Tag Archives: health

Our World in Data Global Health Explorer

Our World in Data has a new Global Health Explorer. I’m going to pick a few metrics and see where the United States stands according to a somewhat random set of peer countries. I think it would be interesting to see where we stand as a percentile among OECD and non-OECD countries, but that would require work.

Peer countries: I’m going to pick six highly developed countries and six middle income countries: Canada, Germany, Japan, Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia.

I’m going to pick 10 metrics.

Life expectancy at birth: We’re #4! (Japan, Canada, Germany, US, Brazil, Malaysia, Indonesia)
Child mortality: We’re #4! (Japan, Germany, Canada, US, Malaysia, Brazil, Indonesia)
Maternal mortality: We’re #4: (Japan, Germany, Canada, US, Malaysia, Brazil, Indonesia)
Homicide rate: We’re #6! (Japan, Germany, Indonesia, Canada, Malaysia, US, Brazil)
Deaths from road injuries (rate): We’re #4! (Germany, Japan, Canada, US, Indonesia, Brazil, Malaysia)
Suicide rate: We’re #6! (Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, US, Japan)
Death rate from all infectious diseases: We’re #2! (Canada, United States, Germany, Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan)
Death rate from alcohol use: We’re #5! (Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Canada, US, Brazil, Germany)
Death rate from drug use: We’re #7! (Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Brazil, Germany, Canada, US)
Death rate from cardiovascular disease: We’re #6! (Brazil, Malaysia, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, United States, Germany)

There’s a lot more to glean from the graphs in terms of how much separates countries in these metrics, and of course there are many more metric and many more countries. But one thing is clear, USA USA! is not #1. And in this peer group of highly developed countries (Canada, Germany, Japan), we are not even average, we are dead last on most metrics. Asian countries tend to beat western countries on metrics related to life style, such as alcohol and drug use, and are significantly less violent. Germans are no saints when it comes to healthy life style – they drink a lot and have a lot of heart attacks. And Brazil is downright violent.

metformin and longevity

This article says billionaires are “racing” to invest in longevity treatments. Top candidates attracting funding include various gene therapies, drugs, stem cells, and old people consuming the blood of children (seriously, this is real but presumably the children are fine). This article argues a known drug called metformin deserves more attention.

Covid wastewater surveillance

I haven’t been able to find a user-friendly government or non-profit agency source of wastewater surveillance information. Here is one from a company called “Biobot Analytics” which seems pretty good, although they are obviously trying to sell their services.

why daylight savings time is unhealthy

There is a clear consensus that everybody hates setting the clocks ahead and losing sleep. There seems to be movement toward doing away with this dumb tradition and going towards all daylight savings time all year. But at least one scientist says the evidence points toward going all standard time all year.

There is evidence for increased strokes, heart attacks, and sleep deprivation during daylight saving time, the latter particularly affecting teenagers. There is also evidence of increased obesity, diabetes, cancer, lower income and higher health care costs in the western portions of time zones, where the shift in dawn and dusk is most pronounced.
The lack of morning light disrupts the body’s natural rhythms when we are trying to wake up.
Increased light in the evening makes it harder to fall asleep. This is particularly hard on adolescents and young adults, who have trouble falling asleep already for biological reasons and often have to wake up early for school, leading to chronic sleep deprivation affecting their already wacked-out bodies and minds.
Standard time is a better match for the natural rhythm of the sun, with the sun directly overhead around noon.

