Can I just say on behalf of all of us in our forties, thank you Lance Armstrong for coming clean! How many of us have gone biking only to think, “If Lance Armstrong were here, he would have passed me, circled back, and passed me again just to make sure I hadn’t suffered a heart attack.” But now we know he was doping! This absolves us of everything in life we have failed to accomplish: “Sure, I’d be a star athlete with millions of dollars in endorsements...if I weren’t drug free. Yeah, I could have made it to my son’s piano recital Tuesday, if I were doping!” Next time my wife asks me to take out the trash, I’m gonna say, “Who do I look like, Lance Armstrong? I am 100% clean, Honey. I’ll just put away the dishes.”
The flu bug
Hemera
What? Why is everybody trying to force their safety on us? Let's go for a little "traffic excitement"!
Don’t you hate it when you find out your back-up plan isn’t as solid as you thought? Like how, if my practice floundered, I was going to get a full-time job with the Livestrong Foundation? A new evaluation of the effectiveness of oseltamivir (Tamiflu) suggests that it may not be such a great safety net for people who fail to vaccinate their children against influenza.
The meta-analysis from the Cochrane Acute Respiratory Infections Group looked to see how effective drugs like Tamiflu are both in treating and preventing influenza infections in children up to age 12. The good news is that for kids with laboratory-confirmed influenza, oseltamivir cut the median duration of illness by 36 hours, or 26%. The less-good news is that when oseltamivir was used to prevent household contacts of flu patients from getting the flu themselves, it worked only 8% of the time. Sure that’s better than, say, LMFAO’s odds of ever releasing another hit, but it still means that over 12 kids have to take Tamiflu for just one not to get sick.
That’s not to say that this year’s flu vaccine is perfect, but its estimated efficacy rate of 62% is more in line with the chances that a new chart-topper will be coming from Nicki Minaj, although I might enjoy the flu more. Looked at in the same way as Tamiflu, you only have to vaccinate 1.6 children for each case of flu prevented. I’m hoping that future research will reveal what it will take for my kids to stop playing Nicki Minaj within my earshot, but if not, I have a back-up plan: donate their iPhones to the Livestrong Foundation.
A Capitol idea
Remember when Congress used to do stuff? Like back in 2005, when they authorized $612 million over four years for state departments of transportation to build sidewalks, bicycle lanes and safe crossings, to improve signage, and to undertake “traffic calming” so kids could walk and bike to school without getting hit by cars? They even stayed up late thinking of a cool acronym: the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act (Get it? Like “safety,” but with more caffeine?) A research team in New York had the bright idea to evaluate the results of this nanny-state, pork-barrel waste of taxpayer money and see if the citizens of the United States got anything in return for being robbed of their freedom to speed in school zones.
To do so, the researchers compared pedestrian injury rates among children in parts of New York that implemented the improvements to those in parts that didn’t fleece hard-working Americans just to stifle drivers’ liberty. And what did we get for squandering people’s tax dollars? Only a 44% reduction in child pedestrian injuries during the hours of travel to and from school. The authors estimate that expanding the program to other school districts could prevent an additional 210 children from being injured by cars each year in New York alone. They do not comment on what sorts of interventions might bring back the 2005 Congress.
Mouths of babes
Perhaps wisdom is to be found among the young. A study performed right here in North Carolina, the tobacco capital of the world, found that more than 80% of middle-schoolers would support a ban on indoor tobacco smoking that would include private homes and cars. High school students were more libertarian in their responses, but still nearly 80% supported smoking bans in homes and workplaces, and 54% wouldn’t even allow smoking in public outdoor spaces like parks! When asked to justify these beliefs, students demonstrated profound insight into the tension between individual liberties and public health. In the words of one interviewee, “IDK, like, IMHO DTRT, UKNWIM?” If only such advice had been available to Lance Armstrong...