Questions FEB 25

Presentation: Jaxon 

Premonition

1. What did Joe DeRisi tell the governor about his lists?

2. Why were local public health officers so slow to accept Biohub's offer of free testing?

3. What were the big takeaways from the test results?

4. In February '21 the US was doing less of what than any other industrialized country?

DQs

• Are you surprised at the response to Biohub's call for volunteers? 243
• Why does financial ambition interfere with science and progress? 246 
• How do we fix the screwed-up incentive structure of the medical-industrial complex? 249
• How can the Strategic National Stockpile be made more functional and responsive to a crisis? 
• 
  

Beyond

1. The advent of what common metric made it possible to calculate the efficacy of selling?

2. What was lacking in the '60s that Principlism offers to provide?

3. What was the final impetus for government intervention in research ethics?

4. What would be the key problem of letting each Institutional Review Board determine its own principles?

DQs

• Has feminist theory been successful?
• Do you agree with Simone de Beauvoir that women are made (by objectifying societal expectations), not born? 
• Are most surgeons really "uncaring"? Why do so many patients say they feel "abandoned"?
• Is the culture of business healthy, on balance, for healthcare?
• Why is the medical profession so slow to respond to whistle-blowing like Henry Beecher's "Ethics and Clinical Research"? What might make it more responsive and generally more vigilant in policing itself?
• Is the culture of mistrusting authority in our society good for healthcare and the regulation of healthcare?
• Is there a general problem with individuals and aggregates of individuals (committees, boards, states...) determining their own principles of conduct? Is there a problem with them not doing so? Is there a solution to the dilemma?
• Have you ever questioned the "system" of a committee of which you were a member? How did that go?  92
• Can you give an example of gender bias resulting in unethical behavior by health practitioners?
• Have we moved significantly away from androcentrism in your lifetime? Will we move further?
• Can the medical profession, or any particular profession, become less gender-biased if the larger society remains relatively moreso? As women increasingly join the ranks of physicians, will that happen?
•  What do you think of the stereotypical "association of women with emotion and men with reason"? 100
• Do you associate emotion more with the body than the mind? How in general does the classic mind-body problem relate, in your thinking, to gender issues (if at all)?
• Do you think sex selection and disability deselection are ethically equivalent or commensurable? Is any stipulated difference between them arbitrary or "hierarchical"?
• How do you define "cosmetic" (vs. "medical")?
• How do you define "disease"?
• 
  

==

How Each of Us Can Prepare for the Next Pandemic

The COVID pandemic has killed more than half a million people in the United States and caused the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. If this pandemic taught us one thing, it's that we weren't ready for it. The scientific and medical community wasn't ready. The government, the military and industry weren't ready. And most of us at home weren't ready either: scrambling for basic supplies, regretting not having a deeper pantry and struggling with the financial fallout... (Scientific American, continues)

==

Cousin Jamie

 Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food... "We've gotta start teaching our kids about food in schools. Period."

 

 

It's not always excellent to be Jamie Oliver...

==
Health news... Health news quiz...
==
‘The Unwinding of the Miracle’ Is About How to Die — and Live

She didn’t know it then, but Julie Yip-Williams began her memoir, “The Unwinding of the Miracle” — which enters the list at No. 8 — in July 2013. That’s when the 37-year-old mother of two, in the E.R. with stomach pains and nausea, learned she had Stage 4 colon cancer.

The next month, she started a blog, partly as a record for her daughters, Mia and Belle (“especially if this cancer-fighting journey doesn’t end in the way we all hope it ends”), and partly, she wrote, “to carve out my own little space out there to express my sadness, anger, joy, hope, despair and a slew of other emotions that come with living with cancer.”

Mark Warren, her editor at Random House, says, “Julie was my friend for a couple of years before the prospect of a book even came up. It was in the last year of her life, when her health was turning toward its end, and she was resolving all she could resolve, that we began to contemplate whether the blog could be a book.” Yip-Williams had been searching for a book that would help her prepare to die, but she hadn’t found one. “She was unnerved by the level of denial that she found in the culture at large,” Warren recalls...
==
Embryo ‘Adoption’ Is Growing, but It’s Getting Tangled in the Abortion Debate
As evangelical Christians, Paul and Susan Lim believe that life begins at conception. So when they decided to have a third child, in vitro fertilization was out of the question, since the process often yields extra embryos.

