|
There Goes the Neighborhood
As if gentrification wasn’t already ruining the vibe enough, polio has now returned to Brooklyn and Queens after a 30-year hiatus.
Are leg-blanket futures the next crypto? Hopefully not – it’s still a 99.9% preventable disease. Get those kids vaccinated!
Colonoscopy Hit Piece
Mainstream media rode a story claiming that colonoscopies don’t prevent cancer deaths. That was misleading because what the study really tested was whether recommending colonoscopies saves lives. Turns out the patient actually has to go through with it to see benefit. Shocking!
So how the study worked was they recruited 28,000 people to whom they offered colonoscopies. and had a control group of 56,000 to whom they did not offer colonoscopies. In the end, the group invited to get colonoscopies saw a statistically insignificant reduction in deaths.
BUT. The issue is the teeny tiny fact that out of the 28,000 invited to get a colonoscopy, only 12,000 did so. So 58% of the 'colonoscopy' group didn’t get a f**king colonoscopy. Ya think that might have altered the results a tad?
When they only looked at people who actually got the colonoscopy and compared that group to the control group, chances of dying from colorectal cancer within 10 years of the study dropped 50%.
Of course, the least healthy group in this study was probably the people who were offered a colonoscopy and declined. So partly, the 50% improvement is a self-selection effect where the more health-conscious people chose to get colonoscopies in the first place. But it would be nice to know how those colonoscopies decliners fared vs the control group when it comes to survival.
All in all, this study only concluded that it might not make sense for doctors to recommend colonoscopies because so many people say no. But for individuals, it almost certainly sounds like actually doing the colonoscopy is still a good thing.
Sanity Prevails
California recently had a very upsetting tale of rape kit DNA being used to implicate the victim in an unrelated crime. This caused a righteous uproar and led to lawmakers rectifying the situation. The state will be implementing a law banning the use of rape victim DNA from any future criminal investigations.
The idea of using rape victims' DNA to pin crimes on them is abhorrent. There is probably no better way to ensure victims stop reporting rapes. Does a female criminal deserve to be raped with impunity? Because that’s a not improbable outcome if their samples could send them to jail.
Kudos to California for codifying this, but frankly, it should be federal law.
Second Opinion, Please
A team at MIT has created a burrowing pill that scrapes through intestinal mucus to deliver a drug payload directly to the gut wall.
Interesting technology, but if someone offered us a "burrowing pill" for a digestive ailment, it would be a hard pass.
| 
