policemen with black masks and automatic rifles guarding workers exploring ground that the mine's owner, Newmont Mining Corporation, has deemed the next best hope.
"This is the Roman peace the company has with the people: They put in an army and say we have peace," said Father Arana as he surveyed the land where gold lies beneath the surface like tiny beads on a string.
Yanacocha is Newmont's prize possession, the most productive gold mine in the world. But if history holds one lesson, it is that where there is gold, there is conflict, and the more gold, the more conflict.
Newmont, which has pulled more than 19 million ounces of gold from these gently sloping Peruvian hills - over $7 billion worth - believes that they hold several million ounces more. But where Newmont sees a new reserve of wealth - to keep Yanacocha profitable and to stay ahead of its competitors - the local farmers and cattle grazers see sacred mountains, cradles of the water that sustains their highland lives.
The biggest issue is the one looming over every modern industrial gold mine: What happens when the ore that lured the miners here is gone?
Over 13 years, Newmont has moved mountains for gold - 30 tons of rock and earth for every ounce. By the time it is through, the company will have dug up a billion tons of earth. Much of it will be laced with acids and heavy metals.
Three years ago, after Newmont acknowledged that 36,700 fish were missing from a river contaminated by the mine, the World Bank hired an American geochemist, Ann Maest, to study the streams and canals flowing from the mine.
In the short term, she concluded, the water was safe for human use. But long term, she said in an interview, the company's own tests show that all the components are in place for the huge piles of rock to leak acids that will pollute surface and groundwater.
The only preventive, she said, would be 'perpetual treatment.'
Mr. Hinze, who was recently appointed head of Newmont's North American operations, insists that the company's plan for closing the mine will take care of long-term treatment and cleanup.
"We plan on being here a very long time," he said.
Newmont has yet to put aside money for long-term treatment, though it says it will comply with a Peruvian government requirement due to take effect in 2007. But to pay for cleanups, the company needs to keep profits high. To keep profits high, it needs to keep finding and mining more gold. Yet increasingly, the unmovable reality is that to keep mining more gold, it has to make peace with the people who will be here long after the miners leave.
Read the entire article
The Cost of Gold | Treasure of Yanacocha
Tangled Strands in Fight Over Peru Gold Mine
By JANE PERLEZ and LOWELL BERGMAN, The New York Times, October 25, 2005
SAN CERILLO, Peru - The Rev. Marco Arana drove his beige pickup over the curves of a dirt road 13,000 feet high in the Andes. Spread out below lay the Yanacocha gold mine, an American-run operation of mammoth open pits and towering heaps of cyanide-laced ore. Ahead loomed the pristine green of untouched hills.
Then, an unmistakable sign that this land, too, may soon be devoured: Policemen with black masks and automatic rifles guarding workers exploring ground that the mine's owner, Newmont Mining Corporation, has deemed the next best hope.
"This is the Roman peace the company has with the people: They put in an army and say we have peace," said Father Arana as he surveyed the land where gold lies beneath the surface like tiny beads on a string.
Yanacocha is Newmont's prize possession, the most productive gold mine in the world. But if history holds one lesson, it is that where there is gold, there is conflict, and the more gold, the more conflict.
Newmont, which has pulled more than 19 million ounces of gold from these gently sloping Peruvian hills - over $7 billion worth - believes that they hold several million ounces more. But where Newmont sees a new reserve of wealth - to keep Yanacocha profitable and to stay ahead of its competitors - the local farmers and cattle grazers see sacred mountains, cradles of the water that sustains their highland lives.
The biggest issue is the one looming over every modern industrial gold mine: What happens when the ore that lured the miners here is gone?
Over 13 years, Newmont has moved mountains for gold - 30 tons of rock and earth for every ounce. By the time it is through, the company will have dug up a billion tons of earth. Much of it will be laced with acids and heavy metals.
Three years ago, after Newmont acknowledged that 36,700 fish were missing from a river contaminated by the mine, the World Bank hired an American geochemist, Ann Maest, to study the streams and canals flowing from the mine.
In the short term, she concluded, the water was safe for human use. But long term, she said in an interview, the company's own tests show that all the components are in place for the huge piles of rock to leak acids that will pollute surface and groundwater.
The only preventive, she said, would be 'perpetual treatment.'
Mr. Hinze, who was recently appointed head of Newmont's North American operations, insists that the company's plan for closing the mine will take care of long-term treatment and cleanup.
"We plan on being here a very long time," he said.
Newmont has yet to put aside money for long-term treatment, though it says it will comply with a Peruvian government requirement due to take effect in 2007. But to pay for cleanups, the company needs to keep profits high. To keep profits high, it needs to keep finding and mining more gold. Yet increasingly, the unmovable reality is that to keep mining more gold, it has to make peace with the people who will be here long after the miners leave.
Read the entire article
Friday, October 21, 2005
Your human body changes itself more effortlessly than you change your clothes
Flaws of Perception, by Deepak Chopra
"At the atomic level you make a new liver every six weeks; a new skin once every five days; you replace your skeleton every three months; and you replace the raw material of your DNA every six weeks - it comes and goes like migratory birds.
What if we could see the body as it really is? What would we see? We would see first of all that it is made up of atoms, the atoms in turn are made up of subatomic particles, and these subatomic particles are not material things, but fluctuations of energy and information that are flickering in and out of an infinite void at the speed of light. If I could see my body as it really is, through quantum instruments, what I would see is that 99% of my body is empty space and that 1% that appears to be material is also empty space; that the whole thing is made out of nothing."
Read the entire article
"At the atomic level you make a new liver every six weeks; a new skin once every five days; you replace your skeleton every three months; and you replace the raw material of your DNA every six weeks - it comes and goes like migratory birds.
What if we could see the body as it really is? What would we see? We would see first of all that it is made up of atoms, the atoms in turn are made up of subatomic particles, and these subatomic particles are not material things, but fluctuations of energy and information that are flickering in and out of an infinite void at the speed of light. If I could see my body as it really is, through quantum instruments, what I would see is that 99% of my body is empty space and that 1% that appears to be material is also empty space; that the whole thing is made out of nothing."
Read the entire article
Hospital infections are the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States
Myth: Hospitals Keep You Safe from Germs
Hospital Infections Kill Tens of Thousands Every Year
ABC News, Oct. 14, 2005
There's a deadly threat hiding inside America's hospitals. What's even scarier, your hospital is probably keeping it a secret.
Maureen Daly's mother was a healthy 63-year-old woman when she had surgery to fix a broken shoulder. However, after being admitted to the hospital, Daly's mother got an infection that left her immobilized on a respirator. Daly was told that life-threatening germs are an inevitable fact of hospital life.
Daly was shocked. "I cannot accept that it would be a fact of life that you can walk into a hospital with a broken shoulder and leave practically dead," she said.
Her mother died four months later. It turns out hospital infections are the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States.
Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York and founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, said, "These infections kill as many people each year in our country as AIDS, breast cancer and auto accidents combined."
McCaughey said it's secrecy that's allowed the problem to grow. "Most states have not required hospitals to report their infections, or provide that information to the public," she said.
Pennsylvania is one of only six states that has passed a law requiring the reporting of infections. Experts say public disclosure forces hospitals to reduce infection rates. Dr. Rick Shannon, chief of medicine at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, looked at the data on patients in the hospital's intensive care units. He was stunned.
"Fifty-one percent of everyone who got these infections died. Half the people who got one died," he said. Dr. Shannon wasted no time. He gave an order to the ICU staff. Reduce hospital infections to zero -- in just 90 days.
Staff nurses said they didn't think it could be done.
But after just one week, the ICU staff identified the culprit. It wasn't a superbug -- it was the staff. And the fact they each had their own way of washing hands, changing dressings, and putting in catheters. "No one actually knew what the right way to do it was. And not knowing what the right way to do it was that all these little errors could creep in that would lead to infection," Dr. Shannon said.
Dr. Shannon and his team quickly found solutions, like putting in more hand-sanitizers and raising the head of the bed 30 degrees to prevent pneumonia. The results were unbelievable.
"Ninety days later, we went from 49 infections to zero," he said.
And the results a year later are equally impressive. Only one patient in the ICU has died from an infection.
McCaughey says it's important for the public to know about infection rates at hospitals. "The public has a right to this information. If you are going into the hospital, you should be able to find out which hospital in your area has a serious infection problem, so you can stay away from that hospital," she said. Her advocacy group is working to pass more state laws -- like Pennsylvania's -- requiring hospitals to release this data.
