Month: May 2014

Ellyn Ruddick-Sunstein shares the haunting work of photographer Sarah Sudhoff:

[She] traces the physical, bodily evidence left by the dead; for her project At the Hour of Our Death, she gives form to death and the unknown, shooting fabrics stained by the blood and fluids of the victims of murder, suicide, and illness. She follows these material reminders of dead, contaminated and removed from the scene, to a warehouse, where they wait to be disposed of; she knows not the names or [identities] of the dead, constructing strange and poignant narratives with only the colors and shapes left by their passing.

Sudhoff spoke to Alison Zavos about her process in 2011:

You’ve mentioned that you feel deeply saddened when photographing the remains of a persons death. How do you mentally prepare before a shoot and how do you cope afterwards?

I don’t think there is anything someone can do to mentally prepare for dealing with death. Each shoot I have to push myself physically and emotionally to even make the call to see if new material is in. On one hand I dread finding out what jobs the crew is working on yet on the other hand I can’t help but be intrigued by the possibilities. …

Each time I leave a shoot I have a long drive ahead of me. I’ve started taking a change of clothes with me so I don’t have to drive and sit in the outfit I shot the material in. I am usually very careful to cover up and wear gloves however its more of a peace of mind to remove even the possibility of something on me. I typically stop at a gas station to scrub down my arms and face before hitting the road. As soon as I get home, I take a long hot shower and wash all my clothes from the shoot.

See more of Sudhoff’s work here. Watch a short film about the project here.

(Photo: Suicide with Gun, Male, 40 years old)

Helen Thompson explains the debate:

This month the World Health Organization (WHO) will meet to decide whether or not to destroy the last living strains of the variola virus, which causes smallpox. Since the WHO declared the disease eradicated in 1979, the scientific community has debated whether or not to destroy live virus samples, which have been consolidated to laboratories in Russia and at the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. Small frozen test tubes preserve the surviving strains, and most were collected around the time of eradication, though some date to the early 1930s.

Inger Damon, who leads the poxvirus and rabies branch at the CDC, and her colleagues argue in an editorial in PLoS Pathogens … to save the virus from full extinction. According to Damon, retaining the live samples will allow researchers to delve into unanswered questions about the variola virus and to test better vaccines, diagnostics, and drugs. “There is more work to be done before the international community can be confident that it possesses sufficient protection against any future smallpox threats,” they write.

Alex B. Berezow lists other reasons to keep the virus samples. Among other arguments:

[E]very once in a while, there is a smallpox scare from historical samples. What was thought to be a 135-year-old smallpox scab turned up in a museum in 2011. It ended up not being smallpox (but possibly a related virus known as Vaccinia). Still, the possibility of smallpox viruses surviving in old human tissue samples is a real enough threat. In an e-mail interview with RealClearScience, Dr. Inger Damon, the lead author of the PLoS Pathogens article, wrote, “The virus is highly stable when frozen; periodically the question of viable virus existing in corpses buried in the northern permafrost is posed, but remains unanswered.”

A reader quotes another:

I am very frustrated with this comment:

Access to medical, dental, and mental care are true human needs. Obamacare should have focused on meeting all those needs, including the mental and dental coverage that too many employers had failed to make available, instead of opting to cover the pill. Except for its palliative uses, the pill is not a form of healthcare.

First, I would ask, why is this an either/or situation? Why pit this one benefit against other benefits? Physical, mental, dental, and reproductive health are all essential human needs. In fact, I would also add vision coverage, as those of us with very bad vision know we cannot operate in the world without the help of optometrists. Shouldn’t we be advocating for a more holistic approach to healthcare and not elevating one type of care over another?

Secondly, I must strongly disagree with the claim that “The pill is not a form of health care.” This is simply erroneous. I know a number of women who take birth control for reasons unrelated to preventing pregnancy.  Most of them use it to treat very painful periods or endometriosis. I know one person who uses it as estrogen therapy to treat Turner Syndrome, a genetic condition resulting from a missing X chromosome. In fact, only 42 percent of women use the pill only for contraceptive purposes, according to a 2011 study by the Guttmacher Institute. Maybe your reader does not consider those uses to be a form of healthcare, but most doctors would.

