Form and Function

Two good examples of kidney art in my opinion. I've been holding on to these most of the semester until we got to the right chapter.
This is a milagro ("miracle") that can be worn as a healing offering to the saints by someone who has kidney problems. It's another Etsy find.

Can you guess what this is? Well, the urinary system, obviously. But it's wallpaper! Isn't that fantastic? My husband Matt found it via his blogroll on BoingBoing but it was originally covered by the LA Weekly blog and is the work of California artist Shannon Wright.

Here's a close-up of the kidney itself.

I'm not very in tune with what's going on right now in the world of A&P, but I do know that in March of this year a whole bunch of Fort Collins residents were getting down to the business of making babies, because the birth situation for my doula partner and I for the end of December is starting to look really hairy.

You'll probably get other journal entries on this, but Time magazine announced a retail DNA test as its "Invention of the Year". The test, developed by a company called 23 and Me, is a personal DNA analysis that can give its purchasers information on the link between their genes and 90 traits and diseases. While affordable, personalized, genetic information may well be the wave of the future (this home saliva test costs $399), the 23 and Me test has its share of controversy, the most valid of which in my opinion is the quality of the information gained. Only 23 of the 90 traits or diseases tested for have enough science behind them to allow the company to develop "quantitative estimates and definitive explanations" of the results to their customers. Quite a few of these 23 conditions are medically significant (e.g. Parkinson's, Type II Diabetes) but the possibility of finding out whether I am likely to produce an excess of ear wax is not going to have me running for the checkbook. The remaining 68 genetic components tested for do not have enough scientific evidence behind them to confidently link the genetics to the potential resulting diseases or traits.

My assessment is that this type of test is the first step towards broadly used, highly personalized health care based on individual genetics but that we have a long way to go to bring the scientific basis for this kind of testing up to par.

I just cannot get on the bandwagon that says that we know what's going on with the relationship between diet, cholesterol, and heart disease to a level that allows us to dramatically reduce the rate of cardiac disease and resulting death in our population as a whole. The "Homeostatic Imbalance" entry on cholesterol levels on page 981 of the text seems like a good representation of how little we know. To rephrase its content:

1. We used the think that high total cholesterol levels and LDL to HDL ratios were the predictors of heart disease but now we think only LDL levels and other risk factors are better predictors.

2. Half of people with heart disease have "normal" (as defined by the AHA or whoever) cholesterol levels.

3. Many people with "bad" cholesterol levels do not have heart disease.

4. Still, statins are prescribed (supposedly only) to those people who a) are cardiac patients and b) have LDL levels over 130.

5. The number of people who meet those 2 criteria apparently number 10 million, because that's the number of people taking statins.

6. Everyone should change their diet, regardless of total cholesterol or HDL levels, despite the fact that only 15% of cholesterol in the body comes from diet, and that dietary restriction of cholesterol may result in deficiencies of other essential nutrients found in cholesterol-containing foods.

Good grief.

Because my husband and I are apparently old and boring liberals, or something of the sort, we listen to a lot of public radio podcasts and a couple weeks ago we caught a really interesting segment from Canadian public radio on the history of the HIV virus. The researcher, Dr. Michael Worobey, had come across two tissue samples from the Congo, circa 1960, with different strains of HIV. Based on the the amount of difference between the two strains and the known rate of mutation in the HIV virus, he was able to estimate that the two strains had differentiated from a single strain beginning around the year 1900. 1900! About 70 to 80 years before any knowledge of the virus really hit the worldwide scene.

Dr. Worobey believes that that virus was present (but still lethal) in widely dispersed populations in Africa for many decades before being recognized as a unique condition because those who succumb to the HIV virus die of opportunistic infections, primarily tuberculosis in many non-industrialized countries, and therefore deaths from HIV were not unlike the many other TB-related deaths. He also believes that the virus would not have grown to epidemic proportions had Africa's population remained dispersed in small tribes, but that the growth of city populations in the 1900s allowed HIV to spread very quickly, becoming the worldwide epidemic it is today.

The .mp3 of the interview with Dr. Worobey can be downloaded here.