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). The big risk for smokers is premature vascular disease. Normally we all have carbon monoxide in our blood (it comes from the breakdown of hemoglobin). [ Brit. Med. J. vol. 296 pp. 78 - 79 '88 ] Natural carbon monoxide production would lead to a carboxyhemoglobin level of .4 – .7%, but normal levels in nonsmokers in urban areas are 1 – 2%. Cigarette smoke contains 4% carbon monoxide, so smokers have levels of 5 – 6%. This can’t be good for their blood vessels.

#3: Doctors know more than they did. My brother is a very competent internist. He took over the practice of a similarly competent internist after his very untimely many death years ago. Naturally he got all the medical records on the patients. He found letters (now over 25 years old) from the late MD to his patients informing them of their lab results, and assuring them that their cholesterol was just fine at 250 mg%.

#4: The drugs are better. In addition they may be working in ways that we have yet to fathom. Consider the statins — their effect on vascular disease is far greater than their effect on blood lipids (cholesterol, triglyerides) — particularly when compared to other agents that lower blood lipids to the same extent.

Megan McArdle guesses it’s not exercise, since fat people probably aren’t the ones jogging. Additionally, a commenter reasonably points out that we may be “exercising” more because our lifestyles, especially our jobs, are less sedentary than they were.

Many of the recent advances in medicine have specifically aimed at ameliorating the effects of obesity and high cholestorol.  We’ve also gotten radically better at neo-natal care and otherwise radically improving survivability in those first days and weeks of a baby’s life.

Beyond that, it’s also quite possible that advances in medicine are a small part of the story.

• Violent crime is down.

• So are deaths in auto accidents.

• We’re less likely to get killed on the job – directly offsetting the fact that sitting behind a computer all day makes us more likely to get fat.

• We’re not losing tens of thousands of people to war every few years.

I’m sure I’m missing half a dozen other contributing factors. What are they?

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 warned he was not recommending people eat as much as they want. “It’s better that thin people try to gain normal weight, but we doubt it’s good for people of normal physique to put on more fat,” he said.

So, do overweight people live longest or not?  A more thorough Times of India report elucidates:

While studying the volunteers, scientists looked at the past physiques of the participants and how long they lived past the age of 40, and grouped them according to their body mass index (BMI), an indicator of how fat a person is.

Men of regular weight (with a BMI of between 18.5 and 25) at age 40 lived for an average of 39.94 more years, while those who were overweight (BMI of between 25 and 30) at age 40 lived a further 41.64 years, the study found.  Ladies of regular weight lived on average a further 47.97 years, compared with overweight women, who lived another 48.05 years. Obese men and women (BMI of 30 or more) lived a further 39.41 and 46.02 years, respectively. But thin men (BMI of less than 18.5) were on average expected to live 34.54 more years, and thin women another 41.79 years.

It’s not surprising that underweight people are unhealthy compared to people of ideal weight and even slightly overweight, especially since we’ve changed the standards in recent years lowering the “overweight” threshold.  But it is surprising that people who are slightly over the ideal BMI live longer than those within the ideal range:

As far as the reason for the surprising finding is concerned, it could be that many thin people smoke and a theory that thin people are more susceptible to contagious diseases.

So, I wouldn’t recommend rushing out to grab a cheeseburger in an attempt to extend your lifespan. On the other hand, if you really want a cheeseburger, it’s probably not worth fighting the urge too much if you’re well on this side of obese.

Photo by Flickr user Steve Dinn under Creative Commons license.

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 could provide no other details.]

I just received that alert, which is atop all of CNN’s pages right now, including a story from last night that puts it in perspective: “Regular flu has killed thousands since January.”

People are nervous about swine flu, but the regular flu kills 36,000 people a year in the United States.

An outbreak of swine flu that is suspected in more than 150 deaths in Mexico and has sickened dozens of people in the United States and elsewhere has grabbed the attention of a nervous public and of medical officials worried the strain will continue to mutate and spread. Experts are nervous that, as a new strain, the swine flu will be harder to stop because there aren’t any vaccines to fight it.

