Credit: jedmorey.com

They are so common no one thinks twice about them: drug ads that tell you about a disease you might have, a pill that could treat it, and tell you to “ask your doctor” if the pill is right for you.

Until 1997, such direct-to-consumer ads did not exist because without a doctor’s recommendation, how could people know if the medication was appropriate or safe? The only thing people knew about drugs and drug risks was from ads they peeked at in medical journals at the doctor’s office.

But after the ads started in 1997, the allergy pill Claritin became a household word, along with Xenical, Meridia, Propecia, Paxil, Prozac, Vioxx, Viagra, Singulair, Nasonex, Allegra, Flonase and of course Lipitor—and Big Pharma became a Wall Street darling.

Now the American Medical Association is taking a second look at DTC advertising. In November, doctors at the AMA’s Interim Meeting sought a policy to address one of its biggest problems: the growing proliferation of ads “driving demand for expensive treatments despite the clinical effectiveness of […]

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Harmful mutations have accumulated during early human migrations out of Africa.
Credit: Image courtesy of Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics

Modern humans (Homo sapiens) are thought to have first emerged in Africa about 150,000 years ago. 100,000 years later, a few of them left their homeland travelling first to Asia and then further east, crossing the Bering Strait, and colonizing the Americas. Excoffier and his colleagues developed theoretical models predicting that if modern humans migrated as small bands, then the populations that broke off from their original African family should progressively accumulate slightly harmful mutations — a mutation load. Moreover, the mutational load of a population should then represent a way of measuring the distance it has covered since it left Africa. In a nutshell: an individual from Mexico should be carrying more harmful genetic variants than an individual from Africa.

Presidential Candidate Senator Bernie Sanders

After his ground-breaking speech earlier this month announcing his plan for Wall Street reform, Bernie Sanders’ has seen enormous support from top economists and financial analysts.

Bernie Sanders’ plan includes instating a law similar to the 1930s Glass-Steagall bill, separating commercial and investment banking. Doing this would break up the “too big to fail” financial institutions into smaller parts. Sanders also plans on pursing bringing criminal charges against banking executives that had a role in the 2008 financial crisis.

Now 170 economists and other financial professionals have officially endorsed the plan. Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and CEPR’s Dean Baker are just two of the highly respected individuals that have pledged their support.

Read the entire letter and view the list of all 170 signers below:

“In our view, Sen. Bernie Sanders’ plan for comprehensive financial reform is critical for avoiding another “too-big-to-fail” financial crisis. The Senator is correct that the biggest banks must be broken up and that a new 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, […]

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Florida Sheriff Grady Judd Credit:Polksheriff

It’s Florida Sheriff Grady Judd’s duty to protect the citizens of Polk County — but he figures it’s their job, too.

One of a growing number of rural and big-city law enforcement officials who openly encourages responsible gun ownership, Judd believes guns allow citizens to defend themselves when police cannot.

“If you are foolish enough to break into someone’s home, you can expect to be shot in Polk County,” Judd said in a statement after a homeowner shot a would-be home invader earlier this month. “It’s more important to have a gun in your hand than a cop on the phone.”

Such full-throated embrace of the Second Amendment as a crime-fighting tool isn’t confined to red states like Florida.

“I want as many law-abiding citizens to arm themselves in this county as we can get.”

– Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke

One California police chief is backing teachers in his district packing heat. Detroit Police Chief James Craig has been a leader in urging his community to arm itself. A Maryland sheriff is working with the […]

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Credit: Sabphoto

Drug overdoses are driving up the death rate of young white adults in the United States to levels not seen since the end of the AIDS epidemic more than two decades ago — a turn of fortune that stands in sharp contrast to falling death rates for young blacks, a New York Times analysis of death certificates has found.

The rising death rates for those young white adults, ages 25 to 34, make them the first generation since the Vietnam War years of the mid-1960s to experience higher death rates in early adulthood than the generation that preceded it.

The Times analyzed nearly 60 million death certificates collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 1990 to 2014. It found death rates for non-Hispanic whites either rising or flattening for all the adult age groups under 65 — a trend that was particularly pronounced in women — even as medical advances sharply reduce deaths from traditional killers like heart disease. Death rates for blacks and most Hispanic groups continued to fall.

The analysis […]

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