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Beaks, Bills and Climate
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, June 28, 2010
In the 1800s, an American zoologist named Joel Allen posited that animals in cold climates evolved to have shorter appendages (limbs, ears, and tails) than those in hot climates, in order to minimize surface area and thereby minimize heat loss. The theory, known as Allen’s rule, has long appeared in biology books, but scientific evidence for it has remained weak.
Now a study comparing bird bills provides the most substantial evidence yet in support of Allen’s rule.
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Effort Uses Dogs’ DNA to Track Their Abusers
By MALCOLM GAY, The New York Times, June 25, 2010
ST. LOUIS — Scientists and animal rights advocates have enlisted DNA evidence to do for man’s best friend what the judicial system has long done for human crime victims. They have created the country’s first dog-fighting DNA database, which they say will help criminal investigators piece together an abused animal’s history by establishing ties among breeders, owners, pit operators and the animals themselves.
Called the Canine Codis, or Combined DNA Index System, the database is similar to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s digital archive containing the DNA profiles of criminal offenders. Scientists say that by swabbing the inner cheek of a dog, they will be able to determine whether the animal comes from one of several known dog-fighting bloodlines.
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Antibiotics in Animals Need Limits, F.D.A. Says
By GARDINER HARRIS, The New York Times, June 28, 2010
WASHINGTON — Federal food regulators took a tentative step Monday toward banning a common use of penicillin and tetracycline in the water and feed given cattle, chickens and pigs in hopes of slowing the growing scourge of killer bacteria.
But the Food and Drug Administration has tried without success for more than three decades to ban such uses. In the past, Congress has stepped in at the urging of agricultural interests and stopped the agency from acting.
In the battle between public health and agriculture, the guys with the cowboy hats generally win.
The F.D.A. released a policy document stating that agricultural uses of antibiotics should be limited to assuring animal health, and that veterinarians should be involved in the drugs’ uses.
While doing nothing to change the present oversight of antibiotics, the document is the first signal in years that the agency intends to rejoin the battle to crack down on agricultural uses of antibiotics that many infectious disease experts oppose.
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Exercise: Bicycling to Keep Off Extra Pounds
By RONI CARYN RABIN, The New York Times, June 28, 2010
Bicycling for exercise may help women control their weight during their 30s and 40s, a new study says.
Brisk walking has the same effect for slim, overweight and obese women, researchers found, but slow walking does not.
The findings are based on the second Harvard Nurses’ Health Study, which is tracking 116,608 female nurses who periodically fill out questionnaires about their health, weight, diet and behavior. The new analysis, published in the June 28 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, looked at weight change and behavior from 1989 (when the nurses were 25 to 42 years old) to 2005; to isolate the effects of exercise, the researchers controlled for other obesity risk factors.
They found that women who increased physical activities like brisk walking and bicycling by 30 minutes a day during the 16-year period maintained their weight and even lost a few pounds, but those whose exercise was slow walking did not lose any weight.
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Childhood: Combination Vaccine and Seizure Risk
By RONI CARYN RABIN, The New York Times, June 28, 2010
Toddlers who get a vaccine that combines the measles-mumps-rubella and chickenpox immunizations are at twice the usual risk for fevers that lead to convulsions, a new study reports.
The risk for a so-called febrile seizure after any measles vaccination is less than 1 seizure per 1,000 vaccinations; but among children who received the combined vaccine, there is 1 additional seizure for every 2,300 vaccinated, said Dr. Nicola Klein, the study’s lead investigator and director of the Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center.
The reactions, which occur a week to 10 days after vaccination, are not life-threatening and usually resolve on their own. The fever-related convulsions can be frightening, but they are brief and not linked to any long-term complications or seizure disorders.
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Rethinking the Way We Rank Medical Schools
By PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D., The New York Times, June 17, 2010
During my internship, the first year after graduating from medical school, I took care of a middle-aged woman who began our first conversation with a question that patients still ask me today.
“So doctor,” she said as I pulled my stethoscope out to listen to her heart, “where did you go to medical school?”
In a social context, I might have considered her question to be polite chatter, a filler during an awkward quiet moment. But on that particular afternoon her words felt more like a dart lobbed at what I had presumed to be a budding and promising patient-doctor relationship.
Trust from this patient, I remember thinking, is not going to depend on my bedside manner or clinical judgment but my medical school.
But even before I had placed my stethoscope bell against my patient’s chest, I realized that I, too, had been culpable of submitting doctors to the same line of questioning. Although I might have satisfied my curiosity more surreptitiously — searching on the Internet, scanning hospital directories, inconspicuously craning my neck to discern Latinized school names on diplomas — I was just as eager as my patient to learn about the medical schools my doctors had attended.
Once I had the information, I would do what my patient did that afternoon: I would mentally find its place within the medical school hierarchy in my mind. Like some existential fast forward button, the right answer to this question could raise the trust in any patient-doctor relationship to a whole new level without a second thought, because by virtue of having graduated from a “good” school, that doctor had the ability to address the most pressing needs of all of his or her patients.
The thought process was easy — good school, good doctor; bad school, bad doctor.
Maybe.
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