But even if there are swine-flu deaths outside Mexico — and medical experts say there very well may be — the virus would have a long way to go to match the roughly 36,000 deaths that seasonal influenza causes in the United States each year.  “That happens on an annual basis,” Dr. Brian Currie said Tuesday. Currie is vice president and medical director at Montefiore Medical Center in Bronx, New York.

Since January, more than 13,000 people have died of complications from seasonal flu, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly report on the causes of death in the nation. No fewer than 800 flu-related deaths were reported in any week between January 1 and April 18, the most recent week for which figures were available.  The report looks at deaths in the 122 largest cities in the United States.

Worldwide, the annual death toll from the flu is estimated to be between 250,000 and 500,000.

That doesn’t make the death of a small child from swine flu less tragic or the spread of a new strain for which we don’t yet have a vaccine less scary.  But one doesn’t want to focus on a single tree while ignoring the forest, either.

Oh, in an unpaid service to the pork industry, it’s worth noting that you don’t catch swine flu from eating the other white meat.

For U.S. pork producers the swine flu name has hurt, forcing government officials into the position of stressing that American pork is safe to eat and that other countries should not ban imports.  Pork, soybean and corn prices have fallen in the last two days, “and if this continues, obviously you have significant potential, which is why it’s important to get this right,” [Agriculture Secretary Tom] Vilsack said.

At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there was also talk of stripping the “swine” from swine flu, which CDC acting director Richard Besser said was leading to the misapprehension that people can catch the disease from pork. “That’s not helpful to pork producers. That’s not helpful to people who eat pork. It’s not helpful to people who are wondering, how can they get this infection,” Besser told a briefing.

Just in case you were wondering.  Somehow, though, like “overseas contingency operations,” I don’t see “H1N1 virus” catching on in the media.  Maybe the pork industry should hire Frank Luntz.

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 education offered in any of grades K through 12 shall include instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including the prevention, transmission and spread of HIV.”

Sargent notes that Obama camp’s explanation that the bill “would simply add instruction on disease prevention to already existing Illinois sex-ed standards.”   Indeed, Team Obama is calling the charge “perverse.”

“It is shameful and downright perverse for the McCain campaign to use a bill that was written to protect young children from sexual predators as a recycled and discredited political attack against a father of two young girls – a position that his friend Mitt Romney also holds. Last week, John McCain told Time magazine he couldn’t define what honor was. Now we know why,” said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton.

Taking legislative language and votes out of context to exploit cultural divides is so routine that it’s hard to get particularly excited by this. Indeed, the ad’s not totally unfair.

While I’m generally pro-sex ed, it strikes me as bizarre to mandate teaching kindergartners about STDs.  Making them aware of sexual predators is, sadly, probably necessary.  But are six-year-olds really having unprotected sex and sharing hyperdermic needles?

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 AP:

Tony Snow, a conservative writer and commentator who cheerfully sparred with reporters in the White House briefing room during a stint as President Bush’s press secretary, has died of colon cancer, Fox News reported Saturday. Snow was 53 years old.

Snow, who served as the first host of the television news program “Fox News Sunday” from 1996 to 2003, would later say that in the Bush administration he was enjoying “the most exciting, intellectually aerobic job I’m ever going to have.”

Snow was working for Fox News Channel and Fox News Radio when he replaced Scott McClellan as press secretary in May 2006 during a White House shake-up. Unlike McClellan, who came to define caution and bland delivery from the White House podium, Snow was never shy about playing to the cameras. With a quick-from-the-lip repartee, broadcaster’s good looks and a relentlessly bright outlook — if not always a command of the facts — he became a popular figure around the country to the delight of his White House bosses.

He served just 17 months as press secretary, a tenure interrupted by his second bout with cancer. In 2005 doctors had removed his colon and he began six months of chemotherapy. In March 2007 a cancerous growth was removed from his abdominal area and he spent five weeks recuperating before returning to the White House.

He resigned as Bush’s chief spokesman six months later, in September 2007, citing not his health but a need to earn more than the $168,000 a year he was paid in the government post. In April, he joined CNN as a commentator.