And McCaughey says there's a simple thing you can do to keep yourself safe from dangerous germs in any hospital.
"Ask doctors and nurses to clean their hands before touching you. If you are worried about being too aggressive, just remember, your life is at stake," she said.
Read at the original source
Hospital Infections Kill Tens of Thousands Every Year
ABC News, Oct. 14, 2005
There's a deadly threat hiding inside America's hospitals. What's even scarier, your hospital is probably keeping it a secret.
Maureen Daly's mother was a healthy 63-year-old woman when she had surgery to fix a broken shoulder. However, after being admitted to the hospital, Daly's mother got an infection that left her immobilized on a respirator. Daly was told that life-threatening germs are an inevitable fact of hospital life.
Daly was shocked. "I cannot accept that it would be a fact of life that you can walk into a hospital with a broken shoulder and leave practically dead," she said.
Her mother died four months later. It turns out hospital infections are the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States.
Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York and founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, said, "These infections kill as many people each year in our country as AIDS, breast cancer and auto accidents combined."
McCaughey said it's secrecy that's allowed the problem to grow. "Most states have not required hospitals to report their infections, or provide that information to the public," she said.
Pennsylvania is one of only six states that has passed a law requiring the reporting of infections. Experts say public disclosure forces hospitals to reduce infection rates. Dr. Rick Shannon, chief of medicine at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, looked at the data on patients in the hospital's intensive care units. He was stunned.
"Fifty-one percent of everyone who got these infections died. Half the people who got one died," he said. Dr. Shannon wasted no time. He gave an order to the ICU staff. Reduce hospital infections to zero -- in just 90 days.
Staff nurses said they didn't think it could be done.
But after just one week, the ICU staff identified the culprit. It wasn't a superbug -- it was the staff. And the fact they each had their own way of washing hands, changing dressings, and putting in catheters. "No one actually knew what the right way to do it was. And not knowing what the right way to do it was that all these little errors could creep in that would lead to infection," Dr. Shannon said.
Dr. Shannon and his team quickly found solutions, like putting in more hand-sanitizers and raising the head of the bed 30 degrees to prevent pneumonia. The results were unbelievable.
"Ninety days later, we went from 49 infections to zero," he said.
And the results a year later are equally impressive. Only one patient in the ICU has died from an infection.
McCaughey says it's important for the public to know about infection rates at hospitals. "The public has a right to this information. If you are going into the hospital, you should be able to find out which hospital in your area has a serious infection problem, so you can stay away from that hospital," she said. Her advocacy group is working to pass more state laws -- like Pennsylvania's -- requiring hospitals to release this data.
And McCaughey says there's a simple thing you can do to keep yourself safe from dangerous germs in any hospital.
"Ask doctors and nurses to clean their hands before touching you. If you are worried about being too aggressive, just remember, your life is at stake," she said.
Read at the original source
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Bigger portions will get eaten
Bigger portions will get eaten
Bigger portions will get eaten
By Nanci Hellmich, USA TODAY, October 20, 2005
Americans eat what's put in front of them, even if it's way too much.
In fact, adults and children - even kids as young as 2 - will keep on eating if they are served bigger portions, according to two new studies discussed Wednesday at the annual meeting of the Obesity Society, an organization of weight-loss professionals.
This research adds to evidence that supersized portions could be contributing to adult and child obesity.
In one study, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston fed dinner to 75 kids ages 2 to 9 on three occasions. The meal was designed to be appealing to them: macaroni and cheese, corn, applesauce, baby carrots, chocolate-chip cookies and milk.
The macaroni-and-cheese entree was served three different ways: an age-appropriate portion on the dinner plates; twice as much of the entree on the dinner plate; and twice as much made available in an individual serving dish instead of on the plate. Findings:
- 63% ate more when served more.
- Normal-weight kids were as likely as overweight kids to eat more of the larger portion.
- When served an age-appropriate amount, children ate about half (56%) of the entree.
- When the portion was doubled, the children ate an average of 29% more of the macaroni and cheese than when they were served the more appropriate amount. However, they ate slightly less of the other foods so that their calorie intake at the larger-entree meal was only about 13% higher. This happened with all ages, even those as young as 2.
- The kids who ate the most when the entree was doubled ate less when allowed to spoon out macaroni from the individual serving dish.
"Modest weight loss improves nearly all parameters of health," says researcher Suzanne Phelan, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral medicine at Brown University.
Read the entire article
Bigger portions will get eaten
By Nanci Hellmich, USA TODAY, October 20, 2005
Americans eat what's put in front of them, even if it's way too much.
In fact, adults and children - even kids as young as 2 - will keep on eating if they are served bigger portions, according to two new studies discussed Wednesday at the annual meeting of the Obesity Society, an organization of weight-loss professionals.
This research adds to evidence that supersized portions could be contributing to adult and child obesity.
In one study, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston fed dinner to 75 kids ages 2 to 9 on three occasions. The meal was designed to be appealing to them: macaroni and cheese, corn, applesauce, baby carrots, chocolate-chip cookies and milk.
The macaroni-and-cheese entree was served three different ways: an age-appropriate portion on the dinner plates; twice as much of the entree on the dinner plate; and twice as much made available in an individual serving dish instead of on the plate. Findings:
- 63% ate more when served more.
- Normal-weight kids were as likely as overweight kids to eat more of the larger portion.
- When served an age-appropriate amount, children ate about half (56%) of the entree.
- When the portion was doubled, the children ate an average of 29% more of the macaroni and cheese than when they were served the more appropriate amount. However, they ate slightly less of the other foods so that their calorie intake at the larger-entree meal was only about 13% higher. This happened with all ages, even those as young as 2.
- The kids who ate the most when the entree was doubled ate less when allowed to spoon out macaroni from the individual serving dish.
"Modest weight loss improves nearly all parameters of health," says researcher Suzanne Phelan, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral medicine at Brown University.
Read the entire article
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
FDA Questions Use of Antibacterial Soaps
FDA Questions Use of Antibacterial Soaps
FDA Questions Use of Antibacterial Soaps
Hearing Will Probe Possible Link To Drug-Resistant Bacteria; No Clear Benefit Over Plain Soap?
By JANE ZHANG, Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, October 18, 2005; Page D1
The Food and Drug Administration is questioning the use of popular antibacterial cleansers, which critics say may not only provide little benefit for healthy consumers but could carry environmental and public-health risks.
In documents made public yesterday, the agency raised concerns about the use of antibacterial soaps, wipes and washes, a class of products that includes everything from some Dial soaps to Pfizer Inc.'s Purell hand sanitizer. This Thursday, the FDA will bring the issue to an outside committee of experts, which will examine whether the agency needs to limit their use by consumers. The FDA could, for example, recommend labels that would limit the circumstances in which some products would be used, which would also restrict how they could be marketed.
The committee is looking at the use of these products by healthy consumers, as opposed to their use by those -- such as health-care providers and food-service employees -- where the benefits may more clearly outweigh the risks. The FDA documents state that it "often is not clear what contribution consumer antiseptics make relative to washing with plain soap and water."
Any moves by the FDA could affect hundreds of products that are on store shelves: Manufacturers have introduced 253 antibacterial products in the U.S. so far this year. Last year, there were 322 new products, according to Datamonitor's Productscan Online, a new-products database. Antibacterial products generally cost about the same as their conventional counterparts, though prices can sometimes vary widely.
Some doctors have recommended against the widespread use of antibacterial products for years, arguing that they can lead to the emergence of bacteria that resist antibiotics. In 2000, the American Medical Association recommended that the FDA "expedite its regulation" of antibacterial consumer products that have been linked to resistant bacteria.
The FDA's concerns come against a backdrop of heightened awareness about the potential for drug-resistant bacteria. The incidences of deadly bird flu in Asia, for example, have increased anxiety about infectious diseases overall. Earlier this year, the FDA for the first time banned an antibiotic used in chickens and turkeys because of evidence that its use might lead to pathogens that could withstand drugs used to fight human illness.
In the documents released yesterday, the FDA said it found no medical studies that showed a link between a specific consumer antibacterial product and a decline in infection rates. Indeed, one major study found little difference between washing with soap and using an antimicrobial product. However, the agency said that the data about links to resistant strains of bacteria are "conflicting and unclear." The worries raised by researchers center largely on triclosan, an ingredient in a number of antibacterial products.
The agency also raised concerns about the environmental impact of some antibacterial cleansers, which may hurt some algae and fish and break down into a harmful contaminant. Another potential fear -- which the FDA said was "controversial" -- was that using too many antibacterial products may prevent people from being exposed to routine bacteria, weakening the development of their immune systems and leading to asthma and allergies.
