Conference May 23rd in NYC: New Dilemmas in Medicine

Conference: New Dilemmas in Medicine, co-hosted by the IHEU-Appignani Bioethics Center & Bioethics International

Where: 777 United Nations Plaza, 2nd Fl., New York, NY

When: May 23, 2008 9. 30 am-7. 00 pm

To Have the Best Child Possible: The Coming Age of “Procreative Beneficence?”

Genetic science has the potential to provide prospective parents with unprecedented control over their unborn child’s characteristics and attributes. In vitro fertilization and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis allow couples to sort out “good” from “bad” embryos prior to the start of pregnancy. Although these technologies are almost exclusively employed to detect genetic and/or chromosomal abnormalities among embryos, their use for selection of other medical and non-medical traits is conceivable. Tomorrow’s couples may have the opportunity to select embryos that will not only be the least susceptible to disease but which also have particular hair colors, skin tones, temperaments, or other personal attributes. Advocates of these eugenic initiatives have argued that future couples will have a moral obligation to pursue these technologies whenever possible to achieve the greatest benefit for their children, a principle known as “procreative beneficence.” Still, secular and non-secular critics alike argue that use of such technologies is immoral and may be potentially devastating to children and the structure of society.

. Arthur Cooper, M.D., Director of Trauma & Pediatric Surgical Services, Columbia University- Harlem Hospital Center

· Jennifer Kimball, Executive Director Culture of Life Foundation

· Eva Kittay, Ph.D. SUNY Stony Brook

· Barbara Katz Rothman, Ph.D. CUNY Baruch College

· Udo Schuklenk, Ph.D. Queen's University, Canada

· Panel Moderator: TBD

Ethics and Pharmaceutical R&D: Who Should Be Responsible for Tomorrow’s Drugs?

The vast majority of prescription medications are developed and sold by private pharmaceutical companies. Under the current market-based system, however, some critics argue that pharmaceutical companies have financial incentives to support R&D that will yield the biggest return but which may not be in the best interests of improving the health of patients worldwide. They claim, for example, that pharmaceutical companies are far more interested in producing Viagra than vaccines, and call for change in paradigm of drug design and provision. Others point to the high costs of R&D and the critical importance of blockbuster drugs to the future development of less profitable vaccines and antibiotics; without the former, they argue, there could be no breakthroughs.

· Angela Ballantyne, Ph.D.,Yale University Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, Visiting Scholar

· Chalmers C. Clark, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Union College

· Paul Howard, Ph.D., Director of the Manhattan Institute's Center for Medical Progress

· Wilmot James, Ph.D., Executive Director of the Africa Genome Education Institute

· Jason L. Schwartz, Ph.D., Researcher, University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics

· Panel Moderator: Jason Lott, M.D., University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine

Saying “No” to Patients: Medical Professionals as Conscientious Objectors

Central to the professional and ethical mandate of physicians, pharmacists, and other healthcare personnel is the provision of medical care consistent with the best interests of their patients. However, news of healthcare professionals refusing to provide certain types of care to their patients under the auspices of “conscientious objection” have raised questions about the role of professionals’ personal beliefs in fulfillment of their purported obligations and duties. Examples include doctors refusing to terminate pregnancies, pharmacists refusing to dispense emergency contraception, certain Catholic hospitals receiving public funds refusing to issue morning-after birth control to rape victims, and others.

• Robert Baker, Ph.D. Director & Professor of Bioethics, The Union Graduate College-Mount Sinai School of Medicine
• Thomas Berg, L.C., Ph.D., Executive Director, Westchester Institute for Ethics & the Human Person
• Laura Katzive, Deputy Director, International Legal Program, Center for Reproductive Rights
• Mark Mercurio, M.D., M.A., Yale University School of Medicine, Director of the Yale Pediatric Ethics Program, and Co-Chair of the Hospital Ethics Committee
• Rosamond Rhodes, Ph.D., Professor & Director Medical Education, Bioethics Education, Mount Sinai School of Medicine
• Girija Nandan Singh , Ph.D., University Professor & Head of Geography at R. D. & D. J. College Munger, Bihar, India
• Panel Moderator: Austin Dacey, Ph.D., Center for Inquiry, NYC

****************************************************************

Following the conference there will be a cocktail reception featuring an Argentinean Tango performance by Laura Real.  This will be from 7:00 PM to 9:30 PM at the Consulate General of Romania, located nearby at 200 East 38th Street @ Third Ave

Registration Fees (includes cocktail reception):
General Public - $65
Students - $30

One can attend the cocktail reception only for $30.

