Gardasil, Ctd, Part III

Yet another worthy article questioning the effectiveness of Gardasil:

While Harper firmly believes Gardasil is a valuable vaccine, she says, "I do think it's wrong for physicians to tell parents that it's 100 percent safe." She also has previously spoken publicly about her impression that Merck was too aggressive in marketing the vaccine to preteens and in lobbying state legislators to make Gardasil mandatory for young girls. It's worth noting that Harper, while at Dartmouth, once received grants from Merck to conduct its clinical trials and served on Merck's advisory board, though she has since broken ties with the company.

What's intriguing to me is how much is still unknown about Gardasil. A Merck study published last year shows that a woman's antibody response to the vaccine—which determines its effectiveness—depends in part on whether she has been previously exposed to HPV through sexual contact. In the study, 16-to-26-year-olds who, before they got Gardasil, tested positive for HPV antibodies (an indication that they'd been infected) had a stronger vaccine-induced antibody response to three of the four HPV strains Gardasil protects against compared with those who initially tested negative for HPV.

Thanks to MediaMaven.

13 year-old Stripped Searched In School

This is horrifying:

An assistant principal, enforcing the school’s antidrug policies, suspected [13 year old Savana Redding] of having brought prescription-strength ibuprofen pills to school. One of the pills is as strong as two Advils.

The search by two female school employees was methodical and humiliating, Ms. Redding said. After she had stripped to her underwear, “they asked me to pull out my bra and move it from side to side,” she said. “They made me open my legs and pull out my underwear.”

She had no pills, and now the lawsuit that her parents filed has reached the Supreme Court. When she brought her case to San Francisco, they ruled that the search violated the Fourth Amendment’s ban on reasonable searches. However, the dissenting judge called it a “close call,” being how humiliating it was, and ended with “I do not think it was unreasonable for school officials, acting in good faith, to conduct the search in an effort to obviate a potential threat to the health and safety of their students.”

Conducting a search to “obviate a potential threat” to other students is reasonable. Forcing a child to strip naked in order to find out if she has the equivalent of two bottles of Advil is crossing the line into disgusting and unnecessary. I cannot even fathom what type of drug she would have to have been suspected of having to make the request for a strip search necessary, but prescription ibuprofen? Hardly a cause for serious concern.

The last Supreme Court decision about school searches was in 1985, which allowed school officials to search purses or bags without warrant or probable cause as long as their suspicions were reasonable. However, this ruling did not address intimate searches. This was probably because no one at the time could ever imagine a principal telling their child to strip naked in school for a drug search.

Redding, now 19, described her self as “nerdy” and a good kid. One of her friends at the time started acting “weird” and “wearing black,” and when she was discovered with pills of her own, she blamed it on Ms. Redding. Before Ms. Redding’s search, no officials checked her record nor did they inform her parents. If they had, they would have seen that she had never been in trouble for something like this before.

The school district does not contest that Ms. Redding had no disciplinary record, but says that is irrelevant.

“Her assertion should not be misread to infer that she never broke school rules,” the district said of Ms. Redding in a brief, “only that she was never caught.”

The school district also said in a statement that the search “was not excessively intrusive in light of Redding’s age and sex and the nature of her suspected infraction.” She was 13 years old. It was excessively intrusive, and I hope the Supreme Court rules that it was. It’s also ironic that the same people (school officials) who are saying that it wasn’t “excessively intrusive” given her age and sex are the same people that are, more recently, getting themselves all in a tizzy about “sexting” and kids “growing up too fast.” So choosing to take a picture of their naked body at 13 and texting it to their boyfriend is wrong, but being forced to strip in front of a nurse and principal is acceptable?

Ms. Redding was home schooled in the months after the search, saying she never wanted to look at the nurse or principal ever again. She eventually transferred to another school, where she was constantly nervous and developed stomach ulcers.

I understand that drugs in schools are a problem and the abuse of prescription drugs among teens is on the rise, but this was wrong, intrusive, and should be illegal. The school district went too far.

