We Speak For Earth

hidingerections:

The Brain Hidden Epidemic: Tapeworms Living Inside People’s Brains

“Nobody knows exactly how many people there are with it in the United States,” says Nash, who is the chief of the Gastrointestinal Parasites Section at NIH. His best estimate is 1,500 to 2,000. Worldwide, the numbers are vastly higher, though estimates on a global scale are even harder to make because neurocysticercosis is most common in poor places that lack good public-health systems. “Minimally there are 5 million cases of epilepsy from neurocysticercosis,” Nash says.

The Brain Hidden Epidemic: Tapeworms Living Inside People’s Brains

“Nobody knows exactly how many people there are with it in the United States,” says Nash, who is the chief of the Gastrointestinal Parasites Section at NIH. His best estimate is 1,500 to 2,000. Worldwide, the numbers are vastly higher, though estimates on a global scale are even harder to make because neurocysticercosis is most common in poor places that lack good public-health systems. “Minimally there are 5 million cases of epilepsy from neurocysticercosis,” Nash says.

abaldwin360:

fuckyeahfeminists:

[TRIGGER WARNING: SUICIDE]

holdontoyourassbutts:

[image: A bill from a collection agency for a hospital bill in the amount of $44,249.85]

A few years ago, I was uninsured and couldn’t afford to get my insulin, Depakote, and anti-depressants for weeks at a time. I’d start rationing insulin when I had one bottle left in an attempt to stave off ketoacidosis.

I also suffer from severe chronic migraines, and the only thing that makes them bearable is Depakote. I had to ration this as well, and when it ultimately ran out, my migraines would keep me in my house for days at a time, curled up in pain and vomiting up anything I ate.

The same thing happened with my anti-depressants, so not only was my diabetes spiraling out of control and my migraines keeping me from working or going to school (I dropped out for a semester), but I also sank deep into depression.

Eventually, I ran out of insulin and went into diabetic ketoacidosis, which basically means that my blood sugar levels were so high for so long that my blood was turning acidic and wreaking twenty kinds of havoc on my entire body.

I ended up in the ER, then intensive care for three days, then a regular ward for two more days while they ran a billion tests on me.

A week after I got out, I got a bill for roughly $15,000, none of which was covered by my non-existent insurance, and none of which was able to be written off using the hospital’s charity program. I also wasn’t eligible for COBRA because it had been less than 12 months since I was last on my dad’s insurance.

A day or two after I got the bill, I tried to kill myself because 1.) Where the fuck is a 21-year-old diabetic college student who can’t even go to school because of his migraines supposed to get $15,000 (plus an assortment of other medical bills from the past 8 months), 2.) My migraines were still untreated because I couldn’t afford to get the prescriptions they’d given me at the hospital, and 3.) The single bottles of the two insulins I use that they’d given me at the hospital were going to be empty pretty fuckin’ quick.

So I spent my last $10 on a bottle of vodka, got trashed, and cut my wrists.

Luckily, I was so drunk I couldn’t really work the blade properly, so I passed out and woke up in a puddle of blood and spilled liquor ten hours later.

I drove myself to the ER once again, and this time ended up in the psych ward for four days before I promised not to kill myself and demanded to be discharged.

That bill totaled about $25,000. I guess psych wards are expensive.

I got evicted from my apartment in the midst of these health crises, lost my job at Burger King (as if that would have paid my medical bills), and lost what little state aid I was getting in the form of food stamps, because I’d lost my BK job.

So I was hungry, homeless, sick, and I still couldn’t afford my damn medication. I spent a month or two living in my Dodge Neon with my cat, buying food from gas stations and grocery stores that I knew didn’t use electronic check readers so that I could write checks for money that I didn’t have in my account.

Eventually, I started to gather my shit together, and I moved back in with my parents 1000 miles away (where I ended up in the hospital AGAIN, but was able to get the bill written off as charity).