Pay at the door, or send your check to:
IHEU-Appignani Center for Bioethics
P.O. Box 4104
Grand Central Station
New York, NY 10162

Contact person: Ana Lita: (212) 687-3324 AnaLita@iheu.org

Girls & sports & character

Not a bioethics story, but I can't resist sharing this one.

Albany Medical Center Prize Awarded to Two Female Biomedical Researchers

For the first time since its inception, the Albany Medical Center Prize, (the largest prize for medicine in the United States, and second world-wide only to the Nobel), was awarded to two women.

Dr. Joan Steitz of Yale University does research that has improved the lives of people suffering from a variety of auto-immune diseases, while Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn of UCSF discovered the enzyme telomerase, which repair telomeres on chromosomes (and many believe may be linked to aging).

The women will share the $500,000 prize.

Wanted: Women to Eat Chocolate

What woman wouldn't want to sign up for this clinical trial? From across the pond:

"Researchers in Norwich have set themselves an easy challenge: finding 150 women prepared to eat a bar of chocolate a day.

The chocolate is free, and made specially for the trial by a Belgian chocolatier. The intention is to see whether it improves the women’s health." To see the rest of the article, click here.

Iron Man: Not So Far From Reality

Iron Man, the upcoming summer blockbuster, has captured the attention of kids and comic book aficionados everywhere -- Isn't this every kid's dream? To be super strong, and a superhero? Well, it's not as far out in the future as you may think -- Although I've written about the ELSI (Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications) of future Augmented Cognition (sorry about the shameless plug), the first step, the Augmented Human Robotics System is already here. Too cool for words, this system not only has military applications, but promises to replace wheelchairs and crutches for those patients suffering with mobility disorders. Check out a prototype here:




Ooooh, I want one of these...(oh, for my nephews and nieces, of course).

More on Malaria -- It really is a preventable disease.

One of the places I teach is at the University of Sciences in Philadelphia, in the Department of Biomedical Writing. The Chair of Biomedical Writing is Susanna Dodgson and she is an amazing woman -- you can see her talking about her program at Pharmed Out, an independent, publicly funded project that empowers physicians to identify and counter inappropriate pharmaceutical promotion practices, and who we just added to our blogroll.

In addition to teaching and being the department chair, she is the Editor-in-Chief of the Medical Journal of Therapeutics Africa, and she has recently taken on the cause of eradicating malaria. She went on location in Lagos, Nigeria and produced, with the help of faculty and students of the Biomedical Writing program, this great video why malaria should be and continue to be a major world health concern and just how malaria can be prevented:



We had posted earlier about World Malaria Day and Blackout for Malaria on Facebook, but Susanna's video is a reminder that one day isn't enough. Go, Susanna!

The “third tier” in US health care?

It’s a sickening situation. Physicians’ incomes are under attack: think lower reimbursements, higher costs for malpractice premiums and the like, greater business costs, claims processing hassles, and deadbeats.

What’s a poor doctor to do? One possible cure is the concept of Concierge Care.

Concierge Care (or Boutique Medicine, or Platinum Practices, one name hasn’t stuck) could offer a patient such privileges as 24-hour phone or pager access to the doctor, house calls, and guarantee of an appointment with your chosen doctor the same day you call.

The cost: a fixed annual fee that could range beyond $20,000 a year, depending on the services provided, and the patient’s age and health.

I’m not quite old enough to remember the days when doctors offered all the above and a lot more to everyone, for a lot less.

So there it is: to the other tiered services available in the US (UPS for the rich, the post office for everyone else; private schools for the rich, public schools for everyone else) we can now add a three-tiered “health” care system: no coverage at all for 45 million people, inadequate medical services for most of the rest of us, and Concierge Care for the lucky, wealthy few.

The God Squad Redux?

There has been a simple problem with organ transplants, for as long as it has been technologically possible to do so: there are never, ever enough organs. And that leads to the simple, painful, difficult question of how you decide who receives a organ, and who is consigned to death that could have been prevented. And perhaps most importantly, how do you make that decision ethically?

