Americans Getting Fatter, Living Longer

Luysii points to CDC data showing that American mortality rates are dropping year after year while we simultantaneously get fatter and fatter. S/he points to several possibilities: #1: More people are exercising than they used to. How many joggers and walkers did you see on the streets 20, 30 years ago? #2: Fewer people are smoking. Forget lung cancer (if you can). ...

Slightly Chubby People Live Slightly Longer

Glenn Reynolds passes along news of a Japanese study that finds "People who are a little overweight at age 40 live six to seven years longer than very thin people, whose average life expectancy was shorter by some five years than that of obese people, the study found." Sweet!  I've apparently gotten out of shape at precisely the right time. Alas, But Kuriyama ...

Swine Flu Kills Texas Child, Regular Flu Kills Thousands

CNN Breaking News: "23-month-old Texas child confirmed as first U.S. swine flu death, according to Richard Besser, acting director, CDC." [UPDATE:  CNN now reports that, while this is the first death in the U.S., the child was a Mexican citizen brought to Houston for treatment, said Kathy Barton, a spokeswoman for the Houston Department of Health and Human Services, adding she ...

Obama: Sex Before Reading?

A new John McCain ad belittles Barack Obama's legislative achievements on education reform and includes this gem: Obama's one accomplishment? Legislation to teach "comprehensive sex education" to kindergartners. Learning about sex before learning to read? TPM's Greg Sargent finds the charge "false" and "pernicious."  He cites this passage from the bill, as circulated by  McCain's staff: "Each class or course in comprehensive sex ...

Tony Snow Dies of Cancer

Tony Snow has died. He was only 53. CNN Breaking: Former White House press secretary Tony Snow has died at the age of 53 after a second battle with cancer. Snow, who had been undergoing chemotherapy treatments for a recurrence of the disease, left his White House job September. 14, 2007, and joined CNN as a conservative commentator. More from ...

No Beer, No Civilization (Updated)

George Will has been at the top of the pundit game for so long that you'd think he'd have joined a sizable number of his peers in seemingly dusting off one of their stock columns every week. Not so. Will's latest installment is on the virtues of beer. "The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization ...

Jesse Helms’ Foreign Policy Legacy

Christopher Hitchens joins the legions dancing on Jesse Helms' grave.   Rather than piling on about the racism of a Southern politician whose career began sixty-odd years ago, he instead focuses on Helms' foreign policy: His chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was a period of national embarrassment and, sometimes, disgrace. The Helms-Burton Act of 1996, imposing additional economic sanctions on ...

Salmonella Cost-Benefit Analysis

Stuart Buck notes that the 130 hospitalizations that resulted from the 943 reported cases of salmonella poisoning caused $100 million in losses to the U.S. tomato industry (and untold damage to the industry in Mexico). He calculates this at $770,000 per hospitalization and asks, simply, "Worth it?" Before you answer, you might want to factor in another variable: "The U.S. ...

Jesse Helms Dead at 86

Former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms died this morning, joining John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in the distinction of passing on Independence Day. Raleigh's WTVD notes, In North Carolina Helms was a polarizing figure, and he freely admitted that many people in the state strongly disliked him: "They (the Democrats) could nominate Mortimer Snerd and he'd automatically get 45 percent ...

Gay Brain Science: Homosexuality a Birth Defect?

Some people are right-brained. Others are left-brained. Apparently, some are gay-brained. What makes people gay? Biologists may never get a complete answer to that question, but researchers in Sweden have found one more sign that the answer lies in the structure of the brain. Scientists at the Karolinska Institute studied brain scans of 90 gay and straight men ...

Burma Air Drops

Barbara Stocking explains that simply dropping food into Burma is much harder than it sounds. [A]ir drops are not the aid equivalent of smart bombs. Running a humanitarian effort from the skies, like running a purely airborne war, is fraught with problems. For a start it requires excellent intelligence. Yet no one knows exactly where the worst affected areas are, or how ...

Too Much, Too Little Sleep Bad for You

Unless you sleep exactly the right amount, you are doomed, a new government study finds. People who sleep fewer than six hours a night — or more than nine — are more likely to be obese, according to a new government study that is one of the largest to show a link between irregular sleep and big bellies. The study also linked ...

New American Arsenal

I attended a briefing today at the National Press Club featuring some board members of the American Security Project promoting what they have dubbed "A New American Arsenal." The bipartisan group, headed by Gary Hart and featuring the likes of John Kerry, Ken Duberstein, Richard Armitage, and several retired flag officers urges a return of a bipartisan foreign ...

Information, DNA Testing and Economics

Over at reason Katherine Mangu-Ward has an interesting article on DNA testing and some of the impacts on workers, employers and the health care debate. She points to a bill in Congress that deals with this issue. Congress reached an agreement clearing the way for a bill to prohibit discrimination by employers and health insurers on the basis of genetic ...

1985 AIDS ‘Victim’ Still Alive

Michael Petrelis has learned that Lauren Burk, pictured along with her husband and infant child on a 1985 LIFE magazine feature informing us that "Now No One is Safe from AIDS," is still very much alive. From the 1985 story: Patrick Burk fits the original profile of the AIDS patient because he is a hemophiliac who received the virus in a ...