In that year and a half at the White House, Snow brought partisan zeal and the skills of a seasoned performer to the task of explaining and defending the president’s policies. During daily briefings, he challenged reporters, scolded them and questioned their motives as if he were starring in a TV show broadcast live from the West Wing.

Critics suggested that Snow was turning the traditionally informational daily briefing into a personality-driven media event short on facts and long on confrontation. He was the first press secretary, by his own accounting, to travel the country raising money for Republican candidates.

Although a star in conservative politics, as a commentator he had not always been on the president’s side. He once called Bush “something of an embarrassment” in conservative circles and criticized what he called Bush’s “lackluster” domestic policy.

His death, while hardly shocking given his health problems, is sad. Like so many media personalities, I had the sense that I “knew” Tony Snow after spending so many hours with him in my living room. He seemed like a decent guy and, certainly, 53 is far to young to die.

Tony Snow Tributes:

• Scott Johnson, Power Line: “Tony was one of the smartest, wittiest, and most humane men in our public life.”

• John Cole, Balloon Juice: “Fifty-three is just way too damned young, especially for a man with a family. Terrible. And, I should note, despite what you thought of Snow, he was the only competent Press Secretary of this administration.”

• Kim Priestap, Wizbang: “Why does it seem like only the good guys die young and not the evil ones like Chavez, Ahmadinejad, and Kim Jung Il?”

• Bruce McQuain, Q and O: “Tony was a gentleman who fielded every question and answered it without all the usual sidestepping spokesman do.“

• Matt Burden, Black Five: “A class act with sharp wit, keen intellect, and a huge heart – we’ll miss him greatly.”

• Joe Gandelman, Moderate Voice: “Snow was a public figure who truly seemed to have fun at his job and did it well. He was the quintessential broadcasting pro who put a professional TV face on the White House point of view.”

• Shannen Coffin, The Corner: “To call him a ‘rock star’ was an understatement. He brought substance to every meeting he was in and every subject he covered. . . . But what struck me most about him was his ceaseless optimism. Even when he was leaving his post, when his prognosis could not have been good, he was always in good cheer with his colleagues.”

• Michelle Malkin: “He was a true mensch, multi-talented–and one of the kindest people I had the honor to meet in the news business.”

• Ed Morrissey, Hot Air: “We lost a good man and a class act.”

• Warner Todd Huston, Stop the ACLU: “[I]t will be a tad colder and less friendly as well as a bit less optimistic now that this wonderful fellow has passed on to his just rewards.”

• Sister Toldja: “He was the best.”

• Faiz Shakir, Think Progress, links this Fox News tribute to their former colleague:

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 itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol.”

Often the most pure fluid available was alcohol — in beer and, later, wine — which has antibacterial properties. Sure, alcohol has its hazards, but as Johnson breezily observes, “Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties.” Besides, alcohol, although it is a poison, and an addictive one, became, especially in beer, a driver of a species-strengthening selection process.

Johnson notes that historians interested in genetics believe that the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest sorting-out among the people who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.

To avoid dangerous water, people had to drink large quantities of, say, beer. But to digest that beer, individuals needed a genetic advantage that not everyone had — what Johnson describes as the body’s ability to respond to the intake of alcohol by increasing the production of particular enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases. This ability is controlled by certain genes on chromosome four in human DNA, genes not evenly distributed to everyone. Those who lacked this trait could not, as the saying is, “hold their liquor.” So, many died early and childless, either of alcohol’s toxicity or from waterborne diseases.

Will goes so far as to assert that beer is a health food. Reminding you that he is, after all, a conservative who wears spectacles and was once famous for his bow ties, he adds the appropriate dig: “And you do not need to buy it from those wan, unhealthy-looking people who, peering disapprovingly at you through rimless Trotsky-style spectacles, seem to run all the health food stores.”

Tina Danze also has a down and dirty guide to “What beer geeks know,” including the proper glasses, serving temperatures, and pouring techniques required for various types.

UPDATE:  Steve Bainbridge points out that beer stocks are a good investment, too!  That, incidentally, is in decided contrast to beer itself which, as the old saying goes, you can only rent.

