Jump to content

U.S. Election Day, 2016


Callie

U.S. Presidential Election, 2016  

42 members have voted

  1. 1. Did you vote in the 2016 United States presidential election?

    • Yes
      24
    • No (not an American citizen)
      9
    • No (citizen, but not eligible)
      2
    • No (abstained)
      4
    • No (other)
      3
  2. 2. Whom did you vote for, or would have voted for, in the 2016 United States presidential election?

    • Hillary Clinton (Democratic)
      23
    • Donald Trump (Republican)
      8
    • Gary Johnson (Libertarian)
      1
    • Jill Stein (Green)
      2
    • Other
      3
    • Nobody
      2
    • Don't know
      3
  3. 3. What is your political affiliation in the U.S., or what would be your affiliation?

    • Democratic Party
      13
    • Republican Party
      6
    • Independent / Nonpartisan / Unaffiliated
      13
    • Libertarian Party
      1
    • Green Party
      1
    • Other
      3
    • Don't know
      5
  4. 4. Which of the following most closely matches your opinion of the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton?

    • Very Positive
      2
    • Somewhat Positive
      7
    • Neutral
      7
    • Somewhat Negative
      11
    • Very Negative
      15
    • Don't know
      0
  5. 5. Which of the following most closely matches your opinion of the Republican candidate Donald Trump?

    • Very Positive
      2
    • Somewhat Positive
      2
    • Neutral
      1
    • Somewhat Negative
      7
    • Very Negative
      30
    • Don't know
      0


Recommended Posts

Because it's happening anyway and it would look dumb for them to turn their back on it, not because it is likely to succeed They even released a statement (IMHO, by far the clearest, most coherent, and most logical-sounding statement I ever heard from them) talking about all the different avenues they looked into and explaining why they did not initiate the process themselves: it's a lost cause.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Trump could have a logically consistent position of millions of illegal votes in places that he lost but that don't affect the results of the election. He isn't arguing that, but he could.

 

—Alorael, who acknowledges that the recount will not change the election. It gives him little embers of hope, though. There's always the outside chance of the discovery of gross polling malfeasance resulting in a challenged outcome.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

Update to fun fact: There was, in fact, one incident of smallpox vaccines that were contaminated with syphilis, which resulted in at least 44 cases of syphilis and several immediate deaths.

 

However, consider that in just one decade (1900-1910), Britain had 5,000 smallpox deaths. Italy--which also had a strong anti-vaccine movement and no mandatory vaccination requirements--had 19,000 deaths. Meanwhile, Germany, which did have a good vaccination program, had only 386 deaths (mainly of Italians visiting Germany? Such was the case for most smallpox cases reported in Germany during 1920-1921).

 

Dikiyoba is glad that we eliminated smallpox, so at least modern anti-vaxxers can't mess that up.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think you said something not quite right there. Unless you're rooting for the viruses, ease of eradication probably isn't unfortunate.

 

 

Most vaccines, particularly childhood vaccines, are against viruses. I'm not enough of a vaccinologist to say why; I think it's a combination of the prevalence and seriousness of viral infections and the ease of vaccine development. Bacterial infections are relatively uncommon. But treatment, as you note, is something of the reverse. We now have loads of antibiotics; while resistance is increasing, the shear number of options available is a traditional cause of consternation to medical students. Antivirals, in contrast, are relatively few in number and mostly target specific viruses.

 

—Alorael, who ends on the hopeful note that while there may be no cure, there just might be a vaccine against the common cold in the pipeline one day soon. Amazing times indeed.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think you said something not quite right there. Unless you're rooting for the viruses, ease of eradication probably isn't unfortunate.

 

I think they meant to imply that the unfortunate part was that bacteria weren't so easy to eradicate with vaccination. (Even when vaccines exist, pathogenic bacteria are less likely than viruses to be reliant on humans for survival and reproduction, so you probably won't get rid of them entirely.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

That was sort of my point with the exception that i have the impression most infections that affect humans are bacteria(now im not that sure but relatively confident(bacteria themselves have considerable diversity and the same bacteria can cause different diseases)). With that in mind i'd rather bacteria were easier to vaccinate against and viruses more easily treated. As in the positions were reversed.

 

Also im considerably surprised/amazed at the vaccine for common cold. How many strains are there?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm not exactly sure how the counts stack up myself; it depends in part on how you count. Total incidence (how many new infections per year)? Prevalence (how many total infections at a given time)? Do you count asymptomatic transient colonization or only illness? But my hunch is that viral infections are in the lead, by a significant margin, by almost any measure. Total infections, infections per year, mortality, you name it. The exception might be if you just count pathogenic entities, but even then it's probably not a big difference and depends on how you count. Is each rhinovirus strain a separate thing? What about each E. coli subspecies?

 

Tuberculosis (bacterial) and hepatitis B (viral) are almost neck and neck for most widespread chronic and lethal infections in the world, both affecting somewhere around 2-3 billion people and causing somewhere around 1 million deaths annually. Gastroenteritis (infectious diarrhea) has somewhere around 5 billion cases per year, mostly in children and again mostly in the developing world, and probably more than 80% of the cases are viral, and again somewhere around 1 million cases per year are fatal. Pneumonia (probably) comes next: about 300 million cases of bacterial pneumonia (various organisms) and 150 million cases of viral pneumonia (various viruses), together accounting for a few million deaths per year.

