The “Skin Rash Hall of Fame” at poison-ivy.org forecasts what can happen if you’re human, allergic to urushiol, and can’t recognize poison ivy, poison oak, or poison sumac. Behold the delights of urushiol-induced contact dermititis. Just one hazard of plants you really, really don’t want to touch.

The CDC gets it. They put out a really well-done video for parents with questions about vaccines that specifically deals with the misinformation out there. Nice. Informative, calm, and speaks directly to concerned parents. Stay through to the video’s end. Very cute!

The most recent issue of New York magazine featured an article by Sam Anderson called “In Defense of Distraction.” It’s a thorough study of our modern Poverty of Attention, diving in to the science of it and looking at what the problem might mean in the whole evolutionary scheme of things. This is a problem that fascinates me right now, writing more and more prescriptions for neurological performance-enhancing drugs.

He starts off the long eight-web-pages article by trying to focus in the attention the reader:

I’m going to pause here, right at the beginning of my riveting article about attention, and ask you to please get all of your precious 21st-century distractions out of your system now. Check the score of the Mets game; text your sister that pun you just thought of about her roommate’s new pet lizard; …refresh your work e-mail; …upload pictures of yourself reading this paragraph to your “me reading magazine articles” Flickr photostream; and alert the fellow citizens of whatever Twittertopia you happen to frequent that you will be suspending your digital presence for the next twenty minutes or so…Good. Now: Count your breaths. Close your eyes. Do whatever it takes to get all of your neurons lined up in one direction…Now it’s just you and me, tucked like fourteenth-century Zen masters into this sweet little nook of pure mental focus.

The ironic thing is, just reading his humorous introduction, and then trying to read through the whole article made me realize just how hard it is these days to focus and get through an article like this. Especially reading it on the computer. Several times I thought of pausing and checking Facebook, or checking a baseball score (Braves, NOT Mets). The kids interrupted me and their Wii game tempted me as well. But I made it through. Here are some of the highlights, though I suggest that–even if it is just a test to see if you yourself still have the power to ignore the distractions around you and get through a scholarly article like this–go and read it yourself.

…our attention crisis is already chewing its hyperactive way through the very foundations of Western civilization. Google is making us stupid, multitasking is draining our souls, and the “dumbest generation” is leading us into a “dark age” of bookless “power browsing.” Adopting the Internet as the hub of our work, play, and commerce has been the intellectual equivalent of adopting corn syrup as the center of our national diet, and we’ve all become mentally obese. Formerly well-rounded adults are forced to MacGyver worldviews out of telegraphic blog posts, bits of YouTube videos, and the first nine words of Times editorials. Schoolkids spread their attention across 30 different programs at once and interact with each other mainly as sweatless avatars…We are, in short, terminally distracted. And distracted, the alarmists will remind you, was once a synonym for insane.

***

The most advanced Buddhist monks become world-class multitaskers. Meditation might speed up their mental processes enough to handle information overload.

***

A quintessentially Western solution to the attention problem—one that neatly circumvents the issue of willpower—is to simply dope our brains into focus. We’ve done so, over the centuries, with substances ranging from tea to tobacco to NoDoz to Benzedrine, and these days the tradition seems to be approaching some kind of zenith with the rise of neuroenhancers: drugs designed to treat ADHD (Ritalin, Adderall), Alzheimer’s (Aricept), and narcolepsy (Provigil) that can produce, in healthy people, superhuman states of attention. A grad-school friend tells me that Adderall allowed him to squeeze his mind “like a muscle.” Joshua Foer, writing in Slate after a weeklong experiment with Adderall, said the drug made him feel like he’d “been bitten by a radioactive spider”—he beat his unbeatable brother at Ping-Pong, solved anagrams, devoured dense books. “The part of my brain that makes me curious about whether I have new e-mails in my in-box apparently shut down,” he wrote.

***

It’s possible that we’re evolving toward a new techno-cognitive nomadism, in which restlessness will be an advantage.

