I could have told you that.

Most of the college students who got the mumps in a big outbreak in 2006 had received the recommended two vaccine shots, according to a study that raises questions about whether a new vaccine or another booster shot is needed. The outbreak was the biggest in the U.S. since shortly before states began requiring a second shot for youngsters in 1990.

Nearly 6,600 people became sick with the mumps, mostly in eight Midwest states, and the hardest-hit group was college students ages 18 to 24. Of those in that group who knew whether they had been vaccinated, 84 percent had had two mumps shots, according to the study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state health departments.

That "two-dose vaccine failure" startled public health experts, who hadn't expected immunity to wane so soon — if at all.

Part of the problem was a new strain of the vaccine that these young people hadn't been vaccinated against.

But beyond that is the fact that the vaccine does not confer lifetime immunity.

And i speak from experience.

You see, i was one of the test subjects for the vaccine back in the 1960s. My family lived in Maryland at the time, and my brother and I were a part of one of the trials of the new vaccine.in late 1965 or early 1966. Several years later, around 1972 or 1973, I got mumps. Since we were now in northern Virginia, my parents took me back to the Naval Hospital at Bethesda -- and in the middle of the night I had a dozen doctors in lab coats standing around me, poking, prodding, and drawing blood. They were members of the original research team from NIH (also located in Bethesda), and having me on site let them check out how much immunity the vaccine conferred and whether it reduced the severity or durration of the disease. It didn't.

i don't know what changes were made over the years, but to hear that the immunity was not entirely effective sure doesn't surprise me.

Posted by: Greg at 10:44 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Probably not.

The idea that drinking eight glasses of water a day is good for your health has been dismissed as a myth.

Scientists say there is no evidence drinking large amounts of water is beneficial for the average healthy person, and do not even know how this widely held belief came about.

Specialists in kidney conditions in America reviewed research on claims eight 8oz glasses of water help flush toxins from the body, preventing weight gain and improving skin tone.

Dr Dan Negoianu and Dr Stanley Goldfarb, of the Renal, Electrolyte and Hypertension Division at the University of Pennsylvania, said no single study indicated average healthy people needed to drink this amount of water - a total of 3.3 pints - each day.

"Indeed, it is unclear where this recommendation came from," they say in a review in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

In other words, drinking all that water does nothing for you – well, other than make you pee.

Will this impact bottled water sales, further fueling the recession?

And will Democrats blame George Bush?

Posted by: Greg at 11:05 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Having recently buried my mother-in-law following an extended illness caused by her smoking, this story interests me to no end.

Scientists say they have pinpointed a genetic link that makes people more likely to get hooked on tobacco, causing them to smoke more cigarettes, making it harder to quit, and leading more often to deadly lung cancer.

The discovery by three separate teams of scientists makes the strongest case so far for the biological underpinnings of the addiction of smoking and sheds light on how genetics and cigarettes join forces to cause cancer, experts said. The findings also lay the groundwork for more tailored quit-smoking treatments.

"This is kind of a double whammy gene,'' said Christopher Amos, a professor of epidemiology at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and author of one of the studies. "It also makes you more likely to be dependent on smoking and less likely to quit smoking.''

I lost my grandfather to such an illness four decades ago, and so avoided smoking out of fear that i would follow in my footsteps. A good move, in my eyes, as my mothers siblings who smoked were both dead before sixty -- while my mother is still going strong in great health in her mid-70s. had i started smoking, I'm sure I would already be gravely ill -- likely because of this gene. Fortunately, free will does come into play on the initial decision to smoke.

And I already see some of my teenage students smoking -- hooked on that nicotine -- in the tenth grade, which has made m wonder to what degree there was a genetic link rather than a social one. How many will die young because of the impact of this gene?

Posted by: Greg at 10:11 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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This raises more questions than it answers.

The news keeps getting worse for two heavily promoted cholesterol drugs, Vytorin and Zetia. These drugs were supposed to offer a valuable alternative to the older cholesterol-lowering agents known as statins, a class that includes Lipitor, Zocor and other drugs that not only reduce cholesterol but also reduce the risk of heart attacks. In clinical trial results released this week, the newer drugs failed to reach their main goal: slowing the growth of artery-clogging plaques — a suggestion that they might not help ward off heart attacks.

* * *

In the clinical trial, 720 European patients with genes that cause abnormally high cholesterol levels were given either Vytorin, a combination pill that contains both Zetia and Zocor, or simply Zocor alone. As expected, the combination pill proved better than the statin alone at reducing the level of bad cholesterol. But to everyoneÂ’s surprise, Vytorin failed to slow the growth of fatty plaques in the arteries, and it may have even allowed greater growth than the statin did.

It seems clear that there is an issue with Zocor. But is Zetia as flawed a drug? I asked one doctor that question yesterday, only to be told that her reading of the study is that the problem is with Zocor itself, because of the lack of a sample with Zetia being given alone. And given that the drug is effective with its primary purpose, Zetia remains a good drug for those who have difficulties with the statin drugs.

I suspect we will hear more in the not terribly distant future about other studies. But one would have hoped that this would have been vetted during the approval process.

Posted by: Greg at 10:09 PM | Comments (59) | Add Comment
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