 

And after that there's a big fall-off in numbers and I think it's mostly viruses: About 50 million cases of HIV with a million deaths per year. 150 cases of hepatitis C, causing a few hundred thousand deaths annually. Millions get influenza every year.

 

But for sheer numbers, it's those common colds that outweigh everything. There are several hundred viruses that cause colds in humans, mostly but by no means exclusively rhinoviruses. Epidemiology is a little iffy because most people don't seek medical attention for colds, but estimates are somewhere around 15-30 billion infections per year. The vast majority are unpleasant but not dangerous; even with orders of magnitude more infections colds cause orders of magnitude fewer deaths than the other diseases I'm listing, and most of those are caused by the cold leading to another infection, like bacterial pneumonia.

 

—Alorael, who writes this while recovering from a probably viral and definitely miserable gastroenteritis. He's never had a life-threatening infection, thankfully. He's had swine flu, regular flu, chicken pox, previous stomach bugs (probably viral), and a vast variety of colds. As far as bacterial infections go, he had a few ear infections in early childhood (and those were quite possibly viral and not bacterial, although he rightly or wrongly got antibiotics) and a mild staphylococcal skin infection. That's it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

In mortality viruses will always have the head because they are difficult to treat. People usually only die of bacterial infections due to negligence or lack of access to basic health services.

Statistically(specially in terms of percentage) bacteria do however hold the biggest death toll with black plague, leprosy and cholera having had whooping death tolls.

Viruses did kill historically but specially in Europe, people developed resistance to most of the respiratory tract viruses. I want to assume the common cold was very fatal at one point in history. We know the flu was having had a significant effect in the Americas. Flu of course can still kill. Its just much less likely. My family(european side) had innate immunity to small pox with them needed repeated shots until it scarred. With bacteria now its the other way around. Their pesky selves are the ones becoming resistant to us.

 

And im honestly surprised thats all the bacterial infections you had. USA has some sort of record in bacterial infections. And the fact that there are new ones endemic to there. I know non typhoid salmonella infections are one of the leading causes in child mortality over there.

I would put common cold with e. Coli. We several times a year have an imbalance in their population leading to short lived relatively unpleasant illness. A lot of the basic food poisonings go unregistered unless they last longer than a few days.

Bacteria are a danger we seem unable to defeat and that makes me(a human rightfully put at the top of the food chain) uncomfortable. Viruses are deadly sure and not to be ignored. But i think if i spend my life more likely to get bacterial infections(including some cases misdiagnosed as common cold) i'd rather be immune to those and treat the relatively less in number, viral infections( I, myself only had measles once and the rest are colds).

 

Btw im thinking that our statistics for diseases are very likely to be biased by personal experiences. And since i touched bacteriology and virology only lightly(relatively) in university(im not specialising in medicine) So honestly i can't really say my stats are better. Im too lazy to make an in depth analysis of infections.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Another factor in relative lethality is that precisely because viruses rely completely on their hosts to reproduce, they don't tend to benefit from killing them quickly; most viruses that are deadly to humans are primarily diseases of nonhuman animals that are imperfectly adapted to us. You might say they kill us by accident, and over a long enough period of time you'd expect us to coevolve with the virus in a way that reduces lethality. On the other hand, many of the most deadly bacterial infections are caused by anaerobic bacteria such as the clostridia, which can live quite happily in soil and don't particularly thrive in the human body -- if we drop dead, so much the better for them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Very true. If you read on it, you will easily realise that for instance modern HIV strains areuch less aggressive than the original ones. And it is very possible to stay years without developing aids even if you don't take ARVs(although for many reasons you should undergo treatment asap as it is still a deadly disease that affects not only the victim but also those around them).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Owen, I think you're moving the goalposts here. Both your and Alorael's original statements were all in present tense, which I imagine is why Alorael analyzed this in terms of present day disease incidence. In the present day, the bacterial diseases you mention have drastically lower death tolls than the viruses Alorael listed.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Not familiar with that expression. In any case. I did say viruses are by far more deadly. I said so in the beginning of the post. Because they are hard to treat. And i said humans are unlikely to die of bacterial infection unless due to negligence or lack of access to basic health services.

 

And i did say on that point that its a historical perspective on it. And then came back to the present with non typhoid salmonella cases. Anyway. If that wasn't helpful to the conversation i apologise.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

In mortality viruses will always have the head because they are difficult to treat. People usually only die of bacterial infections due to negligence or lack of access to basic health services.

That's not exactly true. There are some viruses that are quite treatable, others that don't really require treatment (colds!) and lots of people die in the US of bacterial infections. Some of the problem is that when people get sick with bacterial sepsis they get really sick. Antibiotics, fluids, pressors, and all the other tricks of modern medicine help, but they only help so much.

 

Statistically(specially in terms of percentage) bacteria do however hold the biggest death toll with black plague, leprosy and cholera having had whooping death tolls.

The Black Death probably killed a third to a half of Europe's population, somewhere around 100-200 million. It's true that there's no other disease that has that kind of total population mortality. (It's also not totally clear what it was, although bacterial Yersinia pestis is the leading suspect.) In terms of total deaths, it's probably close; the growth in population means that some of the big killers of today are probably close, if they haven't already caught up.

 

Leprosy is gruesome, but it was never a major cause of death. It's not highly infectious. Cholera pandemics are virulent, but relatively rare. Except during mass outbreaks it wasn't a leading killer.