UPDATE (Dave Schuler)

The connection between civilization and beer is even stronger than George Will alleges. Nomads can do a lot of things but it’s darned hard to brew mead or beer unless you adopt a sedentary habit. There are anthropologists who believe that human beings founded the first permanent settlements in order to brew mead or beer. Beer-drinking anthropologists, naturally.

While we’re talking about beer, Anheuser-Busch continues to fend off the advances of Brazilian-managed Belgian-based InBev. A few days ago AB filed suit against the foreign giant to oppose the replacement of the AB board of directors. Now the company is playing “four corners”:

For those whose knowledge of college basketball goes back only as far as the shot clock, the strategy was to tie up the ball for long periods by passing it back and forth between four players. Back in the day, with the right players, the stalling tactic was quite effective in confounding the opponent (and putting the crowd to sleep). Wooden’s teams won 10 National College Athletic Assn. championships.

The delay, in this case, is clear: St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch has held off meeting with InBev to discuss the European company’s $46 billion offer. Meanwhile, the two brewing giants have furiously traded press releases, advertisements, and lawsuits as if they were political candidates battling a disputed election.

Beer poster image via James McGovern. Hat tip to Jonathan Adler for the Will story.

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 Cuba, multiplied the misery and beggary of Cuba’s luckless inhabitants while doing nothing whatever to weaken its military dictatorship. Helms’ amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act in 1973, forbidding American aid to any family-planning groups that even mentioned the option of abortion, also greatly added to the woes and miseries of millions of Africans. (Fairness obliges me to say that in his last year in the Senate he did somewhat relax his equally stubborn and reactionary opposition to measures designed to combat AIDS in Africa. But this was only because it had by then become obvious that the disease was heterosexually transmitted. In general, his attitude to the AIDS plague was determined by a Bible-based bigotry that saw it as divine retribution for perversion.)

I make no apology for calling him a provincial redneck, because that, to be fair to him once more, was how he thought of himself and even described himself. It was a scandal that a man with so little knowledge of the outside world should have had such a stranglehold on American foreign policy for so long. He once introduced Benazir Bhutto as the prime minister of India. All right, that could have happened to anybody. But what about the hearings on North Korea in which he made repeated references to “Kim Jong the Second”? In order to prevent any repetition of this idiotic gaffe, Helms’ staff propped up a piece of card on which was clearly written the pronunciation “Kim Jong ILL.” The senator from North Carolina duly made the adjustment, referring thenceforth to the North Korean despot as “Kim Jong the Third.”

That’s pretty funny right there. (And shouldn’t it have been “Kim Jong the 99th”?)

UPDATE: Marc Theissen, the chief White House speechwriter and spokesman for Helms from 1995 to 2001, presents the opposing view:

As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Helms led the successful effort to bring Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into the NATO alliance. He secured passage of bipartisan legislation to protect our men and women in uniform from the International Criminal Court. He won overwhelming approval for his legislation to support the Cuban people in their struggle against a tyrant. He won majority support in the Senate for his opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. He helped secure passage of the National Missile Defense Act and stopped the Clinton administration from concluding a new anti-ballistic missile agreement in its final months in office — paving the way for today’s deployment of America’s first defenses against ballistic missile attack. He helped secure passage of the Iraq Liberation Act, which expressed strong bipartisan support for regime change in Baghdad. He secured broad, bipartisan support to reorganize the State Department and bring much-needed reform to the United Nations, and he became the first legislator from any nation to address the U.N. Security Council — a speech few in that chamber will forget.

Not all of those policy outcomes were good ones and most of  represent the provincialism Hitchens accuses him of.  But it’s true that Helms was a powerful leader, not merely an obstructionist, in foreign affairs.

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. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has come out and stated that tomatoes are likely not the source of the salmonella outbreak.”

Photo: Nancee Lewis, San Diego Union-Tribune

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 of the vote.” Helms was particularly popular among older, conservative constituents and was considered one of the last “Old South” politicians to have served in the Senate. However, he also considered himself a voice of conservative youth, whom he hailed in the dedication of his autobiography. He is widely credited with helping to move North Carolina from a one-party state dominated by the Democratic Party into a competitive two-party state that usually votes Republican in presidential elections. Under Helms’ banner, many conservative Democrats in eastern North Carolina switched parties and began to vote increasingly Republican.

