tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79647652011-04-21T14:12:32.749-04:00Biological, medical and sometimes bio-medi-political topics of interest to me.Helen Stavrouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10096166786443044023noreply@blogger.comBlogger161100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7964765.post-1164998791223937202006-12-01T10:25:00.000-05:002006-12-01T13:46:31.426-05:00

How's this for a twist to the West Virginia Medicaid program? Recipients get better benefits--mental health counseling, for example--if they promise to, say, join a "stop smoking" program. Or a cardiac patient could go to rehab if he or she joins a weight-loss program after signing a pledge "to do my best to stay healthy." The perpetrators of this New Wave medical care program are tossing in

Helen Stavrouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10096166786443044023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7964765.post-1164986661649032222006-12-01T10:19:00.000-05:002006-12-01T10:24:21.813-05:00

I've come back from wordpress. No big reason except I've tweaked my template over here and like the look of it.

Helen Stavrouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10096166786443044023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7964765.post-1152564582990909762006-07-10T16:49:00.000-04:002006-07-10T16:49:43.003-04:00

Don't get me wrong, I'm not on the side of agribusiness. I'm all for slow food and small farms. But let's call a spade a spade when it comes to biotech food. Agri uses it to maximise profits--in some insidious ways, too, like preventing farmers from collecting seeds from one harvest to use to plant the next. But is biotech food dangerous to our health or the health of the enviornment?

Helen Stavrouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10096166786443044023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7964765.post-1149364383630035652006-06-03T15:05:00.000-04:002006-06-03T15:53:03.686-04:00

Dr. Angell continues her pounding of Big Pharma with her article in the June 6 New York Review of Books. She reminds us that Merck knew that Vioxx was linked to heart attacks even as it relentlessly marketed the drug to doctors and to us. That's us as in U.S., the only advanced country except New Zealand that allows TV commercials for prescription drugs. She reminds us that many of the FDA

Helen Stavrouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10096166786443044023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7964765.post-1146238800439017902006-04-28T11:38:00.000-04:002006-04-29T15:53:33.503-04:00

The Canada's Environment Minister has silenced a civil service environmental scientist who is author of a sci-fi book on global warming called "Hotter than Hell." She's forbidden him to publicly speak on his book or the science behind it. The plot may be fiction but global warming sure ain't. And IMHO there's not much we can do about it. The earth's profligate ways have contributed to the trend

Helen Stavrouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10096166786443044023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7964765.post-1145294001492602582006-04-17T12:57:00.000-04:002006-04-17T13:21:40.746-04:00

C/net news.com reports on a grad student's original and imaginative business plan to recover methane from organic waste. The waste he has in mind is the vegetable leavings and paper discarded by supermarkets. I see this as an urban equivalent to manure-generated methane down on the farm. C/net reported that the student, Shane Etan, never saw himself as an environmentalist. But let's face it,

Helen Stavrouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10096166786443044023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7964765.post-1144617638346817342006-04-09T17:13:00.000-04:002006-04-09T17:20:38.380-04:00

I do want to love the new Massachusetts universal insurance coverage scheme to require all citizens to have some form of health insurance just like all drivers have to have accident insurance. I really want to adore Gov. Mitt Romney and Senator Ted Kennedy and all the pols who put the legislation together.But this is what sticks in my craw: Under the guise of a wide, universal umbrella, the

Helen Stavrouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10096166786443044023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7964765.post-1144533403923144182006-04-08T17:47:00.000-04:002006-04-08T17:56:43.923-04:00

It blows me away how genes produce proteins. No sooner do their components, amino acids, line up than they start to fold in precise configurations.A scientific pessimist could say it's impossible to simulate this folding in the lab, but the gang a Folding@Home is trying using thousands of home computers around the world. Anyone can help.

Helen Stavrouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10096166786443044023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7964765.post-1144532271655730042006-04-08T17:29:00.000-04:002006-04-08T17:37:51.666-04:00

Charles Darwin has understated himself again. He said his theory wouldn't be worth two beans (a bloggy paraphrase) unless it could be shown that "numerous, successive, slight, modifications" accrued over time.Slight-modification-wise, you can't get any slighter than a subcellular biochemical receptor changing affinity for the protein that fits into it. Researchers reporting in Science determined

Helen Stavrouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10096166786443044023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7964765.post-1142723568545199732006-03-18T17:47:00.000-05:002006-03-23T00:32:20.376-05:00

The other night NBC news called the VA medical system better than private care in the US. The vets deserve the best, but what are the rest of us getting? The US ranks lower than Europe on many health indicators, like infant mortality and life expectancy to name just two. And--here's the kicker--we're paying more for the privilege of having less, roughly $6000 per person. The VA is an

Helen Stavrouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10096166786443044023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7964765.post-1142049557319026152006-03-10T22:33:00.000-05:002006-09-04T18:54:41.363-04:00

I'm not in the habit of reading this online journal, but I thought I'd give this article a whirl after reading about it in the newpaper. The upshot is that human beings were still evolving much more recently than previously thought, perhaps only 6600 years ago.. Not only that, but genetic change occurred swiftly and surely.The evidence for this is the presence of novel chromosome mini-fragments

Helen Stavrouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10096166786443044023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7964765.post-1141851113508830032006-03-08T11:16:00.000-05:002006-03-08T15:51:53.556-05:00

I'm a volunteer tutor of a first and second grader over in Hell's Kitchen . One goes to the local public school and the other, a parochial school. The kids are trudging along in their reading and math, but I found that they are sorely lacking in the most basic geography. They only sort-of know the name of the street where they live but do not know their home addresses. What if they got lost?

Helen Stavrouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10096166786443044023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7964765.post-1141518541378794312006-03-04T19:23:00.000-05:002006-03-04T19:29:01.386-05:00

Bravo Paul Krugman and Robin Wells in their New York Review of Books critique of what's wrong with America's free market, free enterprise, out-of-control health care system. In a word, inefficiency. Or three words, sky high costs. They have a chart showing the US inferior to Canada, France, and the UK in salient health indicators (e.g.,infant mortality, longevity). Yet US costs are almost

Helen Stavrouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10096166786443044023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7964765.post-1140918404524751182006-02-24T12:37:00.000-05:002006-02-25T20:46:44.570-05:00

I'm wowed by the 3 stunning turnabouts coming out of the Women's Health Initative. First, there's fat, previously bad for your heart, now not a problem. Then there's that hot-flash-reducer cum great-skin hormone therapy beloved of menopausal women, now a problem and causing an increased risk of heart ailments as well as breast cancer. Finally (for the moment at least) there's that old bone

Helen Stavrouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10096166786443044023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7964765.post-1140739035869181272006-02-23T18:19:00.000-05:002006-02-23T18:57:15.913-05:00

Finally, I've found a kindred spirit who explains what I am: an introvert. Are most, many, or just some bloggers also introverts? Are they introverts who like to communicate with other introverts? Or introverts who want to blog to extroverts? It would seem to me that the extroverts are out chatting it up in bars or bowling alleys instead of staring at typed letters on a screen.

Helen Stavrouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10096166786443044023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7964765.post-1092601745097228382004-08-15T16:11:00.000-04:002006-02-28T18:30:25.326-05:00

It blows me away how genes produce proteins. No sooner do their components, amino acids, line up than they start to fold in precise configurations.A scientific pessimist could say it's impossible to simulate this folding in the lab, but the gang a Folding@Home is trying using thousands of home computers around the world. Anyone can help.

Helen Stavrouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10096166786443044023noreply@blogger.com2