| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
PHIL 3345. Supporting the philosophical study of bioethics, bio-medical ethics, biotechnology, and the future of life, at Middle Tennessee State University and beyond... "Keep your health, your splendid health. It is better than all the truths under the firmament." William James
Pages
▼
Friday, October 21, 2022
Much Work Remains
Wednesday, October 19, 2022
The neglected clitoris
Half the World Has a Clitoris. Why Don't Doctors Study It?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/17/health/clitoris-sex-doctors-surgery.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/17/health/clitoris-sex-doctors-surgery.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Sunday, October 2, 2022
America Is Choosing to Stay Vulnerable to Pandemics - The Atlantic
Recently, after a week in which 2,789 Americans died of COVID-19, President Joe Biden proclaimed that "the pandemic is over." Anthony Fauci described the controversy around the proclamation as a matter of "semantics," but the facts we are living with can speak for themselves. COVID still killsroughly as many Americans every week as died on 9/11. It is on track to kill at least 100,000 a year—triple the typical toll of the flu. Despite gross undercounting, more than 50,000 infections are being recorded every day. The CDC estimates that 19 million adults have long COVID. Things have undoubtedly improved since the peak of the crisis, but calling the pandemic "over" is like calling a fight "finished" because your opponent is punching you in the ribs instead of the face...
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/09/covid-pandemic-exposes-americas-failing-systems-future-epidemics/671608/
Scientists Knew More About Covid-19 Than We Think. And They Still Do.
"Nobody," Donald Trump claimed in a March 2020 address, "had any idea." He was talking about the Covid virus — which had, seemingly overnight, sparked a global pandemic. In his compelling and terrifying new book, "Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus," the veteran science journalist David Quammen demonstrates just how much was known — and expected — by infectious disease scientists long before patrons of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market fell ill in December 2019 with a pneumonia-like virus.
"Soothsayer" isn't on Quammen's extensive résumé, but he was among those who had long predicted this kind of catastrophe. In 2012 he provided a field guide to the future, "Spillover," whose subtitle — "Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic" — explains exactly what the scientific community had long been expecting.
"This is a book about the science of SARS-CoV-2," he specifies in his new book. "The medical crisis of Covid-19, the heroism of health care workers and other people performing essential services, the unjustly distributed human suffering, and the egregious political malfeasance that made it all worse — those are topics for other books." Instead, he focuses his informed attention on the unsung heroes who dare to wrestle with viruses, those strange entities he calls "the dark angels of evolution." Human beings are part of a sprawling family of interconnected species who can share illness because they all grew up together. It is our common ancestry and related bodily ecology that makes spillover possible between, say, bats and Earth's (currently) dominant mammal.
Covid is, after all, as natural as a wolf cub or David Attenborough, and its thriller-level rate of evolution is part of its danger. "A virus is a parasite, yes," writes Quammen, "a genetic parasite, to be more precise, using the resources of other organisms to replicate its own genome." He demonstrates the sheer weirdness of viruses when he explains how difficult it is to even define them...