 

Viruses did kill historically but specially in Europe, people developed resistance to most of the respiratory tract viruses. I want to assume the common cold was very fatal at one point in history. We know the flu was having had a significant effect in the Americas. Flu of course can still kill. Its just much less likely. My family(european side) had innate immunity to small pox with them needed repeated shots until it scarred. With bacteria now its the other way around. Their pesky selves are the ones becoming resistant to us.

Sources please? I doubt there has ever been widespread resistance to respiratory viruses, and the common cold probably has never been particularly virulent. It's to the viruses' reproductive advantage not to be!

 

And im honestly surprised thats all the bacterial infections you had. USA has some sort of record in bacterial infections. And the fact that there are new ones endemic to there. I know non typhoid salmonella infections are one of the leading causes in child mortality over there.

That's simply untrue. Salmonella is nowhere close to a leading cause of death. I'm not sure why you think the USA is overcome with bacterial infection, but it isn't. Injury, suicide, homicide, cancer, and respiratory infections, in roughly that order (depending on exact age group). GI infection doesn't make the top ten in the developing world and hasn't for a long time.

 

I would put common cold with e. Coli. We several times a year have an imbalance in their population leading to short lived relatively unpleasant illness. A lot of the basic food poisonings go unregistered unless they last longer than a few days.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Respiratory viruses are highly transmissible and airborne. E. coli is both a part of native gut flora and sometimes a pathogen, and while we ingest bacteria, including pathogenic bacteria, all the time, we mostly don't get infections. Certainly not multiple times a year.

 

Btw im thinking that our statistics for diseases are very likely to be biased by personal experiences. And since i touched bacteriology and virology only lightly(relatively) in university(im not specialising in medicine) So honestly i can't really say my stats are better. Im too lazy to make an in depth analysis of infections.

 

 

—Alorael, who is a physician. He doesn't specialize in infectious disease, but it's a big part of his education and training. And a big part of his practice, honestly, in a hospital setting. He sees a mix of acute bacterial infections (they're bad and land people in hospitals) and mostly chronic viral infections (HIV and hepatitis kill, but very slowly even untreated). He thinks he has some idea of what he's talking about.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Another factor in relative lethality is that precisely because viruses rely completely on their hosts to reproduce, they don't tend to benefit from killing them quickly; most viruses that are deadly to humans are primarily diseases of nonhuman animals that are imperfectly adapted to us. You might say they kill us by accident, and over a long enough period of time you'd expect us to coevolve with the virus in a way that reduces lethality.

Given a large enough population and a contagious enough virus, it seems like there wouldn't be selective pressure on the virus to reduce lethality, so long as there are always more hosts available. Who cares if you kill half the city so long as you can make it to the next city? Viruses can only infect a host once before the host gains immunity, so there's not an overwhelming reason for the virus to keep the old host around.

 

The Black Death probably killed a third to a half of Europe's population, somewhere around 100-200 million. It's true that there's no other disease that has that kind of total population mortality. (It's also not totally clear what it was, although bacterial Yersinia pestis is the leading suspect.) In terms of total deaths, it's probably close; the growth in population means that some of the big killers of today are probably close, if they haven't already caught up.

I mean, smallpox. An estimated 300 million and 500 million deaths just in the 20th century*, and it's had thousands of years to work with, while plague has only had hundreds. Also, there's the whole "basically wiping out the indigenous people of North and South America" thing.

 

*Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080131122956.htm (Not the best, perhaps, but any numbers are hard to find, let alone good ones.)

 

Dikiyoba doesn't know how many people malaria has killed historically, but it's got to be up there as one of the worst killers. It kills approxmiately half a million to a million people a year presently, and it's had thousands of years to rack up the death count. But it's not a virus nor a bacteria.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Given a large enough population and a contagious enough virus, it seems like there wouldn't be selective pressure on the virus to reduce lethality, so long as there are always more hosts available. Who cares if you kill half the city so long as you can make it to the next city? Viruses can only infect a host once before the host gains immunity, so there's not an overwhelming reason for the virus to keep the old host around.

 

There are limits. One of the reasons Ebola hasn't overrun the world is that it kills people too quickly and too dramatically to spread beyond local outbreaks. At the very least, your host needs to survive long enough to transmit the virus. (On the other hand, rabies kills within weeks of infection and in a very visible fashion, and it remains endemic even in areas where the mongoose, its original host and one of the few mammals that can be infected with the virus without dying, is not present. So it's true that high lethality isn't an absolute barrier to persistence in the population. In the case of rabies, being less contagious might actually help it: over 80% of bites fail to transmit the disease even without treatment, so it doesn't tend to wipe out entire populations.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It will take me a while to source it. So i'll address what i can for now.

 

- Bacterial sepsis is *usually* result of negligence or lack of access to basic health care. Both of which can happen throughout the world. Even tuberculosis, which factors in the most deadly bacterial diseases of our age, has a significant amount of deaths attributed to; lack of access to treatment. And negligence. Specially since one will feel significantly better after some time on treatment. As such there is a tendency not to finish the treatment(leading to bigger problems such as multidrug resistant strains)

-i said child mortality. Adults are better able to cope with any infection. A kid is unlikely to kill themselves. And while its possible cancer does not tend to develop during early childhood( as a physician you can probably confirm. Child mortality is from birth to 5 years old)

-E. Coli is part of the gut flora. Even "non pathogenic" sttlrains cause illness if the population exceeds a certain limit. Those are short lived because our body usually manages the population efficiently. Why as with common cold its unlikely we'll go to the hospital. While not infectious and "outbreaks" are rare. As you said we ingest bacteria on a daily basis in good quantities. So an imbalance in population is generally attainable.

