philly

Stem Cells: Big in 06

I found this article in Monday's NY Times very interesting for a couple of reasons. First off, it deals with the hot button social issue of embryonic stem cell research. Secondly, given the recent coverage of the NYT of the PA senate race where they basically say Bob Casey will get the nod even with staunch opposition from within his own party; this stem cell article doesn't bring up Casey's position on embryonic stem cell research. It's the same as BushCo.

I support the current federal policy on embryonic stem cell research and would oppose the Castle bill to expand federal support of embryonic stem cell research... As a U.S. Senator, I will strongly support funding for stem cell research that doesn't destroy an embryo. [Ignatius Insight 7.29.05]

Unfortunately, Bob doesn't seem to be aware that embryonic stem cell research is the future and those embryos have to be destroyed. Also, the embryos that are to be worked on have already been discarded and will be destroyed anyways.

Some more reporting on the Castle bill here from 7.29.05 by the same reporter as this newer article.

Human embryonic stem cells are considered by scientists to be the building blocks of a new field of regenerative medicine. The cells, extracted from human embryos, have the potential to grow into any type of tissue in the body, and advocates for patients believe they hold the potential for treatments and cures for a range of diseases, from juvenile diabetes to Alzheimer's disease.

But the cells cannot be obtained without destroying human embryos, which opponents of the research say is tantamount to murder. "An embryo is nascent human life," Mr. Frist says in his speech, adding: "This position is consistent with my faith. But, to me, it isn't just a matter of faith. It's a fact of science."

On Aug. 9, 2001, in the first prime-time speech of his presidency, Mr. Bush struck a compromise: he said the government would pay only for research on stem cell colonies, or lines, created by that date, so that the work would involve only those embryos "where the life or death decision has already been made."

The House-passed bill would expand that policy by allowing research on stem cell lines extracted from frozen embryos, left over from fertility treatments, that would otherwise be discarded. Mr. Castle has said he believes the bill meets the president's guidelines because the couples creating the embryos have made the decision to destroy them.

Today's story focuses on the potential using of the issue of embryonic stem cell research as a new wedge issue.

Democrats are pressing their support for embryonic stem cell research in Congressional races around the country, seeking to move back to center stage an issue they believe resonates with voters and to exploit a division between conservatives who oppose the science and other Republicans more open to it.

The question of whether the government should support or limit stem cell research has cropped up in Senate races in Maryland and Missouri, and in House races in California, Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin, especially in suburban swing districts.

I let out a laugh as Pennsylvania was listed in the House races and left off the Senate list. In what the NY Times has already started to highlight [here and here] as one of the most important Senate races to get back majority in Congress, the issue that Dems are supposed to be using as a new wedge issue is moot.

This is the first real wedge issue Democrats have had with Republicans

says Jennifer E. Duffy, who tracks Senate races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. The first real wedge issue and what has Sen. Chuck Schumer done? Kissed it goodbye here in PA. Schumer promissed his Congressional colleagues that while this guy was pretty far Right, he'd never back extremist SCOTUS nominees, but then Bob goes out and says he'd vote to confirm both John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Oh, and he said he would've also voted to go to war in Iraq and doesn't feel a need to withdraw anytime soon. Let's not even touch on the whole anti-universal healthcare, anti-living wage, anti-choice thing. This candidate Casey is just a shitty choice who just falls short everywhere except for having a dad who was the governor, a popular one at that.

And then there's the candidate I'm volunteering more and more hours every week, Chuck Pennacchio. On the issues, he's a knight in shining armor compared to Bob. Chuck is pro-choice, pro-universal healthcare, pro-embryonic stem cell research, anti-war, anti-extremist SCOTUS appointments, pro-balanced budget amendment, pro-living wage, wants to renew the assault weapons ban... The list just goes on and on and you can read more about his stances on the issues here.

There's only one choice for me in the primary and that's Chuck Pennacchio. A Casey victory would push back the progressive movement six years [his full Senate term]. It would plant another Zell Miller / Joe Lieberman in the Dem side of the aisle undercutting the efforts of the entire party and being BushCo's new favorite Dem lapdog. This guy can't be trusted to vote for a Democratic Senate Majority Leader.

