Health – Page 58 – artdiamondblog.com

Richest Man in World in 1836 Died of an Infection that Modern Antibiotics Cure

(p. A2) Rising incomes alone cannot capture how much better life has gotten. “Nathan Rothschild was surely the richest man in the world when he died in 1836,” economists Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina wrote in 2017. “But the cause of his death was an infection–a condition that can now be treated with antibiotics sold for less than a couple of cents. Today, only the very poorest people in the world would die in the way that the richest man of the 19th century died.”
Mr. Roser is the founder of Our World in Data, a website that tracks the evolution of human welfare over the last few centuries. Scroll through the charts, articles and data sets, and you will be stunned by how much better life has become in just the last few decades: Child mortality, illiteracy and deaths from violence have all plummeted, and life expectancy has gone up.

For the full commentary, see:
Greg Ip. “Stop Calling It ‘Vocational Training’; How we speak about education reflects class prejudice.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, January 3, 2019): A2.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Jan. 2, 2019, and has the title “CAPITAL ACCOUNT; The World Is Getting Quietly, Relentlessly Better.”)

The Roser and Oritz-Ospina piece mentioned above, is:
Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2018) – “Global Extreme Poverty”. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty’ [Online Resource]

Drones Bringing Vaccine May Be Interpreted by Some as Cargo Cult Vindication

(p. A10) In the village of Cook’s Bay, on the remote side of the remote island of Erromango, in the remote South Pacific nation of Vanuatu, 1-month-old Joy Nowai was given shots for hepatitis and tuberculosis that were delivered by a flying drone on Monday.
It may not have been the first vial of vaccine ever delivered that way, but it was the first in Vanuatu, which is the only country in the world to make its childhood vaccine program officially drone-dependent.
“I am so happy the drone brought the stick medicine to Cook’s Bay as I don’t have to walk several hours to Port Narvin for her vaccines,” her mother, Julie Nowai told a Unicef representative. “It is only 15 minutes’ walk from my home.”
.. . .
. . . , about 20 percent of Vanuatu’s 35,000 children under age 5 do not get all their shots, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund.
So the country, with support from Unicef, the Australian government and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, began its drone program on Monday. It will initially serve three islands but may be expanded to many more.
In the future, that expansion may run into some unusual turbulence — Vanuatu is one of the few places where “cargo cults” are still active, and the drones match their central religious dogma: that believers will receive valuable goods delivered by airplane.
That will have to be handled carefully, a Unicef representative said.
. . .
. . . : Vanuatu still has adherents of the John Frum movement, one of the South Pacific cargo cults whose adherents pray for valuables arriving from the sky.
The cults date back more than 100 years, but reached their zenith during and after World War II.
Islanders whose ancestors had been kidnapped by whites to work on plantations in Australia and Fiji watched “silver birds” flown in by the Japanese and American militaries disgorge vast amounts of “cargo” — food, medicines, tools and weapons — which was sometimes shared with them.
The legend spread that the cargo was gifts from the ancestors, but that it had been intercepted and stolen by the foreigners. After the war ended, the cults built airstrips and model planes to lure the “birds” back.

For the full story, see:
Donald G. McNeil Jr. “‘A Buzzing Thing in the Sky’ Delivers Vaccines to Vanuatu.” The New York Times (Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018): A10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 17, 2018, and has the title “An Island Nation’s Health Experiment: Vaccines Delivered by Drone.”)

Mitch Daniels Views Higher Education as a “Racket” (Health Care Too)

(p. A11) Mr. Daniels, 69, is the most innovative university president in America.
. . .
Mr. Daniels kicks off our conversation with a morality tale: “I’ll speak to an audience of businesspeople and say: Here’s the racket that you should have gone into. You’re selling something, a college diploma, that’s deemed a necessity. And you have total pricing power.” Better than that: “When you raise your prices, you not only don’t lose customers, you may actually attract new ones.”
For lack of objective measures, “people associate the sticker price with quality: ‘If school A costs more than B, I guess it’s a better school.’ ” A third-party payer, the government, funds it all, so that “the customer–that is, the student and the family–feels insulated against the cost. A perfect formula for complacency.” The parallels with health care, he observes, are “smack on.”