For better or worse, much of the debate on who gets to play god has centered in and around the medical facilities in Seattle. Almost everyone knows the history of Dr. Belding Scriber and the hemodialysis God Squad, with the now-infamous headline “They Decide Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die.” And their criteria for choosing who did receive dialysis is almost painful to consider these days: a married Christian white man with children? Worthy member of society, should be saved! Single convict? Let 'im die.

It's a well-known history, in bioethics and Seattle proper. So it was with some surprise that I read, in the morning's news cycle, that the University of Washington was back in the news with accusations that their transplant committee was playing god. Only this time, they're second-guessing other medical professionals in the process.

The situation itself is simple: a man in need of a liver transplant was prescribed medical marijuana use by his physician to control pain, alleviate nausea, and stimulate his appetite.

The marijuana use, according to a doctor at Harborview Medical Center, would prohibit his paperwork for transplanting being processed. He would have to abstain for six months - a ruling eventually dropped in favour of an offer to reconsider after completion of a 60 day substance abuse program. Sixty days that the patient didn't have. On appeal, the University of Washington Medical Center agreed to consider the case again, and a week ago rejected the man from transplant consideration for a second time.

Medical use of marijuana was approved by Washington voters back in 1998, yet use of illicit substances is often grounds for rejecting someone's place on the transplant list. UNOS leaves the specific criteria to each individual hospital, and the information coming out of Seattle seems to suggest that UW's policy is not automatic rejection, but instructions to abstain for six months to then be reconsidered. (And of course, the medical center itself is not commenting on this case, save to say a range of factors play into every decision made regarding transplant cases).

The problem with this is hopefully simple: if a patient is using marijuana under medical supervision, why should it be considered problematic? Or any more problematic than the use of any other addictive substance (such as most pain medications).

The other problem is less simple. Physicians trying to do right by their patients, trying to alleviate pain and suffering (something that is often difficult to even motivate physicians to do, as continued coverage of the dearth of chronic pain management indicates), are inadvertently creating a situation where their patients are actually being denied further medical treatment based on their current treatment.

Peggy Stewart, a clinical social worker in the UCLA liver transplant center, has a simple solution: create a national eligibility criteria, so that everyone is on the same page, and aware of what will and will not increase their chances at actually being placed on the list.

Or, if I may be so bold as to point out the obvious, don't penalize a patient for following the medical advice of a fully licensed physician.
-Kelly Hills

Random Acts of Mindfulness

Grrl Scientist posts about a Lakewood, WA police officer who stopped traffic so a duck and her family could finish crossing a highway. (silent video included in post)

While superficially this is an act of kindness by someone in a position of authority or simply a removal of a potential traffic hazard, on a higher level, this story demonstrates a mindfulness about the parts of Nature that we cannot control, the aspects that will keep living and doing regardless of our own engagements. And we all have a choice to ignore those aspects, or we can spare a bit of the immense power we have to embrace something as fundamental as helping a family in the course of its life.

As May dawns and brings with it the rigorous flush of new life, I urge everyone to consider a random act of mindfulness that appreciates the living world around us.

Kudos go out to Officer Carrell and to the drivers for taking a moment to appreciate life.

(This story was so heartwarming I just had to share it)

Cochlear Implant Manufacturer Facing Multi-Million Dollar Fine

As a quick search on this blog for the word deaf shows, I am a pretty vocal advocate of Deaf rights, and quite anti-cochlear implant for d/Deaf children. Because of the nature of the procedure, and its permanence, I do believe it's a choice that an autonomous agent should consent to rather than have pushed onto them. And this article from the LA Times just adds to that belief: the FDA wants to fine cochlear implant manufacturer Advanced Bionics $2.2 million for apparent manufacturing violations that actually put patients at risk for additional hearing loss, electrical shocks, and other issues. (Frankly, those two are enough, as far as I'm concerned.)

As for my other objections, they are relatively simple from a technological standpoint. Unless technology has rapidly changed in the last few years, one of the major drawbacks of cochlear implants is that they do destroy any residual hearing. This is why many doctors suggest only implanting one ear, in case a better technological or biological solution comes along later down the line. So you are wedded to the device implants, and that technological level, for the remainder of your life.

