Eideard

In the first large-scale study of home medication consumption, sociologists at the University of California, San Diego have found a 3,196 percent increase in fatal domestic medication errors involving alcohol and/or street drugs.

Their study examines nearly 50 million U.S. death certificates from 1983 to 2004, and focuses on a subset of 200,000 deaths from medication errors. “The decades-long shift in the location of medication consumption from clinical to domestic settings,” the authors say, “is linked to a dramatic increase in fatal medication errors.”

“Increasingly,” says principal author David P. Phillips, “people take their medications at home, away from hospitals and clinics. But most studies of fatal medication errors have focused on those clinical settings. We wanted to know three things: how many of these fatal errors happen at home; how many involve alcohol and/or street drugs; and are these numbers going up?”

They note that the increase in fatal errors varies by astonishing amounts based on where the errors occur and the particular combinations of drugs.

Type 1 errors – deaths at home from combining medications with alcohol and/or street drugs – skyrocketed by 3,196 percent.

In sharp contrast, type 4 errors – non-domestic fatal errors not involving alcohol or street drugs – show the smallest increase, just 5 percent.

I guess I’m not surprised about the combinations which include booze and street drugs. Folks with dependencies don’t often make the soundest health choices.

Donald Richey, a dermatologist in Chico, California, has two office telephone numbers: calls to the number for patients seeking an appointment for skin conditions like acne and psoriasis often go straight to voice mail, but a full-time staff member fields calls on the dedicated line for cosmetic patients seeking beauty treatments like Botox…

Like airlines that offer first-class and coach sections, dermatology is fast becoming a two-tier business in which higher-paying customers often receive greater pampering. In some dermatologists’ offices, freer-spending cosmetic patients are given appointments more quickly than medical patients for whom health insurance pays fixed reimbursement fees…

And dermatologists nationwide are increasingly hiring nurse practitioners and physicians’ assistants, called physician extenders, who primarily see medical patients, according to a study published earlier this year in the same journal.

“What are the physician extenders doing? Medical dermatology,” Allan Halpern, chief of dermatology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, said in a melanoma lecture at a dermatology conference this year. “What are the dermatologists doing? Cosmetic dermatology.”

Personally, I follow the advice in the article. I consult with a medical dermatologist. Upscale beauty freaks start clogging up the parking lot in front of his practice, I’d go elsewhere.

Fortunately, I don’t think I need to worry about that. He’s a physician dedicated to medical needs.

The U.S. should stop arresting responsible marijuana users, Rep. Barney Frank said today, announcing a proposal to end federal penalties for Americans carrying fewer than 100 grams, almost a quarter-pound, of the substance.

Current laws targeting marijuana users place undue burdens on law enforcement resources, punish ill Americans whose doctors have prescribed the substance and unfairly affect African-Americans, said Frank, flanked by legislators and representatives from advocacy groups.

“The vast amount of human activity ought to be none of the government’s business,” Frank said during a Capitol Hill news conference. “I don’t think it is the government’s business to tell you how to spend your leisure time.”

The Massachusetts Democrat and his supporters emphasized that only the use — and not the abuse — of marijuana would be decriminalized if the resolution passes…

Allen St. Pierre, spokesman for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, likened Frank’s proposal — co-sponsored by Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas — to current laws dealing with alcohol consumption. Alcohol use is permitted, and the government focuses its law enforcement efforts on those who abuse alcohol or drive under its influence, he said.

“We do not arrest and jail responsible alcohol drinkers,” he said.

We have been stupid enough to do so in the past, however.

I don’t smoke anything – having given up cigarettes when I was 22 years old. But, I see nothing wrong with classifying recreational weed along with beer or wine – moderate use of natural chemical distractions from this screwed-up society.

Delta Air Lines flight attendants found the body of a woman in the restroom of a plane that landed in Atlanta, Georgia, early Wednesday morning, a spokeswoman for the company said.

The crew noticed the restroom was occupied on final approach, spokeswoman Keyra Johnson said. Flight 950 from Los Angeles landed at 5:51 a.m.

Delta officials have not said how long the 61-year-old woman may have been in the restroom.

I wonder if she was left over from a previous flight?

A new marketing initiative in Britain for Orange, a wireless operator owned by France Telecom, captures the subtle but significant shift taking place in the European mobile industry.

Like most other operators in Europe, Orange dangles a piece of free hardware in exchange for a two-year service contract. But this time, to win customers, Orange is including a laptop computer, not a mobile phone.

The “Connected Laptop” offer includes a free laptop from Asus or Hewlett Packard, a USB modem and up to five gigabytes of downloads for $49 to $88, per month. As mobile operators start giving away devices other than cellphones, experts say, the industry is entering a new phase.

