Critical Exponent

You can look up studies on the genetics of homosexuality using the OMIM website. What jumps out of this collection of studies is that, for males, the genetic link appears to come through the mother (X chromosome) and that boys with older siblings are more likely to be gay. Interesting.

I learned about this through the NY Times Tierney lab. As seems to be the case every time I bother to look (is it sampling bias?), reader comments on newspaper blogs degenerate into the tangential, irrelevant, and specious. Sigh.

MRSA is no joke. I had a run-in with the superbug a few years ago. Let me tell you, intravenous vancomycin is a drudge. One can take measures to prevent its spread (hibiclens helps), but the little staph is a persistent little thing.

Now, researchers think they may have found a new treatment in French volcanic clay.

From The National Post, via cycling.finial.com:

In a discovery that has stunned even those behind it, scientists at a Toronto hospital say they have proof the body’s nervous system helps trigger diabetes, opening the door to a potential near-cure of the disease that affects millions of Canadians.

You know how Big Tobacco is supposedly not longer targeting kids to get them to smoke cigarettes? Well, nobody said anything about little cigars– essentially often-flavored cigarettes in a brown wrapper. Coincidentally, this category of tobacco products is not subject to the same tax and regulations as cigarettes…

Get them while they’re young, Evita, get them while they’re young…

Sex is fun, but as we all know, it has potential consequences: it can give rise to strong emotions, expose one to STDs, and (for straight folks) carry the possibility of an unintended pregnancy. For this reason, there is general agreement that people are socially and economically better off holding off on sex until adulthood. Even the modern adult, however, is hardly constrained by older notions of “procreative sex only, and only in marriage.” Some choose to hold off on marriage until reaching a more secure and stable point in their lives. Others do not wish to get married, or are not allowed to. Even a married straight couple may choose to limit how many children they have. This does not change the fact that most adults are sexual creatures, and sex can be extremely gratifying.

Which brings us to the Sex Wars. Many conservatives want to establish abstinence-only sex education, reasoning that it will cut down on pre-marital sex and the myriad social problems they claim it brings about: the decay of morals, rampant hedonism, and teenage pregnancy. Many conservatives also want to restrict or criminalize abortion, in part because they see it as breaking the link between sex and procreation. For this reason, too, many conservatives are waging a war on contraception, so that every sexual act (remember, only the straight missionary position is allowed) may lead to pregnancy and the growth of the family.

These solutions put the cart before the horse. Sure, youngsters should wait to have sex, but human nature hasn’t changed in millenia: just as they did in Biblical, medieval, and Victorian times, some fraction of young people will have sex (sometimes covertly, sometimes with a wink from society). Admonitions to abstain have not worked in all that time, and they don’t work now. Given that fact, what is the best we can do? Surely it is to educate people so that the undesirable consequences are reduced as much as possible! This means comprehensive sex education, including information on contraceptives and their risks and benefits. Withholding this information, knowing human nature as we do, is tantamount to cruelly keeping our children ignorant and condemning them to carry the burden of their uninformed, if less than wise, choices.

A similar reasoning applies to abortion. Getting an abortion is no walk in the park, and I doubt many women rely on it as a means of birth control. More to the point, women have abortions even when abortions are criminalized: the rich do it with the discretion that only money can buy, while the poor do it in back alleys. Criminalizing abortion will not stop it, but will drive it underground. The results, at least for the poor, will be a higher rate of health complications and deaths, as well as the additional stigma, vulnerability to extortion, and criminal record that can dash all aspirations of building a better life.

If the conservatives really care about making lives better and not having abortions, they should make it possible for people to be informed about sex, prophylactics, and birth control, so that those who invariably can’t or do not want to live up to conservatives’ moral codes can make informed decisions. In other words, given that some people will choose to have sex in situations that put them at risk of STDs or unwanted pregnancies, our social policy should be to help them and society minimize those risks and associated costs. For this reason, the third front in the sex wars is also important: access to contraceptives must be guaranteed. This way, we can help reduce disease and unwanted pregnancy before they happen, when it’s cheaper and safer.

What seems to drive many of the conservatives in the Sex Wars is the notion that sex and reproduction ought to always remain coupled. That is a moral judgment to which they are entitled, but which should not be forced on the rest of society. I submit for their consideration a different tenet which works for other people: when done in a way that is respectful of all parties and which prevents unwanted consequences, sex is not only harmless, it is a celebration of life.

I did not know that cancer is apparently detectable in the breath. One can even train dogs to identify people with cancer.

All too often, people focus on immediate crises at the expense of long-term plans that can prevent such crises in the future. Case in point: diabetes treatment:

[Diabetes centers across New York] did not shut down because they had failed their patients. They closed because they had failed to make money. They were victims of the byzantine world of American health care, in which the real profit is made not by controlling chronic diseases like diabetes but by treating their many complications

The New York Times is running a series on diabetes. The first article remarks on the dramatic increase in diabetes, largely due to inactivity and obesity:

[T]the velocity of new cases among all races has accelerated significantly from just a few decades ago. Genetics cannot explain this surge, because the human gene pool does not change that fast. Instead, the culprit is thought to be behavior: faulty diet and inactivity. Dr. Vinicor, of the Centers for Disease Control, likes to use this expression: “Genetics may load the cannon, but human behavior pulls the trigger.”

The article then goes on to talk about the dire social effects of a population decimated at the prime of life by the diabetes contracted in youth:

Predicting the path of a disease is always speculative, but without bold intervention diabetes threatens to hamper some of society’s most basic functions.

For instance, no one with diabetes can join the military, though service members whose disease is diagnosed after enlisting can sometimes stay. No insulin-dependent diabetic can become a commercial pilot.

Shereen Arent, director of legal advocacy for the American Diabetes Association, says she already fields 150 calls a month from diabetics who complain that they are being discriminated against in the workplace, double the number just a couple of years ago. She mentioned a typical case, a man rejected for a job at a baked-bean factory in Texas as a safety risk. “If this continues,” she said, “we’re in big trouble.”

Contrary to what many people think, there is no clear evidence linking stress and cancer. Nevertheless, it remains a mystery why the immune system does not attack the cancer cells it recognizes as foreign. One promising therapy being investigated involves making the immune system more aggresive:

In mice, said James Allison, chairman of the immunology program at Sloan-Kettering, some cancers went away after just a single injection of an antibody to CTLA-4. Other cancers required a vaccine, as well, to bolster the newly unleashed immune attack. But then, Dr. Allison found, even the most intractable tumors in mice were destroyed.