EMILY SHIRE, - The Daily Beast
Stephan: Here is the latest report on the autism epidemic that is sweeping across the country. Is it just better reporting, broader diagnosis criteria, or is something toxic in our environment causing this? It is not clear, but 1 out of 68 children ought to bring some serious attention to this question.
One in 68 children in the U.S. are identified with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) according to the latest estimates from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC); this estimate is 30 percent higher than the prevalence reported in 2012. CDC says that since the previous estimate of 1 in 88 children identified with ASD, the criteria used to diagnose, treat, and provide services have not changed.
Overall, the surveillance summary report, ‘Prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorder among Children Aged 8 Years-Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, 11 Sites, United States, 2010,” estimates that there are 1.2 million children under the age of 21 with autism. The study based its numbers off of data solely from eight-year-olds (the ‘peak age of identification,” according to the CDC) in communities from 11 states: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Utah, and Wisconsin.
While the estimates may seem like a startling rise in just two years, Alison Singer, the co-founder and president of the Autism Science Foundation, says she ‘wouldn’t describe this data as shocking.”
The latest report confirmed many of the previous findings, including the fact that ASD is almost five times as common in boys than as girls: 1 in 142 […]
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Stephan: Here is new research on directly influencing the brain's ability to solve problems.
SOURCE: Causal Control of Medial-Frontal Cortex Governs Electrophysiological and Behavioral Indices of Performance Monitoring and Learning The Journal of Neuroscience, 19 March 2014, 34(12):4214-4227
When we humans make a mistake, we have an instinctive “oops” reaction in our brains: a spike of negative voltage in the medial-front cortex. While this is something that has been observed by scientists, the reason why was a little more unclear.
To examine what effect this mistake response has on our behavior, two psychologists from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee — Ph.D. candidate Robert Reinhart and assistant professor of psychology Geoffrey Woodman — designed a cap that administers a low-level current to the brain to simulate the spike. They hypothesized that the spike plays a role in learning, allowing the brain to learn from mistakes.
“That’s what we set out to test: what is the actual function of these brainwaves?” Reinhart said. “We wanted to reach into your brain and causally control your inner critic.”
The cap secured two saline-soaked sponges to the test subject’s head, one to the cheek and one to the crown. Through these sponges, the researchers applied 20 minutes of transcranial direct current stimulation (tCDS) — one of the safest ways to non-invasively stimulate the brain.
They applied three types: anodal (from the crown to the cheek); cathodal (from the cheek to the crown); and control, which replicated […]
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SABRIYA RICE, - Modern Healthcare
Stephan: Having watched both my brother and my late wife, Hayden, go through endless suffering as the result of infections they contracted in the hospital, I have a strong sense of what these infections can mean. In the U.S. you have startling high odds of contracting such infections as this report spells out.
An estimated 1 out of every 25 patients will get an infection on any given day while being treated in a U.S. hospital, and 1 out of 9 of those infected will die, according to new data released today from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Though there has been progress made to improve patient safety efforts, the agency said more work is needed.
‘This is probably the best quality of data we’ve had a in a long time,” said Dr. Michael Bell, deputy director of the CDC’s Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion, regarding two new reports. They sound the alarm, he said, about the specific threats that require national attention.
Nearly 722,000 hospital-acquired infections occurred in acute-care hospitals in the U.S. in 2011, and about 75,000 patients with the infections died during their hospital stays, according to a report published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. More than half of all these infections occurred outside of the intensive-care unit.
‘Doc-fix’ bill elicits grumbling, but swift passage likelyWellStar opening new Paulding Hospital April 1Hospital conversion bill advances in Connecticut
The findings were based on 2011 data from 183 U.S. hospitals and looked at a wide range of hospital infections. The most common […]
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DONALD G. SCHWEITZER, - Truthout
Stephan: Nuclear energy is clearest example we have of profit for the few trumping the wellbeing of the many. There is no need for this technology. When its true costs are calculated it is absurdly expensive and, nothing about it is unique except its exceptional danger and toxicity. Logically this technology should have been abandoned with the end of the cold war. But zombie-like it endures.
Three years after the Fukushima disaster, the Japanese government has reversed its position of abandoning nuclear power and is developing new nuclear reactors – another example that neither nuclear-caused death nor nuclear-caused destruction can deter a corrupt power structure from the pursuit of its goals.
After the Fukushima disaster, Japan’s government claimed it would phase out nuclear power. On February 26, 2014, Tokyo reversed the decision and began starting up most of the 50 idle reactors. It subsequently announced that the plutonium Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Plant at Rokkasho will open in October 2014.
If the results of the past 65 years at the Hanford site can be taken as an example, and 40 years of now-declassified documented analyses says it can, the reprocessing of nuclear fuel to obtain weapons-grade plutonium and the subsequent handling and disposal of the resultant complex radioactive wastes is one of the nastiest, most poorly understood and apparently insoluble problems in the folder of nuclear safety.
The national pitch of “peaceful uses of atomic energy” was, and still is an umbrella for maintaining an active nuclear community that is necessary for the US to assure its position as the planet’s greatest developer and possessor of nuclear weapons.
The Hanford […]
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EMILY BADGER, - The Washington Post
Stephan: Another set of Prohibitionist talking points bites the dust -- not that this data will stop them from continuing to push the lies.
Opponents of medical marijuana envision all kinds of insidious ways that legalizing the drug might lead to crime. Make marijuana more accessible, and more people will use it. If more people use it, more will tumble through the weed “gateway” to cocaine, or worse. Those people will then engage in crime to fund their hard-drug habits, or violence in the service of getting the stuff.
Furthermore: Once word gets out about medical dispensaries, those locations will become hotspots for criminals who now know exactly where to find prey carrying cash and drugs. Same goes for grow houses, which just invite property crime.
Pondering all of these dark possibilities, it’s no wonder anyone suspects mayhem in medical marijuana laws. Actual historic crime data, however, suggest there’s no evidence that legalizing the drug for medicinal purposes leads to an increase in crime. In fact, states that have legalized it appear to have seen some reductions in the rates of homicide and assault.
These findings come from a nationwide study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One (which is notable for the fact that no one seems to have done this crucial analysis before). Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas looked at the FBI’s […]
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