For the full interview, see:
Tunku Varadarajan, interviewer. “THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW: College Bloat Meets ‘The Blade’.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Dec. 15, 2018): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date Dec. 14, 2018.)

Progress on Cancer Cures Is Slow and Too Few Benefit

(p. 5) The reason is a new generation of cancer treatments that have become available in recent years. Some, called immunotherapy, harness the patient’s own immune system to battle a tumor. Others, known as targeted therapies, block certain molecules that cancers depend on to grow and spread. The medical literature — usually circumspect when it comes to cancer, in light of many overhyped treatments in the past — now fairly gushes with terms like “revolutionary” and “cure.” In this case, the hype feels mostly justified.
. . .
A recent analysis estimated that about 15 percent of patients with advanced cancer might benefit from immunotherapy — and it’s all but impossible to determine which patients will be the lucky ones. Just last week, a study of lung cancer patients demonstrated the overall benefits of combining immunotherapy with traditional chemotherapy. But here, too, the researchers noted that most patients will not respond to the new treatments, and it is not yet possible to predict who will benefit. In some cases, the side effects are terrible — different from those of chemotherapy but often just as dire.

For the full commentary, see:
Robert M. Wachter. “The Problem With Miracle Cancer Cures.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sunday, April 21, 2018): 5.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 19, 2018.)

The claim that only 15% benefit, made above, is based on the following:
Howard, Jacqueline. “Hope and Hype around Cancer Immunotherapy.” CNN, Weds., Sept. 27, 2017.
GAY, NATHAN, and VINAY PRASAD. “First Opinion; Few People Actually Benefit from ‘Breakthrough’ Cancer Immunotherapy.” March 8, 2017.

“Outsider Status” of Surgeons “Permitted Greater Risks and Leaps of Faith”

(p. A19) . . . as Arnold van de Laar reminds us in “Under the Knife: A History of Surgery in 28 Remarkable Operations,” a collection of hypervivid anecdotes and oddities, it was only recently that surgeons were considered the equals of what we would now call internists–doctors who diagnose, prescribe medicine and prognosticate.
. . .
. . . , it has been both the bane and the secret glory of surgery as a vocation that it was relegated for so long to the margins of “decent” intellectual or professional life. Its dodgy, outsider status perhaps permitted greater risks and leaps of faith than were available to nonsurgical physicians, who still found themselves making inchworm progress from the dictates of Hippocrates and Galen. Surgeons worked fast to beat pain and gangrene (so fast that in one case, Scottish surgeon Robert Liston cut off a man’s testicles in a rush to amputate his leg). They used whatever materials seemed to make sense–in some cases gold thread, costly but long-lasting; in other cases branding irons.

For the full review, see:
Laura Kolbe. “The Kindest Cuts.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, November 15, 2018): A19.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Nov. 14, 2018, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Under the Knife’ Review: The Kindest Cuts.”)

The book under review, is:
van de Laar, Arnold. Under the Knife: A History of Surgery in 28 Remarkable Operations. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018.

Health Care Premium Costs Continue to Rise

Source of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) The average cost of employer health coverage offered to workers rose to nearly $20,000 for a family plan this year, according to a new survey, capping years of increases that experts said are chiefly tied to rising prices paid for health services.

For the full story, see:
Anna Wilde Mathews. “‘Health Coverage Costs Firms $20,000 a Family.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, Oct. 4, 2018): A1 & A6.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 3, 2018, and has the title “Employer-Provided Health Insurance Approaches $20,000 a Year.”)

High-Tech Toilets Could Reduce Feces in Swimming Pools

If the cringeworthy facts reported below were more widely known, demand would greatly increase for the high-tech toilets common in Japan, that shoot water sprays at human rear ends, to quickly, comfortably, and completely remove fecal residue. Why has no one grasped this entrepreneurial opportunity?