Finally, even preventing pregnancy is healthcare.

Pregnancy is not an illness, but it is a condition that affects a woman’s health. Pregnancy can put some women at great risk, because they have other health problems. For the rest of us who do not currently want to be pregnant, it is a relatively safe and easy method for us to prevent pregnancy – a method that does not require us to rely on a partner’s willingness to wear a condom. Of course, in theory we should all be having sex with partners who are willing to participate in safe sex, but we know that relationship are very imperfect and sometimes dysfunctional or even abusive. The pill is a way for a woman to have autonomous control over their reproductive health. It is a way to prevent a change in one’s health.

Another speaks from personal experience:

Did you notice that health-insurance companies made not a peep about covering birth control? And that they very quickly figured out a way to cover employees of religious hospitals, universities, and other religious employers with separate birth-control policies that would allow the institutions to save face? It is long-run cost savings for them.

I am prescribed “birth control,” which costs $100 a month and does prevent pregnancy – which, as I am 48 years old, is a good thing for me and for all my fellow policyholders. A pregnancy at this point in my life would surely be a very expensive prospect. But more than that, my “birth control” prescription ended the debilitating deluge of menstrual blood that began in my mid-40s, likely caused by the same condition that required my mother to have a hysterectomy at age 48. So my insurance company and fellow policyholders are shelling out $1,200 a year to prevent pregnancy and to prevent an expensive hysterectomy and the subsequent recovery time, which would cost many thousands more.

I expect to be taking this preventive “hysterectomy control” prescription into my early 50s, when my body should end the deluge on its own, thus avoiding an expensive surgical procedure for my insurance company and fellow policyholders, as well as keeping me on the job rather than suffering through the monthly challenge or the surgery that would have been required to stop it. Those savings can eventually be used to pay for expanded coverage of things like dental care – or at least they should.

Another ties the personal issue to a political one:

If Hobby Lobby prevails, their female employees with menorrhagia would have no choices for treatment except surgery – which leaves you unable to later get pregnant and comes with risks not present with the other medical options. “Birth control” is not just birth control. Would a male legislator who had lived one week out of every month bleeding uncontrollably still think it reasonable to deny women access to this treatment?

(Photo by Yoon S. Byun/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

New studies out of Harvard and Stanford, in which researchers used blood transfusions to reverse the effects of aging in mice, are being heralded as bringing us one step closer to immortality:

Scientists previously demonstrated that the process of aging did not rid tissue of its stem cells. Therefore, these researchers set out to identify the signals, potentially carried in the blood, that could reinvigorate the dormant stem cells of elderly mice. … Evidence from a number of studies pointed to a protein called GDF11. Researchers found much more GDF11 in young mice blood and determined that treatment with this protein alone recapitulated some of the effects of the transfusions.

Scientists demonstrated the benefits of these “young blood infusions” in reversing aging effects in three different body systems. In muscles, young blood revived strength and endurance in old mice. In the heart, it reversed age-induced cardiac hypertrophy (enlargement of the heart). Recent findings now point to rejuvenating effects in the brain.

John Timmer explains why GDF11 is so promising for future research:

It should also be clear that a variety of evidence is building in favor of GDF11 being a general factor that promotes youthful behavior in a variety of tissues. None of the findings on their own would be earth-shattering, but there’s now a large collection of incremental results that paint a pretty compelling picture.

That picture is generally good news, too. GDF11 is part of a large family of signaling molecules (the TGF-ß superfamily) that is extremely well studied. (It’s so well studied that you can order a tiny batch of 98 percent pure human GDF11 that was made in bacteria for as little as $80.) So following up on this work won’t mean starting from scratch with a mystery molecule that no one understands.