But “adopting” the frozen embryos of another couple who had gone through I.V.F. was not.

Dr. Lim called it a “rescue operation.” To him, transferring donated embryos to his wife’s uterus was akin to saving a life. “These children are being abandoned in a frozen state,” he said. “If they don’t get adopted, they’re dead.”

As I.V.F. becomes more widespread and the number of spare embryos rises, giving birth with donated embryos is becoming more popular, especially among couples who oppose abortion and are struggling with infertility. But many of the agencies that offer donated embryos, including a vast majority of those supported by federal grants, are affiliated with anti-abortion rights or Christian organizations, leading some people to question whether single people, gay couples and others who might be interested could be missing out.

Even the term “embryo adoption” is caught up in the rhetoric of debate over abortion.

“The issue in the medical community is that by calling it ‘adoption,’ we give too much personhood to the embryo,” said Kimberly Tyson, the marketing and program director at Snowflake Embryo Adoption in Loveland, Colo...

==

A Mother Learns the Identity of Her Child’s Grandmother. A Sperm Bank Threatens to Sue.
The results of a consumer genetic test identified the mother of the man whose donated sperm was used to conceive Danielle Teuscher’s daughter. Legal warnings soon followed.

Danielle Teuscher decided to give DNA tests as presents last Christmas to her father, close friends and 5-year-old daughter, joining the growing number of people taking advantage of low-cost, accessible genetic testing.

But the 23andMe test produced an unexpected result. Ms. Teuscher, 30, a nanny in Portland, Ore., said she unintentionally discovered the identity of the sperm donor she had used to conceive her young child.

The mother of the donor was identified on her daughter’s test results as her grandmother. Excited and curious, Ms. Teuscher decided to reach out.

“I wrote her and said, ‘Hi, I think your son may be my daughter’s donor. I don’t want to invade your privacy, but we’re open to contact with you or your son,’” she recalled. “I thought it was a cool thing.” (continues)

paradise of fools

On Monday, James Marriott of The Times, published in London, noted that the very stability and comfort of the post–World War II liberal order has permitted the seeds of its own destruction to flourish. A society with firm scientific and political guardrails that protect health and freedom, can sustain "an underbelly of madmen and extremists—medical sceptics, conspiracy types and anti-democratic fantasists."

"Our society has been peaceful and healthy for so long that for many people serious disaster has become inconceivable," Marriott writes. "Americans who parade around in amateur militia groups and brandish Nazi symbols do so partly because they are unable to conceive of what life would actually be like in a fascist state." Those who attack modern medicine cannot really comprehend a society without it. And, Marriott adds, those who are cheering the rise of autocracy in the United States "have no serious understanding of what it means to live under an autocratic government."

Marriott notes that five Texas counties that make up one of the least vaccinated areas in the U.S. are gripped by a measles outbreak that has infected at least 58 people and hospitalized 13. It may be, Marriot writes, that "[t]he paradise of fools is coming to an end."
…

HCR
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/february-20-2025?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Questions FEB 20

Presentation: Vuk

1. German lawyers meeting in Berlin in 1934 debated bringing what from the statutes of thirty U.S. states to the Third Reich?

2. Hitler thought the U.S. had made progress toward the creation of what kind of society?

3. What is the real problem of disability?

4. What concept did Quetelet derive from the astronomical "law of error"?

5. Galton's work led directly to what?

6. What state's "fitter families" contest declared that "a sound mind in a sound body is the most priceless of human possessions"?

7. "The Galton Institute" was originally called what?