The only reason I’m able to afford my medications and doctor visits now is because the healthcare reform mandated that insurance companies cover dependent students until they’re 26, rather than 18 or 20 like it was before.

tl;dr: healthcare is important and everyone ought to have access to it, even sick people. If you think only rich and healthy people should have healthcare, that’s fine, but I still think you’re an asshole :)

No one should have to deal with this. Yet another reason why we need comprehensive health care coverage available in this country. And on a related note: welfare reform because one should NOT lose food stamps because they LOST their job.

Folks can argue politics and what they “want their tax dollars going on” all day, when I see something like this it makes me wonder why so many people in general are against public healthcare.

This isn’t a person who simply didn’t “work hard enough” or was being a lazy mooch on society, this is someone who damn near died because they couldn’t afford their medication and then attempted suicide because they felt they had no other options.

In this day and age medical care should be a public service. We have enough money to fund wars and give breaks to huge corporations that make billions of dollars, but when it comes to something like this there seems to be huge swaths of people that don’t understand or don’t want to look at the human aspect of it.

It makes me sick that we have developed this consumer culture where the first things that come to mind when someone suggests that we provide public healthcare is “WELL WHY DON’T WE JUST HAVE THE GOVERNMENT PROVIDE EVERYONE WITH HOUSES TOO.”

Fuck that line of thinking. You can survive without a house. There are those who can’t survive without adequate medial care and access to their medication.

This is very messed up and I’ve had similar struggles. I’m so glad that our country is finally taking steps to help people. We still have a long road ahead, but progress is being made.

Also, don’t underestimate depression. (And don’t confuse “having a bad day” with clinical depression.)

We believe that this study lays the groundwork for the potential use of this type of an approach in combating HIV infection in infected individuals, in hopes of eradicating the virus from the body,” [Scott G.] Kitchen said. “We believe that this is the first step in developing a more aggressive approach in correcting the defects in the human T cell responses that allow HIV to persist in infected people.

Researchers develop stem cells that attack and destroy HIV | The Raw Story (via pieceinthepuzzlehumanity)

(via pieceinthepuzzlehumanity)

drugpolicyreform:

MARCY DOLIN: I’m lying on my bed, smoking a joint. I smoke about eight a day, and eat a marijuana cookie before I go to sleep at night. I like the peanut-butter ones. I’ve been using marijuana for about 35 years, ever since I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. It takes the pain and muscle spasms away. Without it, I would be living on morphine and other horrible drugs. I couldn’t do that to my family. That’s no life, and I would have ended it. That’s the truth. I used to take a drug called Neurontin, and I just never stopped crying. I was in a fog, totally depressed. I told my doctor that I was going back to just marijuana; he said he would have me arrested if he could. What are they going to do? I’m 71 years old. Are they going to put me in jail? I’m not hurting anybody. It’s just here in my own house.

The New York Times

ikenbot:

Better Medical Care, On Cue

Software for managing the busy schedule of the Hubble Space Telescope has led to technology that does the same for hospitals.

Scientists around the world have clamored to use the Hubble Space Telescope for their research. The only problem is there are thousands of scientists—and only one Hubble.

When it first became operational, Hubble functioned under a variety of scheduling restraints. For example, in order to conserve energy, it could have only two scientific instruments operating at one time. In order to compensate for these scheduling constraints, Hubble’s software team designed a system that worked around these conflicts using a variety of methods.

One of the team members who worked on Hubble, NASA computer scientist Don Rosenthal, helped develop the scheduling system, refining the algorithms and consequently increasing the telescope’s efficiency. After working on Hubble, Rosenthal acquired intellectual property rights to the scheduling technology. He then went on to co-found Menlo Park, California’s Allocade Inc. Using Rosenthal’s experience with Hubble’s software, Allocade created its On-Cue software suite, which optimizes schedules for another hectic field where time is of the essence: medicine.

scinerds:

Drug-Resistant Bugs Found in Organic Meat

If you’re paying premium prices for pesticide- and antibiotic-free meat, you might expect that it’s also free of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Not so, according to a new study. The prevalence of one of the world’s most dangerous drug-resistant microbe strains is similar in retail pork products labeled “raised without antibiotics” and in meat from conventionally raised pigs, researchers have found.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a drug-resistant form of the normally harmless S. aureus bacterium, kills 18,000 people in the United States every year and sickens 76,000 more. The majority of cases are linked to a hospital stay, where the combination of other sick people and surgical procedures puts patients at risk. But transmission also can happen in schools, jails, and locker rooms (and an estimated 1.5% of Americans carry MRSA in their noses). All of this has led to a growing concern about antibiotic use in agriculture, which may be creating a reservoir of drug-resistant organisms in billions of food animals around the world.

Tara Smith, an epidemiologist at the University of Iowa College of Public Health in Iowa City who studies the movement of staph bacteria between animals and people, wondered whether meat products might be another mode of transmission. For the new study, published this month in PLoS ONE, she and colleagues bought a variety of pork products—395 packages in all—from 36 different stores in two big pig farming states, Iowa and Minnesota, and one of the most densely populated, New Jersey.

In the laboratory, the team mixed meat samples “vigorously” with a bacterial growth medium and allowed any microbes present to grow. MRSA, which appears as mauve-colored colonies on agar plates, was genetically typed and tested for antibiotic susceptibility.

The researchers found that 64.8% of the samples were positive for staph bacteria and 6.6% were positive for MRSA. Rates of contamination were similar for conventionally raised pigs (19 of 300 samples) and those labeled antibiotic-free (seven of 95 samples). Results of genetic typing identified several well-known strains, including the so-called livestock-associated MRSA (ST398) as well as common human strains; all were found in conventional and antibiotic-free meat.

Less Work, More Living →

Here’s a perfect article for the back-to-work-week doldrums:

Millions of Americans have lost control over the basic rhythm of their daily lives. They work too much, eat too quickly, socialize too little, drive and sit in traffic for too many hours, don’t get enough sleep, and feel harried too much of the time. It’s a way of life that undermines basic sources of wealth and well-being—such as strong family and community ties, a deep sense of meaning, and physical health.

Earn less, spend less, emit and degrade less. That’s the formula. The more time a person has, the better his or her quality of life, and the easier it is to live sustainably.

Imagining a world in which jobs take up much less of our time may seem utopian, especially now, when a scarcity mentality dominates the economic conversation. People who are employed often find it difficult to scale back their jobs. Costs of medical care, education, and child care are rising. It may be hard to find new sources of income when U.S. companies have been laying people off at a dizzying rate.

But fewer work hours for people with jobs is a key step toward solving the unemployment crisis—while giving Americans healthier lives. Fewer hours means more jobs are available to people who need them. Living on less pay usually means consuming less, making more of the things one needs at home, and living lighter, whether by design or by accident.

thingsworsethancannabis:

Things worse than cannabis #1: Margarine.

Margarine is the result of vegetable oil put through a hydrogenation process which creates a solid substance, in essence spreadable fat. While it has been marketed as a healthier butter substitute, margarine is so full of trans fats that even minimal consumption could increase your risk of heart disease.

The most harmful aspect of consuming margarine is chronic inflammation - linked to Rheumatoid arthritis, Scleroderma, Systemic lupus and of course heart disease. Chronic inflammation has dietary roots and could be triggered by any diet involving dairy products.

While consumption peaked in 1993, United States citizens nowadays eat about 2 billion pounds of margarine per year. The margarine and cooking oil industry legally sold $4.2 billion worth of buttery spreads in 2011 and not one customer was fined or imprisoned from consuming this harmful substance.

mothernaturenetwork:

Ouch! Women feel pain more intensely than men
The researchers assessed sex differences in reported pain for more than 250 diseases and conditions.

discoverynews:

Magic Mushrooms Could Treat Depression

The active ingredient in the trippy fungus could help users treat depression, anxiety and stress.

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