“More than 20 years of Israeli spying operations in
Washington culminated in the interception of
e-mails from President Bill Clinton, intelligence
sources claimed last week.
The revelations come at a sensitive time as Ehud
Barak, the Israeli prime minister, is expected to
fly to Washington today for talks with Clinton
about the Middle East peace process.”[Times of London]
All this back and forth between the pharmaceutical industry and its detractors about whether selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants (Prozac [fluoxetine], Zoloft [sertraline], Paxil [paroxetine], Celexa [citalopram], Luvox [fluvoxamine], etc.) cause or contribute to suicidal feelings misses the point. A potential side effect of these medications is an intense kind of restlessness called akathisia that makes people feel so unbearably frantic that some may be driven to take their lives. Every mental health professional prescribing these drugs knows that, and it is useless for the pharmaceutical industry to argue that it is merely the patients’ depression, and not a drug effect, that contributes to the SSRIs’ suicide statistics (which indeed, as critics charge, may have been “spun” by the manufacturers to preserve profits). But the point is that the makers of these drugs have for the past decade or more aggressively marketed them to primary care providers (PCPs) over and above psychiatrists. The drug companies’ strategy is to persuade non-psychiatrists that they are so easy to prescribe that patients’ depression can be managed without needing to refer to psychiatrists or psychotherapists. Do we hear inadequate care here?? Most PCPs do not have the time or the expertise to track a patient’s suicidality adequately, and they are not sophisticated enough psychopharmacologically to recognize and address akathisia. (I know; I teach both suicide assessment and psychopharmacology and, at various times, have been approached by pharmaceutical companies to train PCPs,) I’ll bet that the proper analysis would show that any excess suicide mortality over the last decade or so in patients on SSRIs has a correlation with the proportion of SSRI ‘scripts written by non-psychiatrist MDs. ( No offense to the primary care physicians among you; you are victims of the no-holds-barred marketing tactics of Eli Lilly et al as well!)
But maybe it isn’t SSRIs at all. If there were a different reason over the past ten or fifteen years that depressed patients were committing suicide more (like the adverse impact on quality of mental health treatment caused by the penetration of managed care), this might be misconstrued as an SSRI effect. Since SSRIs became the first-line medications for depression during that time period, totally supplanting older antidepressants, treatment with medication for depression during that time period has been virtually synonymous with treatment with an SSRI.
Coup News Back on Fiji Site. “For the first several hours of the attempted overthrow of the government of the South Pacific island of Fiji,
one small website was feeding the world with news.
When it was inaccessible after that, fears were raised that the insurgents, led by coup leader George
Speight, had cut access to fijilive.com. As it turns out, it was probably a case of server overload. The site is back up, as is a mirror.” [Wired]
Geek.com Geek News – Intel’s new Xeons. “Intel announced limited availability of its newest Xeon
processors, running at 700MHz. The chips feature L2 cache sizes
of 1MB and 2MB, and unlike the older 550MHz Xeons that use
separate L2 cache chips, the L2 caches are built directly into
the chip die.” These chips run $1,980 apiece at present. Commentators note that the chips won’t be available in any quantity until the third quarter, making this a ‘paper’ rollout to offset Intel’s other woes in the press.
Black bear kills hiker in Smoky Mountain park, apparently without provocation. [I hike in black bear territory and had become accustomed to thinking of them as inoffensive, in comparison e.g. to the acknowledged threat when hiking in grizzly country.]
Images reveal lakes, snow, geysers on Jupiter moon Io. Galileo spacecraft flyby pictures depict an impossibly harsh, impossibly beautiful landscape (right).
Northwestern scientists shed new light on neurodegenerative diseases. A roster of apparently dissimilar neurodegenerative diseases are major challenges to neuropsychiatry: Huntington’s Disease, Alzheimer’s Disease, Creutzfelt-Jakob Disease and the other prior diseases (see below), cystic fibrosis. They all share one basic common pathway — they arise from the neurotoxic effects of the accumulation of misfolded proteins due to metabolic errors. Misfolded protein is insoluble because of its conformation change, and aggregates, and the aggregation takes down good protein with the bad in a snowballing effect. It turns out there are a class of “chaperone” molecules called heat shock proteins that function to prevent misfolding and detect already-misfolded proteins to prevent their further accumulation. Neurodegenerative diseases, new research suggests, represent the body’s losing race between the misfolding process and its supply of the protective heat shock proteins.Elucidating the role of these molecular chaperones suggests a possible avenue for prevention and remediation of this vexing class of gruesome and fatal diseases.
Four museum curators share their lists of the top ten picks for the most influential visual artworks of the past 1,000 years. It would’ve been nice if the lists were hyperlinked to web reproductions of each piece.
Political scientist Daniel Bell’s experience teaching in Singapore teaches him that classical education and multiculturalism need not conflict. I’m not sure this makes the case persuaively in a way that translates into our own culture.
Scholars search for da Vinci’s DNA. Testing DNA found in smudges and
fingerprints in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks and sketches may be a useful way to distinguish da Vinci’s work from that of his apprentices. An Italian art historian in Vinci has collected dozens of fingerprints from the master’s notebooks and drawings.
“Irradiating meat is the meat industry’s answer to filthy meat processing
practices that leave meat contaminated”: The union representing federal food inspectors joined a coalition opposing food irradiation (brokered by Public Citizen and including the Center for Food Safety, the Campaign for Biodemocracy,
Friends of the Earth, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, the Nuclear Information
and Resource Service, and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine). The union is concerned that irradiation is central to a meat industry initiative to police itself and displace the role of federal inspectors. “Although the meat industry claims that irradiation will make
food safer, the health impacts of eating irradiated food are uncertain. New chemicals called
unique radiolytic products are created in the irradiation process. No testing has been done
to identify these chemicals, much less to determine if they are safe for human
consumption. Evidence indicates that chromosomal damage (among other problems) could
occur as the result of consuming irradiated food. Further, meat that is treated using
irradiation often gives off a very strange odor.”
Violence Policy Center reacts to planned NRA cafe and store in Times Square, NYC: “Today’s announcement by the NRA that they are opening an NRA cafe and store in Times
Square is an amazing example of how bizarrely out of sync the organization is with
mainstream America. It will go down in history as the worst marketing decision since New
Coke. What will their sign say, ‘Over a Million Killed?’ It will quickly become a protest
Mecca in the wake of the high-profile shootings that now define our nation, each of which
will be laid at the NRA’s doorstep.” —Josh Sugarman, VPC executive director and author of the 1992 book NRA: Money, Firepower and Fear
Creative arts a vital industry in New England. The Boston Globe features a new report indicating that “The ‘creative industry’ (nonprofit institutions such as museums and libraries, individual
artists, and arts-related commercial activities) makes up
3.5 percent of New England’s total job base – more than our software or
medical technology industries. It is growing at a remarkable rate of 14
percent each year – nearly twice as fast as the average rate of job
growth in New England.” The arts, apparently, are a very good investment to stimulate employment and economic growth.