8. Many scientists continued to believe in what core tenet of eugenics even after the atrocities of WWII?

9. What did Robert Edwards say he learned from the development of IVF?

10. What connects old-school eugenics with more recent "market" versions?

Premonition

1. What happened a week after Charity "railed about the idiocy" of CDC rules?

2. What would have happened if the first infected passenger on the Diamond Princess had flown to the U.S. and then home?

3. What mental model did Carter have wrong?

4. What CDC guidance regarding social gatherings defied common sense? Was it a good thing for people to not know what was about to happen, in early March 2020?

5. Why did Charity ignore her boss's order about emails?

6. What had Japanese public health authorities figured out about contact tracing?

7. What was Charity's interpretation of Nancy Messonier's public statement?

8. What's the simple truth about herd immunity?

9. What's an L6?

10. What did Charity insist was the single most important part of her COVID response plan?

DQs

• Does the extent of U.S. influence on Nazism shed any light on current events? Does it deserve significantly greater attention? Is its relative obscurity a stain on our educational establishment?
• COMMENT: "it's no great surprise that [Nazis] believed that what had made America great was American racism."
• Were you familiar with the views of Jefferson and Lincoln cited on p.62? Are you surprised?
• What do you think of the various euphemisms in current circulation that refer not to disability but to differently abledness, and the like? Do they represent an evolution of awareness and sensitivity? Do they reflect a failure to come to grips with the problem of creating and sustaining a genuinely open and just society? Or...?
• What do you think of the author's analysis of norms and ideals ? (64)
• Norms of the kind the author is concerned with, that make life more difficult for the disabled, are clearly problematic in an ethical sense. But what about the norms that have been flouted lately by the current U.S. president and his administration? Isn't that also ethically problematic-or just wrong? (See Adam Gopnik, "Norms and Cliffs in Drumpf's America")
• Is it significant, if true, that all the early statisticians were eugenicists? (66)
• Is it true that Darwinian evolutionary theory repudiates the disabled as "defectives to be surpassed by natural selection," (67) in view of the fact that culture now competes with pre-cultural nature for selective influence? (Put another way: culture is an ever-growing part of nature, making the fate and fortunes of the disabled a matter of cultural decision as much as natural default.)
• Is the impulse to perfect the human race entirely misplaced?
• Is men sana in corpore sano a good approach to health and social justice?
• Was Robert Edwards right that soon it will be widely considered a "sin" to have a child with genetic disease?
• Will it ever be widely acceptable to "select the features of future generations much like we currently configure...a new car"? 

Trump Cuts Target Next Generation of Scientists and Public Health Leaders

The notices came all weekend, landing in the inboxes of federal scientists, doctors and public health professionals: Your work is no longer needed.

At the National Institutes of Health, the nation's premier biomedical research agency, an estimated 1,200 employees — including promising young investigators slated for larger roles — have been dismissed.

At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, two prestigious training programs were gutted: one that embeds recent public health graduates in local health departments and another to cultivate the next generation of Ph.D. laboratory scientists. But the agency's Epidemic Intelligence Service — the "disease detectives" who track outbreaks around the world — has apparently been spared, perhaps because of an uproar among alumni after a majority of its members were told on Friday that they would be let go.

President Trump's plan to shrink the size of the federal work force dealt blows to thousands of civil servants in the past few days. But the cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services — coming on the heels of the coronavirus pandemic, the worst public health crisis in a century — have been especially jarring. Experts say the firings threaten to leave the country exposed to further shortages of health workers, putting Americans at risk if another crisis erupts...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/us/politics/fda-cdc-health-department-trump.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Questions FEB 18

Presentation: Danny

Premonition

1. What was sometimes as persuasive to Charity as data? Do you share her attitude, have you had a similar experience? Do you think health care providers and public health officers should?

2. Who sent Charity to the border, and why? Should the administration have been held accountable for its immigration policy?

3. What was "the money question"? 

4. Why wasn't Charity promoted to top CA public health officer? Is it unethical for politicians to appoint important officials on the basis of considerations other than credentials and competence? How can they be prevented from doing so?