Makers of the antibacterial products strongly defended them in filings to the agency. Manufacturers said that the cleansers' effects on the environment are limited, and there is no solid evidence that their products lead to resistant bacteria in real-world conditions. Moreover, they said, monitoring systems are in place to pick up such problems if they arise.
Manufacturers also stood by their individual products. "We're not aware of any evidence linking the use of Safeguard to drug resistance in bacteria," said Laurie Steuri, a spokeswoman for Procter & Gamble Co., which makes the Safeguard line of antibacterial soaps. A spokeswoman for Pfizer, which markets Purell to consumers, said, "We definitely believe there is benefit to consumers."
Still, many medical experts disagree. Stuart Levy, a researcher at Tufts University and president of the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics, says products with alcohol and bleaches aren't worrisome, but chemicals that don't quickly evaporate or break down -- including triclosan -- are. Triclosan, he says, has been linked to antibiotic-resistant bacteria in lab tests. Use of such products by healthy households should be limited, he says, unless their manufacturers can prove concrete health benefits.
Read article at original source
FDA Questions Use of Antibacterial Soaps
Hearing Will Probe Possible Link To Drug-Resistant Bacteria; No Clear Benefit Over Plain Soap?
By JANE ZHANG, Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, October 18, 2005; Page D1
The Food and Drug Administration is questioning the use of popular antibacterial cleansers, which critics say may not only provide little benefit for healthy consumers but could carry environmental and public-health risks.
In documents made public yesterday, the agency raised concerns about the use of antibacterial soaps, wipes and washes, a class of products that includes everything from some Dial soaps to Pfizer Inc.'s Purell hand sanitizer. This Thursday, the FDA will bring the issue to an outside committee of experts, which will examine whether the agency needs to limit their use by consumers. The FDA could, for example, recommend labels that would limit the circumstances in which some products would be used, which would also restrict how they could be marketed.
The committee is looking at the use of these products by healthy consumers, as opposed to their use by those -- such as health-care providers and food-service employees -- where the benefits may more clearly outweigh the risks. The FDA documents state that it "often is not clear what contribution consumer antiseptics make relative to washing with plain soap and water."
Any moves by the FDA could affect hundreds of products that are on store shelves: Manufacturers have introduced 253 antibacterial products in the U.S. so far this year. Last year, there were 322 new products, according to Datamonitor's Productscan Online, a new-products database. Antibacterial products generally cost about the same as their conventional counterparts, though prices can sometimes vary widely.
Some doctors have recommended against the widespread use of antibacterial products for years, arguing that they can lead to the emergence of bacteria that resist antibiotics. In 2000, the American Medical Association recommended that the FDA "expedite its regulation" of antibacterial consumer products that have been linked to resistant bacteria.
The FDA's concerns come against a backdrop of heightened awareness about the potential for drug-resistant bacteria. The incidences of deadly bird flu in Asia, for example, have increased anxiety about infectious diseases overall. Earlier this year, the FDA for the first time banned an antibiotic used in chickens and turkeys because of evidence that its use might lead to pathogens that could withstand drugs used to fight human illness.
In the documents released yesterday, the FDA said it found no medical studies that showed a link between a specific consumer antibacterial product and a decline in infection rates. Indeed, one major study found little difference between washing with soap and using an antimicrobial product. However, the agency said that the data about links to resistant strains of bacteria are "conflicting and unclear." The worries raised by researchers center largely on triclosan, an ingredient in a number of antibacterial products.
The agency also raised concerns about the environmental impact of some antibacterial cleansers, which may hurt some algae and fish and break down into a harmful contaminant. Another potential fear -- which the FDA said was "controversial" -- was that using too many antibacterial products may prevent people from being exposed to routine bacteria, weakening the development of their immune systems and leading to asthma and allergies.
Makers of the antibacterial products strongly defended them in filings to the agency. Manufacturers said that the cleansers' effects on the environment are limited, and there is no solid evidence that their products lead to resistant bacteria in real-world conditions. Moreover, they said, monitoring systems are in place to pick up such problems if they arise.
Manufacturers also stood by their individual products. "We're not aware of any evidence linking the use of Safeguard to drug resistance in bacteria," said Laurie Steuri, a spokeswoman for Procter & Gamble Co., which makes the Safeguard line of antibacterial soaps. A spokeswoman for Pfizer, which markets Purell to consumers, said, "We definitely believe there is benefit to consumers."
Still, many medical experts disagree. Stuart Levy, a researcher at Tufts University and president of the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics, says products with alcohol and bleaches aren't worrisome, but chemicals that don't quickly evaporate or break down -- including triclosan -- are. Triclosan, he says, has been linked to antibiotic-resistant bacteria in lab tests. Use of such products by healthy households should be limited, he says, unless their manufacturers can prove concrete health benefits.
Read article at original source
Monday, October 10, 2005
Scientists Finding Out What Losing Sleep Does to a Body
Scientists Finding Out What Losing Sleep Does to a Body
Scientists Finding Out What Losing Sleep Does to a Body
By Rob Stein, Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday, October 9, 2005
With a good night's rest increasingly losing out to the Internet, e-mail, late-night cable and other distractions of modern life, a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that too little or erratic sleep may be taking an unappreciated toll on Americans' health.
Beyond leaving people bleary-eyed, clutching a Starbucks cup and dozing off at afternoon meetings, failing to get enough sleep or sleeping at odd hours heightens the risk for a variety of major illnesses, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity, recent studies indicate.
"We're shifting to a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week society, and as a result we're increasingly not sleeping like we used to," said Najib T. Ayas of the University of British Columbia. "We're really only now starting to understand how that is affecting health, and it appears to be significant."
A large, new study, for example, provides the latest in a flurry of evidence suggesting that the nation's obesity epidemic is being driven, at least in part, by a corresponding decrease in the average number of hours that Americans are sleeping, possibly by disrupting hormones that regulate appetite. The analysis of a nationally representative sample of nearly 10,000 adults found that those between the ages of 32 and 49 who sleep less than seven hours a night are significantly more likely to be obese.
The study follows a series of others that have found similar associations with other illnesses, including several reports from the Harvard-run Nurses' Health Study that has linked insufficient or irregular sleep to increased risk for colon cancer, breast cancer, heart disease and diabetes. Other research groups scattered around the country have subsequently found clues that might explain the associations, indications that sleep disruption affects crucial hormones and proteins that play roles in these diseases.
"There has been an avalanche of studies in this area. It's moving very rapidly," said Emmanuel Mignot of Stanford University, who wrote an editorial accompanying the new obesity study in the October issue of the journal Sleep. "People are starting to believe that there is an important relationship between short sleep and all sorts of health problems."
Not everyone agrees, with some experts arguing that any link between sleep patterns and health problems appears weak at best and could easily be explained by other factors.
"There are Chicken Little people running around saying that the sky is falling because people are not sleeping enough," said Daniel F. Kripke of the University of California at San Diego. "But everyone knows that people are getting healthier. Life expectancy has been increasing, and people are healthier today than they were generations ago."
Other researchers acknowledge that much more research is needed to prove that the apparent associations are real, and to fully understand how sleep disturbances may affect health. But they argue that the case is rapidly getting stronger that sleep is an important factor in many of the biggest killers.
"We have in our society this idea that you can just get by without sleep or manipulate when you sleep without any consequences," said Lawrence Epstein, president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. "What we're finding is that's just not true."
While many aspects of sleep remain a mystery -- including exactly why we sleep -- the picture that appears to be emerging is that not sleeping enough or being awake in the wee hours runs counter to the body's internal clock, throwing a host of basic bodily functions out of sync.
"Lack of sleep disrupts every physiologic function in the body," said Eve Van Cauter of the University of Chicago. "We have nothing in our biology that allows us to adapt to this behavior."
The amount of necessary sleep varies from person to person, with some breezing through their days on just a few hours' slumber and others barely functioning without a full 10 hours, experts say. But most people apparently need between about seven and nine hours, with studies indicating that an increased risk for disease starts to kick in when people get less than six or seven, experts say.
Scientists have long known that sleep disorders, such as sleep apnea, narcolepsy and chronic insomnia, can lead to serious health problems, and that difficulty sleeping may be a red flag for a serious illness. But the first clues that otherwise healthy people who do not get enough sleep or who shift their sleep schedules because of work, family or lifestyle may be endangering their health emerged from large epidemiological studies that found people who slept the least appeared to be significantly more likely to die.
