02.08.07
Posted in Yada Yada, Science, Politics, Religion at 6:25 am by Administrator
Mandate HPV vaccine?
Lawmakers, parents, doctors debate if state should follow Texas’ lead
BY EMILY HAGEDORN, Californian staff writer
e-mail: ehagedorn@bakersfield.com | Wednesday, Feb 7 2007 10:56 PM
Last Updated: Wednesday, Feb 7 2007 10:55 PM
In a state often liberal when it comes to women’s health — it was one of the first to dispense emergency contraception without a prescription — some people wonder if mandatory human papillomavirus vaccines for school-aged girls are not far off.
If California mandated the vaccines, which have been shown to prevent some cervical cancers, it would follow Texas, which became the first state to do so Friday.
“It’s a very wonderful and proactive way of avoiding disease,” said Dr. B.A. Jinadu, director of the Kern County Department of Public Health. “But let’s not take the responsibility away from the parent.”
Through a Republican governor’s order, Texas girls must now receive the HPV vaccine before entering sixth grade unless their parents opt out. Now there’s a bill pending in the California Assembly, AB 16 by Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, D-Mountain View, carrying the same requirement.
“Because it’s largely for a sexually transmitted disease, then I’m not sure of the medical necessity for all students,” said Assemblywoman Jean Fuller, R-Bakersfield.
Sen. Roy Ashburn, R-Bakersfield, is definitely opposed because “there’s a direct correlation between the government mandate and a lack of personal responsibility.”
Sen. Dean Florez, D-Shafter, says parents should decide if their daughter gets the vaccine and “we can then look at participation rates and adjust accordingly.”
But Assemblywoman Nicole Parra, D-Hanford, says she is “encouraged by any effort to make the HPV vaccine more readily available and affordable to all women.”
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger hasn’t taken a position on mandated HPV vaccinations, said spokeswoman Sabrina Lockhart, but has proposed spending $11 million to provide the vaccine to Medi-Cal-eligible women age 19 to 26.
HPV is one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases, infecting at least 80 percent of women by age 50, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The virus includes more than 100 different strains and types.
Most HPV infections are asymptomatic and clear up on their own, but some can cause genital warts or cancer.
The HPV vaccine, given in three shots over six months, is recommended for girls before they become sexually active because the vaccine is most effective in women who have not acquired the four types of HPV covered by the vaccine, the CDC says.
The vaccine has been found to be almost 100 percent effective in preventing these four types, which cause 70 percent of cervical cancers and 90 percent of genital warts.
What Kern doctors think
Parents and patients are more curious about the vaccine’s availability than risks, local physicians said.
“We’re very keen on it,” said Dr. Philip Davis, obstetrician/gynecologist with San Dimas Medical Group, which will soon offer the vaccine. “If we can knock out the majority of cervical cancer, hallelujah.”
Potential side effects worry Dr. Joel Cohen, chief of service for obstetrics and gynecology at Bakersfield’s Kaiser Permanente. Gardasil, the only HPV vaccine, was just approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in June. But to date, he doesn’t know of any major complications, only injection-site pain and swelling. Cohen opposes mandatory HPV vaccinations.
“I still believe patients have their right to be well-informed and to choose their own health care,” he said.
Unless HPV is a public health problem, it shouldn’t be mandatory, said Dr. Michael Thorpe, independent family practice physician with Lake Truxtun Medical Group.
“HPV is just rampant,” he said. “Anything that can help these poor ladies is good.”
Some patients are concerned about the cost, Davis said. It’s $360 for the three-shot series, the CDC says. Others have quoted it as high as $500.
Medi-Cal and many insurance companies are starting to cover it, local doctors said.
Parents chime in
Any mandate would face a lot of opposition locally, said Kimberly Van Horne, a Bakersfield parent of teen and preteen boys.
The fact the vaccine is supposed to be administered before someone is sexually active should be stressed, she said.
“When we get the vaccine for measles, it doesn’t mean we’ll get it that week,” Van Horne said.
The fact this health issue involves reproduction makes mandating the vaccine an unfortunate taboo, said Paul Anderson, a Bakersfield father of three boys.
“If it was for breast cancer, this wouldn’t be as big an issue,” he said. “Prevention is always a lot cheaper than fixing it later.”
Activists react
Terri Palmquist, a Bakersfield mother and well-known anti-abortion rights activist, says a mandate would promote promiscuity.
“I’m happy I home-school my children,” she said. “I think we should be spending our money on telling our kids how to save themselves rather than on every little disease we could prevent.”
Planned Parenthood supports a mandate and for the government to help people pay for the shots, said Patsy Montgomery, spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood Mar Monte.
Requiring vaccination would also protect young girls and women who are raped or sexually abused from getting HPV, she said.