5. What was Charity really doing at her whiteboard?

6. Why did her boss ban her from using the word pandemic? 

7. Why did Charity think she'd end up in the White House?

8. What did she like to say about leadership?

Beyond 2-3

1. What kind of "motherhood" did Indiana officially promote in the '20s and '30s?

2. What was every child's right, in Indiana?

3. What dismaying transfer of power did Ada Schweitzer inadvertently facilitate?

4. What led to the "exponential" expansion of the Infant and Child Hygiene division?

5. What did Schweitzer call the Better Baby Contest at the fair?

6. Half of what occurred in California before WWII?

7. What role was played by corporate philanthropies and academics in the promotion of eugenics?

8. What happened in Lincoln, IL?

9. What was Hitler's "bible"?

10. How did California eugenicists re-brand themselves after the war?

DQs

• Is there an appropriate role for the state in promoting or mandating particular approaches to parenting?
• How would you articulate children's rights? Would you, for instance, include a right "to be brought up in the fear and admonition of the Lord"? (compare: Indiana child creed, Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child, Timeline of young people's rights...)
• Were the Suffragists wrong to "link the language of biology and bacteriology"? 35
• Are there enough female pediatricians? What difference does a physician's gender make?
• Is there still a marked division in this country between the "male medical establishment" and women in healthcare? (40)
• Is there any inoffensive way of expressing and defending the impulse to "raise better babies"?
• What do you think of Schweitzer's statement to "a Muncie reformer" (43)?
• How would you caption the photo in Figure 2.1 (46)?
• Was Francis Galton wrong about "talented people" (54)?
• Are you shocked to learn of the "lethal chamber"?
• 
  

California's dark legacy of sterilization... Eugenics and the Nazis-the California Connection

California was sterilizing its female prisoners as late as 2010 | Corey ...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/.../california-female-prisoner-sterilization

▶ 17:25

Nov 8, 2013 - Uploaded by The Young Turks

Nor did I know that Nazi Germany consulted with California's eugenics leaders in the 1930s. I also was ...

State's little-known history of shameful science / California's role in ...

https://www.sfgate.com/.../State-s-little-known-history-of-shameful-science-2663925.ph...

▶ 1:00

Mar 10, 2003

"California was the second state to pass eugenics laws in 1909," two .... Record Office, in turn, had links to ...

 Fast-spreading measles outbreak infects dozens

---

Eduardo Cuevas and James Powel

USA TODAY February 17, 2025

---

A fast-growing measles outbreak has infected dozens in Texas and New Mexico as officials suspect the highly contagious disease continues to spread.

In just two weeks, an outbreak in northwest Texas jumped from two cases among unvaccinated children in Gaines County to 48 people across four counties, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. All cases are among people, mostly children, who weren’t vaccinated or had unknown vaccination status. More than a dozen people have been hospitalized for measles as of Friday.

Texas officials warned cases are likely to increase.

“Disaster” close to home

"…the shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is a blow to the agricultural sector: USAID buys about $2 billion in agricultural products from U.S. farmers every year. It has also supported funding for research at state universities like the University of Tennessee, the University of Missouri, and the University of Louisiana.

Cuts to indirect spending in grants from the National Institutes of Health will also hit hard across the country, and states where Trump won more than 55% of the 2024 vote are no exception. Former college president Michael Nietzel noted in Forbes that Texas stands to lose more than $300 million; Ohio, more than $170 million; and Tennessee, Missouri, and Florida, more than $130 million apiece. These losses will cause thousands of layoffs and, as the Association of American Medical Colleges said, "diminish the nation's research capacity, slow scientific progress and deprive patients, families and communities across the country of new treatments, diagnostics and preventive interventions."

Trump said Wednesday he wanted to shutter the Department of Education immediately, calling it "a big con job." That Department provides grants for schools in low-income communities as well as money for educating students with special needs: eight of the ten states receiving the most federal money for their K–12 schools are dominated by Republicans.

Trump has called the Federal Emergency Management Agency a "disaster" and said states should handle natural disasters like hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and tornadoes on their own. But states do not have the resilience they need for such short-term emergencies. Once again, while all states receive FEMA money, Republican-dominated states get slightly more of that money than Democratic-dominated states do..."

