My previous posts about suicide haven’t been particularly cheery, and not just because of the grim subject matter. Everything I’ve seen in recent years has convinced me that our current anti-suicide measures aren’t working particularly well, given the stability of America’s suicide rate over the past half-century. It’s quite discouraging to realize that innovations such [...]
Entries Tagged as 'public health'
The Suicide Conundrum
July 20th, 2010 · 2 Comments
(Cross-posted from Ta-Nehisi Coates) Sorry to start this gorgeous summer day on an exceedingly somber note, but it’s time to talk suicide. I’ve written a lot about this topic, primarily from a public-health angle. Despite all we’ve learned about human psychology over the past several decades, we seem unable to make much of a dent [...]
Tags:Britain·public health·suicide
The Myth of the Mickey Slim
June 9th, 2010 · 8 Comments
Last week, the long discussion spurred by this post led one of our most trusted readers to offer this startling factoid: Bizarre note: there was a cocktail in the 40s and 50s called the Mickey Slim that was made with gin and a pinch of DDT. Sure enough, The Tubes abound with mentions of this [...]
Tags:alcohol·DDT·fur-bearing trout·Mickey Slim·public health·urban legends
The Oaxacan Example
June 7th, 2010 · 2 Comments
Continuing on with our promised examination of DDT’s usefulness in the War on Malaria, we’re gonna turn our gaze southward this morning. As carefully detailed here, Mexico was a longtime heavy user of DDT, sloshing out 70,000 tons of the controversial chemical between 1959 and 1999. Then the nation resolved to phase out DDT entirely, [...]
Tags:DDT·malaria·Mexico·public health
The DDT Equation
June 4th, 2010 · 4 Comments
Yesterday’s post about temperance medals somehow got the Microkhan community meditating upon whether DDT deserves to have its reputation rehabilitated, at least as a malaria fighter. The revisionist stance these days is that the chemical should be used to combat the disease “when no other effective, safe and affordable alternatives are locally available.” That doesn’t [...]
Tags:DDT·malaria·public health·Uganda
The Rabies “Racket”
May 18th, 2010 · 2 Comments
Healthy skepticism is obviously the lifeblood of a functioning society, yet there are moments when distrust of The Man can have dire consequences. That is too often the case in the public-health sphere, which we reckon makes sense—the notion of injecting ourselves with foreign agents is terrifying, especially since it’s so hard to observe how [...]
A Question of Lead
May 17th, 2010 · 2 Comments
Back in November, we opined that the likes of the United Nations would be well-advised to focus less on paying for physical improvements to impoverished schools, and more on reducing lead poisoning among very young children. As it turns out, the endlessly troubled city of Detroit might want to consider heeding that advice, too: A [...]
Bumps for Life
May 7th, 2010 · 2 Comments
Yesterday, a pal of ours asked whether the following stat (gleaned from a recent Harpers article) could possibly be true: One out of every 85 humans living today will meet their end as a result of a vehicular accident. That figure may sound ridiculously astronomical, but data from the World Health Organization lends some powerful [...]
Tags:Harpers·New Jersey·public health·speed bumps·traffic·World Health Organization
“People Who Died for Our Entertainment”
May 4th, 2010 · No Comments
Back in the 1930s, a New York subway conductor named Manuel Velazquez befriended a middling boxer named Pete “Kid Indian” Nebo. Like many pugilists of the era, Nebo fought two to three times per week in order to make ends meet. As a result of his athletic pursuit, Nebo suffered terrible brain damage, and was [...]
Tags:boxing·public health·sports
First, Do No Harm
April 28th, 2010 · No Comments
While we’re sensitive to the fact that millions of people trust folk cures more than modern remedies, stories like this one make us question whether shamanism deserves to survive in the post-antibiotics age: A couple in Samoa ,who perform traditional healing, have been found guilty of causing actual bodily harm, but had charges of manslaughter [...]
Tags:medicine·pseudoscience·public health·Samoa·South Africa·witchcraft
Thwarted by Ocular Weakness
March 29th, 2010 · 4 Comments
If you have even a passing interest in the nuts and bolts of warfare, we highly recommend this thorough exploration of Afghan marksmanship. We’ve all heard how rural Afghan boys are essentially born with rifles in their hands, and that meme has led to a belief that Taliban soldiers are expert shots. But the reality [...]
The Last Beer Run
March 16th, 2010 · 4 Comments
The sign above, which features script that translates as “Attention: Drunks,” was briefly part of a safety initiative in the Romanian town of Pecica. The mayor was concerned that too many of inebriated pedestrians were getting mowed down by cars, and so sought to duplicate a series of warning signs that he had once encountered [...]
The Comfort of Statistics
March 10th, 2010 · 1 Comment
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 · 6 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 [...]
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
TR and the Nation’s Health
September 10th, 2009 · 8 Comments
As soon as President Obama invoked Theodore Roosevelt’s name last night, we started digging through the archives in search of details about the Bull Moose’s call for health-care reform. It was a tougher get than we expected, as the proposal amounts to little more than a single line in the Progressive Party’s final 1912 platform; [...]
Tags:Barack Obama·economics·presidents·prisons·public health·Theodore Roosevelt
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 [...]
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,” [...]
Tags:economics·games·Japan·karōshi·law·public health·statistics·suicide