Because of recurring health problems, including bone disorders, prostate cancer and heart disease, Helms did not seek re-election in 2002. His Senate seat was won by Elizabeth Dole, wife of long-time colleague and former Senator Bob Dole. Helms remains to date the longest-serving popularly-elected U.S. senator in North Carolina history.

I got the news from Rob Bluey, who calls Helms “a truly great American and champion of freedom.”

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 and women, and found that the size of the two symmetrical halves of the brains of gay men more closely resembled those of straight women than they did straight men. In heterosexual women, the two halves of the brain are more or less the same size. In heterosexual men, the right hemisphere is slightly larger. Scans of the brains of gay men in the study, however, showed that their hemispheres were relatively symmetrical, like those of straight women, while the brains of homosexual women were asymmetrical like those of straight men. The number of nerves connecting the two sides of the brains of gay men were also more like the number in heterosexual women than in straight men.

This would seem further evidence, as if any were needed, that homosexuality is biological rather than “a lifestyle choice.”

Slate’s Will Saletin sees a potentially eerie consequence of this: Homosexuality being treated as a birth defect.

[T]he march of science into the gay brain hasn’t stopped. It has continued, seeking to understand not just what doesn’t cause homosexuality—playing with dolls, growing up with a strong mother, watching Will and Grace—but what does. And the more we understand these biological factors, the closer we get to being able to change them.

Going deeper into the study, we see that the differences in brain symmetry is an effect, not a cause. The most likely cause is “hormonal influences.” It turns out, “homosexuality may be caused by ‘under-exposure to prenatal androgens’ in males and ‘over-exposure’ in females.” This strikes me as quite plausible. Recall that there was a study several years back showing that women who took diet pills during pregnancy were much more likely to have gay children.

But, if it’s a mattering of balancing out hormones . . .

Where science leads, technology follows. Two years ago, scientists in Oregon reported an attempt to “interfere with defeminization of adult sexual partner preferences” in sheep. Their method, as they described it, was to alter hormonal inputs in pregnant ewes “during the period of gestation when the sheep brain is maximally sensitive to the behavior-modifying effects of exogenous testosterone.” When the attempt failed, they concluded that the dosage should be increased.

Would hormonal intervention work in humans? Should we try it? Some thinkers are intrigued. Last year, the Rev. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote: “If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use.” Mohler told the Associated Press that morally, this would be no different from curing fetal blindness or any other “medical problem.” The Rev. Joseph Fessio, editor of the press that publishes the pope’s work, agreed: “Same-sex activity is considered disordered. If there are ways of detecting diseases or disorders of children in the womb … that respected the dignity of the child and mother, it would be a wonderful advancement of science.”

If the idea of chemically suppressing homosexuality in the womb horrifies you, I have bad news: You won’t be in the room when it happens. Parents control medical decisions, and surveys indicate that the vast majority of them would be upset to learn that their child was gay. Already, millions are screening embryos and fetuses to eliminate those of the “wrong” sex. Do you think they won’t screen for the “wrong” sexual orientation, too?

Oddly, this is happening simultaneously with people becoming far, far accepting of homosexuals and homosexuality. Yet, while they may intellectually agree with the now-shopworn Seinfeld catchphrase, “not that there’s anything wrong with that, most wouldn’t go so far as being indifferent to whether their own kid were gay. Most, I suspect, would indeed take relatively-low-risk medical steps to ensure that their kid is “normal.”

It doesn’t end there. A few years back, Bryan Murley wondred whether the availability of genetic testing for homosexual predisposition would lead to aborting gay fetuses. It almost surely would.

Science that has answered the prayers of gays in demonstrating a biological determinant, proving that they weren’t freaks who made a choice to live a life of sinful disobedience to society’s moral code but merely living “as God made them.” This has helped normalize homosexuality in the eyes of the medical community — it has long since been removed from the list of “mental disorders” — and the minds of most Americans. Yet, we may have come full circle to thinking of homosexuality as something to be cured.