***

Which brings me, finally, to the next generation of attenders, the so-called “net-gen” or “digital natives,” kids who’ve grown up with the Internet and other time-slicing technologies. There’s been lots of hand-wringing about all the skills they might lack, mainly the ability to concentrate on a complex task from beginning to end, but surely they can already do things their elders can’t—like conduct 34 conversations simultaneously across six different media, or pay attention to switching between attentional targets in a way that’s been considered impossible…The neuroscientist Gary Small speculates that the human brain might be changing faster today than it has since the prehistoric discovery of tools. Research suggests we’re already picking up new skills: better peripheral vision, the ability to sift information rapidly…Kids growing up now might have an associative genius we don’t—a sense of the way ten projects all dovetail into something totally new. They might be able to engage in seeming contradictions: mindful web-surfing, mindful Twittering. Maybe, in flights of irresponsible responsibility, they’ll even manage to attain the paradoxical, Zenlike state of focused distraction.

Here’s another interesting article in The New Yorker magazine about “cosmetic neurology” and performance-enhancing drugs like Adderall.

Here’s a fabulous post by Dartmouth College student Owen Jennings who, just prior to entering college suffered liver failure, for no clear reason. This meant that he entered college with a really, really good reason to avoid the all too common campus poison, alcohol. He even pledged a fraternity, and yet, “not even a sip.”

Some highlights:

Even though no one cares that I don’t drink, they still see it as bizarre. But being alcohol-free has given me a unique vantage point from which to observe college life and culture. It seems to me that alcohol might be the only drug that everyone is expected to use.

***

At Dartmouth, and at every other college campus I have been to, the consumption of alcoholic beverages is common. But the word “consumption” is an understatement. I’m not talking about the casual sipping of a few beers. Here, alcohol consumption means the rapid and repeated gulping and guzzling of beer after beer after beer. Often, students will drink upwards of 15 or 20 beers. On any given night, a frat brother or a sorority sister will spend hours vomiting. Sometimes a classmate will wind up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning. And often, these people wake up unable to remember anything that happened the night before.

My sobriety has shown me how mindless my friends’ drinking has become. The question shouldn’t be, “Why aren’t you drunk?” Rather, we need to start asking, “Why are you drunk?”

***

I realize that drinking is a way to rebel and revel in the newfound freedom that college brings. But it’s also a veil, a way to manipulate, distort and enhance who we really are. If anything, being sober at the Animal House has taught me just to be myself.

Headlining the Inky today (subscription required) is a story about a Long Island man dying from the Deer-tick Virus. On an island where disease-infested ticks are about as common as the grains of sand underfoot, this story will likely result in new concerns whenever islanders experience otherwise common and non-specific neurologic symptoms like headaches.

The May 14 issue of the New England Journal reports what might be the first case of  a someone dying from an infection with the Deer-tick virus. The 62-year-old man, who apparently also had a history of leukemia/lymphoma died last year of meningoencephalitis, after being bitten by a deer tick infected with deer tick virus.

He presented to the hospital after a 4-day history of fever, fatigue, and a rash on his palms, progressing to stroke-like symptoms of double-vision, slurring his speech, and right-sided weakness.

“This is the first definitive case describing fatal deer tick virus encephalitis in humans,” said Norma P. Tavakoli, lead author of the paper detailing the case. “Deer tick virus encephalitis [inflammation of the brain] is rare, but diagnostic testing is not routinely performed, so there could be cases out there we’re actually missing,” said Tavakoli, who is a research scientist with the Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health in Albany.

“It is quite a rare virus,” said Dr. Geoffrey Weinberg, a professor of pediatrics in the division of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Rochester Medical Center. “I would advise people not to be overly concerned. Ticks are less commonly infected with this than with Lyme disease and, even in Lyme, Conn., a minority of ticks are infected with Lyme disease. Also, the odds are 300-to-one that someone infected with the virus will develop encephalitis. The vast majority have no symptoms at all.”

