October 20, 2014

Is there any way The Walking Dead ends well?

October 18, 2014

Dog doors: we're babysitting a friend's young dog, but we're having trouble getting

across the concept of the dog door. Our two dogs hop in and out with ease, and this fellow will put his head through, but he doesn't like using it. He was a rescue dog just homed a month or so back, so I don't know his early history.

Any advice?

October 17, 2014

My pharmacist is not worried about Ebola, he's worried about this:

Rapid Price Increases for Some Generic Drugs Catch Users by Surprise

Large price increases in the United States for vital medicines for the young, such as vaccines, have been mirrored by similar rises in some of the most basic treatments for older patients, like digoxin. Though there are many newer types of drugs to treat heart disease, for some patients there are no effective substitutes; digoxin is on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines.

In recent years, generics have curbed the rise of drug prices, saving the American health care system billions of dollars. After the patents for Lipitor, the cholesterol drug, and Ambien, the sleeping pill, expired in the last few years, for example, generics entered the market and prices plummeted.

But increasingly, experts say, the costs of some generic drugs are going the other way. The prices paid by pharmacies for some generic versions of Fiorinal with codeine (for migraines) and Synthroid (a thyroid medicine) as well as the generic steroid prednisolone have all more than doubled since last year, EvaluatePharma found. In January, the National Community Pharmacists Association called for a congressional hearing on generic drug prices, complaining that those for many essential medicines grew as much as “600, 1,000 percent or more” in recent years. The price jumps especially affected smaller pharmacies, which do not have the clout of big chains to bargain for discounts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/health/some-generic-drug-prices-are-soaring.html?_r=0

An older story, but one that is still relevant.

October 17, 2014

Much of the panic over Ebola is generated by information originally in the book,

The Hot Zone, by Richard Preston,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hot_Zone

which was written in 1994 as a non-fiction thriller. He went on to write a fictional account of a bio weapon, Cobra Event and a non-fiction discussion of smallpox, The Demon in the Freezer. I read these books and interpreted them as an attempt to alert people to the need to have a well funded government agency studying emerging diseases and preparing against bio-warfare. It was to Mr. Preston's advantage to select the most horrifying facts to make his point. (Not that there is anything wrong or unusual with that - look at other recent books by other authors about say, the meat packing industry.) The film Outbreak was loosely based on the Hot Zone and of course we've had the recent movie Contagion as well.

That said, Mr. Presto's book was written in 1994. Here is a cell phone from 1994:



I would suggest that the information in The Hot Zone does not reflect the results of the 20 years of research since it was published.

October 17, 2014

We're fighting Ebola here because Republicans cut the budget for fighting it there.

October 16, 2014

Will we be shutting down schools now every time a little kid barfs?

October 16, 2014

My husband just solved the Ebola crisis: get Republicans in Congress to retroactively

fund the CDC and NIH.

October 15, 2014

Can someone tell me how to send this link to Texas Presbyterian?

http://www.gemplers.com/product/122924/Lakeland-MicroMax-Hooded-Coveralls-w-Booties

http://www.gemplers.com/product/FSC/Lightweight-Low-cost-Faceshield

October 14, 2014

When's the best time to get a flu shot?

October 14, 2014

It's not gridlock - "gridlock" implies that all parties are

equally at fault, and that all parties are trying to get somewhere. What we have is one party determined that no one goes anywhere - except maybe in reverse. So what do you call that?