ReNu with MoistureLoc

As a contact lens wearer, this Bloomberg Newswire story caught my attention.

Retailers have been pulling the Bausch & Lomb product from their shelves. The contact-lens solution is linked to an eye fungus.

Yuck. Fungus.

SD Planned Parenthood on Sioux Land

With the state of South Dakota chugging full steam in reverse in basically outlawing all forms of abortion within their state, someone has decided to take a stand. The President of the Oglala Sioux tribe, Cecilia Fire Thunder, [a former nurse and healthcare giver] had this to say:

To me, it is now a question of sovereignty... I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction.

via Pesky'Apostrophe

But I doubt President Fire Thunder can do this herself. Mac tracked down some contact info and an address to send her some funds to construct the building.

If you want to mail donations to the reservation, you may do so at:

Oglala Sioux Tribe
ATTN: President Fire Thunder
P. O. Box 2070
Pine Ridge, SD 57770

OR: and this may be preferred, due to mail volume:

ATTN: PRESIDENT FIRE THUNDER
PO BOX 990
Martin, SD 57751

Enclose a letter voicing your support and explaining the purpose of the donation. Bear in mind, the Pine Ridge Res is not exactly dripping with disposeable income, so do consider donating funds directly to the tribe as well as specifically for this effort.

ETA: Make checks out to OST Planned Parenthood Cecelia Fire Thunder. This will ensure that the funds get routed properly.

And I'm sure she'd appreciate a few emails of support too. Email info here.

Product Purchasing Changes

Lady and I have been making more and more conscious decisions about spending our money in the time we've been together. Where to shop. What to buy. Who to buy from. Who not to support. Decisions like not buying Nike. Not shopping at Wal Mart. Shopping at local stores whenever possible as opposed to chains.

Lately, we've been purchasing things that are of the more healthy nature. Organic when we can, even though it is usually more expensive. And now, with the products we use, Lady took steps to research what we're putting on our faces, what we're washing our hair with, what we're absorbing on a daily basis. She found SafeCosmetics.org and we've made some changes already.

We're not just throwing out everything in the house though. We're not rich enough to do that and we're not wasteful enough to do that even if we were rich enough. We're replacing things as we run out of them along the way. Changes will be made in the shampoos we use, body wash, facial soap, lotion, hand soap...

Take a click over to this tool and enter in a product or two that you use right now. Your shave cream. Your shampoo. Your toothpaste. Your hand soap. Your deoderant. Your contact lens solution. See what's inside there. See which carcinogens you're absorbing. Skeeves you out don't it? Every single product isn't listed, but this is a pretty good start. They have tons of the major brands and their various lines of products.

One alarming thing that Lady learned was that there are no regulations on what the companies put on the labels of their products. 'Not tested on animals' doesn't mean jack shit. They can flat out lie. 'Natural' on a bar of soap doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means. There is no governmental regulation on the usage of words like that as there are with food and the FDA. There are rules via the FDA as to what is 'organic' or 'light' but no such agency oversees products that can be just as harmful as a Big Mac. Stuff that you use and ingest/absorb every day.

Be aware of the shit that you put on your body. Take steps to cut back on the bad stuff. Be an informed consumer [and an informed voter while you're at it!]. I know this is going to be a long learning process for me/us, but you gotta start sometime and there's no time like the present.

One of the biggest coverups in products is the ingredient "fragrance" which can be almost anything. It can be rat shit, it can be otter musk, it can be patchouli, it can be vanilla. Just about every company uses it in their ingredients list. It's a way to get around disclosing some potentially nasty stuff.

Wal Mart and Medicaid in PA

The Inky's got a story today on how one in six of th 48,000 Wal Mart employees in PA are on Medicaid, the state medical assistance program. Wal Mart is the largest employer in the U.S. let alone PA and their lack of proper health coverage [*I don't have any healthcare coverage right now temping] is costing us PA residents $15M a year.