Stop and think about this for a minute. Go dig around in your junk drawer and take a look at your cell phone from three or four years ago. Or better yet, go find a computer from the 1980s.

How would you like to have that technology (in all it's now unsupported glory) embedded as a part of you that you are reliant upon for the remainder of your life, regardless of whether or not people continue to support that level of technology?

From a purely technological, I spent too long in the software industry, standpoint (and leaving out all notions of Deaf culture), it's simply a bad idea.

This Advanced Bionics lawsuit is just another in a long list of reasons cochlear implantation is a decision that should be made only by competent adult agents.
-Kelly Hills

No wrongful-dismissal verdict for creationist postdoc

From The Scientist (free subscription may be required) comes this report of the outcome of Nathaniel Abraham's lawsuit against the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Abraham claimed that he was fired from his postdoc position because he told his supervisor, Mark Hahn, that he believes in the literal truth of the Bible and considers evolution to be a theory, not a fact. Abraham, who had been working in evolutionary biology, sued and asked for $500,000 in damages for violation of his civil rights. (There's an NPR report on the lawsuit here.)

Over at the Panda's Thumb, blogger Timothy Sandefur explains that the case was thrown out on a pair of technicalities: Abraham failed to file his complaint within the required time period of a notice from the EEOC, and he couldn't personally sue Hahn under applicable law. It could well be that this will be appealed--and that Abraham will be the new poster child for Ben Stein's creationist campaign. Stay tuned.

The FDA blows it ... again.

Despite all of the recent, largely negative press that the US Food and Drug Administration has received, one of their biggest screw-ups has so far slipped under the radar.

In yesterday's Federal Register, the FDA published its amended rule for accepting for regulatory review data collected from in foreign clinical trials not performed under an IND.

I'm thrilled that the FDA wants all trials submitted to it for review to be conducted in accordance with Good Clinical Practice (GCP) guidelines, including review and approval by an independent ethics committee such as an IRB or a REC. In doing so, however, the FDA removed from its regulations all reference to the Declaration of Helsinki.

Many of us in the advocacy arena have been arguing against this proposed change for years, suggesting instead that the FDA should work towards harmonizing the substantive requirements of GCP with the ethical aspirations of the Declaration of Helsinki. But the Agency chose to ignore us, leaving many of us to wonder if this is just another example of the FDA kowtowing to corporate business interests ... particularly their oft-stated opposition to Paragraph 30 of the Declaration:

"At the conclusion of the study, every patient entered into the study should be assured of access to thebest proven prophylactic, diagnostic and therapeutic methods identified by the study."

Sex selection in India ...

It took then-US President Ronald Reagan several years to even mention the word "AIDS," by which time thousands had died and tens of thousands more were infected.

Much in the same way, it has taken Manmohan Singh four years as Prime Minister to finally denounce the wide-spread practice of in utero sex determination and selective abortion of female fetuses in India.

The Lancet once estimated that as many as 10 million female fetuses had been selectively aborted in India between 1986 and 2006. So, we can conservatively guesstimate that approximately 2 million such abortions have occurred since Mr. Singh's election as Prime Minister.

Hopefully the next words out of his mouth will be a clear order to Indian law enforcement agencies to actively implement already existing laws that make the practice of selectively aborting female fetuses illegal, instead of just paying lip-service.

The Boycott to Help Global Warming

Living in Vermont, I get to meet really interesting people sometimes -- and this weekend, I had the serendipitous fortune to meet a woman who decided she, one person, was going to try and make a difference in the battle against global warming. She has launched a one-women show, The Boycott Play, based on the 2400-year-old Greek sex comedy Aristophanes’ "Lysistrata", where the First Lady leads the women of the world to go on a sex strike to pressure political leaders (the fictional self-absorbed President, in particular) into taking action. As one reviewer put it, "If the planet gets hot, the men will get naught."

Here's one of her clips from Youtube:




What a nice reminder that one person can make a difference! You go, girl!

Reversal in life expectancy for some Americans

Ok, ok, I'll spare you the suspense: it's poor women, mainly.

According to a study published last week in PLoS Medicine, available here, life expectancy for some people--and particularly women in the Deep South and Appalachia--has actually decreased since the 1980s. According to the lead author, Dr. Majid Ezzati, "The finding that 4 percent of the male population and 19 percent of the female population experienced either decline or stagnation is a major public health concern." Yeah, you could say that. The main culprits are identified as chronic diseases related to smoking, overweight and obesity, and high blood pressure.