"The strongest evidence out there right now is for the risk of overall mortality, but we also see the association for a number of specific causes," said Sanjay R. Patel of Harvard Medical School, who led one of the studies, involving more than 82,000 nurses, that found an increased risk of death among those who slept less than six hours a night. "Now we're starting to get insights into what's happening in the body when you don't get enough sleep."
Physiologic studies suggest that a sleep deficit may put the body into a state of high alert, increasing the production of stress hormones and driving up blood pressure, a major risk factor for heart attacks and strokes. Moreover, people who are sleep-deprived have elevated levels of substances in the blood that indicate a heightened state of inflammation in the body, which has also recently emerged as a major risk factor for heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes.
"Based on our findings, we believe that if you lose sleep that your body needs, then you produce these inflammatory markers that on a chronic basis can create low-grade inflammation and predispose you to cardiovascular events and a shorter life span," said Alexandros N. Vgontzas of Pennsylvania State University, who recently presented data at a scientific meeting indicating that naps can help counter harmful effects of sleep loss.
Other studies have found that sleep influences the functioning of the lining inside blood vessels, which could explain why people are most prone to heart attacks and strokes during early morning hours.
"We've really only scratched the surface when it comes to understanding what's going on regarding sleep and heart disease," said Virend Somers of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "I suspect as we understand more about this relationship, we'll realize how important it really is."
After several studies found that people who work at night appear unusually prone to breast and colon cancer, researchers investigating the possible explanation for this association found exposure to light at night reduces levels of the hormone melatonin. Melatonin is believed to protect against cancer by affecting levels of other hormones, such as estrogen.
"Melatonin can prevent tumor cells from growing -- it's cancer-protective," said Eva S. Schernhammer of Harvard Medical School, who has conducted a series of studies on volunteers in sleep laboratories. "The theory is, if you are exposed to light at night, on average you will produce less melatonin, increasing your cancer risk."
Other researchers are exploring a possible link to other malignancies, including prostate cancer.
"There's absolutely no reason it should be limited to breast cancer, and it wouldn't necessarily be restricted to people who work night shifts. People with disrupted sleep or people who are up late at night or get up frequently in the night could potentially have the same sort of effect," said Scott Davis of the University of Washington.
The newest study on obesity, from Columbia University, is just the latest to find that adults who sleep the least appear to be the most likely to gain weight and to become obese.
Other researchers have found that even mild sleep deprivation quickly disrupts normal levels of the recently discovered hormones ghrelin and leptin, which regulate appetite. That fits with the theory that humans may be genetically wired to be awake at night only when they need to be searching for food or fending off danger -- circumstances when they would need to eat to have enough energy.
"The modern equivalence to that situation today may unfortunately be often just a few steps to the refrigerator next door," Mignot wrote in his editorial.
In addition, studies show sleep-deprived people tend to develop problems regulating their blood sugar, which may put them at increased risk for diabetes.
"The research in this area is really just in its infancy," Van Cauter said. "This is really just the tip of the iceberg that has just begun to emerge."
Read at the original source
Scientists Finding Out What Losing Sleep Does to a Body
By Rob Stein, Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday, October 9, 2005
With a good night's rest increasingly losing out to the Internet, e-mail, late-night cable and other distractions of modern life, a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that too little or erratic sleep may be taking an unappreciated toll on Americans' health.
Beyond leaving people bleary-eyed, clutching a Starbucks cup and dozing off at afternoon meetings, failing to get enough sleep or sleeping at odd hours heightens the risk for a variety of major illnesses, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity, recent studies indicate.
"We're shifting to a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week society, and as a result we're increasingly not sleeping like we used to," said Najib T. Ayas of the University of British Columbia. "We're really only now starting to understand how that is affecting health, and it appears to be significant."
A large, new study, for example, provides the latest in a flurry of evidence suggesting that the nation's obesity epidemic is being driven, at least in part, by a corresponding decrease in the average number of hours that Americans are sleeping, possibly by disrupting hormones that regulate appetite. The analysis of a nationally representative sample of nearly 10,000 adults found that those between the ages of 32 and 49 who sleep less than seven hours a night are significantly more likely to be obese.
The study follows a series of others that have found similar associations with other illnesses, including several reports from the Harvard-run Nurses' Health Study that has linked insufficient or irregular sleep to increased risk for colon cancer, breast cancer, heart disease and diabetes. Other research groups scattered around the country have subsequently found clues that might explain the associations, indications that sleep disruption affects crucial hormones and proteins that play roles in these diseases.
"There has been an avalanche of studies in this area. It's moving very rapidly," said Emmanuel Mignot of Stanford University, who wrote an editorial accompanying the new obesity study in the October issue of the journal Sleep. "People are starting to believe that there is an important relationship between short sleep and all sorts of health problems."
Not everyone agrees, with some experts arguing that any link between sleep patterns and health problems appears weak at best and could easily be explained by other factors.
"There are Chicken Little people running around saying that the sky is falling because people are not sleeping enough," said Daniel F. Kripke of the University of California at San Diego. "But everyone knows that people are getting healthier. Life expectancy has been increasing, and people are healthier today than they were generations ago."
Other researchers acknowledge that much more research is needed to prove that the apparent associations are real, and to fully understand how sleep disturbances may affect health. But they argue that the case is rapidly getting stronger that sleep is an important factor in many of the biggest killers.
"We have in our society this idea that you can just get by without sleep or manipulate when you sleep without any consequences," said Lawrence Epstein, president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. "What we're finding is that's just not true."
While many aspects of sleep remain a mystery -- including exactly why we sleep -- the picture that appears to be emerging is that not sleeping enough or being awake in the wee hours runs counter to the body's internal clock, throwing a host of basic bodily functions out of sync.
"Lack of sleep disrupts every physiologic function in the body," said Eve Van Cauter of the University of Chicago. "We have nothing in our biology that allows us to adapt to this behavior."
The amount of necessary sleep varies from person to person, with some breezing through their days on just a few hours' slumber and others barely functioning without a full 10 hours, experts say. But most people apparently need between about seven and nine hours, with studies indicating that an increased risk for disease starts to kick in when people get less than six or seven, experts say.
Scientists have long known that sleep disorders, such as sleep apnea, narcolepsy and chronic insomnia, can lead to serious health problems, and that difficulty sleeping may be a red flag for a serious illness. But the first clues that otherwise healthy people who do not get enough sleep or who shift their sleep schedules because of work, family or lifestyle may be endangering their health emerged from large epidemiological studies that found people who slept the least appeared to be significantly more likely to die.
"The strongest evidence out there right now is for the risk of overall mortality, but we also see the association for a number of specific causes," said Sanjay R. Patel of Harvard Medical School, who led one of the studies, involving more than 82,000 nurses, that found an increased risk of death among those who slept less than six hours a night. "Now we're starting to get insights into what's happening in the body when you don't get enough sleep."
Physiologic studies suggest that a sleep deficit may put the body into a state of high alert, increasing the production of stress hormones and driving up blood pressure, a major risk factor for heart attacks and strokes. Moreover, people who are sleep-deprived have elevated levels of substances in the blood that indicate a heightened state of inflammation in the body, which has also recently emerged as a major risk factor for heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes.
"Based on our findings, we believe that if you lose sleep that your body needs, then you produce these inflammatory markers that on a chronic basis can create low-grade inflammation and predispose you to cardiovascular events and a shorter life span," said Alexandros N. Vgontzas of Pennsylvania State University, who recently presented data at a scientific meeting indicating that naps can help counter harmful effects of sleep loss.
Other studies have found that sleep influences the functioning of the lining inside blood vessels, which could explain why people are most prone to heart attacks and strokes during early morning hours.
"We've really only scratched the surface when it comes to understanding what's going on regarding sleep and heart disease," said Virend Somers of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "I suspect as we understand more about this relationship, we'll realize how important it really is."
After several studies found that people who work at night appear unusually prone to breast and colon cancer, researchers investigating the possible explanation for this association found exposure to light at night reduces levels of the hormone melatonin. Melatonin is believed to protect against cancer by affecting levels of other hormones, such as estrogen.
"Melatonin can prevent tumor cells from growing -- it's cancer-protective," said Eva S. Schernhammer of Harvard Medical School, who has conducted a series of studies on volunteers in sleep laboratories. "The theory is, if you are exposed to light at night, on average you will produce less melatonin, increasing your cancer risk."
Other researchers are exploring a possible link to other malignancies, including prostate cancer.