UPDATE: My colleague Alex Knapp notes the large number of homosexuals who have made tremendous contributions to humanity and wonders whether changing “the very structure” of their brains risks might have also taken away their gifts. The snarky retort I generally make to that sort of argument is to note the number of truly rotten people who we might theoretically been saved from. But the real answer is that we’re far from having a sufficient understanding of such things to know what the effects of hormonal “cures” would be. Which is probably as good a reason as any not to attempt them.

Image: Photo.net

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 many people are suffering in each place. We don’t know if people are on the move, or what diseases are starting to appear, or exactly what state their homes and infrastructure are in.

Without good intelligence it’s very hard to run an effective humanitarian operation – especially an airborne one. It would be only too easy to drop the food miles from the nearest village, or even in water or swamp. Food is perishable and leaving it outside for too long could ruin it. You can’t drop a well or a sanitation system from the sky without specialists to set it up. Communities could find themselves with aid completely inappropriate to their situation.

Of course, air drops would presumably be at least marginally better than standing by and doing nothing while waiting for the junta to allow us to help. But it’s not as simple as it sounds. That’s pretty much always the case when “Send in the military!” is proposed as a solution to some crisis.

True, we managed to overcome plenty of obstacles in a somewhat similar situation decades ago with the Berlin Airlift. But we were dealing with a rather smaller geographic area and had plenty of experienced people on the ground to deal with the sort of issues Stocking describes.

Via Andrew Sullivan

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 light sleepers to higher smoking rates, less physical activity and more alcohol use.

The research adds weight to a stream of studies that have found obesity and other health problems in those who don’t get proper shuteye, said Dr. Ron Kramer, a Colorado physician and a spokesman for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. “The data is all coming together that short sleepers and long sleepers don’t do so well,” Kramer said.

The study released Wednesday is based on door-to-door surveys of 87,000 U.S. adults from 2004 through 2006 conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Such surveys can’t prove cause-effect relationships, so — for example — it’s not clear if smoking causes sleeplessness or if sleeplessness prompts smoking, said Charlotte Schoenborn, the study’s lead author. It also did not account for the influence of other factors, such as depression, which can contribute to heavy eating, smoking, sleeplessness and other problems.

In other words, this is what social scientists refer to as “a completely worthless study.” Your tax dollars at work.

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 policy consensus and, more concretely, a rethinking of “national security policy” to encompass more than just military issues.

It was an interesting talk and I look forward to reading the report in detail. There are, however, two basic problems that need to be overcome.

First, the panel shares an undue fondness for the past, which they mistakenly recall as a time when “politics stopped at the water’s edge” and policy could be debated in a spirit of bipartisan comity. The reality, of course, is different. As bitter as the fight over Iraq is, it pales in comparison to the split over Vietnam. Foreign policy has been a tool of political campaigns for decades; certainly, it has been key to most Republican victories over the last 30-odd years. And the idea that the past was a golden era where everyone abroad loved the United States and looked to us for guidance is simply absurd. Ronald Reagan had every bit as many problems selling missile defense, the placement of Pershing IIs in Germany, and so forth as George W. Bush is having now.

Second, a bipartisan approach to foreign policy — which I heartily support in principle — can often be platitudinous. Here is the outline of the Arsenal:

Terrorism:

• Building new alliances and international frameworks to fight extremists by coordinating military, law enforcement and intelligence agencies and creating a sustainable international legal framework to combat terrorist movements;
• Countering and undermining jihadist ideology in a more effective battle for hearts and minds in the Islamic world by expanding development assistance, trade and investment opportunities and health and education programs to raise economic prospects and increasing public diplomacy; and
• Investing in alternative energy to begin to diversify energy sources for us and our allies.

Energy:

• Strengthening the international concert of oil importing nations by encouraging the International Energy Association to admit China and India to its ranks;
• Diversifying U.S. energy supplies by encouraging investment in environmentally responsible development of new oil and gas fields and renewable energy and expanding domestic refining capacity; and
• Doubling annual U.S. investment in research and development of alternative energy, including hydrogen, clean coal and renewables.