On the USA having some kind of record i can e-mail you the whole pdf so you can read at your leisure. Worth noting however that it is not a jab at your health system(my jabs at it are on another matter). Simply put bacteria are somewhat better than us in that aspect. And over there, there are new species and new strains. As with the "new world" in general.

 

-I too think i have some idea of what im talking about. And that was the point really.

 

-@dikiyoba, there is pressure on viruses to be less lethal. Because said virus that killed half a city has a lesser chance of spreading than a virus that causes little harm. Specially with the ones that cannot survive outside a host for a sustained period. It also works the other way as i said, humans develop resistance to viruses more quickly than to i think any other pathogen. The same virus may give light symptoms in one population and anichilate another because it has no resistance.

A good example being the ebola virus, which is 20% less likely to kill someone that had malaria over someone that didn't. Putting most of the developed world at a disadvantage. So it would be more easily spread in the tropics because odds of someone surviving enough time to pass it on are higher. It would also spread more easily in the tropics for other reasons. But anyway.

 

By the end of next week i will give the rest of the sources. But the above mentioned pdf is available.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Bacterial sepsis is *usually* result of negligence or lack of access to basic health care.

I thought it was from infected wounds and old age/impaired immune systems?

 

Because said virus that killed half a city has a lesser chance of spreading than a virus that causes little harm.

It turns out one of the first thing people do when an epidemic hits and the body count climbs is to run away. And running away is a good way to spread disease to new areas.

 

---

 

There are limits. One of the reasons Ebola hasn't overrun the world is that it kills people too quickly and too dramatically to spread beyond local outbreaks. At the very least' date=' your host needs to survive long enough to transmit the virus.[/quote']

I mean, from the virus' point of view, it didn't do to bad during the 2013-2015 outbreak. It infected three countries severely over three years, infecting more than 17,000 people and killing 6000 of them. And it did that despite modern medical knowledge and intervention, and only being transmissible through direct contact with body fluids. If it could spread via respiration, or by surviving on objects for a long period of time, or if it had evolved in 4000 BC or 1300 AD or 1800 AD, it probably would get beyond local outbreak form. I mean, the (bubonic) plague is still out there and highly lethal, but doesn't get beyond local outbreaks anymore because we know how to contain and treat it.

 

Dikiyoba's argument is rather silly though, because at this point the requirements are so narrow the virus basically has to be smallpox (and possibly measles?). And even then, natural selection on the host species would bring lethality down quickly, because only the hosts that resist or survive the virus get to reproduce.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Dikiyoba's argument is rather silly though, because at this point the requirements are so narrow the virus basically has to be smallpox (and possibly measles?).

 

Measles has a case fatality rate of a few tenths of a percent, comparable to influenza. It's certainly not something you want to have, especially as an adult, but the vast majority of infectees survive.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

- Bacterial sepsis is *usually* result of negligence or lack of access to basic health care. Both of which can happen throughout the world. Even tuberculosis, which factors in the most deadly bacterial diseases of our age, has a significant amount of deaths attributed to; lack of access to treatment. And negligence. Specially since one will feel significantly better after some time on treatment. As such there is a tendency not to finish the treatment(leading to bigger problems such as multidrug resistant strains)

Bacterial sepsis is usually due to a combination of ill health and bad luck. Lack of medical care contributes, but you need the other two to even catch a bacterial infection. Poor sanitation is a huge contributor and keeps bacterial contamination way down in the developed world; as I've said, most of us don't need medical care for bacterial infections very much.

 

Tuberculosis is something of a class of its own; it's much slower and more indolent than most bacterial infections. As Lilith noted, most bacterial infections are rather accidental. Once bacteria get inside us, we're basically nutrient soup and they go nuts in a way that kills us but then often kills off the infection (because dead humans are no longer good sources of nutrients, at least to the infection). Some pathogenic bacteria are instead parasitic and evolved to inhabit us, and tuberculosis is one of them. It takes a long time to kill. Syphilis is also like that. (And back when the revered William Osler was inventing things like medical curriculum and medical residency he considered knowledge of syphilis to be a cornerstone of medical education.)

 

-i said child mortality. Adults are better able to cope with any infection. A kid is unlikely to kill themselves. And while its possible cancer does not tend to develop during early childhood( as a physician you can probably confirm. Child mortality is from birth to 5 years old)

I said child mortality too. Children are up to the age of 18. But you're right, a 5 year old won't commit suicide. That particular cause of death doesn't make the top ten the 10-14 age group, when it shoots to number 2 and stays there until middle age.

 

There are plenty of cancers of childhood. They're not the same cancers that kill adults, for the most part, but cancer is in the top five causes of death for every age group past neonates.

 

You're still wrong. Gut infections are much more likely to kill kids than adults, that's true, but in the US it's exceptionally rare for anyone to die of them. The developing world is a different story; hygiene and water sanitation may be poor, and safe rehydration is harder to come by. But in the US death is very, very rare. So is serious GI infection, for that matter.

