For those suffering from a grave case of ursinophobia, we provide the following snippet from Bear Facts, an informational brochure produced by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game:
Many bears live in Alaska and many people enjoy the outdoors, but surprisingly few people even see bears. Only a tiny percentage of those few are ever [...]
Entries Tagged as 'public health'
The Comfort of Statistics
March 10th, 2010 · 1 Comment
Tags:Alaska·animal attacks·bears·dogs·North Dakota·public health·statistics
Gaming the System
March 9th, 2010 · 4 Comments
When conducting business deals with their fellow private citizens, people basically tend to be honest. Perhaps this is because we all secretly fear retribution and punishment, no matter how unlikely the consequences. Or maybe it’s just that we’re wired to realize that society can’t function if we’re constantly preoccupied with suspicion. Whatever the explanation, the [...]
Choke on This
February 16th, 2010 · 2 Comments
There’s an old chestnut (of dubious veracity) about how more rock climbers perish in auto accidents to-and-from the cliffs than from accidental falls. We thought of that contrarian info-nugget this morning upon stumbling across some surprising morbidity news from Britain:
Last week, the House of Commons’s Environmental Audit Committee heard evidence that about 35,000 people – [...]
Tags:Britain·cars·environment·Manila. economics·Philippines·pollution·public health
Desperation in Action
February 8th, 2010 · 4 Comments
One of our treasured Japanese correspondents just have us a heads up about this tragedy, involving an airplane stowaway who apparently froze to death while concealed in a Boeing 777’s landing gear. Such deaths are actually somewhat common, not to mention quite predictable—at 35,00 feet, temperatures are insanely icy, and oxygen scarce. Yet men and [...]
Tags:airplane stowaways·aviation·Cuba·economics·immigration·public health·Tahiti
Reason Through the Haze
January 29th, 2010 · 5 Comments
Having finally closed the Wired story that sent us out to Kenya last fall, we’ve moved on to another big project for the magazine. This time the focus will be on addiction, which means you should expect plenty of drug-policy posts in the coming months. We’ll kick off the fiesta today by noting this paper [...]
Buried Whales, Cont’d
January 22nd, 2010 · 3 Comments
Our recent post about the hazards of whale burial attracted a celebrity commenter: Steve O’Shea of the Auckland University of Technology. Best known for his squid-hunting endeavors, O’Shea is also overseeing the research into the public-health consequences of interring beached whales. He takes us to school thusly:
I can assure you that E. coli is the [...]
Tags:animals·cetaceans·giant squid·New Zealand·public health·Steve O'Shea·surfing
A Sadder Breed of Fail Whale
January 19th, 2010 · 5 Comments
What to do with beached whales who can’t be guided back out to sea, and so perish on the sand? In parts of New Zealand where the indigenous Maori hold sway, this has become quite the conundrum. The trust that oversees Maori fisheries recently proposed harvesting such unfortunate cetaceans for meat—arguably a more humane option [...]
The Roots of the Trainspotting Generation
January 15th, 2010 · 3 Comments
“There is nothing sadder than an aging hipster,” Lenny Bruce once opined. While there’s certainly a kernel of truth to that statement, we believe the late comedian missed the mark by just a few degrees. Far sadder, in our estimation, is an aging drug addict, whose aims to recapture lost glory not by feigning interest [...]
Tags:books·drugs·heroin·Irvine Welsh·life expectancy·opium·public health·Scotland·statistics·Trainspotting
Paint, Not Books
November 19th, 2009 · 5 Comments
There’s actually been a small silver lining to our newfound anxiety over the lead content in balsamic vinegar: it’s got us thinking about education spending in a new way. How’s that? Well, upon learning that our favorite salad-dressing base might well harm Microkhan Jr.’s neural health, we started thumbing through the literature on lead poisoning’s [...]
Tags:educuation·intelligence·lead poisoning·public health·statistics·UNESCO
The Vaccine Dream Deferred
November 10th, 2009 · 3 Comments
An MIT economist argues that botched incentives, rather than scientific hurdles, are frustrating the quest for an HIV vaccine. The point that jumped out at us the most:
It has become increasingly apparent that an HIV vaccine may need to be administered in combination with antiretroviral drugs, even if a stand-alone vaccine remains the ultimate goal [...]
The Marching Powder
November 4th, 2009 · 12 Comments
When Latin percussion god Tito Puente died some years back, The New York Post speculated that a 40-year cocaine addiction had finally caught up with the man. This piece of gossip turned out to be of (to say the least) dubious veracity, but it stuck with us nonetheless. That’s because it got us thinking about [...]
Tags:cocaine·drugs·public health·Tito Puente·War on Drugs·World Health Organization
Official Sport of the Health Care Debacle
October 9th, 2009 · 2 Comments
When folks ask us about out take on the health care mess, we always bring up the tale of our pal “Lancer.” (Names have been Robotech-ed to protect the potentially moritified.) A few years back, poor Lancer was playing a little pickup basketball when his ACL decided that it no longer enjoyed being a complete [...]
Can Nicorette Be Righteous?
September 23rd, 2009 · No Comments
As we’ve given ever-deeper thought to our nation’s distressingly high infant morality rate, we’ve started to wonder how best to address the problem. Everything we’ve read in recent days seems to indicate that the rate could be dramatically lowered if more expectant mothers took better care of their bodies—specifically by quitting smoking, which pretty clearly [...]
Tags:cigarettes·infant mortality·medicine·Nicorette·philosophy·public health
Our Infant Mortality Conundrum
September 14th, 2009 · 7 Comments
No matter where you stand on the whole health-care debate, it’s tough to argue with the fact that our revamped system needs to address our appallingly high rate of infant mortality. Though the American economy is the largest in the OECD, our babies perish more frequently than the organization’s average. In fact, our national infant [...]