About Those Bonuses

So AIG wants to give over 100 million dollars in bonuses to its employees. The majority of these bonuses are going to the employees in the financial products division, the exact people who helped cause this great big mess. Boy, people are outraged! All over the interwebs and on the 24 hour news shows people are yelling and complaining. Look at this greed! This is what got us into this mess in the first place! Everyone was greedy, greedy, greedy. The public wants AIG's head on a platter. I can understand this anger. It's frustrating to see these people not only still employed, but receiving tens of thousands of dollars in bonus money, when their mistakes are partially to blame for the soaring unemployment of people who didn't do anything wrong.

However, I think our anger should also be targeted at the government. They knew this whole time that AIG was going to give out these bonuses. They saw the contracts, signed off on it, the whole shebang. As we saw with Chris Dodd, who at first said, I don't know how this happened! And then a few hours later was changing his tune to, oh right. I did sign off on that. It wasn't until the American people got outraged that the government said, oh yeah, we're angry too! They could have gotten around these bonuses earlier, they were just hoping you and I wouldn't find out about it. Or at least that we wouldn't be so pissed.

Now the House voted on taxing the bonuses at 90%. 90%! Even for someone with left leaning tendencies as myself I think this is ridiculous. It's the governments fault for not making sure these bonuses were taken out of the contract (or at least minimized) and now they are punishing the employees. Should the AIG execs be given so much money? Of course not. But the government signed off on it, and they should just admit their mistake and make sure it doesn't happen again. Goodness knows there are plenty of other people we bailed out that we can block from getting bonus money.

"Pathogens in Our Pork"

Over the weekend, Nicholas Kristof wrote about the use of antibiotics in American pork. Farmers give antibiotics to the pigs in order to keep them from getting infections, but we end up consuming these drugs which breeds "super germs"- those horrible infections you hear about that just can't be cured because they become immune to our medicines. This wasn't very shocking to me, as I'm pretty well read in the food industry arena, but it's still important for us to understand where our food is coming from, and what is being put into it before it makes it to our plates.

These dangerous pathogens are now even in our food supply. Five out of 90 samples of retail pork in Louisiana tested positive for MRSA — an antibiotic-resistant staph infection — according to a peer-reviewed study published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology last year. And a recent study of retail meats in the Washington, D.C., area found MRSA in one pork sample, out of 300, according to Jianghong Meng, the University of Maryland scholar who conducted the study.
[...]
Public health experts worry that pigs could pass on the infection by direct contact with their handlers, through their wastes leaking into ground water (one study has already found antibiotic-resistant bacteria entering ground water from hog farms), or through their meat, though there has been no proven case of someone getting it from eating pork. Thorough cooking will kill the bacteria, but people often use the same knife to cut raw meat and then to chop vegetables. Or they plop a pork chop on a plate, cook it and then contaminate it by putting it back on the original plate.

Yet the central problem here isn’t pigs, it’s humans. Unlike Europe and even South Korea, the United States still bows to agribusiness interests by permitting the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in animal feed. That’s unconscionable.

"I'm all for sushi, but see-through-shi?"

So after you get over that uncomfortable feeling the Stewart/Cramer interview left you with, watch this for some serious laughs:

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Craziest F#?king Thing I've Ever Heard - Barreleye Fish

Colbert Report Full Episodes
Political Humor

Rap Battle
NASA Name Contest

Stewart v Cramer

In case you missed it, Jon Stewart threw it down with Jim Cramer last night. The argument Jon raised wasn't even to attack Cramer personally, but to attack all the financial journalists, reporters and professionals who knew what was going to happen but kept it from us. The interview was the entire show, so I will just post the first part here. Please go here to view the rest.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 1

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

"There's a roo in my room!"

Australian Ben Ettlin woke in the middle of the night to an intruder crashing through the windows of his house. He thought it was a "lunatic ninja," but it was actually, in fact, a kangaroo:

As Ettlin cowered beneath the sheets with his wife and 9-year-old daughter at 2 a.m. Sunday, the frantic kangaroo bounded into the bedroom of his 10-year-old son Leighton Beman, who screamed, ''There's a 'roo in my room!''

''I thought, 'This can be really dangerous for the whole family now,''' Ettlin said.

The ordeal played out over a few minutes in the family's house in Garran, an upmarket suburb in the leafy national capital of Canberra.

