Bakker already has treated 20 video game addicts, aged 13 to 30, since January. Some show withdrawal symptoms, such as shaking and sweating, when they look at a computer.

The part of this that's a problem is, it blames the games. I don't want to blame the person who is so out of their gourd that they're popping pills to stay awake longer so they can play longer, but it's not like the games are doing things to your CNS (other than maybe giving you the headache from hell because the monitor refresh rate is bad).

Making the nuts into victims makes games bad and the nuts ok. Bullshit. They're nuts, that's why they have the problem, and if it wasn't video games it'd be something else.

Detox clinic opening for video addicts - Yahoo! News

"We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use," he said. "What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect."

Smoking pot protects you from cancer. Who would have thought?

Study Finds No Cancer-Marijuana Connection

Today, May 3—in case you didn't know it—is "National Day To Prevent Teen Pregnancy." In the past decade, possibly no social program has been as dramatically effective as the effort to reduce teen pregnancy, and no results so uniformly celebrated. Between 1990 and 2000 the U.S. teen pregnancy rate plummeted by 28 percent, dropping from 117 to 84 pregnancies per 1,000 women aged 15-19. Births to teenagers are also down, as are teen abortion rates. It's an achievement so profound and so heartening that left and right are eager to take credit for it, and both can probably do so. Child-health advocates generally acknowledge that liberal sex education and conservative abstinence initiatives are both to thank for the fact that fewer teenagers are ending up in school bathroom stalls sobbing over the results of a home pregnancy test.

Read the full article. From the sound of the rest of it, the real reason for the lack of pregnancies isn't that teens are more responsible and either use condoms or don't have sex, but that the little swimmers don't swim so good.

Maybe a comparison of teen STD rates is in order.
UPDATE here's the comparison data from the CDC. While the gonorrhea rate is down, the syphilis rate is up and the chlamydia rate is basically unchanged. The fundamental upshot seems to be teen pregnancy is down because male fertility is for shit, and not because of education or abstinance.

Sperm counts and teen pregnancy rates. By Liza Mundy

The criminal investigation was disclosed at a court hearing in a lawsuit over the F.D.A.'s actions on the emergency contraceptive Plan B, a subject of bitter contention during Dr. Crawford's tenure as acting commissioner and commissioner. After the pill's maker, Barr Laboratories, applied three years ago to sell the pill over the counter, the agency repeatedly delayed making a decision on the application.

While many lawmakers, abortion rights advocates and former F.D.A. officials said the delays had resulted from politics, Dr. Crawford and other agency officials said their concerns were scientific and legal.

Hey! Lying to Congress! Way to go Crawford! How far up the food and drug chain will this one go?

Ex-Head of F.D.A. Faces Criminal Inquiry - New York Times

"If you prevent countries from using generic drugs," said Pedro Chequer, the head of Brazil's national AIDS program, "you are creating a concrete obstacle to providing access to drugs. You are promoting genocide, because you're killing people."

Maybe if the drug companies spent money on R&D anywhere near the amount they spend on advertising or lining their pockets, they'd already have the next generation of drugs ready to make money with.

U.S. pushes to limit generic-drug rights in trade pacts - Business - International Herald Tribune

saying he wanted to stockpile enough vaccine to protect 20 million Americans against the current strain of bird flu.

Once again, dubya demonstrates why Crawford needs their villiage idiot back. The current strain of bird flu is a great hazard to birds, and probably to the people who handle them, but making a vaccine for the current strain will do a whole lot of nothing other than throw yet more money down a hole.

Funding research is one thing, and creating a system to produce vaccines faster than the current system is a good idea, except the way to actually DO that would be to put it under the direct control of either CDC or NIH, and I think that'd be a bit too much socialized medicine for these guys. If this goes through it is yet another windfall for pharmaceutical companies and yet another shovel to the back of the head for everyone else.

Bush Outlines $7.1B Flu-Fighting Strategy

Poice arrested Noesen in July after an incident at the Onalaska Wal Mart. Noesen was working as a temporary pharacist when he again refused to fill a birth control prescription. He created a disturbance when management asked him to leave the store, police were called and officers arrested him.

But, Noesen failed to show up for a court date last week and the warrant was issued.

On Wisconsin! Go get this craphead!

Pharmacist Sought WXOW TV-19

When she finally did find a pharmacy with it, she said she was told the pharmacist on duty would not dispense it because of religious and moral objections.

If the pharmacy doesn't carry something (and in this case they comment later that a bit over half the pharmacies in the state don't carry it), then they don't carry it. If I owned a pharmacy, and I carried it, and I had an employee who refused to fill a prescription, I ask why, and if there is a medical reason (drug A, which the person is on, reacts badly with drug B) then we tell the person and we refer them back to their doctor based on that. That's a valid reason to defer filling the prescription.

If I have an employee who refuses to do it for "religious or moral reasons," I get a new employee. Kosher butchers don't carry bacon, and religious kook pharmacies don't carry RU-486. I can't get bacon at a kosher deli, they don't carry it. But if I go to a non-kosher butcher for bacon (which they have) and get told, "No, I won't give you bacon because it's against my religion," then that person is working in the wrong place.

Rape victim: 'Morning after' pill denied | The Arizona Daily Star

Public Citizen petitioned the
Food and Drug Administration Thursday to add black-box warnings to the labels of Viagra, Cialis and Levitra, as well as the hypertension drug Revatio, which is similar to Viagra.

A small number of people taking the impotence drugs have developed NAION, or non-arteritic ischemic optic neuropathy, a loss of vision that is frequently irreversible.

So it's now clear, mastubation doesn't cause blindness but Viagra can.

FDA Asked to Require ED-Blindness Label

The ministry said the turkey came from a small private poultry farm of about 20 turkeys on the tiny island of Inousses off Chios which belongs to the Chios prefecture.

The only question about what happens next is virulence. This WILL make a jump to human transmission, and based on the spread rate among birds (which don't move around as randomly as we do) and assuming transmission among humans is as easy, this will be global at the same time we realize it has made the shift.

The question is, how to deal with it. Quarantine won't be of any use, by the time it's known, it will be too late. It's viral, which means there isn't really a treatment. If a vaccine can be developed, that would make an enormous difference, but that's not a sure thing, and the numbers required would be astronomical.

Best case scenario? The version that makes the leap isn't especially virulent and it's like an average flu. 35-50,000 dead. A more realistic answer? 350,000-5,000,000 (one to two odrers of magnitude worse). Worst case? Decimation. We'll see what happens.

Greece says has detected one case of birdflu