Medical news: The facts, please...

How would you like to live rent free in Seattle?
Just be a drunk...
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Slate allows an "activist"* to claim that a recent HPV study by the New England Journal of Medicine shows that condoms work...and then goes on to ridicule abstinence education...

But she fails to notice that the most influential Christian group, Focus on the Family, actually supports the vaccine (PDF Summary).

As a doc, I have delivered too many condom babies (or had the girls go for abortions) to believe my teenaged patients would use them all the time...the dirty little secret is that they are hard to put on in the back of the boyfriend's Mom's Toyota... which is why in the REAL world, the pregnancy rate is 15% per year using a condom...and probably much higher in teenagers.

Slate writes thatMs. Schaffer "uncovers conservative meddling at the CDC"...if she were a true consumer advocate, she would worry more about drug companies meddling with drug approval than overprotective parents' organizations....
What the girls say they REALLY want is to learn: how to say no to unwanted pressure to have sex or take drugs...PDFHERE
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Other medical news:

Down's syndrome AKA Mongoloid children is caused by having an extra gene...if they could turn that gene off, maybe the kids wouldn't be retarded...
Dirty little secret: Most are aborted as "partial birth abortions".
Little known fact of Down's syndrome: They develop Alzheimer's disease in their 40's....one ignorant person said how could you tell...well, most function at a 6-10 year old level...
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And, as usual, there is a whole bunch of articles on things we have known about for years:

Applying heat relieves pain...
Premies do better on breast milk...yup. that's why 40+ years ago, our hospital had a breast milk bank, giving it to premies both in the nursery and at home...
Tylenol overdosage causes liver disease...all my druggies claimed that this is why they needed Talwin or Ultram for their stubbed toe...
If teenagers don't drive, you get fewer deaths from teenaged car accidents...yup. That makes sense.
It's hard to diagnose flu in kids...yup...been there. Done that...
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Pesticide use causes brain damage in Kids...from their MOTHER's exposure 20 years ago...
Hmmm...however, since there are other factors not checked for (poverty....poor nutrition...lead and toxic metal levels) ..the study seems to be done to prove we shouldn't allow DDT to become legal again...Abstract here...
360 mothers, and the test was early developmental testing, which picks up only very major problems...maybe we should test the older siblings who are already in school? That would give us a better idea...
Or maybe we should check the Italians dusted with DDT to stop the typhus epidemic in 1943-1944...yes, malnutrition would skewer the results, but you could use non treated cohorts as a control group...

And even if true, the damage is probably less than a kid who suffers from malaria, especially cerebral malaria...
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Finally, Dengue fever is back...two kids in a nearby town died of Dengue like symptoms...but the docs haven't decided if it's Dengue or something else...