I would add that the time shift causes trouble in science and other technical fields, where we try to measure stuff over time and make sense of it. It also causes practical problems for people who have to travel or collaborate with colleagues across time zones (which is already challenging). Once I got a roomful of people together at 7 a.m. in Singapore for a meeting led by U.S. staff, only to find that the U.S. had changed its clocks the night before and the meeting was over. Those people were a little mad at me. I bought them doughnuts. A lesson learned there is to let your calendar software handle time zones and not try to do the math yourself. The U.S. is not even the worst – Australia has half-hour time shifts that are different in different cities not that far apart. The time shift is dumb, let’s just stop doing it.

flu and Parkinson’s

This article makes a link between flu infection and increased risk of developing Parkinson’s disease later in life. It makes me wonder if a person’s history with viruses and other infections has a more significant effect on the brain than the average person things. There has been so much talk and worry about the effects of Covid-19 on the brain, but I wonder if a lot of viruses have these effects and Covid-19 is just the one we happen to have studied incredibly intensively over the past 2 years. It’s a disturbing thought, but also suggests that vaccines for certain viruses earlier in life could reduce risk of developing dementia later in life.

what’s new with cancer?

This article is critical of the focus on new treatments for cancer, saying prevention should be more of a focus.

Up to 40% of cancers could be prevented by reducing the consumption of highly processed foods, high-calorie diets, and certain fats, increasing consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables, and getting people to be more physically active. Alcohol consumption increases the risk of several types of cancer and accounts for 19,500 cancer deaths a year. Air pollution is a major cause of lung cancer and may also increase bladder and breast cancer. And one study found that pollution in U.S. drinking water could have caused 100,000 cancer cases between 2010 and 2017…
The human costs of allowing businesses rather than scientists and doctors to shape cancer research are high. By pursuing cancer treatment options that are the most profitable rather than the most effective for the largest number of people, the medical enterprise misses opportunities to make more substantial progress…
By proposing additional measures to make prevention the priority, tackle commercial determinants of cancer, and avoid the technological quick fix suggested by war and moonshot metaphors, those seeking to reduce the burden of cancer can develop more effective and equitable approaches.
STAT

I had the impression that, smoking, air pollution, and lack of sunscreen aside (okay, those are actually three big ones), the causes of cancer were still murky, with a suspected role for various chemicals in consumer products, food, water, and the environment, but not much known for sure and luck still playing a big role. This article seems to suggest a lot more is known about the causes of cancer than I thought. That big business has captured and corrupted our government is not news, however.

East Asian people may have genetic defenses against Covid-19

It’s somewhat taboo to suggest that ethnic groups might be genetically superior or inferior to others, but when it comes to susceptibility or resistance to specific diseases, we should be willing to acknowledge this possibility. Most countries in Asia seemed to manage the Covid emergency much better than most western countries. I thought from the beginning that much better health and quarantine systems at airports must be a big factor. Somewhat privacy-invasive contact tracing measures and a willingness to restrict movement seem to be other significant differences between west and east, and you can see these even in Australia and New Zealand which are still largely ethnically European (although I say lots of Asian faces on trips on Sydney). But even given that, it always seemed like there might be some genetic or lifestyle factors to explain the order-of-magnitude differences.

Studies have shown that more people in Asia have a defense enzyme called APOBEC3A that attacks RNA viruses, including the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, when compared to people in Europe and Africa…
Some people may wonder if the self-extinction of the delta variant in Japan was caused by something special in the genetic make-up of Japanese people, but Inoue disagrees.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “People in East Asia, such as Koreans, are ethnically the same as Japanese. But I don’t know why this observation was made in Japan.”
Japan Times

The “self-extinction”, by the way, is the idea that once isolated from external influxes and exposed to a largely resistant population, the virus may have acquired mutations that have doomed it.