 

-E. Coli is part of the gut flora. Even "non pathogenic" sttlrains cause illness if the population exceeds a certain limit. Those are short lived because our body usually manages the population efficiently. Why as with common cold its unlikely we'll go to the hospital. While not infectious and "outbreaks" are rare. As you said we ingest bacteria on a daily basis in good quantities. So an imbalance in population is generally attainable.

You can have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) with native gut flora. It's unpleasant, and occasionally dangerous. It's also rare and unrelated to ingestion. You can also ingest pathogenic bacteria, and then the exceptionally potent immune defenses of the gut will almost always kill the bacteria. This isn't an "imbalance," this is part of normal life in a bacteria-laden world. It's not an illness at all and is completely asymptomatic.

 

Colds are unpleasant and a perceptible deviation from normal health. Fluctuations in gut flora aren't.

 

On the USA having some kind of record i can e-mail you the whole pdf so you can read at your leisure. Worth noting however that it is not a jab at your health system(my jabs at it are on another matter). Simply put bacteria are somewhat better than us in that aspect. And over there, there are new species and new strains. As with the "new world" in general.

I'd like to see it. It's always possible that I'm missing some major trend in health, but it's one I'm completely unaware of. Saying it's available is nice, but no Googling I put in could find it. What I could find was CDC estimates of about 450 deaths to non-typhoidal salmonella annually, all age groups. The young and old are overrepresented, presumably, but that's still nowhere close to a leading cause of death.

 

—Alorael, who glanced over the Wikipedia list of most lethal diseases. Maybe unsurprisingly, lots of stuff becomes very bad news if it's in your brain. Viral meningitis is the odd one out here, and sticks with Owenmoz's hypothesis by being the intracranial process that gets you sent home with ibuprofen instead of admitted to the ICU for moonshot therapy and crossed fingers. Sometimes, at least. If it's herpes encephalitis, you still get the ICU and antiviral treatment, and you're probably never going to fully get better. And if it's rabies, you get an induced coma and if you live you make headlines and maybe some doctor's career.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Btw im thinking that our statistics for diseases are very likely to be biased by personal experiences. And since i touched bacteriology and virology only lightly(relatively) in university(im not specialising in medicine) So honestly i can't really say my stats are better. Im too lazy to make an in depth analysis of infections.

-I too think i have some idea of what im talking about. And that was the point really.

It's absolutely possible for highly trained professionals to be biased. And I hope it goes without saying that nobody should hold their thinking back just because they don't have some particular qualification. However, sometimes training and knowledge are relevant. Particularly in a battle of very broad, generalizing assertions, and particularly when one or both parties are "lazy" about citing evidence ;)

 

This is just to say, if you want untrained readers to take your argument as seriously as the medical doctor's, insisting "what I think is just as relevant as what he thinks" or otherwise equating your vantage point with his is an unhelpful distraction. Including links, citations, and actual evidence (rather than unsupported assertions) would be more convincing.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have been lazy about my sources, haven't I? It's in part because epidemiology varies so widely. I've been mostly using the very rigorous method of looking up various papers on PubMed, or WHO/CDC data, squinting, and kind of roughly averaging it for things like total infections and case fatality.

 

Okay, no, that's a lie. I've been doing some of that, but also turning to Wikipedia and then going to the cited sources. Which are usually on PubMed or WHO/CDC data themselves, but it saves me the work of finding them.

 

—Alorael, who actually does this more than he should probably admit. For medical and scientific articles Wikipedia is actually quite good at providing interesting and relevant information. And he finds it oddly gratifying to find an article that he read show up in the ultimate public space of Wikipedia. Somehow it feels like science has really made it and become real when it's a little blue superscript number.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

—Alorael, who actually does this more than he should probably admit. For medical and scientific articles Wikipedia is actually quite good at providing interesting and relevant information. And he finds it oddly gratifying to find an article that he read show up in the ultimate public space of Wikipedia. Somehow it feels like science has really made it and become real when it's a little blue superscript number.

 

One measure of the significance of an academic paper is how many other publications it is referenced in. I wonder if being referenced in Wikipedia counts to those who measure such things.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You only get to count the number of times your peer-reviewed publication is cited in peer-reviewed publications.

 

—Alorael, who aims for the higher exaltation that you get when your paper is so foundational that everyone stops citing it. They're often methods papers, and eventually tricks like SDS-PAGE (to name a familiar one) stop being interesting and start being like, "We used electricity to power our lab equipment."

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Measles has a case fatality rate of a few tenths of a percent, comparable to influenza. It's certainly not something you want to have, especially as an adult, but the vast majority of infectees survive.

Hmmm. Certain measles outbreaks had a much higher death rate, usually because it was reaching an unexposed population for the first time. For example, when it first reached the Fiji Islands in 1875, it killed 20-25% of the total population.

 

---

 

—Alorael, who glanced over the Wikipedia list of most lethal diseases. Maybe unsurprisingly, lots of stuff becomes very bad news if it's in your brain. Viral meningitis is the odd one out here, and sticks with Owenmoz's hypothesis by being the intracranial process that gets you sent home with ibuprofen instead of admitted to the ICU for moonshot therapy and crossed fingers. Sometimes, at least. If it's herpes encephalitis, you still get the ICU and antiviral treatment, and you're probably never going to fully get better. And if it's rabies, you get an induced coma and if you live you make headlines and maybe some doctor's career.