"There's absolutely no reason it should be limited to breast cancer, and it wouldn't necessarily be restricted to people who work night shifts. People with disrupted sleep or people who are up late at night or get up frequently in the night could potentially have the same sort of effect," said Scott Davis of the University of Washington.
The newest study on obesity, from Columbia University, is just the latest to find that adults who sleep the least appear to be the most likely to gain weight and to become obese.
Other researchers have found that even mild sleep deprivation quickly disrupts normal levels of the recently discovered hormones ghrelin and leptin, which regulate appetite. That fits with the theory that humans may be genetically wired to be awake at night only when they need to be searching for food or fending off danger -- circumstances when they would need to eat to have enough energy.
"The modern equivalence to that situation today may unfortunately be often just a few steps to the refrigerator next door," Mignot wrote in his editorial.
In addition, studies show sleep-deprived people tend to develop problems regulating their blood sugar, which may put them at increased risk for diabetes.
"The research in this area is really just in its infancy," Van Cauter said. "This is really just the tip of the iceberg that has just begun to emerge."
Read at the original source
Friday, October 07, 2005
Pollution: A life and death issue
Pollution: A life and death issue
Pollution: A life and death issue
By Alex Kirby, BBC News website environment correspondent, Monday, 13 December, 2004
As part of Planet Under Pressure , a BBC News website series looking at some of the biggest environmental issues facing humanity, Alex Kirby considers the Earth's growing pollution problem.
One of the main themes of Planet Under Pressure is the way many of the Earth's environmental crises reinforce one another.
Pollution is an obvious example - we do not have the option of growing food, or finding enough water, on a squeaky-clean planet, but on one increasingly tarnished and trashed by the way we have used it so far.
Cutting waste and clearing up pollution costs money. Yet time and again it is the quest for wealth that generates much of the mess in the first place.
Living in a way that is less damaging to the Earth is not easy, but it is vital, because pollution is pervasive and often life-threatening.
Air: The World Health Organization (WHO) says 3 million people are killed worldwide by outdoor air pollution annually from vehicles and industrial emissions, and 1.6 million indoors through using solid fuel. Most are in poor countries.
Water: Diseases carried in water are responsible for 80% of illnesses and deaths in developing countries, killing a child every eight seconds. Each year 2.1 million people die from diarrhoeal diseases associated with poor water.
Soil: Contaminated land is a problem in industrialised countries, where former factories and power stations can leave waste like heavy metals in the soil. It can also occur in developing countries, sometimes used for dumping pesticides. Agriculture can pollute land with pesticides, nitrate-rich fertilisers and slurry from livestock. And when the contamination reaches rivers it damages life there, and can even create dead zones off the coast, as in the Gulf of Mexico.
Chronic problem
Chemicals are a frequent pollutant. When we think of chemical contamination it is often images of events like Bhopal that come to mind.
But the problem is widespread. One study says 7-20% of cancers are attributable to poor air and pollution in homes and workplaces.
The WHO, concerned about chemicals that persist and build up in the body, especially in the young, says we may "be conducting a large-scale experiment with children's health".
Some man-made chemicals, endocrine disruptors like phthalates and nonylphenol - a breakdown product of spermicides, cosmetics and detergents - are blamed for causing changes in the genitals of some animals.
Affected species include polar bears - so not even the Arctic is immune. And the chemicals climb the food chain, from fish to mammals - and to us.
About 70,000 chemicals are on the market, with around 1,500 new ones appearing annually. At least 30,000 are thought never to have been comprehensively tested for their possible risks to people.
Trade-off
But the snag is that modern society demands many of them, and some are essential for survival.
So while we invoke the precautionary principle, which always recommends erring on the side of caution, we have to recognise there will be trade-offs to be made.
The pesticide DDT does great damage to wildlife and can affect the human nervous system, but can also be effective against malaria. Where does the priority lie?
The industrialised world has not yet cleaned up the mess it created, but it is reaping the benefits of the pollution it has caused. It can hardly tell the developing countries that they have no right to follow suit.
Another complication in tackling pollution is that it does not respect political frontiers. There is a UN convention on transboundary air pollution, but that cannot cover every problem that can arise between neighbours, or between states which do not share a border.
Perhaps the best example is climate change - the countries of the world share one atmosphere, and what one does can affect everyone.
For one and all
One of the principles that is supposed to apply here is simple - the polluter pays.
Sometimes it is obvious who is to blame and who must pay the price. But it is not always straightforward to work out just who is the polluter, or whether the rest of us would be happy to pay the price of stopping the pollution.
One way of cleaning up after ourselves would be to throw less away, designing products to be recycled or even just to last longer.
Previous generations worked on the assumption that discarding our waste was a proper way to be rid of it, so we used to dump nuclear materials and other potential hazards at sea, confident they would be dispersed in the depths.
We now think that is too risky because, as one author wrote, "there's no such place as 'away' - and there's no such person as the 'other'".
Ask not for whom the bell tolls - it tolls for thee, and for me.
Read the entire article
Pollution: A life and death issue
By Alex Kirby, BBC News website environment correspondent, Monday, 13 December, 2004
As part of Planet Under Pressure , a BBC News website series looking at some of the biggest environmental issues facing humanity, Alex Kirby considers the Earth's growing pollution problem.
One of the main themes of Planet Under Pressure is the way many of the Earth's environmental crises reinforce one another.
Pollution is an obvious example - we do not have the option of growing food, or finding enough water, on a squeaky-clean planet, but on one increasingly tarnished and trashed by the way we have used it so far.
Cutting waste and clearing up pollution costs money. Yet time and again it is the quest for wealth that generates much of the mess in the first place.
Living in a way that is less damaging to the Earth is not easy, but it is vital, because pollution is pervasive and often life-threatening.
Air: The World Health Organization (WHO) says 3 million people are killed worldwide by outdoor air pollution annually from vehicles and industrial emissions, and 1.6 million indoors through using solid fuel. Most are in poor countries.
Water: Diseases carried in water are responsible for 80% of illnesses and deaths in developing countries, killing a child every eight seconds. Each year 2.1 million people die from diarrhoeal diseases associated with poor water.
Soil: Contaminated land is a problem in industrialised countries, where former factories and power stations can leave waste like heavy metals in the soil. It can also occur in developing countries, sometimes used for dumping pesticides. Agriculture can pollute land with pesticides, nitrate-rich fertilisers and slurry from livestock. And when the contamination reaches rivers it damages life there, and can even create dead zones off the coast, as in the Gulf of Mexico.
Chronic problem
Chemicals are a frequent pollutant. When we think of chemical contamination it is often images of events like Bhopal that come to mind.
But the problem is widespread. One study says 7-20% of cancers are attributable to poor air and pollution in homes and workplaces.
The WHO, concerned about chemicals that persist and build up in the body, especially in the young, says we may "be conducting a large-scale experiment with children's health".
Some man-made chemicals, endocrine disruptors like phthalates and nonylphenol - a breakdown product of spermicides, cosmetics and detergents - are blamed for causing changes in the genitals of some animals.
Affected species include polar bears - so not even the Arctic is immune. And the chemicals climb the food chain, from fish to mammals - and to us.
About 70,000 chemicals are on the market, with around 1,500 new ones appearing annually. At least 30,000 are thought never to have been comprehensively tested for their possible risks to people.
Trade-off
But the snag is that modern society demands many of them, and some are essential for survival.
So while we invoke the precautionary principle, which always recommends erring on the side of caution, we have to recognise there will be trade-offs to be made.
The pesticide DDT does great damage to wildlife and can affect the human nervous system, but can also be effective against malaria. Where does the priority lie?
The industrialised world has not yet cleaned up the mess it created, but it is reaping the benefits of the pollution it has caused. It can hardly tell the developing countries that they have no right to follow suit.
Another complication in tackling pollution is that it does not respect political frontiers. There is a UN convention on transboundary air pollution, but that cannot cover every problem that can arise between neighbours, or between states which do not share a border.
Perhaps the best example is climate change - the countries of the world share one atmosphere, and what one does can affect everyone.
For one and all
One of the principles that is supposed to apply here is simple - the polluter pays.
Sometimes it is obvious who is to blame and who must pay the price. But it is not always straightforward to work out just who is the polluter, or whether the rest of us would be happy to pay the price of stopping the pollution.
One way of cleaning up after ourselves would be to throw less away, designing products to be recycled or even just to last longer.
Previous generations worked on the assumption that discarding our waste was a proper way to be rid of it, so we used to dump nuclear materials and other potential hazards at sea, confident they would be dispersed in the depths.