“Whether or not this will become a real problem, I don’t think anybody knows. Obviously, there is no treatment for the virus so, really, prevention is the only thing you can do,” said Dr. Peter Welch, an infectious disease specialist with Northern Westchester Hospital in Mt. Kisco, N.Y. “We should always be cautious to do our best to not be bitten by ticks.”

Deer tick virus is closely related to Powassan virus, which can also cause encephalitis and is also transmitted by way of the deer tick, according to background information in the study. Both are flaviviruses, a group that includes West Nile virus, St. Louis encephalitis virus, dengue and yellow fever viruses, all of which are transmitted by mosquitoes. In general, encephalitis cases of any sort are few, and labs are not usually able to identify the source, unless it is the herpes simplex virus.

“Since no one has been testing, we really don’t know the incidence of deer tick virus, but it can’t be very high, because we don’t have many cases of encephalitis,” Welch said. “What happens in the future will depend on how many ticks get infected, how easy it is to transmit to people and what percent of people infected get severe disease. It could be that people with normal immune systems are relatively resistant.”

Small-time blogger Shirley Wu has written a perfect letter to Oprah, and I really hope that Ms. Winfrey will see it. Here’s an excerpt:

To me, it is clear that a significant number of people look up to you, and trust your advice and judgment. That is why it is such a huge mistake for you to endorse Jenny McCarthy with her own show on your network.

Surely you must realize that McCarthy is neither a medical professional nor a scientist. And yet she acts as a spokesperson for the anti-vaccination movement, a movement that directly impacts people’s health. Claims that vaccines are unsafe and cause autism have been refuted time after time, but their allure persists in part because of high-profile champions for ignorance like McCarthy.

The letter is clear, factual, calm, and hits the right notes perfectly.

Like it or not, Oprah has a huge influence. I suspect the letter above is not even enough; she needs to actively denounce what McCarthy is saying. Still, we take what we can. Oprah now has a chance to lay down a path to either promote thousands of children getting sick and even dying, or to perhaps save those same lives.

I recently read a fascinating post on the NewScientist website called “13 things that do not make sense.” Here are some of this highlights:

The placebo effect–

Don’t try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away…We have a lot to learn about what is happening here,…but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body’s biochemistry. “The relationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand mind-body interaction.” Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works.

The horizon problem–

Our universe appears to be unfathomably uniform. Look across space from one edge of the visible universe to the other, and you’ll see that the microwave background radiation filling the cosmos is at the same temperature everywhere. That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have travelled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.

Belfast homeopathy results–

Madeleine Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen’s University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.

In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These “basophils” release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions – so dilute that they probably didn’t contain a single histamine molecule – worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths’ claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this “mother tincture” in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy. You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. “We are,” Ennis says in her paper, “unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon.” If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.

I read about an interesting study today in the NYTimes, published in this week’s  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Antioxidant vitamins like C and E  may block some of the beneficial effects of exercise and dieting, including the body’s sensitivity to insulin.

As summarized in the article:

…exercise makes the muscle cells metabolize glucose, by combining its carbon atoms with oxygen and extracting the energy that is released. In the process, some highly reactive oxygen molecules escape and make chemical attacks on anything in sight…These reactive oxygen compounds are known to damage the body’s tissues. The amount of oxidative damage increases with age, and according to one theory of aging it is a major cause of the body’s decline…The body has its own defense system for combating oxidative damage, but it does not always do enough. So antioxidants, which mop up the reactive oxygen compounds, may seem like a logical solution.

The researchers  at the University of Jena in Germany, tested this proposition by having young men exercise, giving half of them moderate doses of vitamins C and E and measuring sensitivity to insulin as well as indicators of the body’s natural defenses to oxidative damage.

They found that in the group taking the vitamins there was no improvement in insulin sensitivity and almost no activation of the body’s natural defense mechanism against oxidative damage.

The reason, they suggest, is that the reactive oxygen compounds, inevitable byproducts of exercise, are a natural trigger for both of these responses. The vitamins, by efficiently destroying the reactive oxygen, short-circuit the body’s natural response to exercise.