Climate Change:

• Actively leading the negotiation of an enforceable international framework to reverse global warming that is compatible with continued economic development;
• Leading by example by adopting rigorous climate policies and investing in clean energy; and
• Preparing now for the global consequences associated with predicted climate change, such as climate refugees and tropical disease migration.

Nuclear Proliferation:

• Taking the lead in creating a new international consensus opposed to nuclear proliferation that can mount meaningful economic, political, and even military sanctions to deter and dissuade would-be proliferators;
• Strengthening existing international frameworks, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty;
• Changing the calculation states make of the cost and benefit in the pursuit of nuclear arms; and
• Preventing terrorist organizations from acquiring and using nuclear weapons.

With the possible exception of IEA expansion, a topic that’s sufficiently obscure as to be off my radar screen, this is all incredibly uncontroversial. There’s some genuine debate on how to deal with terrorism and whether change is something that requires substantial government action but there’s plenty of consensus at the level of these bullet points.

The problem, as Kerry himself admits, is actually building the political consensus to formulate and enact public policy surrounding these things. That’s much, much harder than agreeing on an outline. The hope, I suppose, is that having people of such high profile reaching across the aisle to speak on these issues will help forge consensus for action. I hope that’s the case.

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 tests.

Senator Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican who had been almost single-handedly holding up action on the bill, said in an interview Tuesday that most of his concerns had been resolved and predicted that the bill would pass soon.

Proponents say the new law, more than a dozen years in the making, would help usher in an age of genetic medicine, in which DNA tests might help predict if a person is at risk of a disease, allowing action to be taken to prevent it.

Some of the tests already exist, like one for breast cancer risk, and new ones are being introduced almost every month. But backers of the legislation say many people are afraid of taking such tests because they fear the results would be used to deny them employment or health insurance.

This is a great of how information can prevent the market from arriving at the optimal solution. For example, if you are genetically predisposed towards a given condition then finding out early might be the best in terms of treating the problem and being more proactive (i.e. testing for that condition earlier and more often than one otherwise would). At the same time, when such information becomes available insurance (in the true sense of the word, not the nonsense we have today) becomes problematic. Insurance works best when you have events that are costly and also uncommon. You wouldn’t want to get insurance for the common cold. Similarly you don’t want to offer insurance that covers child birth since that is a voluntary act, it would be like offering car insurance to drivers at a demolition derby. Then there are firms who may not be thrilled with investing a considerable amount of time training an employee only to have that employee no longer able to function in that job due to either disability or death. So should a firm be able to use such information in hiring decisions?

From a purely theoretical stand point the optimal market outcome is achievable only under situations where information is perfect. As such, hiding information, as this legislation does, creates a wedge between what the actual outcome is and the theoretically optimal solution. However, Mangu-Ward is missing one little fly ointment in regards to her take on this issue. We are already dealing with a sub-optimal situation. Part of the problem is due to informational asymmetries. It isn’t necessarily clear that removing some, but not all, of those asymmetries will result in an improvement. For example, a law that prohibits employers and insurance companies from discriminating against employees who have a genetic predisposition for a condition would remove some of the incentive problems in terms of using that information to obtain timely and improved medical treatment.

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 contaminated blood product. Unknowingly, he transmitted it to his wife, Lauren, who in turn passed it to their son in the womb or through her milk.

[...]

AIDS struck the Burk family all at once. Only after Dwight was diagnosed last August did his parents’ symptoms – the unexplained rashes, diarrhea, swollen lymph nodes – make sense to doctors. In December Patrick was hospitalized for a month with a type of pneumonia that defines AIDS; Lauren has the condition called pre-AIDS. A registered nurse, she still drags herself to work at an institution for the retarded in Ebensburg, Pa., where Patrick also was employed.

The future is dark, yet Lauren stays cheerful and Patrick has a quiet confidence that he’ll beat the disease. “Apart we’d probably be two of the weakest people,” says Lauren. “But together we’re strong.”

Dwight and Patrick succumbed to the disease. Lauren, though, has managed to survive, her sister reports to Michael, thanks to tremendous medical advances since the article was written.

Via Andrew Sullivan.