We now think that is too risky because, as one author wrote, "there's no such place as 'away' - and there's no such person as the 'other'".
Ask not for whom the bell tolls - it tolls for thee, and for me.
Read the entire article
Climate change: Uncharted waters?
Climate change: Uncharted waters?
Climate change: Uncharted waters?
By Alex Kirby, BBC News Online environment correspondent, Friday, 3 December, 2004
As part of Planet Under Pressure , a BBC News series looking at some of the biggest environmental problems facing humanity, Alex Kirby explores the implications of climate change.
Climate change is our biggest environmental challenge, says the UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair. His chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, calls it a far greater global threat than international terrorism.
There is wide though not unanimous agreement from scientists that they are right.
It is certainly possible that warming temperatures could take the Earth into uncharted waters, even though nobody can say exactly how fast it may happen and who will be most affected.
Life on Earth exists only because of the natural greenhouse effect, the ability of the atmosphere to retain enough heat for species to thrive (and no more).
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a consortium of several thousand independent scientists, says rising levels of industrial pollution are unnaturally enhancing this effect, with increasing amounts of heat trapped near the Earth instead of escaping into space.
The main culprits, it says, are the burning of fossil fuels - oil, coal and gas - and changes in land use.
The chief greenhouse gas from human activities is carbon dioxide (CO2).
Before the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric CO2 concentrations were about 270-280 parts per million (ppm).
They now stand at almost 380ppm, and have been rising at about 1.5ppm annually.
Rising temperatures
The consequence of increasing CO2 and other pollutant levels, the IPCC says, will be higher average global temperatures, meaning unpredictable weather, rising sea levels, and perhaps runaway heating as the whole climate system slips out of gear.
The IPCC predicts that if we go on as we are, by 2100 global sea levels will probably have risen by 9 to 88cm and average temperatures will be between 1.5 and 5.5C higher than now.
That may not sound very much - but the last Ice Age was only 4-5C colder than today.
The sceptics are unmoved. Some say the human influence on the climate is negligible, and that isolating one small variable, CO2 and other greenhouse gas levels, in an immensely complex natural system is meaningless.
Others insist the IPCC's measurements are flawed and its predictions unreliable. Yet others believe a warmer world would be better for most of us.
They are entirely right to argue that there are still many uncertainties about the climate and any influence we may have on it.
Sobering facts
But many who were once sceptics now accept that enhanced climate change is happening, and that we have to respond - not necessarily by trying to reduce its extent but by adapting to its effects.
Part of the problem is that climate change is now part of the stuff of science fiction, with Hollywood and some campaign groups alike feeding scare stories that owe little, if anything, to scientific fact.
But the facts are sobering enough. We know that average global surface temperatures have risen by 0.6C in the last 140 years.
All of the 10 warmest years have occurred since 1990, including each year since 1997.
The possibilities are sobering too.
Many water-scarce regions now will probably become thirstier.
Some countries may be able to produce bigger harvests, but in others yields will drop. Sea level rise may make many coastal areas uninhabitable.
Weather patterns may change, producing more heat waves, droughts, floods and violent storms.
Aid agencies are warning that these combined effects could seriously jeopardise attempts to lift the world's poorest people out of poverty.
Furthermore, there is also the possibility of "positive feedbacks"- for example, higher temperatures may release more methane from the Arctic tundra and CO2 from peat bogs, which will themselves speed up the warming process.
Then there is the inertia of the atmosphere and the oceans.
Delayed effect
If somehow we could halt all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, the heating would continue for decades or centuries.
What we do today may literally determine how long the Greenland icecap survives - even though, at fastest, it will still take a good few centuries to disappear.
And wildlife, less equipped to adapt than humans, could be hit hard. One estimate suggests hundreds of thousands of species may be at risk of extinction by 2050 because of climate change.
Creating worldwide consensus on this global problem is difficult, not least because of the economic cost of cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions.
The Kyoto Protocol, which commits rich countries to reducing emissions, is a small but necessary start on building an international system for tackling climate change, its proponents believe.
But the country responsible for about a quarter of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, the US, has refused to sign up to it.
The protocol does not require developing countries to cut their emissions, although fast-industrialising countries like China will soon be significant contributors as those in poor nations increasingly demand rich world lifestyles.
For them, emissions cuts could have significant social costs in slowing the growth that feeds economic development, creates jobs and helps lift the poor out of poverty.
A prudent look at the evidence, preliminary though it is, suggests we shall be wise to err on the side of caution.
Dr Geoff Jenkins, of the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, said recently: "Over the last few decades there's been much more evidence for the human influence on climate.
"We've reached the point where it's only by including human activity that we can explain what's happening."
And what's happening now could lead to a world beyond our experience.
Read the entire article
Climate change: Uncharted waters?
By Alex Kirby, BBC News Online environment correspondent, Friday, 3 December, 2004
As part of Planet Under Pressure , a BBC News series looking at some of the biggest environmental problems facing humanity, Alex Kirby explores the implications of climate change.
Climate change is our biggest environmental challenge, says the UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair. His chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, calls it a far greater global threat than international terrorism.
There is wide though not unanimous agreement from scientists that they are right.
It is certainly possible that warming temperatures could take the Earth into uncharted waters, even though nobody can say exactly how fast it may happen and who will be most affected.
Life on Earth exists only because of the natural greenhouse effect, the ability of the atmosphere to retain enough heat for species to thrive (and no more).
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a consortium of several thousand independent scientists, says rising levels of industrial pollution are unnaturally enhancing this effect, with increasing amounts of heat trapped near the Earth instead of escaping into space.
The main culprits, it says, are the burning of fossil fuels - oil, coal and gas - and changes in land use.
The chief greenhouse gas from human activities is carbon dioxide (CO2).
Before the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric CO2 concentrations were about 270-280 parts per million (ppm).
They now stand at almost 380ppm, and have been rising at about 1.5ppm annually.
Rising temperatures
The consequence of increasing CO2 and other pollutant levels, the IPCC says, will be higher average global temperatures, meaning unpredictable weather, rising sea levels, and perhaps runaway heating as the whole climate system slips out of gear.
The IPCC predicts that if we go on as we are, by 2100 global sea levels will probably have risen by 9 to 88cm and average temperatures will be between 1.5 and 5.5C higher than now.
That may not sound very much - but the last Ice Age was only 4-5C colder than today.
The sceptics are unmoved. Some say the human influence on the climate is negligible, and that isolating one small variable, CO2 and other greenhouse gas levels, in an immensely complex natural system is meaningless.
Others insist the IPCC's measurements are flawed and its predictions unreliable. Yet others believe a warmer world would be better for most of us.
They are entirely right to argue that there are still many uncertainties about the climate and any influence we may have on it.
Sobering facts
But many who were once sceptics now accept that enhanced climate change is happening, and that we have to respond - not necessarily by trying to reduce its extent but by adapting to its effects.
Part of the problem is that climate change is now part of the stuff of science fiction, with Hollywood and some campaign groups alike feeding scare stories that owe little, if anything, to scientific fact.
But the facts are sobering enough. We know that average global surface temperatures have risen by 0.6C in the last 140 years.
All of the 10 warmest years have occurred since 1990, including each year since 1997.
The possibilities are sobering too.
Many water-scarce regions now will probably become thirstier.
Some countries may be able to produce bigger harvests, but in others yields will drop. Sea level rise may make many coastal areas uninhabitable.
Weather patterns may change, producing more heat waves, droughts, floods and violent storms.
Aid agencies are warning that these combined effects could seriously jeopardise attempts to lift the world's poorest people out of poverty.
Furthermore, there is also the possibility of "positive feedbacks"- for example, higher temperatures may release more methane from the Arctic tundra and CO2 from peat bogs, which will themselves speed up the warming process.
Then there is the inertia of the atmosphere and the oceans.
Delayed effect
If somehow we could halt all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, the heating would continue for decades or centuries.
What we do today may literally determine how long the Greenland icecap survives - even though, at fastest, it will still take a good few centuries to disappear.
And wildlife, less equipped to adapt than humans, could be hit hard. One estimate suggests hundreds of thousands of species may be at risk of extinction by 2050 because of climate change.
Creating worldwide consensus on this global problem is difficult, not least because of the economic cost of cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions.
The Kyoto Protocol, which commits rich countries to reducing emissions, is a small but necessary start on building an international system for tackling climate change, its proponents believe.
But the country responsible for about a quarter of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, the US, has refused to sign up to it.