(p. A2) Mrs. [Lindsey] Blackstock and several colleagues tested 31 swimming pools and hot tubs in hotels and recreational facilities in Canada for the presence of acesulfame potassium, an artificial sweetener that is largely undigested and almost entirely excreted in urine.
. . .
Using that information, they deduced that a 110,000-gallon pool they studied contained an estimated eight gallons of urine, while a 220,000-gallon pool contained an estimated 20 gallons. The concentrations represented about 0.01% of the total water volume.
“If your eyes are turning red when you’re swimming, or if you’re coughing or have a runny nose, it’s likely there is at least some urine in the pool,” said Michele Hlavsa, chief of the Healthy Swimming Program for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Urine isn’t a primary source of germs in pools or hot tubs, but feces that clings to the body is. At any time, Dr. Hlavsa said, adults have about 0.14 grams of poop on their bottoms and children have as much as 10 grams.
“When you’re talking about bigger water parks with 1,000 children in a given day, you’re now talking about 10 kilograms or 22 pounds of poop,” she said.
Feces can contain bacteria, viruses and parasites such as E. coli, norovirus and giardia that can lead to outbreaks of diarrhea, vomiting and other illnesses.

For the full commentary, see:
Jo Craven McGinty. “THE NUMBERS; A Sanitary Pool Requires Proper Behavior.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, July 21, 2017): A2.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed name, added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 21, 2017, and has the title “THE NUMBERS; Is That Pool Really Sanitary? New Chemical Approach Has Answers.”)

Blackstock’s research, described above, was published in:
Jmaiff Blackstock, Lindsay K., Wei Wang, Sai Vemula, Benjamin T. Jaeger, and Xing-Fang Li. “Sweetened Swimming Pools and Hot Tubs.” Environmental Science & Technology Letters 4, no. 4 (April 2017): 149-53.

Buddhist Monks Fear Death

(p. C4) A recent paper in the journal Cognitive Science has an unusual combination of authors. A philosopher, a scholar of Buddhism, a social psychologist and a practicing Tibetan Buddhist tried to find out whether believing in Buddhism really does change how you feel about your self–and about death.
The philosopher Shaun Nichols of the University of Arizona and his fellow authors studied Christian and nonreligious Americans, Hindus and both everyday Tibetan Buddhists and Tibetan Buddhist monks.
. . .
The results were very surprising. Most participants reported about the same degree of fear, whether or not they believed in an afterlife. But the monks said that they were much more afraid of death than any other group did.
Why would this be? The Buddhist scholars themselves say that merely knowing there is no self isn’t enough to get rid of the feeling that the self is there. Neuroscience supports this idea.
. . .
Another factor in explaining why these monks were more afraid of death might be that they were trained to think constantly about mortality. The Buddha, perhaps apocryphally, once said that his followers should think about death with every breath. Maybe just ignoring death is a better strategy.

For the full commentary, see:
Alison Gopnik. “Who’s Most Afraid to Die? A Surprise.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, June 9, 2018): C4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 6, 2018.)

The print version of the Cognitive Science article discussed above, is:
Nichols, Shaun, Nina Strohminger, Arun Rai, and Jay Garfield. “Death and the Self.” Cognitive Science 42, no. S1 (May 2018): 314-32.

“Entrepreneurs Are Often Driven by Personal Experiences”

(p. B5) Eczema entrepreneurs are often driven by personal experiences that they or their family members have had with the skin condition. Joe Paulo, for example, created Smiling Panda clothing after he had eczema as a teenager.
. . .
Mr. Paulo, 23, has already made some inroads with adults seeking relief with his Smiling Panda brand, which he started after getting eczema on his arms. The eczema appeared after he moved from California to Philadelphia in 2012 to attend college.
His eczema, he said, “got significantly worse” when he had to wear professional clothing during college internships. When even bedsheets began irritating his skin, he started researching the properties of different fibers and how clothing was made. He chose a bamboo-cotton blend for his clothing because bamboo is soft and cotton fibers allow a closer fit, he said. He began cutting and stitching his own shirts, with flat seams and no tags.
When he wore his shirts to bed, he said: “I went from having a really tough time falling asleep to having no trouble at all.”
“I thought there might be other working adults interested in this type of clothing, and that comfortable clothing would help them in the same way it helped me,” he said. He found a small manufacturer willing to make a batch of sizes for women and men. He chose Smiling Panda as the company name and started a website in February 2016.
. . .
Mr. Paulo said he did not know if the company would ever be profitable. “I like doing it because I feel like our products make a difference in our customers’ lives,” he said. “I know from personal experience how miserable clothing can be when you are itching from eczema.”

