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Evidently today - April 25 - is DNA Day. Uh, "a unique day when students, teachers and the public can learn more about genetics and genomics!" according to the National Human Genome Research Institute. I say that we can do that any day, but sure - happy DNA Day to you all.

The US has hit a new high in cesarean births - more than 30% of all births are now done surgically. This news is especially timely to me - last week my wife gave birth to our first child, and after a lengthy but never alarming labor she gave birth to a fine boy early Tues morning. But a few hours later, word was that we were far closer to a cesarean (or rather, closer to the doctors recommending caesearean) than we'd ever imagined.

First in a series: From this week's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the CDC's chronicle of reports from state health departments: "Nail-Gun Injuries Treated in Emergency Departments --- United States, 2001--2005". The, uh, upshot: Nail gun injuries among consumers have tripled since 1990, with nearly 15,000 misfires in 2005. Not surprisingly, 98% of those injured are men. Here are the gory details:

Following up my post last week about computerized breast cancer screening, I found this report today about the perils of false-positives intriguing. Women who received a positive mammogram for breast cancer - and then later were told the test was wrong, and they don't have cancer - suffered high levels of stress for long periods of time. This was a meta-analysis of 23 different screening studies - meaning it's not a one-off, but much more likely to provide a clear consensus finding. Here's a link to the study abstract. A good reminder that as we embark into an era of more and more screening - for more and more biomarkers and genetic signatures and whatnot - there's a very clear side effect, and a great need to keep the tests' sensitivity and specificity - the accuracy, in other words - as high as possible.(It's not just cancer, false positives are a problem for screening in many diseases).

Last summer, Andy Kessler came out with new book, The End of Medicine, which despite its decisive and severe title, is in fact a nifty ramble around the frontiers of medical scanning. A former VC, Kessler was particularly compelling in assessing the business prospects of the store-front scanning businesses - BodyScan and others - and how they have tumbled in the last few years. The problem, as Kessler described it, was in the business model: Once you get people in the door for a scan, if there's something wrong they go to a doctor. If there's nothing wrong, they don't come back. No repeat business. And so the sector crashed, with the SEC sniffing for corpses. Such are the perils of trying to bring the frontiers of science to the consumer market. What works for hospitals and insurance companies may not be such a sure sell to patients/citizens. The tricky nature of direct-to-consumer high-tech medicine come to mind whenever I hear about some new genetic profiling startup. They've been around for a couple years now; DNA Direct was one of the first one on the block, I think they started in 2005. Recently there's word of the awkwardly named 23andMe, a startup that looks to be backed by Google, and has generated much scuttlebutt accordingly. The NIH/National Human Genome Institute and the FTC have issued some cautions over the past couple years.

A new study has found that computerized mammogram readers are significantly less accurate than human readers. The technique - known as computer-aided detection (or CAD, not to be confused with computer-aided design or computer-assisted dispatch or coronary artery disease) is expensive; according to Bloomberg, a CAD system can cost $675,000. Despite that cost (or perhaps because of it? Medicare covers the procedure - an important consideration for any facility considering an investment), many cancer centers have adopted the technology. It's a big setback for what many investors saw as a hugegrowtharea. Gonna be interesting to watch these stocks (link is to a Yahoo sector snap) react next week.

Oh boy. So this headline is spinning around the world today: Cancer cases are expected to double by 2030, according to a UN agency. What agency? Why, the International Agency for Research on Cancer.

A nice post from Derek Lowe about a couple new cancer vaccines in the works. The post is pretty sophisticated - if you're not a molecular chemist or a pharma expert (which I'm not) his analysis is pretty dense - but it's enough for me that Lowe finds these things credible. Here's a more consumer-centric report on Cell Genesys's GVAX vaccine from the American Cancer Society, and another on Dendreon's Provenge from the Wall Street Journal. What's interesting to me is that these things aren't conventional drug therapies - they are vaccines derived from a patient’s own cells. The vaccine protein mobilizes the immune system to attack cancer.

Trolling through Google news, it became apparent to me that it's Science Fair season... in Illinois

and Vermont

and Kentucky

and everywhere else in the US and Canada.

Ok, that's a bit of an alarmist and slightly misleading header - but there's frightful news out this weekend about a new influx of hemorrhagic dengue fever in Mexico. At least it appears frightful. "Hemorrhagic" is a terrifying word, giving rise to visions of ebola virus - and the idea that this exotic disease is on the US's doorstep is enough to spark fears of it crossing over. Indeed, dengue is quite at home in the Americas, contrary to popular perception that all virulent exotic diseases roost in Africa or Asia - and it has been known to cross our border into the Texas.