Life expectancy has long been regarded as an indicator of the effectiveness of a country's health and social systems. The fact that we seem to be moving backward, particularly in poor parts of the country, is bad news. You can read more at the NYT.

And because I can't help it on a Monday, here's a big fat helping of irony for you: Linda's link to Art Caplan's commentary on the ethics of extending life (ie, there's nothing wrong with us "haves" choosing to extend our lives) and this MSNBC feature, on the crazy things some women are doing to their faces in hopes of looking younger (having outlived their dewy complexions, presumably).

Social justice, anyone?








Photo credit: Shelby Lee Adams for the NYT

Sexual Assault Awareness Month

April is (at this point, was) Sexual Assault Awareness Month - something I'm rather embarrassed to admit I didn't realize until this past Saturday, when I was a guest at the Tau Chapter (Union College) of the Lambda Pi Chi Sorority's annual domestic violence and rape awareness banquet.

This year's theme was "Out of the Silence, Finding Our Voices", and guest speakers included visiting professor of sociology Linda Relyea speaking on relationship red flags and the difficulties and dangers in leaving abusers, Luz Marquez from the National Organization of Sisters of Color Ending Sexual Assault, who spoke about their work modifying the Violence Against Women Act to be inclusive of cultural differences in approaching healing to violence, and UPenn's Dr. Salamishah Tillet, who shared bits of A Long Walk Home: A Story of a Rape Survivor, her own narrative of moving from rape victim to rape survivor.

The event itself was structured well, moving from personal accounts of rape and violence to a larger overview - a hook that then led to education, and a major emphasis of the last speaker (Professor Relyea) was in making sure the target girls in the audience, girls in the 18-25 age group, understood the warning signs (red flags) of violence and shied away/extracted themselves from those situations. Being not in that target age group, my attention started to drift and I found myself refocusing on earlier speakers comments, especially those in the narrative provided by Dr. Tillet.

Years ago, I did the occasional domestic violence awareness talk, and almost always looped it into the sex education courses I taught. One of the things I struggled with was how to refer to those who had experienced assault. Rape/DV victim seemed, in itself, a victimizing word - reminding someone over and over of their loss of agency, their status of a harmed, violated being; it seemed to emphasize submissiveness. At the same time, survivor seemed to be a flip side of that coin, seeming to emphasize success and healing that might not have actually taken place. There are interesting parallels that can be drawn here between victim/survivor and Erving Goffman's ideas of the discredited and discreditable in his seminal work Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity; that those who have experienced a trauma have two processing routes. There is the immediate and self-conscious, what Goffman calls the discredited, where the person assumes that the trauma they have received is evident and available to everyone, and a more delayed and suppressed response that assumes no one knows what has happened (Goffman's discreditable). In both cases, how a person interacts with the world after their trauma changes based on what they assume the world sees, but for the discredited it is because they assume everyone knows, while the discreditable is wrestling with an internal actual change that does not match the personae shown to the public.

I never did find that healthy balance between the two tensions, of victim or survivor, and learned to simply follow the lead of those I was speaking to, or to use the as neutral as I could conceive of term "someone who had been raped/experienced DV" - a phrase I felt acknowledged a change in how someone might view their own self-identity without casting their entirety into a role defined by trauma.

But as interesting and academic as those thoughts might be, they don't actually deal directly with one of the biggest problems behind rape and DV - silence born of shame. And we can again go back to Goffman's stigma for this: we have become something other than we, and those we know, see as us, and because of the general prohibition about sex in our society, combined with Puritanical attitudes that shame women for being sexual creatures (the good ol' Madonna/Whore dichotomy), that change is viewed as bad, negative. Tarnishing and tainting. (A problem that exists for men, too, only instead of dealing with the Madonna/Whore dichotomy, they have a questioning of masculinity issue.) The traumatized person has to mediate between a new self and their old self, and the fact that what has happened to them is often, by social conditioning, seen as something that either faults or contaminates them. And so you stay silent, you suffer, you repress. You attempt to hold on to that damaged identity, reconstruct it, ignore the fraying edges, deny. You find excuses - it's my fault, if only I was a better person, if I hadn't... if I wasn't...