Hopefully this debate will help more people learn about STDs, said Linda Davis, executive director of the abstinence-based Pregnancy Center.
“There’s a responsibility on the part of the public health sector to be fully informed,” she said. “I hope parents will discuss it with their daughters.”
Human Papillomavirus
Cause: genital contact
Symptoms: Visible genital warts or precancerous changes in the cervix, vulva, anus or penis. Men can get HPV too but it largely affects women.
Complications: Anal or genital cancers
Treatment: There is no cure, but in most women, the infection goes away on its own.
Prevention: Abstinence from sex. Women can get the HPV vaccine, which protects against four types of HPV. A latex male condom only protects the area it is covering, and HPV can be spread elsewhere.
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
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01.28.07
Posted in Yada Yada, Science, WTF at 8:14 pm by Administrator
Brain Man
Jan. 28, 2007
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(CBS) Twenty-four years ago, 60 Minutes introduced viewers to George Finn, whose talent was immortalized in the movie “Rainman.” George has a condition known as savant syndrome, a mysterious disorder of the brain where someone has a spectacular skill, even genius, in a mind that is otherwise extremely limited.
Morley Safer met another savant, Daniel Tammet, who is called “Brain Man” in Britain. But unlike most savants, he has no obvious mental disability, and most important to scientists, he can describe his own thought process. He may very well be a scientific Rosetta stone, a key to understanding the brain.
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Back in 1983, George Finn, blessed or obsessed with calendar calculation, could give you the day if you gave him the date.
“What day of the week was August 13th, 1911?” Safer quizzed Finn.
“A Sunday,” Finn replied.
“What day of the week was May 20th, 1921?” Safer asked.
“Friday,” Finn answered.
George Finn is a savant. In more politically incorrect times he would have been called an “idiot savant” – a mentally handicapped or autistic person whose brain somehow possesses an island of brilliance.
Asked if he knew how he does it, Finn told Safer, “I don’t know, but it’s just that, that’s fantastic I can do that.”
If this all seems familiar, there’s a reason: five years after the 60 Minutes broadcast, Dustin Hoffman immortalized savants like George in the movie “Rainman.””
Which brings us to that other savant we mentioned: Daniel Tammet. He is an Englishman, who is a 27-year-old math and memory wizard.
“I was born November 8th, 1931,” Safer remarks.
“Uh-huh. That’s a prime number. 1931. And you were born on a Sunday. And this year, your birthday will be on a Wednesday. And you’ll be 75,” Tammet tells Safer.
It is estimated there are only 50 true savants living in the world today, and yet none are like Daniel. He is articulate, self-sufficient, blessed with all of the spectacular ability of a savant, but with very little of the disability. Take his math skill, for example.
Asked to multiply 31 by 31 by 31 by 31, Tammet quickly – and accurately – responded with “923,521.”
And it’s not just calculating. His gift of memory is stunning. Briefly show him a long numerical sequence and he’ll recite it right back to you. And he can do it backwards, to boot.
That feat is just a warm-up for Daniel Tammet. He first made headlines at Oxford, when he publicly recited the endless sequence of numbers embodied by the Greek letter “Pi.” Pi, the numbers we use to calculate the dimensions of a circle, are usually rounded off to 3.14. but its numbers actually go on to infinity.
Daniel studied the sequence – a thousand numbers to a page.
“And I would sit and I would gorge on them. And I would just absorb hundreds and hundreds at a time,” he tells Safer.
It took him several weeks to prepare and then Daniel headed to Oxford, where with number crunchers checking every digit, he opened the floodgates of his extraordinary memory.
Tammet says he was able to recite, in a proper order, 22,514 numbers. It took him over five hours and he did it without a single mistake.
Scientists say a memory feat like this is truly extraordinary. Dr. V.S. Ramachandran and his team at the California Center for Brain Study tested Daniel extensively after his Pi achievement.
What did he make of him?
“I was surprised at how articulate and intelligent he was, and was able to interact socially and introspect on his own—abilities,” says Dr. Ramachandran.
And while that introspection is extremely rare among savants, Daniel’s ability to describe how his mind works could be invaluable to scientists studying the brain, our least understood organ.
“Even how you and I do 17 minus nine is a big mystery. You know, how are these little wisps of jelly in your brain doing that computation? We don’t know that,” Dr. Ramachandran explains.
It may seem to defy logic, but Ramachandran believes that a savant’s genius could actually result from brain injury. “One possibility is that many other parts of the brain are functioning abnormally or sub-normally. And this allows the patient to allocate all his attentional resources to the one remaining part,” he explains. “And there’s a lot of clinical evidence for this. Some patients have a stroke and suddenly, their artistic skills improve.”
