Search Results for: label/measles

• Biology Explainer: The big 4 building blocks of life–carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and nucleic acids

  …e X Extra: A triglyceride can have up to three different fatty acids attached to it. Canola oil, for example, consists primarily of oleic acid, linoleic acid, and linolenic acid, all of which are unsaturated fatty acids with 18 carbons in their chains. Why do we take in fat anyway? Fat is a necessary nutrient for everything from our nervous systems to our circulatory health. It also, under appropriate conditions, is an excellent way to store up…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on June 8, 2012

• What blinded Mary Ingalls?

  …d, I still recall snippets of other ones, with Laura from her youth up through her years as a schoolteacher, and the family’s Christmases. And I remember Laura’s sister Mary, who tragically went blind when she was 14 in 1879 from scarlet fever. Or so we were told. In fact, though, it probably wasn’t scarlet fever after all, even though that disease was rampant, between 1840 and 1883, which includes the time of the Ingalls girls&…

  Authored by Tara Haelle on February 19, 2013

• Vaccination attitudes are contagious

  …ts make about vaccinating their children. It’s a tragic irony that the United Kingdom is in the throes of one of the worst measles epidemics in decades just as the United Nations World Immunization Week is upon us. Over 1,000 cases of the highly contagious and potentially fatal disease have been reported in Wales and in northeast England. Yet measles is preventable with the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine – as long as enough people are…

  Authored by Tara Haelle on April 24, 2013

• Parenting paranoia comes in different forms

  …ls because they are not “a big scoop.” Yet they often show that the initial, Big Headline Finding was overblown or even incorrect. That brings me to an example that really pushes my buttons — childhood immunizations. In 1998, Andrew Wakefield and colleagues published a study in the prominent British medical journal the Lancet. The paper examined a hypothesized association between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and autism, but the…

  Authored by DXS Contributor on May 19, 2013

• Vaccine fears: What can you do?

  …ad out” the schedule or reduce the number of vaccinations. In fact, the evidence supports the schedule as it’s recommended. The fear of vaccination is not new. Since Edward Jenner and his cowpox inoculation at the turn of the 19th century, people have latched onto the fear of the known—those needles!—and unknown—what’s in those things? What might be considered the first anti-vaccine cartoon appeared in response to Jenner’s proposed inoculation of…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on December 4, 2011

• After Newtown missteps, journalists get guidelines

  Protip: Don’t diagnose based on speculation. by Jessica Wright                Attention journalists: If you’ve been calling people “nuts” or “deranged” in your stories, the Associated Press is recommending that it’s time you stopped. This guideline — along with the common-sense assertion that writers shouldn’t diagnose individuals with a mental illness based entirely on speculation — is part of a new recommendation added to the AP styleboo…

  Authored by DXS Contributor on March 27, 2013

• Wordy Wednesday: ‘Tis the season to give the gift of health and life

  …According to the Red Cross, measles kills an estimated 450 people each day worldwide and most of those are children.   What will it cost? vaccinations for 25 childern: $25 vaccinations for 50 childern: $50 vaccinations for 100 childern: $100 vaccinations for a village: $500 Forget getting your best friend Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3! Get 50 vaccinations instead. In that holiday card to your boss, let them know they’ve vaccinated 25…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on December 7, 2011

• Friday roundup: Nature is beautiful, weird, terrifying, & gross, and vaccines are a social responsibility

  Madagascar oxymoron: a new species of giant mouse lemur has been discovered bya Malagasy-German research team. Credit: B. Randrianambinina. Women in science An important woman in science you may have never heard of,  Clelia Mosher .  Mae Jemison, first African-American woman astronaut to travel into space, now selected to head up the Pentagon’s 100-year Starship project . Nature is beautiful. Nature is weird. Nature is terrif…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on January 14, 2012

• Depressing genes

  …ch experience — yet it was obvious he didn’t have the knack for it. This student’s dogged pursuit of a mental health career made me wonder what kind of emotional turmoil he experienced which would make him think, at age 19, that psychiatry was the only vocation worth working towards. Then there were the two graduate students who both worked incredibly hard and were both prone to obsess about their experiments. Each burned off stress in quit…

  Authored by DXS Contributor on May 17, 2013

• Unicorns and Brainbows

  Brainbow is a mouse with a rainbow brain. By Jeffrey Perkel    A couple weeks ago I wrote about the beautiful world right under our noses, a world visible only under the microscope. The cover image for that post was this picture, a “‘Brainbow’ transgenic mouse hippocampus,” which placed 18th in the 2008 Nikon Small World Photomicroscopy contest. Brainbow technology also won the 2007 Olympus Bioscapes contest, with this be…

  Authored by Jeffrey Perkel on May 6, 2013