Obese because your grandparents were in a famine?

Epigenetics, a very hot topic in bioethics and public health, may provide an explanation for the current obesity epidemic. Epigenetics deals with how gene activity is regulated within a cell - which genes are switched on or off, which are dimmed and how, and the transgenerational effect -- the implications for public health could be huge.

In this clip from the NOVA special, the Ghost in Your Genes, researcher Marcus Pembrey of the Institute of Child Health at University College London and his colleagues analyzed records from an isolated community in northern Sweden and found that men whose paternal grandfathers had suffered a famine between the ages of 9 and 12 lived longer than their peers; they also found that the mother's nutrition might affect a child's risk of obesity, too -- women in the Netherlands who were in the first two trimesters of pregnancy during a famine in 1944 and 1945 gave birth to boys who, at 19, were much more likely to be obese. The implication is that extended periods of feast or famine might trigger a switch to a pattern of gene expression that results in different metabolic states for future generations.



The realization that individuals can acquire characteristics through interaction with their environment and then pass these on to future generations of offspring will likely forcue us to rethink evolutionary theories such as Dawkins' selfish gene theory.

Today is World Malaria Day

Today is the first-ever World Malaria Day, which organizers hope will raise our collective awareness about this disease. The mosquito-borne illness kills more than a million people a year, mostly infants, children, and pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa. According to the World Health Organization, that's one child every 30 seconds. These deaths occur despite the fact that malaria is a preventable and treatable condition.

Insecticide-treated bed nets keep the skeeters off sleepers and reduce the rate of infection. You can donate one--heck, they cost a paltry 10 bucks apiece! Donate a few!--at Malaria No More, here.

[Editor's note: And if you are on Facebook, please join in Project Blackout: One Million Faces Against Malaria today.]

"Novel" public health ethics

World War Z, billed as "an oral history of the Zombie Wars," is a novel by Max Brooks that purports to tell the history of the global battle against the zombie horde. There are of course a number of horror movies along these lines--among them the gorefest 28 Days Later and its equally horrifying sequel, 28 Weeks Later--and a film version of WWZ is supposedly in the works.

Spoiler alert:
The plan credited in WWZ with saving humanity involves the sacrifice of isolated communities: these unfortunates are left behind, as a distraction for the swarm of zombies, while the rest of the population flees. Once the communities have been completely "zombified," the army moves in mows them down. It's not an especially realistic scenario--or at least, one hopes not! But it does raise some interesting questions about what kinds of measures can, or should, be taken in the case of public health emergencies, and whether we all become utilitarians under such circumstances.

Camus' The Plague is, of course, the classic. Geraldine Brooks' Year of Wonders is also very good. And I just picked up a copy of The Last Town on Earth by Thomas Mullen, which is another quarantine story, this one set here in the Pacific Northwest. You'll probably get a review of it here one of these days ... when I have time for leisure reading again!