I understand why it is politically and culturally hard to do contact tracing and quarantine in the U.S., and nearly impossible to physically restrict movement. I still don’t understand why we can’t implement effective screening and quarantine procedures at our international airports when we have had a year and a half of emergency conditions now to get that done.

the anti-vax movement…of 1796

This is a great article from Open Culture – even if I hadn’t read it (I did), the pictures alone made me laugh out loud. However, beyond the laughs, the interesting and educational part was the description of how each and every new vaccine that comes out causes some fear and resistance, and this has been going on since vaccines were invented. Smallpox was a horrible disease, and the first vaccine was derived from a related virus that afflicts cows. People at the time were concerned that the vaccine would make them grow horns and start mooing. The early vaccine technology was in fact riskier than what we have now, although much less risky than the diseases they were vaccinating against, which is the whole point. The only silver lining is that once a vaccine has been out for a few decades to a couple centuries at most, we all seem to just accept it as the new normal and move on to complaining about the next one that comes out. Almost everyone screaming about the (incredibly effective, low-risk in absolute terms, and absolutely negligible risk relative to the disease it is preventing) Covid-19 vaccine is going to have been inoculated for polio, measles, tetanus, and many other diseases as a child. We don’t appreciate the suffering these vaccines have prevented (at least in developed countries) because we have not suffered ourselves or lost people we care about to these diseases in living memory.

Why I’m not fully vaccinated (for Lyme disease)

I’m not fully vaccinated for Lyme disease because there is no vaccine available and I have no choice in the matter. I remember the vaccine being available, but recently I was discussing this with a friend who looked at me as though I had grown two heads when I mentioned it. Anyway, this Slate article explains what happened:

We had one, once. The Food and Drug Administration approved LYMErix, manufactured by SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline), for use in 1998. LYMErix worked by inducing antibodies into human blood, which would then go into any ticks that attached to your body. There, they would neutralize the bacteria that cause Lyme, Borrelia burgdorferi, before the bacteria could go from the tick into you. In clinical trials, the shot showed about 78 percent effectiveness after the required three doses (hey, I’d take it). But some patients who got the shot after it went on the market testified that they developed arthritis after vaccination. The FDA investigated, but decided the evidence that the vaccine was linked to patients’ arthritis wasn’t strong enough to withdraw its approval for LYMErix. Sales fell nonetheless, and the company pulled the vaccine in 2002.
Slate

So if the vaccine was approved, isn’t it still approved? This would lead me to believe there is a working, approved vaccine, but it is not commercially available because there is not enough of a market for it for companies to make a profit. But to have a market, wouldn’t it be helpful if the general public were aware of its existence?

The article reaches some ridiculous conclusions about a Lyme vaccine mostly benefitting the affluent, and this sounds like nonsense to me. They don’t offer any evidence for this claim. Which sounds ridiculous to me, because the hunting/hiking/camping crowd most at risk is going to be a decidedly working- to middle-class one. Maybe the working class is more familiar with and therefore less afraid of this disease than the more affluent? There could be a grain of truth here.

I think everyone knows someone who has had a brush with this disease. I can think of a work colleague who was incorrectly diagnosed with early-onset arthritis and lived in pain for some time before Lyme disease was correctly diagnosed and appropriately treated. Second, a cousin who was rushed to the hospital with a racing heart and difficulty breathing during the height of the Covid crisis in 2020 – in this case, it was correctly diagnosed and appropriately treated, and he is fine after going through a somewhat harrowing episode. So this is a serious disease. But beyond the pain and suffering it causes directly, it just really takes away a lot of peoples’ desire and excitement to be in the woods. And it keeps children of some risk-averse parents out of the woods, which is a shame but understandable. It’s also a shame if you’re a gardener in a tick infested area who wants to grow anything other than neatly-trimmed grass. Your neighbors can complain you are putting them at risk of Lyme disease, and they may have a point. So really, it would be nice to have a vaccine for this disease available so we can all weigh the evidence and make up our minds.

Incidentally, a Lyme disease vaccine for dogs is approved and commercially available. And the public charity and savior of humanity known as Pfizer is working on a new vaccine and hoping to have it on the market by 2025 (but really, if there is a 100% approved vaccine out there and Pfizer believes there is now a market, can’t somebody just buy the recipe and start making it right now?)

Future Yada Yada Yada

in which I explore the imminent collapse of civilization, the fabulous science fiction future, and points in between