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Search Results for: label/thimerosal

  • Why a UN ban on thimerosal in vaccines would be a big mistake

    …y’s three AAP articles drive the point home. One of these provides some  historical context for why thimerosal was removed from childhood vaccines in the U.S. (as  recommended by the AAP and the U.S. Public Health Services in 1999) and in other high-income countries. The other two emphasize just how important it is – and how ethically essential it is –that the ban not be included in the UN treaty. Here’s the back story: A  1997 US FDA review of t…

    Authored by on December 18, 2012

  • 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 on June 8, 2012

  • 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 on March 27, 2013

  • YES. The CDC childhood immunization schedule is safe. For reals.

    …members who review the evidence to make their assessments are not all necessarily experts specifically in the field in question and are “selected to avoid any real or perceived biases or conflicts.” That means the 14 committee members are not all vaccine researchers, pediatricians or infectious disease epidemiologists. In the report’s appendix, you can read the bios of all the committee members, who include a nursing professor,…

    Authored by on January 24, 2013

  • Bad flu season in full swing, but flu shot still helpful

    …tbreak arrived early and features a strain that is infamous for its virulence. Forty-four states now have met the cutoff for “widespread” flu activity as of this writing, and in hotspots like Boston, MA, cases are 10 times the number from the same time last year. In many areas, hospitals have taken to setting up temporary tent shelters outside the buildings to manage the flood of cases and prevent spread inside the facility. ETA: This…

    Authored by on January 21, 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 on May 6, 2013

  • Is the bar high enough for screening breast ultrasounds for breast cancer?

    …nt movement and legislation to inform women that they have dense breasts. Merits and pitfalls of device approval The approval of breast ultrasound hinges on a study of 200 women with dense breast evaluated retrospectively at 13 sites across the United States with mammography and ultrasound. The study showed a statistically significant increase in breast cancer detection when ultrasound was used with mammography. Approval of a device of this nat…

    Authored by on September 21, 2012

  • Autism and the DSM-5

    …questions in the context of these criteria. I’ve expanded on a couple of these reports at length elsewhere, as have others with an interest in the subject. The short version is that studies overall indicate that at the least, 10% of people who would currently have an autism diagnosis under the DSM-IV-TR criteria would lose that diagnosis under the DSM-5, and some studies go as high as 55% in their estimates. Even more troubling? The committee’s s…

    Authored by on April 23, 2013

  • 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 on May 17, 2013

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