It's weird how the list separates out the different forms of smallpox and plague, and the different ebola viruses, but then lump all kinds of malaria together. They're totally different organisms with separable symptoms, and one form is significantly more lethal than the other three.

 

Dikiyoba's main source is Encyclopedia of Plague and Pestilence. Interesting, but with the worst organization possible, so it's hard to use. Dikiyoba also relies on Wikipedia and squinting.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Salmonella – A Dangerous Foodborne Pathogen

Edited by Barakat S. M. Mahmoud

Published by InTech

Janeza Trdine 9, 51000 Rijeka, Croatia

 

thats the paper i read on bacterial infections in the united states. Now that i read the title i suppose the angle is a bit too narrow.

 

-on sepsis, after a little research i will retract my comment partly. Like Alorael and dikiyoba said sepsis has as risk factors debilitated immune system. Very old or very young age, lack of some organs and chronic diseases. Those are risk factors.

 

In all honesty though i still strongly believe it a result. At least in part, of negligence. Because i've seen it as a result of negligence in 5 out of the 8 cases i've seen. Lack of basic health care doing 1(and this particular one is the exception that managed to take themselves to a real hospital. Most without access die without even knowing what is wrong). In any case you see a 5 year old kid who has been sick for weeks but his parents just give them paracetamol. Come to the hospital because its "weird" that it hasn't passed and the kid is almost dead.( Note worthy that not all cases of sepsis are bacterial.)

http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0050175 i think this article can explain how negligent adults with lack of access to basic health care are likely to get sepsis. Under the prevention tag. There are many more of/similar to those that contain information on efforts to improve the situation. Including education.

 

-I didn't say kids cannot get cancer. I said they don't tend to. Specially compared to adults. Since kids are unlikely to get exposed to risk factors. Only genetics tend to play a role. (Unfortunately(i suppose fortunately for some) genes play a bigger role in adults than exposure/habits as well) but on that account(one of the leading causes of death) i already wrote you the title and author. I would send the email but thats sorta against placement if personal info etc etc..

 

Also i did mention. Feeling ill for a time on imbalances. Those are pretty common. They don't kill usually but come on. even then specially depending on where, what and how you eat food poisoning is common. Not all is caused by bacteria though. (But non of the intoxications are caused by viruses)

 

On Wikipedia. I haven't yet seen a scientific error on it so it's reliable. But many times its incomplete. Out of habit i steer away from citing it. My main sources are lecturers, personal experience, a book called terapia(which granted is probably very dated, its a Soviet Union official translation of another book sp its oolllldddd) i'll get the details later as im on the way to school now.

 

On malaria. I having had the luck of having it a whooping 8 times. Two resulting in lasting brain damage. Am honestly baffled at how all of them are on the same ground. Some of them have different(slightly) life cycles even. Using the cross system there are 5 types of malaria. With one cross and 5 crosses being the deadliest for completely different reasons. 5 crosses gives you a whoopass of heavy symptoms with 40+ celsius skin temp fevers. Convulsions and horribly debilitating other stuff. It kills ypu quickly if you don't go to the hospital immediately. Which most people go.

The one cross has very light symptoms extremely light that you don't notice you're sick so you don't go to the hospital and you die.( Why if you are in the tropics and feel slightly sick don't shy out of going to the hospital.)

So honestly one of the deadliest diseases in the world with so much impact in all aspects and there is no detailed information? I think im getting unreasonably pissed at it. Smh. This lack of information can kill people but anyway.

 

I hope with this post i made clear what i meant by biased. But good point slartibus.

Wish me luck on my last exam folks. I may need it.

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Salmonella – A Dangerous Foodborne Pathogen

Edited by Barakat S. M. Mahmoud

Published by InTech

Janeza Trdine 9, 51000 Rijeka, Croatia

 

thats the paper i read on bacterial infections in the united states. Now that i read the title i suppose the angle is a bit too narrow.

That's not a paper, that's 450 pages of papers. The first of them looks like the one you'd be citing, but it doesn't say that salmonella is a leading cause of death in children. So again, point me at where, exactly, you're seeing this.

 

-I didn't say kids cannot get cancer. I said they don't tend to. Specially compared to adults. Since kids are unlikely to get exposed to risk factors. Only genetics tend to play a role. (Unfortunately(i suppose fortunately for some) genes play a bigger role in adults than exposure/habits as well) but on that account(one of the leading causes of death) i already wrote you the title and author. I would send the email but thats sorta against placement if personal info etc etc..

Kids don't tend to die. But of kids who die, cancer is a leading cause in the US, just after accidental injury. I already cited the CDC there. Genetics plays a role, but it's probably small; actually, heritable causes are relatively rare for cancer generally. Like adults, it's probably mostly spontaneous mutations, and most don't have any identifiable environmental exposure.

 

On Wikipedia. I haven't yet seen a scientific error on it so it's reliable. But many times its incomplete. Out of habit i steer away from citing it. My main sources are lecturers, personal experience, a book called terapia(which granted is probably very dated, its a Soviet Union official translation of another book sp its oolllldddd) i'll get the details later as im on the way to school now.

Wikipedia definitely is hit or miss, mostly because its sources are hit or miss. But as a way to dig up sources of interest you can do much worse. For some medical literature things don't change all that much. The natural history of infection, for example. But treatment (Terapia) changes rapidly with advancements, and epidemiology also changes with changes in treatment, hygiene, and populations.

