which surfaced back, what, 10 years or so ago? Painted as lurid scandal-mongering with no substance, especially by the Omaha establishment, the reaction by the Republicans to the Foley scandal really makes one wonder about the Franklin case. Here's one of the calmer websites on the matter for those of you who are curious.

http://www.franklincase.org/timeline.htm

I want to hear about battling posters again - those were the days. Doonesbury even ran a series about the wall posters.

it's common wisdom, accepted fact, what-have-you, that perchlorate suppresses thyroid function. I was unaware that studies had been done only in men or that those studies had not shown much of a relationship. The main point of the study seems to have beed much more about low doses being dangerous rather than showing women to be at risk as well. But, as I said, the whole story is odd. Everybody here in LA knows that the old rocket fuel dumps damage thyroids. Makes me wonder if the CDC did a sloppy lit review.

Andrew likes me better than you!

in surveys we all are familiar with - or at least, that we epidemiologists are all familiar with. The NHANES, NHIS, and BRFS all spring to mind - that's National Health And Nutrition Examination Survey, the National Health Interview Survey, and the Behavioral Risk Factor Survey, all done by branches of the National Insitutes of Health, and all used to set national policy.

To nitpick a bit, the methods used for these studies are cluster sampling plus, since they weight their samples for various minority groups, so the samples are quite complicated and analysis is somewhat tedious. But it is essentially the same basic method.

and perhaps a little titillation, along with the opportunity to show off their vast experience.

"the results under Clinton"?

And by what standard do you think Kim is any crazier than Bush? He's certainly a hell of a lot less dangerous.

although I see somebody's beat me to it, "officials shined on the faithful" left me befuddled. I, however, am 60, so am allowed occassional, even frequent, befuddlement.

look at all the vacation time bush gets, and look at all the nap time Reagan got. Four hour work day, 2-3 months of vacation, long weekends - but, hey, it's a stressful job.

not puzzle over cures. I am no botanist or plant ecologist, but I am aware of a lot of plant disease here in southern California that is related to both dry conditions and to warmer temps allowing disease-spreading beetles to go to higher altitudes. So, naturally, I wonder what might be going on to bring about a spread of such a devastating disease so rapidly. Often looking for a cause is reqarding, more so than coming up with a resistant plant, if some of the causes turn out to be vulnerable to blocking them. We still are not very good at treating human lung cancer, but we've done a pretty good job of reducing the population impact by getting people to quit smoking.

the difference between population risk and individual risk. As someone who's spent many years teaching those concepts to med students and physicians, I can only hope that docs who make mistakes such as undertreating women with heart disease weren't my students.

One ER doc told me a story on herself, and actually presented this as a cautionary tale to the med students. While she was head ER resident, one of the interns came running up, told her a mid-40s aged patient had arrived with a list of symptoms sounding a lot like a heart attack. She replied, well, lets start checking enzymes, getting initial treatment going with a presumptive diagnosis of mycardial infarct, and so on. The intern replied, okay, we'll get to work on her. She replied, wait, it's a woman? Can't be an MI, then, must be something else. And she dinked around for longer than she should have, because a mid-40s woman couldn't possibly be having an MI. Of course she was, and the doc learned her lesson - it was fortunate, though, that the patient came through okay.

An even worse horror story that the head of ob/gyn, a black South African, used to tell involved racial assumptions. Back before fast pregnancy tests, black women in the states died at a higher rate from ectoopic (tubal) pregnancies than white women. The reason was the assumption made by the ER docs - if two women come into the ER, both with acute pelvic pain & really sick, if one is white, then the assumption is she has an ectopic pregnancy even before those slow test results come back, and she is treated accordingly. However, if she's black, well, we know that black women have a higher rate of pelvic inflammatory disease, which looks a lot like ectopic pregnancy - so we assume that's what she has, and treat accordingly - until that pregnancy test comes back positive - but by then it may be too late to save her. The only thing that's changed to make a difference is that the pregnancy tests are now much faster, so black women aren't dying at that high rate from a treatable condition.

That's an excellent point, anon, and in my opinion explains much of what's going on. Unfortunately, I don't have a subscription to that journal, and it belongs to one of those big med journal publishing consortia that wants everyone to pay to look at the articles online, a deplorable development. So I gleaned what I could from, likely, the same sources Rebecca used - Reuters and the like - and did see a bit in there about "age-adjustment". So to some degree they did take the age effect out of the risk estimate, but it still tough not to have some distortion still going on. Wish I could look at the original article.