Ettlin, a chef originally from the Swiss city of Stans, said he jumped the 90 pound (40 kilogram) marsupial from behind and pinned it to the floor. He grabbed it in a headlock and wrestled the trashing and bleeding intruder into a hallway, toward the front door.

He used a single, fumbling hand to open the front door and shoved the kangaroo into the night.

''I had just my Bonds undies on. I felt vulnerable,'' he said, referring to a popular Australian underwear brand.

The kangaroo, which Ettlin said was around his height, 5 foot 9 inches (176 centimeters), left claw gouges in the wooden frame of the master bed and a trail of blood through the house. The animal was cut when it came crashing through the bedroom window.

Ettlin, who had scratch marks on his leg and buttocks and was left wearing only his shredded underpants, described himself as ''lucky."

The Cost Of Having Health Insurance

Yesterday, Salon linked to a blog written by a woman whose husband underwent cancer treatments. They had health insurance, but ended up having to pay tens of thousands of dollars anyway. Although the whole post is maddening, some parts are particularly so:

The surgeon recommends a routine colonoscopy for Will. Our insurer tells us they cover it at 100%--this is an extra perk written into our insurance plan. Okay, let's do it. Will's not looking forward to it, but he finally schedules his colonoscopy for December 27, 2008.

I go with him that day. There's a jarring little caveat emptor sign that I notice. "Hey," I say to Will, pointing out the sign. "Look at that." The sign says that patients should check their insurance coverage. Most insurance plans that pay for a colonoscopy screening at 100% will get stingy on you if it turns out you have a problem. Then, buddy, all bets are off. Then it's considered a "therapeutic" colonoscopy, and it's subject to deductibles and coinsurance.

How can this be allowed? As soon as they find something wrong they can change the charges? The writer's husband, Will, lived in Australia and New Zealand for a total of almost 50 years before coming to America, and he was never able to understand how a country could treat their ill so badly. Then he had to experience it first hand. The couple has even discussed seperating so that Will could go back to New Zealand to get medical care. Can you imagine having that conversation with your sick spouse?

I recently learned that half of all personal bankruptcies are health care related. The real kicker? HALF of those people had health insurance. That is one quarter of all personal bankruptcies. How did things get this bad?

I just got my Time magazine today, and the cover story is "So You Think You're Insured? Think Again." I should probably also check with the details of my health insurance plan, just in case.

Bailouts for Everyone!

So how's this for fair: the ex-leaders of Countrywide, who gave out bad mortgages to tons of people who now can't pay them, are profiting from their mistakes! The government bought the bad loans, then sold them to a dozen or so of the former top executives of Countrywide for just pennies on the dollar! Oh, good for them. In this day and age, so many people are struggling, it's nice to see someone getting a good deal and making some money! Except that these are the last people you want to see profit from this mess, a mess they could have prevented.

Oh, and also, Citi Bank stock temporarly "broke the buck" during trading today, with shares dropping under $1. And the stock market plunged another 200 or so points. Oh, and AIG has reported the greatest quarterly loss in corporate history. So, obviously, the government gave them more money. Speaking of more money, GM has asked for a bit more too.

I've had enough with the bailouts, personally. The government has given more and more money to companies that are still failing miserably, so why not just give the money to all of us instead? If consumer spending is such a huge part of our economy, wouldn't that just make much more sense?

Andrew Sullivan has started a series on his blog called "The View From Your Recession," where people can write it about how the recession is affecting them. They are a really great read. We constantly hear about the big picture, but it's more rare to hear how it's affecting individuals.

As terrible as all this is, and it certainly is not getting better anytime soon, there has recently been a light in my tunnel. I was laid off at the end of January. I worked in financial services, so it wasn't much of a surprise, although I was still pretty upset about it. I was laid of on a Monday, and between Monday and that Wednesday, 74,000 Americans lost their job (at least I had some company). However, this week I started a new job, which I think is much better than my old one. I didn't think I'd be able to find anything with the economy like it is, but there ARE jobs out there. Even though the number of jobs being shed is high, and the competition for a new one is fierce, there is still hope out there for people.