 

On malaria. I having had the luck of having it a whooping 8 times. Two resulting in lasting brain damage. Am honestly baffled at how all of them are on the same ground. Some of them have different(slightly) life cycles even. Using the cross system there are 5 types of malaria. With one cross and 5 crosses being the deadliest for completely different reasons. 5 crosses gives you a whoopass of heavy symptoms with 40+ celsius skin temp fevers. Convulsions and horribly debilitating other stuff. It kills ypu quickly if you don't go to the hospital immediately. Which most people go.

The one cross has very light symptoms extremely light that you don't notice you're sick so you don't go to the hospital and you die.( Why if you are in the tropics and feel slightly sick don't shy out of going to the hospital.)

So honestly one of the deadliest diseases in the world with so much impact in all aspects and there is no detailed information? I think im getting unreasonably pissed at it. Smh. This lack of information can kill people but anyway.

I'm not sure what you're angry at, but I'm very sorry you got malaria multiple times. I've never heard of the cross system. Do you know any other name for it?

 

—Alorael, who wishes you good luck with your exams.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

In truth there were 3 i had but i can't find it anywhere written that its a leading cause of child mortality anywhere. I do remember reading that. But its at odds with statistics given on these papers as it says kids have a relatively low incidence of the disease. 1.something% so what i read was probably wrong.

 

-on cancer i really wanna fight(figuratively) you on that one. But that would mean too much work. In any case random mutations are in fact the main cause of cancer. What i am sure of is that there was a mention of those being linked to genes(redundant, but i mean the odds of those random mutations occuring are hereditary in a way. I think its something to do with programed cell death in case of aberrant mutation. Some have it more precise others less so.) That being said im willing to take your word on it. Like i said im not specialising in medicine so not really my area of expertise.

 

 

-True on changes throughout the ages. But it is a very accurate book when it comes to life cycles and symptoms. Has saved some lives at least. On Wikipedia also true. You can easily find gizmodo or daily mirror as a source. And those aren't even the worst i've seen. But still i haven't seen it having scientific errors. Actually were i to edit it im confident it would be corrected in less than 2 hours. Well. Probably not. Depending on where i go.

 

-lolz don't be sorry it feeds my ego and delusions of grandeur on the basis of immortality. Not many can claim that xD

I'm angry at the lack of information. As the symptoms vary a bit, so does the treatment. With a lot of people using quinine(not to mention fansidar which can actually cause chemical burns(well, severe alergic reaction and skin death) to treat something that could be treated with chloroquine(although not advisable in some areas as there are resistant strains) which is much less damaging to the liver. Hell they even give people preemptive quinine shots in certain situations. Which is definitely not helpful because it may give rise to new resistant strains. And its a bit silly because even some doctors don't know how to go about treating it. I know of this British guy that got it in Mozambique and flew back to Europe to die there of the disease. I believe in part its because it is a tropical disease and people in the tropics are more used to treating it. But information like that should be available to the public. It can save lives.

I don't know for sure but i think its called semi quantitative parasitemia. On density of plasmodia per thick blood smear. There are some variations of the same test for serotyping to see if its plasmodium ovale or vivax( ovale can cause relapses due to hypnozoits and vivax needs extra measures to prevent spleen enlargement). 5 crosses is almost always falciparum. And there are 2 other kinds of plasmodia that cause disease in humans but generally not given much attention as they can be treated the same as falciparum.

 

Thanks man! It went well.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Things are heating up in the election: Republican Electors are starting to defect. I guess 20 have indicated that they will go against their states' popular votes if an additional 20 or so also decide to flip. We may yet avoid a President Trump. I got forwarded this by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (most known for their devotion to Senator Elizabeth Warren and their focus on putting more similar politicians in government). The whole time they were emphasizing that the electoral college protests they've been organizing at State Houses around the country would likely be just symbolic and get people moving to try to counteract Trump's baloney once he's in, but they seem to have been taken by surprise that it's actually working and gaining ground.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Even if enough electors refuse to vote for Trump, which I doubt will happen, a hung election goes to the Republican-controlled House, who will choose Trump over Clinton or Johnson. (They must choose from the three candidates with the most votes.)

I think it's the three candidates with the most Electoral College votes, so Johnson isn't necessarily the third. They could pick whoever they want to come in third place.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If the Electoral College fails to represent their voting districts by a large enough margin to elect someone different then they have sealed their fate. it will bring about the biggest blowback and push for college reform due to the perception that democracy is dead. It is in their best interests to vote trump if their district chose trump.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The Electoral College doesn't really have interests. Quite a few electors might well believe that the Electoral College is a terrible system and shouldn't exist.

 

If there were enough electors who went against what they were elected to do and Clinton ended up as president, it would lead to a weird situation where there would be justifiable complaints about the whole Electoral College system, but the absence of the Electoral College would have had exactly the same outcome.