The protocol does not require developing countries to cut their emissions, although fast-industrialising countries like China will soon be significant contributors as those in poor nations increasingly demand rich world lifestyles.
For them, emissions cuts could have significant social costs in slowing the growth that feeds economic development, creates jobs and helps lift the poor out of poverty.
A prudent look at the evidence, preliminary though it is, suggests we shall be wise to err on the side of caution.
Dr Geoff Jenkins, of the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, said recently: "Over the last few decades there's been much more evidence for the human influence on climate.
"We've reached the point where it's only by including human activity that we can explain what's happening."
And what's happening now could lead to a world beyond our experience.
Read the entire article
Can the planet feed us?
Can the planet feed us?
Can the planet feed us? The challenge of feeding the world without destroying the planet.
By Alex Kirby, BBC News Online environment correspondent, Wednesday, 24 November, 2004
More of us are eating more and better than ever before.
World cereal consumption has more than doubled since 1970, and meat consumption has tripled since 1961.
The global fish catch grew more than six times from 1950 to 1997.
None of this happened by magic, though, but only by giving Nature a massive helping hand.
The World Resources Institute said in 1999 that half of all the commercial fertiliser ever produced had been applied since 1984.
So one question is whether the world can go on increasing its harvests at this rate - or even faster, to cater as well for the extra 75 million people born annually.
Crop increases
Our recent achievements are impressive - while global population doubled to 6 billion people in the 40 years from 1960, global food production more than kept up.
The proportion of malnourished people fell in the three decades to the mid-1990s from 37% to 18%. But we may not be able to go on at this rate.
For a start, much of the world's best cropland is already in use, and farmers are having to turn to increasingly marginal land. And the good land is often taking a battering - soil degradation has already reduced global agricultural productivity by 13% in the last half-century.
Many of the pesticides on which the crop increases have depended are losing their effectiveness, as the pests acquire more resistance.
A key constraint is water. The 17% of cropland that is irrigated produces an estimated 30-40% of all crops, but in many countries there will be progressively less water available for agriculture.
Many of these are poor countries, where irrigation can boost crop yields by up to 400%. There are ways to improve irrigation and to use water more effectively, but it's not clear these can bridge the gap.
Biotechnology, in principle, may offer the world a second Green Revolution, for example by producing drought-resistant plants or varieties that withstand pest attacks.
But it arouses deep unease, not least because of fears it may erode the genetic resources in thousands of traditional varieties grown in small communities across the world.
Nobody knows what the probable impacts of climate change will be on food supplies.
Modest temperature increases may actually benefit rich temperate countries, but make harvests even more precarious across much of the tropics.
Too little space
Another question concerns the huge cost to other forms of life of all the progress we've made in securing our own food supply.
The amount of nitrogen available for uptake by plants is much higher than the natural level, and has more than doubled since the 1940s.
The excess comes from fertilisers running off farmland, from livestock manure, and from other human activities. It is changing the composition of species in ecosystems, reducing soil fertility, depleting the ozone layer, intensifying climate change, and creating dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and other near-coastal seas.
The sheer amount of the Earth we need to produce our food is having an enormous impact.
Globally, we have taken over about 26% of the planet's land area (roughly 3.3 billion hectares) for cropland and pasture, replacing a third of temperate and tropical forests and a quarter of natural grasslands.
Another 0.5 billion ha has gone for urban and built-up areas. Habitat loss from the conversion of natural ecosystems is the main reason why other species are being pushed closer to the brink of extinction.
Food security comes at a high price. In any case, it is a security many can only envy.
Increasing hunger
At the moment we are not on course to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of halving world hunger by 2015.
Although the proportion of hungry people is coming down, population increase means the actual number continues to rise.
In the 1990s global poverty fell by 20%, but the number of hungry people rose by 18 million. In 2003, 842 million people did not have enough to eat, a third of them in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation.
Hunger and malnutrition killed 10 million people a year, 25,000 a day - one life extinguished every five seconds.
The world does produce enough to feed everyone. But the food is often in the wrong place, or unaffordable, or can't be stored long enough. So making sure everyone has enough to eat is more about politics than science.
But whether we can go on eating the sort of diet we've grown used to in developed countries is far from clear.
Much of it travels a long way to reach us, with the transport costs adding hugely to the "embodied energy" it contains. There's a lot to be said for eating local, seasonal food where we can.
And meat usually demands far more than grain - water, land, grain itself (34% of world grain supplies are fed to livestock reared for meat). Yet, worldwide, the richer we grow the more we turn to meat.
Something's got to give - and not only our waistbands.
Read the entire article
Can the planet feed us? The challenge of feeding the world without destroying the planet.
By Alex Kirby, BBC News Online environment correspondent, Wednesday, 24 November, 2004
More of us are eating more and better than ever before.
World cereal consumption has more than doubled since 1970, and meat consumption has tripled since 1961.
The global fish catch grew more than six times from 1950 to 1997.
None of this happened by magic, though, but only by giving Nature a massive helping hand.
The World Resources Institute said in 1999 that half of all the commercial fertiliser ever produced had been applied since 1984.
So one question is whether the world can go on increasing its harvests at this rate - or even faster, to cater as well for the extra 75 million people born annually.
Crop increases
Our recent achievements are impressive - while global population doubled to 6 billion people in the 40 years from 1960, global food production more than kept up.
The proportion of malnourished people fell in the three decades to the mid-1990s from 37% to 18%. But we may not be able to go on at this rate.
For a start, much of the world's best cropland is already in use, and farmers are having to turn to increasingly marginal land. And the good land is often taking a battering - soil degradation has already reduced global agricultural productivity by 13% in the last half-century.
Many of the pesticides on which the crop increases have depended are losing their effectiveness, as the pests acquire more resistance.
A key constraint is water. The 17% of cropland that is irrigated produces an estimated 30-40% of all crops, but in many countries there will be progressively less water available for agriculture.
Many of these are poor countries, where irrigation can boost crop yields by up to 400%. There are ways to improve irrigation and to use water more effectively, but it's not clear these can bridge the gap.
Biotechnology, in principle, may offer the world a second Green Revolution, for example by producing drought-resistant plants or varieties that withstand pest attacks.
But it arouses deep unease, not least because of fears it may erode the genetic resources in thousands of traditional varieties grown in small communities across the world.
Nobody knows what the probable impacts of climate change will be on food supplies.
Modest temperature increases may actually benefit rich temperate countries, but make harvests even more precarious across much of the tropics.
Too little space
Another question concerns the huge cost to other forms of life of all the progress we've made in securing our own food supply.
The amount of nitrogen available for uptake by plants is much higher than the natural level, and has more than doubled since the 1940s.
The excess comes from fertilisers running off farmland, from livestock manure, and from other human activities. It is changing the composition of species in ecosystems, reducing soil fertility, depleting the ozone layer, intensifying climate change, and creating dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and other near-coastal seas.
The sheer amount of the Earth we need to produce our food is having an enormous impact.
Globally, we have taken over about 26% of the planet's land area (roughly 3.3 billion hectares) for cropland and pasture, replacing a third of temperate and tropical forests and a quarter of natural grasslands.
Another 0.5 billion ha has gone for urban and built-up areas. Habitat loss from the conversion of natural ecosystems is the main reason why other species are being pushed closer to the brink of extinction.
Food security comes at a high price. In any case, it is a security many can only envy.
Increasing hunger
At the moment we are not on course to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of halving world hunger by 2015.
Although the proportion of hungry people is coming down, population increase means the actual number continues to rise.
In the 1990s global poverty fell by 20%, but the number of hungry people rose by 18 million. In 2003, 842 million people did not have enough to eat, a third of them in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation.
Hunger and malnutrition killed 10 million people a year, 25,000 a day - one life extinguished every five seconds.
The world does produce enough to feed everyone. But the food is often in the wrong place, or unaffordable, or can't be stored long enough. So making sure everyone has enough to eat is more about politics than science.
But whether we can go on eating the sort of diet we've grown used to in developed countries is far from clear.
Much of it travels a long way to reach us, with the transport costs adding hugely to the "embodied energy" it contains. There's a lot to be said for eating local, seasonal food where we can.
And meat usually demands far more than grain - water, land, grain itself (34% of world grain supplies are fed to livestock reared for meat). Yet, worldwide, the richer we grow the more we turn to meat.
Something's got to give - and not only our waistbands.
Read the entire article
Energy: Meeting soaring demand
Energy: Meeting soaring demand
Energy: Meeting soaring demand
By Alex Kirby, BBC News website environment correspondent, Tuesday, 9 November, 2004
The first problem with energy is that we are running short of traditional sources of supply.