“As the European market gets more saturated, operators are looking at other drivers from a connection standpoint,” said Carolina Milanesi, director of mobile devices at Gartner in London. “The laptop subsidies reflect the growing importance of mobile broadband to the business.”

Cross-marketing agreements between mobile operators and computer makers are becoming more common. Lenovo, the Chinese company that bought IBM’s laptop business, is selling its X200 laptop in Britain with a preinstalled SIM chip from Vodafone and one month of free broadband service.

As Milanesi put it, “If they can have you as a subscriber for your phone as well as for your personal computer, they get you twice.”

This is one of those posts that is only a footnote for climatologists – except for the dweebs who can’t seem to comprehend the difference between weather and climate and, more than any other ethic, hate to own up to any responsibility for global warming on the part of human beings.

Arctic sea ice is unlikely to shrink below a 2007 record low this year in a reprieve from the worst predictions of climate change even though new evidence confirms a long-term thaw is under way, experts said.

The 2007 record raised worries of a melt that could leave the North Pole ice-free this year, threaten indigenous hunters and thaw ice vital for creatures such as polar bears. It would also help open the Arctic to shipping and oil and gas firms…

It is still far smaller than the average of recent decades.

“Ninety percent … of the decreasing sea-ice extent is empirically ‘accounted for’ by the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” Ola M. Johannessen wrote in a study to be published next month in a journal by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The Arctic has been warming about twice as fast as the rest of the globe in recent decades. Ice and snow reflect heat and any thaw uncovers darker ground or sea water that soak up the sun’s warmth and further accelerate the melt.

The propaganda campaign against human responsibility not only is comparable to that waged by the tobacco industry against years of cancer study, it’s the same hangers-on trumpeting any individual day’s forecast that counters massive trends by an infinitesimal amount. Exactly the same louts who fear losing their chance to smoke themselves to oblivion at the American Legion Bar on a Friday night.

Britain’s DNA database, the most comprehensive in the world, should remove details of people who are acquitted of crimes.

A “citizen’s inquiry” instigated by the Human Genetics Commission also called for the National DNA Database to be taken out of direct control of the police and government, with oversight handed instead to an independent authority.

The conclusions will fuel controversy about the ethical foundations of the database, which was established in 1995 in Britain — the country where scientists first pioneered the technique of DNA fingerprinting…

The proposal to delete DNA records is likely to be opposed by police, on the grounds that it could make it more difficult to solve past crimes, or “cold cases”.

But, the Home Office admits that almost all of the offenders convicted under the cold case programme have proved to be persistent and prolific violent criminals, whose DNA would be on the database anyway.

Coppers and prosecutors hate like hell to give up anything that gives them oversight of the general population. That’s more a commentary upon the attitudes and ideology of police professionals – than forensic procedures.

What would he think of today’s executives?

Siemens is planning to sue two former chief executives and nine other former senior managers for alleged supervisory failings that led to a corruption scandal at the German engineering group. Siemens’ current supervisory board has said it will seek damages from Heinrich von Pierer, former chief executive, and his successor Klaus Kleinfeld.

In a statement, Siemens said it was basing its claim for damages on alleged “breaches of organisational and supervisory duties relating to illegal business practices and extensive bribery between 2003 and 2006″.

Siemens added that the scandal was placing a substantial financial burden on the company but did not state how much it was demanding in compensation.

The company said the 11 former board members “will be given an opportunity to state their positions on the accusations before legal action for damages is taken”.

The company has put the total costs incurred by the scandal at €1.9 billion. I think the company board is taking it easy on their fellow country club members.

It sure ain’t Lubbock…

Last-ditch talks to salvage a deal in the seven-year Doha round of global trade negotiations broke down dramatically in Geneva after India, China and the US fell out over measures to protect poor farmers…

Clinching a deal would have provided a powerful vote of confidence in globalisation from the WTO’s 153 members, in the face of the world economic slowdown. But after nine gruelling days, Lamy was forced to accept that the US, China and India were still too far apart for a deal.

The US trade representative, Susan Schwab, said it was “unconscionable” that developing countries were insisting on shielding their farmers…

Kamal Nath, India’s trade minister, said he was representing the position of all the G33 members, who were “concerned about the livelihood of poor and subsistence farmers“, and said he hoped the talks could eventually be revived.

The US objected to the details of a “special safeguard mechanism”, designed to protect farmers in the developing world against temporary surges in cut-price imports of cotton and rice.

This safeguard mechanism has long been a key demand of the G33 – a group of countries including Indonesia, India and China, concerned about the livelihoods of their subsistence farmers…

The Doha round was supposed to make world markets fairer for poor countries. Peering in from the outside, I’d be hard pressed to sympathize with the Bush flunkeys who think a “poor” farmer is any segment of American agribusiness grossing less than a billion$ a year.