Wal Mart, an employer of 1.3M nationwide raked in $11.2B in PROFIT in 2005. Do some math. If they were to take that full $11.2B and redistribute it to the full 1.3M [that's including the execs and managers and other white collar employees] it would result in $8,615 in extra money. Take away the execs and other already well-paid employees, and that numer rises a little across the board for those on state assistance. Now the crazy thing is, many of these people are employed "full time" as Wal Mart calls it. Wal Mart's version of "full time" employment is thirty-four hours per week. Extrapolate that against a normal forty-hour work week and over a year's time, you're short 312 hours! That's 7.8 weeks in real full-time employment.

"Wal-Mart is making billions in profits, while pushing people onto medical assistance at a time when 100,000 people in Pennsylvania were in jeopardy of losing benefits," said Jonathan Stein, general counsel at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia. "The situation only makes life difficult for other poor people who could only look to Medicaid."

Swelling state medical assistance rolls and higher health-care costs compelled Gov. Rendell last year to limit some services and increase some fees for many of the 1.8 million Pennsylvanians on medical assistance.

Wal-Mart, the largest employer in the state, has a total of 7,577 of its employees, or 15.8 percent, on medical assistance in Pennsylvania. The company's workforce is more than double the number of workers at the next-largest retailer, Giant Food.

Giant Food has about 19,000 total workers.

Good god I hate Wal Mart.

Birth Control and Emergency Contraception

According to this WaPo article, there have already been more than sixty bills filed in state legislatures this year in regards to emergency contraception.

Many of the state bills intended to expand access give specially trained pharmacists in states including Maryland, New York, Kentucky and Illinois the right to dispense emergency contraception without a prescription. Other bills require pharmacies to stock and distribute the drug, and to ensure that the pill is made available to women who come into emergency rooms after a sexual assault.

But some bills would make it more difficult for many women to get emergency contraception, which is effective for only 72 hours after a woman experiences a contraceptive failure or unprotected sex. Legislation in New Hampshire, for instance, would require parental notification before the drug is dispensed, and more than 20 other states will consider bills that give pharmacies the right not to stock the drug and pharmacists the right not to dispense it, even to women with valid prescriptions.

Access to emergency contractptive pills [ECPs] is a good thing. To claim that it's some kind of Lefty form of everyday contraceptive is a fucking joke. Who in their right minds would take ECPs as a normal form of contraception?

And then there's an interesting article from Nerve.com [I used to work there] via AlterNet on access to birth control in general and Planned Parenthood. The writer of the piece describes the troubles of several young adults who have had problems in obtaining birth control from Planned Parenthood as a result of high cost.

Red Cross is Fucked Up

I don't give much money to charities, I just don't have that much to give. But I do when I can. And it doesn't go to the American Red Cross. After 9/11, they fucked up so much of the money they got, I didn't think they'd be able to bounce back, but they did. So much of the money donated to the ARC didn't get to where it needed/was intended to go, it was appalling.

And then last year's hurricane season in the Gulf Coast region was just horrendous. Their response, or lack thereof was and continues to be a discrace.

And now, there's a report on how the ARC spent half a million dollars in the last three years pitching it's brand to Hollywood and reinforcing that brand as the recently ousted CEO Marsha J. Evans who fell lock step in line with the W administration's tactic of blaming the local officials instead of FEMA who had the sole responsibility of authority in the region.

There are tons of other great charities to donate money too. There's a list towards the top of the right pane of this blog. But the ARC is the only large outfit that I know of which organized blood drives; correct me if I'm wrong on that one.

Lee Scott, CEO Walmart: A Dick

The NY Times has a story on an internal website that Lee Scott, CEO of evil evil big box Walmart, keeps called Lee's Garage. How homey. He used to pump gas at his pop's Kansas gas station. Now, he makes a bajillion dollars a year, but he's so in touch with his roots and what it's like to have nothing and just want the basic things like healtcare. Riiiight.