The International Energy Agency says the world will need almost 60% more energy in 2030 than in 2002, and fossil fuels will still meet most of its needs.
We depend on oil for 90% of our transport, and for food, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and the entire bedrock of modern life.
But oil industry experts estimate that current reserves will only last for about 40 years.
Views vary about how much more will be found or made economically viable to use.
Pessimists predict production will start declining within 15 years, while optimists say we won't have to worry for a century - though rising prices are likely to push us towards alternative energy sources anyway.
Gas, often a suitable replacement for oil, won't last indefinitely either.
There's plenty of coal, but it's still usually hard to use without causing high pollution.
Worrying signs
Not everyone depends on the fossil trio, though. Nearly a third of today's world population (6.1bn people) have no electricity or other modern energy supplies, and another third have only limited access.
About 2.5 billion people have only wood or other biomass for energy - often bad for the environment, almost always bad for their health.
That's the second problem - understandably, they want the better life that cheap and accessible energy offers.
But if everyone in developing countries used the same amount of energy as the average consumer in high income countries does, the developing world's energy use would increase more than eightfold between 2000 and 2050.
The signs are already there. In the first half of 2003 China's car sales rose by 82% compared with the same period in 2002.
Its demand for oil is expected to double in 20 years.
In India sales of fuel-guzzling sports utility vehicles account for 10% of all vehicle purchases, and could soon overtake car sales. And the developed world is not standing still.
In the last decade, US oil use has increased by almost 2.7 million barrels a day - more oil than India and Pakistan use daily altogether.
Crossing continents
Where our energy comes from is a third problem - energy sources are often long distances from the point of consumption.
Centralised energy generation and distribution systems are fairly new.
A couple of centuries ago virtually everyone would have depended on the fuel they could find within a short distance of home.
Now, the energy for our fuel, heat and light travel vast distances to reach us, sometimes crossing not only continents but political and cultural watersheds on the way.
These distances create a whole host of challenges from oil-related political instability to the environmental risks of long-distance pipelines.
But even if we could somehow indefinitely conjure up enough energy for everyone who wants it, without risking conflict and mayhem in bringing it back home, there would still be an enormous problem - how to use the energy without causing unacceptably high levels of damage to the natural world.
Counting cost
The most obvious threat is the prospect that burning fossil fuels is intensifying natural climate change and heating the Earth to dangerous levels.
But forget the greenhouse effect if you want. There are still real costs that go with the quest for and use of energy: air and water pollution, impaired health, acid rain, deforestation, the destruction of traditional ways of life.
It's one of the most vicious circles the planetary crisis entails.
Cheap, available energy is essential for ending poverty: ending poverty is key to easing the pressures on the planet from the abjectly poor who have no choice but to eat the seed corn. But the tank is running dry.
It doesn't have to be like this. Our energy use is unsustainable, but we already know what a benign alternative would look like.
All we have to do is decide that we will get there, and how.
It will make vastly more use of renewable energy, from inexhaustible natural sources like the Sun and the seas.
Nuclear power?
One key fuel may well be hydrogen, which is a clean alternative for vehicles and is in abundant supply as it is a chemical component of water.
But large amounts of energy are needed to produce hydrogen from water, so it will not come into its own as a clean alternative until renewable energy is widely available for the process.
Some analysts suggest that nuclear power will be needed to bridge the gap between now and the renewable future.
Many environmentalists (but not all) are deeply unhappy with the idea - fission technology has been in use for a generation, but concerns remain about radioactive waste disposal and the risk of accidents.
Nuclear fusion - a new form of nuclear power which combines atoms rather than splitting them apart - could be ready by around 2040, but that is too long to wait.
However, we can also get energy to do several jobs at once, as combined heat and power plants do. And we can use less of it by becoming energy-efficient.
The British government estimates that 56% of energy used in UK homes could be cut using currently available technologies - yet the original Model T Ford did more miles to the gallon than the average Ford vehicle produced today in the US.
We can install power stations on our roofs by covering our houses with solar tiles, or buying miniature wind turbines the size of a satellite dish.
Practically, the energy crisis is soluble. But reaching the broad sunlit uplands will mean a drastic mental gear change for policy-makers and consumers alike.
Read the entire article
Energy: Meeting soaring demand
By Alex Kirby, BBC News website environment correspondent, Tuesday, 9 November, 2004
The first problem with energy is that we are running short of traditional sources of supply.
The International Energy Agency says the world will need almost 60% more energy in 2030 than in 2002, and fossil fuels will still meet most of its needs.
We depend on oil for 90% of our transport, and for food, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and the entire bedrock of modern life.
But oil industry experts estimate that current reserves will only last for about 40 years.
Views vary about how much more will be found or made economically viable to use.
Pessimists predict production will start declining within 15 years, while optimists say we won't have to worry for a century - though rising prices are likely to push us towards alternative energy sources anyway.
Gas, often a suitable replacement for oil, won't last indefinitely either.
There's plenty of coal, but it's still usually hard to use without causing high pollution.
Worrying signs
Not everyone depends on the fossil trio, though. Nearly a third of today's world population (6.1bn people) have no electricity or other modern energy supplies, and another third have only limited access.
About 2.5 billion people have only wood or other biomass for energy - often bad for the environment, almost always bad for their health.
That's the second problem - understandably, they want the better life that cheap and accessible energy offers.
But if everyone in developing countries used the same amount of energy as the average consumer in high income countries does, the developing world's energy use would increase more than eightfold between 2000 and 2050.
The signs are already there. In the first half of 2003 China's car sales rose by 82% compared with the same period in 2002.
Its demand for oil is expected to double in 20 years.
In India sales of fuel-guzzling sports utility vehicles account for 10% of all vehicle purchases, and could soon overtake car sales. And the developed world is not standing still.
In the last decade, US oil use has increased by almost 2.7 million barrels a day - more oil than India and Pakistan use daily altogether.
Crossing continents
Where our energy comes from is a third problem - energy sources are often long distances from the point of consumption.
Centralised energy generation and distribution systems are fairly new.
A couple of centuries ago virtually everyone would have depended on the fuel they could find within a short distance of home.
Now, the energy for our fuel, heat and light travel vast distances to reach us, sometimes crossing not only continents but political and cultural watersheds on the way.
These distances create a whole host of challenges from oil-related political instability to the environmental risks of long-distance pipelines.
But even if we could somehow indefinitely conjure up enough energy for everyone who wants it, without risking conflict and mayhem in bringing it back home, there would still be an enormous problem - how to use the energy without causing unacceptably high levels of damage to the natural world.
Counting cost
The most obvious threat is the prospect that burning fossil fuels is intensifying natural climate change and heating the Earth to dangerous levels.
But forget the greenhouse effect if you want. There are still real costs that go with the quest for and use of energy: air and water pollution, impaired health, acid rain, deforestation, the destruction of traditional ways of life.
It's one of the most vicious circles the planetary crisis entails.
Cheap, available energy is essential for ending poverty: ending poverty is key to easing the pressures on the planet from the abjectly poor who have no choice but to eat the seed corn. But the tank is running dry.
It doesn't have to be like this. Our energy use is unsustainable, but we already know what a benign alternative would look like.
All we have to do is decide that we will get there, and how.
It will make vastly more use of renewable energy, from inexhaustible natural sources like the Sun and the seas.
Nuclear power?
One key fuel may well be hydrogen, which is a clean alternative for vehicles and is in abundant supply as it is a chemical component of water.
But large amounts of energy are needed to produce hydrogen from water, so it will not come into its own as a clean alternative until renewable energy is widely available for the process.
Some analysts suggest that nuclear power will be needed to bridge the gap between now and the renewable future.
Many environmentalists (but not all) are deeply unhappy with the idea - fission technology has been in use for a generation, but concerns remain about radioactive waste disposal and the risk of accidents.
Nuclear fusion - a new form of nuclear power which combines atoms rather than splitting them apart - could be ready by around 2040, but that is too long to wait.
However, we can also get energy to do several jobs at once, as combined heat and power plants do. And we can use less of it by becoming energy-efficient.
The British government estimates that 56% of energy used in UK homes could be cut using currently available technologies - yet the original Model T Ford did more miles to the gallon than the average Ford vehicle produced today in the US.
We can install power stations on our roofs by covering our houses with solar tiles, or buying miniature wind turbines the size of a satellite dish.
Practically, the energy crisis is soluble. But reaching the broad sunlit uplands will mean a drastic mental gear change for policy-makers and consumers alike.
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