Category: Health
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My recent post on the case fatality ratio of the new Wuhan Coronavirus sparked a long discussion about the role of European epidemics in the colonization of the new world. There is a theory that after Europeans came to the new world (the Americas, Australia, etc) they brought with them diseases that went through the…
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Since 31st December 2019 there has been an outbreak of a new coronavirus in China. It originated in the city of Wuhan, and over the past 22 days has spread rapidly, including cases in several cities outside China. Initial reports suggested it originated in a seafood market in the city, which had me hoping it…
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Are you young, American, living in America and scared about where your country is headed? Want to get out before it all goes down? Are you worried about getting shot at school or work, or by the police? Don’t think that the healthcare situation is going to get better or even stay as bad as…
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There has been some fuss in the media recently about a new study showing no level of alcohol use is safe. It received a lot of media attention (for example here), reversed a generally held belief that moderate consumption of alcohol improves health (this is even enshrined in the Greek food pyramid, which has a…
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Today’s Guardian has a column by George Monbiot discussing the issue of obesity in modern England, that I think fundamentally misunderstands the causes of obesity and paints a dangerously rosy picture of Britain’s dietary situation. The column was spurred by a picture of a Brighton Beach in 1976, in which everyone was thin, and a…
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The journal Molecular Autism this week published an article about the links between Hans Asperger and the Nazis in world war 2 Vienna, Austria. Hans Asperger is the paediatric pscyhiatrist on whose work Asperger’s syndrome is based, and after whom the syndrome is known. Until recently Asperger was believed to have been an anti-Nazi, someone…
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This week the US Congress passed a set of censorship laws, commonly called FOSTA/SESTA, that aimed to prevent online sex trafficking but in practice work to shut down all forms of online sex work advertising. The laws were developed in the wake of claims that the website backpage was being used to buy and sell…
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In September 2017 Philip Morris International (PMI) – one of the world’s largest cigarette companies – introduced a new foundation to the world: The Foundation for a Smoke Free World. This foundation will receive $80 million per year from PMI for the next 12 years and devote this money to researching “smoking cessation, smoking harm…
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Last week the Lancet Public Health published a comment piece by me about the challenges it faces in the near future. This comment was linked to a research article that found a huge increase in elderly people with care needs in the UK population over the next 10 years. This article predicted that 10 years…
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In the wake of the Republicans’ catastrophic inability to repeal Obamacare, many people have begun to accept that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the new basis on which the US health system will be built. This means that for the foreseeable future, assuming the Republicans are not able to suddenly develop a…
Compromise and Conceit 