Let's forget, for just a moment, how evil Walmart is on providing healthcare to its workers when they're working there. Let's take it a step further for this multi-multi-multi billion dollar multi-national corporation and how it doesn't care for you when you're there and then shits on you when you leave. One store manager popped in a question on the site as to why:

the largest company on the planet cannot offer some type of medical retirement benefits?

And Scott's response:

Quite honestly, this environment isn't for everyone. There are people who would say, 'I'm sorry, but you should take the risk and take billions of dollars out of earnings and put this in retiree health benefits and let's see what happens to the company.' If you feel that way, then you as a manager should look for a company where you can do those kinds of things.

He could've just pulled a Dick Cheney and said "Go fuck yourself" or just shot him in the face.

Defending the internal corporate spin was a spokesperson:

Mona Williams, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said Mr. Scott responded so sharply because of the manager's sarcastic tone. The question, she said, indicated the manager failed to understand how competitive retailing is and would not be able to convey that to his subordinates.

Yes, the manager's peon mind couldn't possibly fathom how competitive retailing is. It's not like he's a manager of a multi-million dollar big box and isn't briefed on just how competitive the industry is. That manager probably pumps gas at his dad's gas station and won't amount to much in the end anyways.

Drug Companies are Evil

What does a drug company who discovers that their already existing colon cancer treating drug - Avastin - is also good in fighting lung and breast cancer? Hike up the fucking prices of course! Who the fuck wants to cure people anyway? This NY Times article takes a look at the $100K a year price Genetech plans to charge.

That price, about double the current level as a colon cancer treatment, would raise Avastin to an annual cost typically found only for medicines used to treat rare diseases that affect small numbers of patients. But Avastin, already a billion-dollar drug, has a potential patient pool of hundreds of thousands of people — which is why analysts predict its United States sales could grow nearly sevenfold to $7 billion by 2009.

Doctors, though, warn that some cancer patients are already being priced out of the Avastin market. Even some patients with insurance are thinking hard before agreeing to treatment, doctors say, because out-of-pocket co-payments for the drug could easily run $10,000 to $20,000 a year.

Until now, drug makers have typically defended high prices by noting the cost of developing new medicines. But executives at Genentech and its majority owner, Roche, are now using a separate argument — citing the inherent value of life-sustaining therapies.
...
Because Genentech is a leading developer of cancer therapies, some doctors also fear that the company's pricing plans for Avastin — around $8,800 a month — may encourage other companies to charge more for their own oncology drugs. That could potentially drive up the overall cost of cancer treatment to unsustainable levels, they say.

Nice eh?

So these fuckers cite one reason for the higher price as the doseage must be higher. But...

Dr. Leonard Saltz, an oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, noted that Genentech had not tested the Avastin at the dose level for colon cancer in large-scale trials of lung and breast cancer. As a result, no one really knows whether the lower dose might turn out to be equally effective in lung and breast cancer, he said. Besides costing less, he said, a lower dose might have fewer side effects.

Why bother testing! Just tell them more juice will create a bigger bang and you need that bigger bang or else they'll die.

Good thing that my insurance... oh wait, I don't have insurance.

Chuck Pennacchio wants universal health care

As both a moral and economic imperative, every American must have access to high quality basic care. Years of "safety net" programs have not eliminated the uninsured; in fact, more people lose employer-based coverage each year. It’s time for an American-style single-payer health insurance system. We can get better health outcomes for less money with universal health care and administrative simplification. Our talented, creative and caring medical professionals should be free to treat patients; they should not have to struggle with duplicative paperwork. Savings and waste reduction from a single payer system will make payments to hospitals and caregivers fair and reliable, and will make fraud easier to spot.

I like that.

Fighting TB

Every 15 seconds somebody dies of TB, avoidably, preventably

said UK Chancellor Gordon Brown yesterday at a conference. And Bill Gates is helping to stop that, perhaps more so [monetarily] than any other person in the world. He's kicking in $600M [in addition {IN ADDITION} to the $300M he's already committed] to the program to Stop TB.

Say what you want about this guy [and I sure as hell will], but he's more than put his money where is nerdy mouth is.