For the full story, see:
Elizabeth Olson. “Personal Stories Drive Start-Ups In Eczema Products.” The New York Times (Thursday, July 20, 2017): B5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 19, 2017, and has the title “‘The Beginning of a Wave’: A.I. Tiptoes Into the Workplace.”)

Drug Middlemen Create “Perverse Incentive” for Higher List Prices

(p. B1) The Department of Health and Human Services is scrutinizing the system of rebates and discounts paid to middlemen as medicine flows from manufacturers to patients. Those middlemen, such as drug wholesalers, pharmacies, and pharmacy-benefit managers, are often compensated as a percentage of a drug’s list price. That creates a perverse incentive for higher list prices throughout the system.
. . .
Pfizer , which made headlines earlier this month by pausing a slate of planned price increases due to White House criticism, sounds ready for reform. Chief Executive Ian Read on a conference call with analysts last week predicted that rebates are “going away” over the long term. Mr. Read added that the larger gaps between list and net prices amounted to a “subsidy” for companies in the drug supply chain and blamed those subsidies for the relatively weak sales of certain lower-priced versions of blockbuster drugs.

For the full commentary, see:
Charley Grant. ” HEARD ON THE STREET; Skies Darken for Drug Middlemen.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, Aug. 8, 2018): B1.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Aug. 7, 2018.)

Dr. Charles Wilson Had Surgical Intuition, “Sort of an Invisible Hand”

(p. A19) Dr. Wilson sometimes worked in three operating rooms simultaneously: Residents would surgically open and prepare patients for his arrival, and he would then enter to seal an aneurysm or remove a tumor before moving on to the next case.
“He never spent much more than 30 or 60 minutes on each case, and we were left to close the case and make sure everything was O.K.,” Dr. Mitchel Berger, a former resident who is chairman of U.C.S.F.’s neurosurgical department, said in an interview. “It was unorthodox, but it worked. He demanded excellence and we gave him excellence.”
They also gave him silence. He allowed no music, no ringing phones and no idle chatter. Scrub nurses were expected to anticipate his requests.
“He would manage any break of silence with a stern look,” said Dr. Brian Andrews, a neurosurgeon who was one of Dr. Wilson’s residents and also his biographer, with the book “Cherokee Surgeon” (2011). (Dr. Wilson was one-eighth Cherokee.)
Dr. Wilson became world renowned for excising pituitary tumors through the sinus in a surgery called transsphenoidal resection.
. . .
The writer Malcolm Gladwell, in a profile of Dr. Wilson in The New Yorker in 1999, described one of those pituitary cancer surgeries. Looking at a tumor through a surgical microscope, Dr. Wilson used an instrument called a ring curette to peel the tumor from the gland.
“It was, he would say later, like running a squeegee across a windshield,” Mr. Gladwell wrote, “except that in this case, the windshield was a surgical field one centimeter in diameter, flanked on either side by the carotid arteries, the principal sources of blood to the brain.”
A wrong move could nick an artery or damage a nerve, endangering the patient’s vision or his life.
When Dr. Wilson saw bleeding from one side of the gland, he realized that he had not gotten all of the tumor. He found it and removed it. The surgery took only 25 minutes.
Dr. Wilson performed the surgery more than 3,300 times.
He told Mr. Gladwell that he had a special feel for surgery that he could not entirely explain.
“It’s sort of an invisible hand,” he said. “It begins almost to seem mystical. Sometimes a resident asks, ‘Why did you do that?’ ” His response, he told Mr. Gladwell, was to shrug and say, “Well, it just seemed like the right thing.”

For the full obituary, see:
Richard Sandomir. “‘Charles Wilson, 88, Lauded For Excising Brain Tumors, Sometimes Several in a Day.” The New York Times (Monday, March 5, 2018): A19.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date March 2, 2018, and has the title “‘Charles Wilson, Top Brain Surgeon and Researcher, Dies at 88.”)

The biography of Wilson, mentioned above, is:
Andrews, Brian T. Cherokee Neurosurgeon: A Biography of Charles Byron Wilson, M.D. Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011.