HCR

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/february-15-2025?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

 Why the COVID Deniers Won

Lessons from the pandemic and its aftermath

By David Frum

 

February 12, 2025  March issue of The Atlantic titled “Dispathces”

Five years ago, the coronavirus pandemic struck a bitterly divided society.

Americans first diverged over how dangerous the disease was: just a flu (as President Donald Trump repeatedly insisted) or something much deadlier.

Then they disputed public-health measures such as lockdowns and masking; a majority complied while a passionate minority fiercely resisted.

Finally, they split—and have remained split—over the value and safety of COVID‑19 vaccines. Anti-vaccine beliefs started on the fringe, but they spread to the point where Ron DeSantis, the governor of the country’s third-most-populous state, launched a campaign for president on an appeal to anti-vaccine ideology.

Five years later, one side has seemingly triumphed. The winner is not the side that initially prevailed, the side of public safety. The winner is the side that minimized the disease, then rejected public-health measures to prevent its spread, and finally refused the vaccines designed to protect against its worst effects.

Ahead of COVID’s fifth anniversary, Trump, as president-elect, nominated the country’s most outspoken vaccination opponent to head the Department of Health and Human Services. He chose a proponent of the debunked and discredited vaccines-cause-autism claim to lead the CDC. He named a strident critic of COVID‑vaccine mandates to lead the FDA. For surgeon general, he picked a believer in hydroxychloroquine, the disproven COVID‑19 remedy. His pick for director of the National Institutes of Health had advocated for letting COVID spread unchecked to encourage herd immunity. Despite having fast-tracked the development of the vaccines as president, Trump has himself trafficked in many forms of COVID‑19 denial, and has expressed his own suspicions that childhood vaccination against measles and mumps is a cause of autism.

The ascendancy of the anti-vaxxers may ultimately prove fleeting. But if the forces of science and health are to stage a comeback, it’s important to understand why those forces have gone into eclipse.

Continues here:  https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/03/covid-deniers-anti-vax-public-health-politics-polarization/681435/

Human Genome Project

On this date in 2001, a working draft of the human genome was published in the journal Nature. This draft covered about 83 percent of the genome. The entire Human Genome Project was completed in April 2003 — two years ahead of schedule.

In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick had published a paper that first described the structure of DNA, and they hypothesized that this structure "suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." DNA is the blueprint that develops and directs the function of an organism. Its molecules take the form of a double helix: two twisting strands that are linked together like the sides of a ladder. They're made up of four different chemical units, called nucleotide bases, which match up, forming the base pairs that make up the rungs of the ladder. The goal of the Human Genome Project was to sequence and map all the genes in the blueprint that makes up a human being, using the resources and brainpower of scientists all over the world; it's the largest single biological investigation in modern science.

Funding for the project originally came from the United States Department of Energy's Office of Health and Environmental Research; they had been supporting research into understanding the human genome for several years. Once the Human Genome Project was ready to get underway in 1990, the DOE coordinated its efforts with the National Institutes of Health. James Watson — who had first described DNA's structure in 1953 — was heading up the NIH's National Center for Genome Research at that time. There was a similar project in the private sector, run by a company called Celera Genomics. Celera planned to patent as many as 300 genes, but President Clinton declared in 2000 that the genome sequences could not be patented, and said that the results should be made available to the public. As a result, the human gene sequence is freely available on the Internet, but Clinton's announcement sent Celera's stock plummeting and cost the biotech sector about $50 billion in market capitalization.

Scientists expected to find that humans had more than 100,000 genes; it turns out we have only about 20,000 to 30,000 — about the same as mice. The genes themselves are mostly similar to mice and other mammals too, with only a few exceptions. The Human Genome Project is the highest profile DNA sequencing project, but there are others that map the genomes of other organisms, like fruit flies, yeast, plants, and microbes.

