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Yesterday a story caught my eye titled "Disease Resistance May Be Genetic" that heralded a breakthrough study in Evolution about the inheritance characteristics of genes conferring resistance to infectious disease. It sounded like a perfect link for Epidemix (even though, curiously, the study actually came out in the June issue). But as I began to write it up, I kept stumbling over the headline. Didn't we already know that disease resistance may be genetic? I'm no geneticist, nor an infectious disease expert, but I did know that sickle cell anemia - which confers resistance to malaria - and other resistant traits were genetic and thus inherited conditions. And since the journal is not open access, I could only check out the journal's press release and the abstract, which didn't clarify matters at all.So I dropped a note to the study's author, Paul Schliekelman, a statistician at the University of Georgia. And I'm very glad I did. He kindly explained the actual import of his work and it's very cool. Here's the thread:

The Pump Handle has a scathing and rather startling rundown on the risk of microwave popcorn, specifically a butter-flavoring chemical called diacetyl, and federal regulators' failure to act to protect consumer health. The anecdotes in the comments are especially disconcerting. Makes me glad we've never owned a microwave (until last month). A great testament to the power of informed blogging.

All the Venter hubub today reminds me of a scenario that Oliver Morton offered at SciFoo:

Imagine the human race is wiped out. Aliens come down from the sky, and want to see who these humans were. All they'd have to go on would be the DNA of Craig Venter and James Watson. So at best, they could come up with a floc of Venter and Watson clones. Oy.

Much frenzy about the rapid increase in diagnoses for bipolar syndrome in children. A new study in the Archives of General Psychiatry shows that there's been a 40-fold increase in diagnoses over the past decade or so, with now fully 1 percent of all children being labeled "bipolar." According to the DSM IV, the textbook for mental health and disease classification, bipolar disorder is a mood disorder characterized by manic episodes and major depressive episodes. The diagnosis is controversial because of familiar riddle of epidemiology: Either the illness was underdiagnosed for decades, and we are now identifying a previously-hidden epidemic. Or the illness is being overdiagnosed, as a condition already of flimsy status in adult populations gets extended into children. As it happens, I was speaking last week with a prominent psychiatrist who was involved in the crafting of the DSM IV. First characterized bipolar disorder in children as one of the two "major issues"* in the psychiatric community and in the crafting the new edition of the diagnostic manual. The issue is how applicable is the disorder to children, in whom mental health can be far more variable and transitory.

One of the coolest things from SciFoo was a presentation by Lincoln Stein of Colds Springs Harbor Lab. Lincoln is an intriguing guy, a computational biologist who is extremely handy with code.

I've long been a fan of Dover Books, the no-frills publisher of reissued and public-domain texts. The books are typically high quality - each book has an endpage with this text:

A DOVER EDITION DESIGNED FOR YEARS OF USE We have made every effort to make this the best book possible. Our paper is opaque, with minimal show-through; it will not discolor or become brittle with age. Pages are sewn in signatures, in the method traditionally used for the best books, and will not drop out, as often happens with paperbacks held together with glue. Books open flat for easy reference. The binding will not crack or split. This is a permanent book.

Given the recent spate of stories about the risks to public health coming from Chinese factories - toys, and dog food and pharmaceuticals and sea food and pigs - I've been waiting for someone to write a definitive story on the public health lessons to be learned. But since nothing definitive has been forthcoming - aside from the very good but incremental reporting in the NYTimes and elsewhere, which is more about global politics than public health - I figure it's just as well that I throw down a few conclusions. 1) Regulation is a good thing. Government oversight of trade products - especially those that impact public health - are essential. Establishing clear standards for, say, the presence of lead in children's toys - and then having the governmental appartatus in place to enforce such regulations is not just important, but essential for the US. The fact that the US has recently reduced its funding for FDA inspection and other threshhold checks on imports is the opposite of what the government should be doing.

Wow. I totally missed this last week: Publix, a Florida-based chain of super markets, announced last week that it was offering free antibiotics. With a prescription, of course. But still - this is pretty appalling. I mean, antibiotics are way overprescribed as it is, for just about any condition they're used for (check out a simple Google search for proof), so the fact that Publix is fomenting that misuse is, well, kinda craven. So much for the fight against antibiotic resistance, at least in Florida...

All I have to say about this NYTimes story about Google's and Microsoft's approaches to health care is: What the heck does this story actually have to say about the future of health care? And considering they've seen the Google prototype, it seems awfully thin on actual content about what these companies' forays might consist of...

Great episode of the Colbert Report tonight - "DNA: Could It Happen To You?".

Mostly focused on familiar bits of genetics - the Innocence Project, National Geo's Genographic Project, which has collected DNA samples from more than 100,000 folks for geneological purposes. Introduced, though, by a nicely done spoof 1950s film on where DNA is from (from Jesus!)