“The greatest fear Democrats should have at this point is what will happen when millions of hard-working, lower-middle-class American families without health insurance are told they’re about to be slapped with a $500 to $1000-a-month bill to buy a plan … [and] be told that their employers and the government aren’t going to help out.”
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“Every other industrialized country has a national health care system that makes keeping track of these elementary facts possible. The US doesn’t.”
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As Obama explains, world leaders are puzzled that healthcare gets painted with a Hitler moustache. and other news.
Confusion grows over the still-unreleased study that apparently finds, contrary to other studies, that getting this year’s seasonal flu shot may raise your risk of getting swine flu. Peter Sandman, meanwhile, argues that since the swine flu seems to have largely displaced the seasonal flu, getting vaccinated for the latter doesn’t make much sense. (I’m doing so this afternoon anyway.)
Maybe best argument yet for expanding the US rail system.
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This shouldn’t be something that flu experts feel compelled to discuss sotto voce. If the journal has good reasons to sit on the paper for now, it should declare them. If not, it should get the paper out in the open so the data and findings can be examined and vetted openly.
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Even with that experimentation, he added, the ongoing shrinkage of newspapers is likely to create a “giant hole” that will not be filled for some time. He said he has a vision of communities of 10,000 people or fewer becoming rife with “casual endemic corruption,” as newspapers are no longer able to fulfill their traditional…
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via wired.com Another fine story from Wired Science. Posted via web from David Dobbs’s Somatic Marker
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Eric Michael Johnson contemplates the hearts, minds, teeth, and claws of bonobos and other primates, while — no fault of Eric’s — the flu, the end of publishing, and the death of the uninsured march on. Plus some great old surgery footage.
As the World Health Organisation meets in Hong-Kong to discuss, among other things, swine flu, here are a couple that make good follow-ups to my Slate piece on how adjuvants gobble up vaccine antigen supply.