The next phase of the research, the International HapMap Project, aims to establish a list of common genetic variants, since an individual's genome — with the exception of identical twins and clones — is unique to them. Researchers hope to identify the variants that cause higher risk of diseases like cancer and diabetes, and they also hope to develop more accurate and effective treatments tailored to these genetic variants. Biotech companies have developed tests to show whether a person has a genetic predisposition to develop things like cystic fibrosis, liver disease, and breast cancer. But there are also ethical concerns, like whether the information contained in a genome is likely to be used to discriminate against an individual when it comes to insurance or employment. The Human Genome Project formed and funded the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications program to consider such questions. GK

"muzzling of the C.D.C. endangers Americans"

Former health officials object to restrictions on the agency.

To the Editor:

As former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention public health professionals, we are alarmed by the Trump administration's recent actions, which severely restrict the agency's communications and have compromised its ability to protect the health of the American people.

Late last month, the C.D.C. was ordered to cease communications with the World Health Organization and other agencies to comply with an executive order from President Trump. The C.D.C. and the W.H.O. have worked closely together since they were created in the 1940s to improve the health of Americans and save lives.

That work has included eliminating smallpox, nearly eliminating polio, stopping the first SARS epidemic, containing Ebola, mitigating the Covid-19 pandemic and protecting people from bird flu — to name only a few accomplishments. But now, for example, the C.D.C. will not have input into the W.H.O.'s meeting deciding which influenza strains should be targeted by next year's flu shot.

Domestically, C.D.C. employees are now severely restricted from communicating with anyone outside the government and from publishing anything that includes words like "gender, L.G.B.T.Q., biologically male and biologically female," and have been ordered to retract and revise existing publications using those words.

Certain C.D.C. websites with medical recommendations for practitioners and health officials have gone dark. Witness the C.D.C.'s recent posting and immediate deleting of data about bird flu spread from cats to people (news article, Feb. 8).

Many people are not aware of the work the C.D.C. does because it focuses on prevention, and it usually works: We don't see diseases and injuries that did not occur as a result of those interventions.

From tracking disease and containing outbreaks, to promoting evidence-based disease prevention programs, to cutting-edge research and laboratory testing available nowhere else, the C.D.C. works tirelessly to protect and promote the health of America's people.

The administration's muzzling of the C.D.C. endangers Americans.

Peter Cegielski
Barbara Marston
Atlanta
The letter was also signed by 36 other former C.D.C. health professionals.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/13/opinion/trump-cdc.html?smid=em-share

Mindless confirmation

"…Of Kennedy's confirmation, Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) said to his colleagues: "It's truly astounding that the Senate stands on the brink of confirming Mr. Kennedy to lead America's public health agencies. And if the Senate weren't gripped in this soon-to-be infamous period of total capitulation, I don't think this nominee would have made it as far as a hearing…. If I'd told you a couple of years ago, 'There's a guy who's been nominated to run public health nationwide. His job will be to protect American families from death and disease. He's going to run the whole public health system: Medicare, Medicaid, the C[enters] for D[isease] C[ontrol and Prevention], the N[ational] I[nstitutes of] H[ealth]—all of it. He'll decide how we protect the country from infectious disease, he'll set the rules for every hospital in the country, he'll decide what healthcare and medicines get covered by Medicare, he'll manage our response in the event of a pandemic.' And then I told you,… 'Well,... there are a few concerns about this nominee. First of all, zero relevant experience. He's a trial lawyer, a politician from a famous family. No medical or scientific background, he's never run a hospital or a health system or anything like that. Second of all… he's said some pretty wild stuff about public health, over and over and over again, like: he proposed that Covid-19 might be 'ethnically targeted' to spare Jews. Ethnically targeted to spare Jews. He said Lyme disease was a military bioweapon. For years he's been persuading American families against routine childhood immunizations. He's compared the work of the CDC to 'Nazi death camps.'... If a couple of years ago I told you all that, and I told you that the Senate was about to put America's health in this man's hands, you'd probably tell me the Senate has lost its mind."
All the Senate Republicans but McConnell voted to confirm Kennedy..."

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/february-13-2025?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Movie & pizza-courtesy Middle East Center

 Dr. Kari Neely of the World Languages and Literatures Department will give a ten-minute introduction to the film before screening the movie.