As a follow-up to this afternoon's post (which, on reflection, I've decided to friends-lock), Casey just got sent home from school early with a fever. Her teacher says that several kids in the class have recently been diagnosed with Fifth Disease, googling on which term has turned up an interesting etymological/historical story I didn't know. (It's not, as I'd assumed since first hearing about it, named after a Doctor Fifth.)

I'll post it later, if I get the chance, but if you're curious in the interim, poke around at the results for "Fourth Disease" also, to make sure you get the full scoop.

Tags: casey, history, medicine, parenting

Never one to shrink from a fight, my buddy Kevin has stepped up to defend one of the few factually indefensible claims in the Jeremiah Wright clips that have been getting so much airplay:

If the government had actually anticipated that AIDS would particularly affect the black community, and stood aside to allow it to happen, that would be nothing more than an absolutely literal recreation of its behavior in regard to other diseases in the past. The step from there to the idea that the government might actually have created that disease is a small one, and hardly far-fetched in light of other things the government and medical researchers really have done. Now, it appears in fact that the US government did not invent AIDS, or deliberately encourage its spread through the black community -- although they did stand by and watch for years as it happened in front of them. But with all this history behind, who would not suspect the government might have played an active, and not just a passive, role in creating the epidemic?

Go read the whole thing. I guarantee you you'll learn some stuff about the history of race and medicine in the United States --- stuff you didn't know, and need to know. If you want to understand how race works in America today, you've got to know your history.

Go get schooled.

Tags: history, medicine, politics, race

My social circle is abuzz about the new study that shows that a quarter of American girls and women aged 14 to 19 have contracted a sexually transmitted infection, but I haven't seen much discussion of this angle.

Apparently the vast majority of the infections found were human papilloma virus --- eighteen percent of the teens studied tested positive for HPV, compared with just four percent who tested positive for chlamydia and two percent for genital herpes. The CDC estimates that more than half of sexually active Americans contract HPV at some point in their lives, with the vast majority remaining asymptomatic. In about 90% of cases, a person who contracts HPV will fight off the infection within two years in the absence of treatment.

So that's one important thing to know about this study. The vast majority of the infections found were instances of a virus that's endemic among sexually active adults. If you assumed, as I have to admit I did, that most of the cases found were of chlamydia, herpes, or HIV, you assumed wrong. The study didn't find that a quarter of teens have STDs, it found that a quarter of them have STIs, most of which will clear up on their own.

The other thing to take away, of course, is that there's an HPV vaccine now. (The article I linked to above passes along speculation that the folks who make that vaccine may have sponsored the study, and I'd be curious to know whether that's the case.) I haven't done a full study of the issues surrounding the HPV vaccine, but I gotta say I've always been favorably disposed towards shelling out for it for the kids when the time comes.

What say you, my sciencey friends? Any of you have a Gardasil soundbite for me?

Tags: medicine, parenting, politics