Tags:cigarettes·infant mortality·Lithuania·OECD·public health·Slovakia
What the Oklahoma Legislature Hath Wrought
September 9th, 2009 · 4 Comments
In researching the history of freedmen’s towns this morning, we came across a rather irresistible bit of trivia: the fact that Oklahomans have an official state meal. And what a doozy of a repast it is (PDF):
Chicken-fried steak
Barbecue pork
Fried okra
Squash
Blackeyed peas
Cornbread
Biscuits
Sausage gravy
Grits
Corn
Strawberries
Pecan pie
This gluttonous revelation made us curious as to whether there’s any correlation between [...]
Tags:chicken-fried steak·food·obesity·Oklahoma·public health
The Safety Line
September 8th, 2009 · 4 Comments
We here at Microkhan are avid fans of Robert Young Pelton’s World’s Most Dangerous Places series, in part because we never cease being amazed by the man’s utter ballsiness. (Algeria sans security in the thick of civil war? Really?) But the lure in Pelton’s work isn’t just his bravado—it’s his frankness about which travels threats [...]
Tags:cars·economics·Kazakhstan·public health·Robert Young Pelton·statistics·travel·World Health Organization
Those Wage Earners Left Behind
September 4th, 2009 · 1 Comment
As you’re stuffing your face with sweet sausages and Budwesier Chelada this holiday weekend, we hope you’ll pause for a brief moment to remember those who really could have used a Labor Day respite: victims of karōshi, who remain far more numerous than they should be.
Karōshi translates from the Japanese as “death from overwork,” and [...]
Tags:economics·games·Japan·karōshi·law·public health·statistics·suicide
Olfactory Attack
September 2nd, 2009 · 4 Comments
We’re currently prepping for a work-related trip to East Africa, which means we now get to spend lots of time being freaked out by ominous Centers for Disease Control warnings. (According to the CDC’s literature, setting foot in half the countries on the planet appears to be a recipe for gory death.) It also means [...]
Citrus is Your Friend
August 19th, 2009 · No Comments
Yesterday we touched upon medicine’s tendency to stick with certain treatments even when there’s a lack of credible evidence attesting to their efficacy. But there’s a flip side to that foible—some physicians’ genius for concocting cures on the fly, with no lab or patient data to assist them.
Such was certainly the case with scurvy, the [...]
Tags:California·disease·food·James Lind·medicine·public health·scurvy·Vasco de Gama
Scared Sober?
August 18th, 2009 · 1 Comment
We don’t have too many hobby horses here at Microkhan, but one of them is a steadfast belief that many long-accepted practices are far less effective than advertised. This is typically because our species is easily seduced by logical facades, and thus pays too little attention to actual evidence. You can understand, then, why the [...]
Tags:alcohol·Australia·bloodletting·crime·medical science·public health
The Fog of Plague
August 6th, 2009 · No Comments
With the Chinese town of Ziketan locked down on account of pneumonic plague, it’s worth looking back at a similar incident from 15 years ago: the Surat plague of 1994. The Indian city ended up recording approximately 5,150 cases of pneumonic plague, which resulted in a shade under 60 fatalities—by no means a major epidemic, [...]
Tags:bubonic plague·China·India·Italy·pneumonic plague·public health·Renaissance history·Surat plague
Poison on the March
July 15th, 2009 · No Comments
A loyal reader recently sent us the above graph, culled from a recent issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The accompanying text only explains what’s obvious to even the untrained eye: as the age-adjusted death rates linked to firearms and motor-vehicle accidents have declined, poison has become an increasingly efficient killer of Americans.
Does this [...]
Tags:drugs·medicine·poison·public health
Delhi’s Worrying Trend
July 6th, 2009 · 2 Comments
We normally assume that public health constantly improves, if only incrementally for long stretches. But then along comes a story like this, detailing how Delhi’s infant mortality rate has doubled since 2005. The obvious culprit is the continuing influx of rural migrants, few of whom seek professional medical care while pregnant—or, for that matter, for [...]
Tags:Delhi·India·infant mortality·Janani Suraksha Yojana·public health
Jaundiced for the Cause
April 30th, 2009 · 7 Comments
In today’s edition of NtHWS Extras, we’re taking a look at a nearly forgotten medical tale from World War II: The widespread use of Atabrine to combat malaria, with varying results.
This story starts all the way back in the 19th century, with a bunch of Dutch smugglers who brought Cinchona seeds from South America to [...]
Tags:Atabrine·malaria·medicine·Now the Hell Will Start·NtHWS Extras Month·public health·quinine
Know Your Flu Terms
April 30th, 2009 · 1 Comment
What’s the difference between an epidemic, a pandemic, and a mere outbreak? Microkhan gives the skinny here. Apparently the dreaded Osaka flu doesn’t qualify as any of the above, at least in the non-Simpsons universe.
Tags:Osaka flu·public health
CSWs and PCR
April 7th, 2009 · No Comments
As a proud realist, I’m typically sympathetic to commercial sex worker (CSW) campaigns that seek legitimacy for their members’ chosen trade. That doesn’t mean I lack all squeamishness about the cash-for-flesh exchange, but I acknowledge that it’s called “the world’s oldest profession” for a reason. The transparency that is supposed to accompany legitimacy strikes me [...]
The Miracle of Concrete
March 20th, 2009 · No Comments
Sometimes the simplest measures can improve public health in the most remarkable ways. Want to save hundreds of thousands of young lives each year, while improving those kiddos’ IQ scores to boot? Cover their floors with concrete.
Tags:public health