If it’s so easy to make GDF11, could places offering injections be far off in the future? Probably not, but we’re a long way from the sort of evidence that would make that a safe, approved therapy for the declines of aging. It’s possible for GDF11 to have both positive and negative effects on a variety of tissues.

Jesus Diaz notes that there really doesn’t appear to be much of a catch to this good news:

There’s only two caveats. The first is that these are experiments with mice. They still have to be tested in humans, who have their own version of GDF11. It will probably work in the same way, but we don’t know for sure yet. The second one is cancer. The moment you start awakening stem cells and telling them to start creating new cells, you may increase the possibilities of cancer. Honestly, I would rather take the chance of cancer than the certainty of dementia or early death because of some heart disease.

That’s why scientists are so excited. The results are clear and there are no conflicts between the two studies, so this is wonderful news so far, they say.

Michael Byrne meditates on how discoveries like these may change the way we think about old age:

If a whole range of diseases are the result of declining GDF11 levels in the body, then it’s not really hard to imagine a disease that just is the decline itself. It’d be one big package of pathologies under one generalized roof, like, say, hypothyroidism, an illness sometimes known as the “great imitator” because it encompasses symptoms and syndromes associated with about every illness ever. Treating it, meanwhile, is just a matter of upping the levels of one hormone in the blood. You might imagine GDF11 deficiency in a similar light, except of course that age happens to everyone.

Society hasn’t really found an “OK” way to die. “Old age” is about the closest we have, and there’s not actually such a thing as dying of old age. People die of aging-related diseases, like the two mentioned above, but also cancer and even just getting the flu as an old person. Bodies get worn down by time because that’s what time does; GDF11 would seem like a way of not buying extra time, but of resetting the clock in general, erasing age and, most strangely, erasing time. Which is where it gets ominous, if vaguely so: the clock itself as the disease.

Walter Russell Mead quips:

Over the years boomers have sucked millennials dry financially in all sorts of ways: by promoting policies that shifted wealth towards them and away from the young; by resisting reform to entitlement programs; by hogging all the job growth; and by supporting reductions in spending that benefits the young (like aid to public colleges).

Now they could be out for millennials’ blood. Young people don’t expect to be looking up the local blood bank instead of the local job bank. But since they’ve got nothing in the bank, maybe it’s worth considering a new way to pay off those college loans.

A reader cries foul:

The headline of this post is badly misleading. It states that only 46 percent of the non-affiliateds’ kids remain unaffiliated, but the survey on which the data was based breaks down the “unaffiliated” demographic as follows:

Unaffiliated: 16.1% of the total US population

– Atheist: 1.6% of the total US population
– Agnostic: 2.4% of the population
– Nothing in particular: 12.1% of the population

– Secular unaffiliated: 6.3% of the population
– Religious unaffiliated 5.8% of the population

In other words, more than one-third of the unaffiliated in question are actually religious, and another one-third-plus are sufficiently noncommittal to eschew both religious and non-religious identification. As an atheist contemplating reproduction, I’m deeply interested in what happens to the children of the committed nonreligious (atheists and agnostics). But generalizations about the “unaffiliated” don’t really address that question at all.

A few more readers sound off:

The thing about the “nothing in particular” group is that they tend to believe in a god or universal spirit while being skeptical that organized religion has any special knowledge about that god or universal spirit. So you’re not looking at how many atheist kids convert to belief; you are looking at a group that mostly consists of mostly of disenfranchised theists.

All of that being said, the retention issue is one of the reasons I support the creation of atheist community centers: places where atheist parents can bring their children to be indoctrinated in reason, logic, evidence, and science in the same way that religious children are indoctrinated into the beliefs of their parents’ religion.

Another:

I’m an atheist, and my husband is on the belief fence. We are not raising our kids in any religious tradition (we were both raised Catholics – he much more traditionally than me). A kid from across the street who does go to church told my six-year-old that all she has to do is believe and then she won’t go to hell. Nice. So we talked about it. She is a thinking type of kid and says she doesn’t know if she believes or not. And at six years of age, I think that is the perfectly correct answer.