 

—Alorael, who doesn't expect more than a few symbolic votes against Trump. No outcome thrown to Congress, much less actual changes in who is president.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

There is a rising demand from the Electors (70 of them last I heard) to see the evidence the CIA, FBI, and NSA have that Trump's victory was caused by interference from the Russian government, even Vladimir Putin himself, before they vote, and as I understand it there is even a protocol for delaying the vote while unfolding situations are considered. There are suggestions in the media that depending on the circumstances, whether it's actual complicity or just trying to hide it after the fact, Mr. Trump could be at risk of a charge of treason.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well, so far, there has been no drama. The votes are going on as scheduled and the electors pledged toward Trump are voting for him. According to the NYT at 4:45 PM, the only defections have been four electors pledged to Clinton voting for someone else. The media has certainly not covered itself with glory this election cycle and today is just continuing that theme. Proving collusion between Putin and Trump would be hard if such collusion even existed. Right now, collusion is up there with Obama was born in Kenya.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So, it didn't work.

 

Lately I've been hearing stuff about how the Supreme Court could throw out Trump's Presidency. If this is legally possible though, I think it doesn't matter; the Republicans would probably ignore SCOTUS, because they could get away with it and they know it.

 

Also, anyone notice how Trump has his own private security force in addition to the Secret Service?

 

I do not think we have rule of law on a federal level any more. On a local and state level, in some places, but not federal.

 

Good luck and best wishes to everyone here. Please try to keep your anger, if nothing else. I'm forcing myself every day to keep mine. :(

Link to comment
Share on other sites

From an electoral standpoint, trying to remove Trump's mandate to be president seems moot. From a political standpoint, strategies of how to resist Trump's policies and goals is far more productive.

 

re: rule of law. Paul Krugman recently compared Trump's presidency to the fall of the Roman Republic. Krugman's analysis seems pretty non-specific, here, and if anything just makes me think of how executive power has been ballooning in size historically since the onset of the Cold War, which is what uniquely gives presidents the ability to be more influential than they have been previously. Obama used them to pass policy through an obstructionist Congress, and Trump may use them for the same purpose if he is unable to effectively garner support among all parts of the GOP.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The fall of the Roman Republic was preceded by generations of wars, civil wars, and political purges. The slave population grew to drown out almost all other economic activity. Caesar, growing up, saw the prosciptions of Sulla and the dismantling of several centuries of Roman legal and civic development. His entire generation did. Roman culture more or less collapsed under the weight of its conquests, and dramatically, and for a long time. It is perennially tempting to compare any bad political thing that happens to the fall of the Roman Republic. It is perennially a poor comparison. Caesar, though interesting and unique in his own right, was not the avatar of tyranny. He was not even the first person to successfuly declare themselves dictator for life. And, honestly, his rule was probably the most reasonable, most successfully progressive, most humanitarian thing to happen to Rome since the fall of Carthage, so pointing to the events of Caesar's life as an example of a bad thing is maybe not even a good point to try to make in the first place.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

As I said, Krugman had some very non-specific analysis.

 

My own non-specific analysis, inspired by Krugman's analysis of "republican facades,' is that the power of the presidency has expanded dramatically to the point where it has overgrown the rule of law, already. By and large, Congress has not worked to contravene this.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Caesar, growing up, saw the prosciptions of Sulla and the dismantling of several centuries of Roman legal and civic development. His entire generation did. Roman culture more or less collapsed under the weight of its conquests, and dramatically, and for a long time. It is perennially tempting to compare any bad political thing that happens to the fall of the Roman Republic. It is perennially a poor comparison. Caesar, though interesting and unique in his own right, was not the avatar of tyranny. He was not even the first person to successfuly declare themselves dictator for life. And, honestly, his rule was probably the most reasonable, most successfully progressive, most humanitarian thing to happen to Rome since the fall of Carthage, so pointing to the events of Caesar's life as an example of a bad thing is maybe not even a good point to try to make in the first place.

To be clear, Krugman is pointing to Augustus, not Julius Caesar, as the leader who ended the Republic. (This is fairly standard in classical scholarship; Rome transitioned from the Republic to the Principate at this time.) Many similar points could be made about Augustus, but we may as well get the person right.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

In the last few months, Paul Krugman seemed to be trying to thrown his objectivity out of the window. While he was never my favorite economist, I used to respect him for his accomplishments in that realm. As he has dipped farther and farther into politics, my respect for him has dropped.

 

The ballooning of the powers of the executive branch precedes the cold war. FDR dramatically increased the power of the executive branch and attempted to (and in several ways succeeded in) suborning the Supreme Court to the executive branch. While the Supreme Court has in many ways recovered, the legislative branch has not. Policies are set by the executive branch agencies, not by congress. In my opinion, this is a very bad thing, but somewhere between few and none of the Senators and Representatives of either party seem to have any interest in actually doing their job. President Obama certainly did his best to make this situation worse and President Trump is likely to continue that trend.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Edgwyn

 

At this point, if you can look at Trump and his cabinet in all their cumulative awfulness and just say that they continue a bad trend, you are in denial far beyond anything I can help with.

 

@Goldengirl

 

Agreed. I want to say I fault Pres. Obama in part for failing to curtail this, but it goes waaaay back and a lot of people share responsibility. (Including people like me, for failing to make enough noise about it.)

 

But, I think that a Trump administration is a qualitative change, not just a quantitative one. Trump is a guy who doesn't even pay lip service to rule of law, and his cabinet will consist mostly of people who make the Bush Administration's worst look like Isaac Asimov protagonists. Trump's only detailed policy item during his campaign was ethnic cleansing. Various forms of bigotry are the only positions he's been consistent on.

 

If the worst thing he does is stuff the political system with billionaires and make us all peons, I will be astonished.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...