And to be very honest, I'm not sure how we erase the shame and stigma that so often comes along with rape and domestic violence. Certainly the standard response is to talk about it, share stories, force people to listen and learn and understand. But I'm not convinced that works as well as we would hope; in fact, sometimes I think that those who are able to do so almost work to increase the shame and stigma felt by those who, for whatever reason, feel unable to speak out, speak up, share themselves. But an interesting suggestion raised itself over at, of all places, a website devoted to snarking romance books. A reader wrote in for recommendations for a friend's mother, trapped in a domestic violence situation. The abused woman reads romance novels, and the concerned friend was hoping to start passing her books with themes that have an abused woman successfully leaving the abuser, pulling her life together, and falling happily in love, and into a healthy relationship. The idea is almost beautiful in its simplicity: indoctrinate someone via their recreational reading that the situation they are in is not only unhealthy/bad/abusive, but not permanent, not something that she has to settle for, and that it is possible to both leave and happily move on.

It got me thinking about a story I used to tell, when doing that DV/rape education, about a woman whose music was the impetuous for her own leaving an almost decade long abusive situation. Instead of finding strength in romance novels, she found strength in the lyrics from one of her favourite bands. That song went through my head a lot on Saturday evening, as speakers talked about how you reach the point of knowing, how one day you do just wake up and say "screw it, there can't be anything worse than this, I'm going." And so I wonder, how much power and effect does media have, or could/can have in situations like this (and others)? Can we habituate people to realize that their situation is untenable? Would a multi-pronged push at both genders, targeting abuser and abused, work to train people to change behaviour? I don't know - I'm not sure it could work, effectively, as counter-programming to all the things in society that have been linked to increases in abuse and violence, from war to declining economic realities.

That said, it's interesting, and perhaps works as an accompaniment to people refusing to be silenced and shamed for trauma that is most definitely, firmly, cannot argue the point, not their fault.

The numbers of people who experience sexual assault vary, but you can't argue that it's a grim statistic no matter how you look at it. Every two minutes, someone in the United States is assaulted. Now expand that to North America. The world.

We have to find a way to break the silence.
-Kelly Hills

Breakfast - Now Determining the Sex of Your Baby?

When I was in my teens, a few of us used to sit around and daydream about our futures and the families we would have (yes, complete with white picket fences - you can stop laughing any time now). For reasons that I am not really certain of, save to chalk it up to socialized expectations, we always wanted either balanced numbers of children - a boy and a girl, or some combination. But everyone always wanted at least one of each. So, being teens and curious and in the days prior to Google and this fancy "internet" thing that's all the rage these days, we would read books and magazines and whatever else we could get our hands on, scouring for articles on precisely how to best skew the odds in favour of having a baby of the preferred sex.

What time of the month to have sex, what positions were better for X or Y sperm, whether or not the acidity of the vagina changed the longevity of the sperm - we read it all, clipping articles and saving them, writing down the names of books, making photocopies.

I don't remember, really, how much credit we ever gave these ideas. I do, however, remember that we scoffed openly at the idea of what you eat affecting the sex of your child. How naive did the amorphous "they" think we were, anyhow?



Needless to say, it doesn't surprise me that of all the possible wives tales about how to fix the sex of your child, the one that looks to be at least provisionally plausible? What you eat.

A study of 740 first time mothers in Britain shows that whether moms eat breakfast cereal or not might determine whether their bundle of joy is a boy or a girl. ..."Prior to pregnancy, breakfast cereal, but no other item, was strongly associated with infant sex," the researchers write in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. "Women producing male infants consumed more breakfast cereal than those with female infants."

The reason is a mystery, but Mathews speculates that glucose may be key. This type of sugar, converted by the human body into energy, is a by-product of the breakdown of carbohydrates such as those in breakfast cereal. Women who do not eat breakfast tend to have low levels of glucose, and other studies have shown that glucose enhances the growth of male fetuses in vitro.

Lead researcher Fiona Mathews thinks that this might be another way the body gauges whether or not food is plentiful or scarce; in a famine, the less energy intense female fetus makes more sense to biologically invest in, a finding echoed in a lot of animals, which produce more male offspring when food is bountiful. (I would guess it has something to do with future offspring potential - men can create quite a few more children than women, so populations would be checked, to a degree, by having more wombs than sperm.)