That theory fits well with Daniel. At the age of four, he suffered a massive epileptic seizure. He believes that seizure contributed to his condition. Numbers were no longer simply numbers and he had developed a rare crossing of the senses known as synesthesia.
“I see numbers in my head as colors and shapes and textures. So when I see a long sequence, the sequence forms landscapes in my mind,” Tammet explains. “Every number up to 10,000, I can visualize in this way, has it’s own color, has it’s own shape, has it’s own texture.”
For example, when Daniel says he sees Pi, he does those instant computations, he is not calculating, but says the answer simply appears to him as a landscape of colorful shapes.
“The shapes aren’t static. They’re full of color. They’re full of texture. In a sense, they’re full of life,” he says.
Asked if they’re beautiful, Tammet says, “Not all of them. Some of them are ugly. 289 is an ugly number. I don’t like it very much. Whereas 333, for example, is beautiful to me. It’s round. It’s….”
“Chubby,” Safer remarks.
‘It’s—yes. It’s chubby,’ Tammet agrees.
Yet even with the development of these extraordinary abilities as a child, nobody sensed that Daniel was a prodigy, including his mother, Jennifer. But he was different.
“He was constantly counting things,” Jennifer remembers. “I think, what first attracted him to books, was the actual numbers on each page. And he just loved counting.”
Asked if she thinks there’s a connection between his epilepsy and his rare talent, she tells Safer, “He was always different from—when he was really a few weeks old, I noticed he was different. So I’m not sure that it’s entirely that, but I think it might have escalated it.”
Daniel was also diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome—a mild form of autism. It made for a painful childhood.
“I would flap my hands sometimes when I was excited, or pull at my fingers, and pull at my lips,” Tammet remembers. “And of course, the children saw these things and would repeat them back to me, and tease me about them. And I would put my fingers in my ears and count very quickly in powers of two. Two, four, eight, 16, 32, 64.”
“Numbers were my friends. And they never changed. So, they were reliable. I could trust them,” he says.
And yet, Daniel did not retreat fully into that mysterious prison of autism, as many savants do. He believes his large family may have actually forced him to adapt.
“Because my parents, having nine children, had so much to do, so much to cope with, I realized I had to do for myself,” he says.
He now runs his own online educational business. He and his partner Neil try to keep a low profile, despite his growing fame.
Yet the limits of his autism are always there. “I find it difficult to walk in the street sometimes if there are lots of people around me. If there’s lots of noise, I put my fingers in my ears to block it out,’ he says.
That anxiety keeps him close to home. He can’t drive, rarely goes shopping, and finds the beach a difficult place because of his compulsion to count the grains of sand. And it manifests itself in other ways, like making a very precise measurement of his cereal each morning: it must be exactly 45 grams of porridge, no more, no less.
Daniel was recently profiled in a British documentary called “Brainman.” The producers posed a challenge that he could not pass up: Learn a foreign language in a week – and not just any foreign language, but Icelandic, considered to be one of the most difficult languages to learn.
In Iceland, he studied and practiced with a tutor. When the moment of truth came and he appeared on TV live with a host, the host said, “I was amazed. He was responding to our questions. He did understand them very well and I thought that his grammar was very good. We are very proud of our language and that someone is able to speak it after only one week, that’s just great.”
“Do you think that Daniel, in a certain way, represents a real pathway to further understanding the brain?” Safer asks Dr. Ramachandran.
“I think one could say that time and again in science, something that looks like a curiosity initially often leads to a completely new direction of research,” Ramachandran replies. “Sometimes, they provide the golden key. Doesn’t always happen. Sometimes it’s just mumbo-jumbo. But that may well be true with savants.”
Daniel continues to volunteer for scientists who want to understand his amazing brain. But he is reluctant to become what he calls “a performing seal” and has refused most offers to cash in on his remarkable skills.
“People all the time asking me to choose numbers for the lottery. Or to invent a time machine. Or to come up with some great discovery,” he explains. “But my abilities are not those that mean that I can do at everything.”
But he has written a book about his experiences, entitled “Born on a Blue Day.”
He also does motivational speeches for parents of autistic children—yet one more gift of his remarkable brain.
But at the end of the day—genius or not—that brain does work a little differently.
“One hour after we leave today, and I will not remember what you look like. And I will find it difficult to recognize you, if I see you again. I will remember your handkerchief. And I will remember you have four buttons on your sleeve. And I’ll remember the type of tie you’re wearing. It’s the details that I remember,” Tammet tells Safer.
And it’s the details that make us all so different. One man may see numbers as a tedious necessity of modern life, another sees them as the essence of life.
“Pi is one of the most beautiful things in all the world and if I can share that joy in numbers, if I can share that in some small measure with the world through my writing and through my speaking, then I feel that I will have done something useful,” he says.
Produced By Deirdre Naphin
© MMVII, CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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