The researcher’s conclusions:

If you exercise to promote health, you shouldn’t take large amounts of antioxidants, and antioxidants in general cause certain effects that inhibit otherwise positive effects of exercise, dieting and other interventions.

It might be that reactive oxygen is beneficial in small doses, because it touches off the body’s natural defense system, but harmful in higher doses.

Parents are ultimately responsible for deciding what is best for their babies. Only in critical situations should a something like this statement be questioned. Yet fears about vaccine safety is threatening to become a critical, public health concern.

An article in the upcoming issue of Discover magazine attacks this controversy head-on.

Vaccines do not cause autism. That was the ruling in each of three critical test cases handed down on February 12 by the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C. After a decade of speculation, argument, and analysis—often filled with vitriol on both sides—the court specifically denied any link between the combination of the MMR vaccine and vaccines with thimerosal (a mercury-based preservative) and the spectrum of disorders associated with autism. But these rulings, though seemingly definitive, have done little to quell the angry debate, which has severe implications for American public health.

The idea that vaccines are responsible for an epidemic of autism is everywhere–cable news shows,blogs, celebrity magazines, and on Oprah–and has a number of high-profile, if not highly scholarly, supporters (e.g., Charlie Sheen, Jenny McCarthy, and Jim Carrey).

There is a lot of passion and emotion around this issue, and with good reason. Autism is terrible, and is often devastating to families. And for reasons no one is sure of, the incidence of autism seems to be rising rapidly. In the 70′s, the statistic was something like 1 in 10,000 kids. Today, you often hear quoted a 1 in 150 statistic.

“The irony is that vaccine skepticism—not the vaccines themselves—is now looking like the true public-health threat,” writes Chris Mooney, the author of the Discover article.

This article good does a good job of reviewing the history to led to the vaccine scare in the first place, and I would encourage you to read it, along with some of the resources below. It goes further, however,to cover why this matters:

The provaccine case starts with some undeniable facts: Vaccines are, as the IOM puts it, “one of the greatest achievements of public health.” The CDC estimates that thanks to vaccines, we have reduced morbidity by 99 percent or more for smallpox, diphtheria, measles, polio, and rubella. Averaged over the course of the 20th century, these five diseases killed nearly 650,000 people annually. They now kill fewer than 100. That is not to say vaccines are perfectly safe; in rare cases they can cause serious, well-known adverse side effects. But what researchers consider unequivocally unsafe is to avoid them. As scientists at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health recently found while investigating whooping cough outbreaks in and around Michigan, “geographic pockets of vaccine exemptors pose a risk to the whole community.”

The fact that the vaccination program has, over the years, been so successful is one of the reasons why antivaccination sentiments have thrived. We rarely see most of the diseases that the vaccines protect us against. It’s hard to be afraid of such an enemy that has not been around in a while, and now we’re a generation or two removed from the devastation these diseases cause.

Given enough vaccine exemptions and localized outbreaks, it is possible that largely vanquished diseases could become endemic again. (That is precisely what happened with measles in 2008 in the U.K., due to skepticism there about the MMR vaccine, where the original, faulty reports came from.) The public-health costs of such a development would be enormous—and they would not impact everyone equally. If vaccine rates start to drop as a whole, it won’t matter that an individual did or didn’t get the shots, and the people that are going to be affected the most are going to be people who live in poor, crowded conditions.

Resources:

AntiAntiVax–The Truth About the Evils of Vaccination

Every Child By Two

Vaccinate Your Baby

Viewpoints:

Why Does the Vaccine/Autism Controversy Live On

My Child Has Autism and I Vaccinate

Say It Ain’t So Oprah

A Life Less Ordinary: A Deadly History

The Vaccines-Autism War: Détente Needed

Vaccines Get New Scrutiny

The Pros and Cons of a Flexible Vaccine Schedule

Here’s a link to Hospital Food, a new blog that collects pictures of healthy, healing meals from hospitals from around the world.