But maybe the most interesting thing about the research?

The finding may explain a persistent and puzzling drop in the ratio of male to female births in well-fed industrialized nations, a fact that Mathews ascribes to the decline in the proportion of women eating breakfast.

There's still quite a bit of research that needs to be done, including reproducing it in other countries and cultures, but it's certainly intriguing, as is. And I suppose for those who do want to conceive and are hoping for a specific sex, it's at least a little bit more reliable than much of the stuff I was reading those many years ago.
-Kelly Hills

*********
Kelly--have to jump in to add this item from The Onion.
~Sue

Adding to our collection of posts about Gardasil and the HPV vaccine is the news that HPV is one of two viral links to lung cancer. Two new studies suggest that viruses - specifically, HPV and measles - can significantly boost a smoker's already serious risk of developing non-small cell lung cancer. Almost 90% of the over 200,000 cases of lung cancer that will be diagnosed in the United States this year are typed non-small cell lung cancer, and it tends to be a highly malignant version of cancer to end up with.

Both findings were presented Friday by separate research teams attending the European Lung Cancer Conference in Geneva.

"In terms of HPV, our finding is pretty controversial," said study author Dr. Arash Rezazadeh, a fellow of medical oncology and hematology at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. "And this is just the beginning of the road. There is much more work to be done. But it's important to know that being infected with this virus does appear to increase lung cancer risk."

As for the role of measles, the second study's lead author, Dr. Samuel Ariad, from the department of oncology at Soroka Medical Center in Beer Sheva, Israel, said that infection -- perhaps even asymptomatic infection -- seems to be associated with half of the lung cancer cases he tracked.

So,... can we mandate HPV vaccinations for all, now?

(Yes, I admit it would be good to see more studies done on this, in larger numbers, and with smokers as well as ill non-smokers. But I watched someone die from non-small cell lung cancer last year, and it's not something I'd wish on anyone - if we can stop even a small handful of those cases, along with all the other types of cancer HPV has been indicated in causing, isn't it worth the unlikely chance that the vaccine itself would encourage promiscuity?)
-Kelly Hills

Art Caplan: It's not immoral to want to be immortal

For those of us who are very interested in life-extension and regenerative medicine, our colleague Art Caplan has a brand new column on the MSNBC web site about how the big ethical question being kicked around quite a bit these days is "Is it right to want to try to live forever?" [Well, not really forever, but a longer time, he explains]:

"As the science of regenerative medicine using stem cells inches forward, as more is understood about how lifestyle influences longevity, as organ and tissue transplants become routine and as geneticists begin to unravel the secrets of why we age, the prospect of living forever — or at least until the Cubs win a pennant — makes the question something more than an exercise in science fiction.

What is particularly interesting is that many of those raising the question of the ethics of immortality do so with an answer already in mind — “No, it’s not right!” Both conservative and liberal writers alike are expressing a lot of moral angst in recent books, articles and opinion pieces about the prospect of people hanging around long, long after the last broadcast of "The Price Is Right" has aired, which could be an eternity.

Why is the prospect of immortality viewed in such a negative light? A bunch of different reasons can be found in the writings of the growing ranks of anti-agers..."

The rest of the article can be accessed here and as far as I am concerned, I would like to stick around long enough to go one of the rejuvenation clinics envisioned by Robert A. Heinlein -- and to make sure the opportunity is available for friends and family, and anyone else who would like to take advantage of a longer, healthier life.

once more, with feeling*

Once again, experts have testified that abstinence only sex education programs don't work. This time, groups of experts, including representatives from the American Public Health Association, the U.S. Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists testified before various Congressional groups that abstinence only sex education programs simply and plainly do not work. They do not cut teen pregnancy rates, they do not slow the spread of STIs, and do not delay age of first sexual experience.

Of course, the Bush Administration doesn't want to cut funding to these abstinence only programs (and especially not in favour of comprehensive sex education programs). The choice quote of the day award goes to Tennessee Republican representative John Duncan, who apparently said with a completely straight face, "that it seems 'rather elitist' that people with academic degrees in health think they know better than parents what type of sex education is appropriate."
-Kelly Hills
(* With my own apologies to anyone now wandering around singing Broadway, or Buffy, showtunes.)