�The widely-held perception that the influenza vaccination reduces overall mortality risk in the aged does non withstand careful scrutiny, according to researchers in Alberta. The vaccine does confer protection against specific strains of flu, but its overall benefit appears to have been exaggerated by a figure of experimental studies that found a very large reduction in all-cause mortality among aged patients world Health Organization had been vaccinated.
The results will appear in the first issuing for September of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, a publication of the American Thoracic Society.
The study included more than 700 matched elderly subjects, half of whom had interpreted the vaccine and half of whom had not. After controlling for a wealth of variables that were largely not considered or simply not available in previous studies that reported the mortality benefit, the researchers concluded that any such benefit "if present at all, was very little and statistically non-significant and may just be a healthy-user artifact that they were unable to identify."
"While such a reduction in all-cause mortality rate would have been impressive, these mortality rate benefits ar likely implausible. Previous studies were likely measuring a benefit non directly attributable to the vaccine itself, but something specific to the individuals who were vaccinated - a healthy-user benefit or frailty bias," said Dean T. Eurich,Ph.D. clinical epidemiologist and supporter professor at the School of Public Health at the University of Alberta. "Over the last two decades in the United Sates, even while inoculation rates among the aged have increased from 15 to 65 percent, on that point has been no commensurate decrease in hospital admissions or all-cause mortality. Further, only almost 10 percent of wintertime deaths in the United States ar attributable to influenza, so to suggest that the vaccine can reduce 50 percent of deaths from all causes is implausible in our opinion."
Dr. Eurich and colleagues hypothesized that if the healthy-user effect was responsible for for the mortality benefit associated with influenza vaccination seen in observational studies, there should also be a significant mortality benefit present during the "off-season".
To determine whether the discovered mortality benefits were actually an effect of the flu vaccinum, therefore, they analyzed clinical data from records of all six hospitals in the Capital Health region in Alberta. In summate, they analyzed data from 704 patients 65 years of years and old who were admitted to the infirmary for community-acquired pneumonia during non-flu season, half of whom had been immunised, and
Friday, 5 September 2008
Saturday, 16 August 2008
Nebraska Women Benefit From Efforts To Close Gaps In Cancer Screening
�A decade-long Nebraska study that showed disparities in breast and cervical cancer screenings could have spurred changes that raised the percentage of women screened in the state.
"Disparities in screening 'tween racial and ethnic groups, even in a homogenous state such as Nebraska, are a problem and by dig into some of the differences we were able to have an wallop on breast and cervical cancer
"Disparities in screening 'tween racial and ethnic groups, even in a homogenous state such as Nebraska, are a problem and by dig into some of the differences we were able to have an wallop on breast and cervical cancer
Thursday, 7 August 2008
Miley 2.0 Can't Speak for Herself
Is on that point an echo in here? Selena Gomez was asked about her rumored assemblage with Nick Jonas -- but only if parroted back what her flack told her to say.
More info
More info
Friday, 27 June 2008
Monday, 23 June 2008
Eric Burdon and the Animals
Artist: Eric Burdon and the Animals
Genre(s):
Blues
Rock
Discography:
The Twain Small Meet
Year: 1968
Tracks: 8
Love Is
Year: 1968
Tracks: 9
Winds Of Change
Year: 1967
Tracks: 11
Eric Is Here
Year: 1967
Tracks: 12
Wednesday, 18 June 2008
PETA Lines Up Birthday Present For Olsen Twins
Animal rights group PETA are celebrating the upcoming 22nd birthday of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, by encouraging people to send locks of their hair to the celebrity twins with a note saying, "Please, use my hair instead of the animals," in a protest against the actresses wearing fur.
A website set up by PETA and dedicated to the 'Trollsen Twins', "Hairy-Kate and Trashley", states they are "old enough to know better than to wear the skins of animals... Since they seem to be in such dire need of extra hair on their bodies, let's give them some of ours."
The site lists an address to post any hair cllippings to and is part of an ongoing campaign by the group to stop the twins from wearing fur.
NEXT: Tom Cruise's Lawyer Slams Dr.'s Diagnosis
Photo courtesy of PETA.
Tuesday, 17 June 2008
The alluring alchemy of Dario Robleto
You've never seen the Frye Art Museum look like this before. With two exhibitions that take over the entire museum (for the first time sweeping clean the usual crush of paintings from the permanent collection in the center galleries), Dario Robleto has transformed the place into a shrine to love and longing.
A rising star from San Antonio, Robleto bases his artwork in sympathetic magic, with the energy and symbolic meaning of the raw materials becoming the soul of the objects he creates. You must read the labels to fully "get" the work — and the ingredients he cites read like the stuff of a witch's brew, invoking the spirits of the dead.The spiritual center of Robleto's work arouses cultlike admiration among his fans. The meticulously crafted artworks do a kind of voodoo thing, seeping into you viscerally as you take in the sometimes shocking materials Robleto says they're made from: men's wedding-ring-finger bones coated in melted bullet lead from various American wars. Men's wedding bands excavated from American battlefields. Casts of Civil War-era "pain bullets" — the ones soldiers used (in lieu of anesthesia) to bite on during operations. Robleto works with tears, hair, shredded vinyl records (stand-ins for the songs recorded on them), tinctures and vintage apothecary concoctions. Whether those lists are real or pure poetry, it's powerful stuff. Yet at times Robleto's ideas seem overwrought and the objects start to feel way too precious — giving me the urge to just bury all that minutiae and move on.
The first part of the exhibition, "Heaven Is Being a Memory to Others," was assembled specifically for the Frye. This part of the show takes its cue from conceptual artist Fred Wilson, who demonstrated that the objects in museums are themselves an art medium and that new meaning can be constructed by the way they are selected and displayed. With a nod to Wilson, "Heaven" is Robleto's poetic imagining of the inner life of Emma Frye, who founded the museum with her husband to house their art collection.
Robleto stirs up Emma's ghost with a spare assortment of paintings and sculptures from the Frye's permanent collection that reflects the inner world he imagines for her. Not much is known about the late Mrs. Frye, so what he chose may tell us as much about Robleto's character as hers. He shows us an Emma who is lovely and passionate but unfulfilled, the paintings she lived with substituting for the children she never had — and who knows what else?
One painting the artist chose to spotlight is an odd, little-known jewel of the Frye collection, a small, undated oil by Grigory Gluckmann, called "Young Woman, Head & Shoulders." It depicts only the back of a woman's head and vulnerable-looking nape. Who is she? The image sets the tone of mystery and yearning that is Robleto's hallmark. Adding several of his own emotion-laden assemblages, one a tableau of wedding and mourning gowns, the artist creates a portrait by proxy of the various phases of Emma's life, with a strong resonance of the hereafter. It's brilliantly done.
The back galleries house Robleto's big traveling exhibition "Alloy of Love," more of a mixed bag. There are plenty of searing artworks, including the gut-punch of "A Defeated Soldier Wishes to Walk His Daughter Down the Wedding Aisle" — a pair of antique military boots slogging through sand and rice, seemingly resurrected from the grave by sheer force of will.
Here, too, you'll see Robleto's iconic assemblage "War Pigeon With a Message (Love Survives the Death of Cells)." It's a fragile pigeon skeleton marked with a WWII-era ID tag that lies toppled on a pile of debris. The long-dead bird still carries a tiny scroll with its never-to-be-delivered message. By itself, the image pulses with a thousand associations, a palpable sense of loss. Yet what the label tells us intensifies the charge. The paper is said to be made from a pulp of human bone dust and a Civil War letter from a wife pleading for the release of her prisoner-of-war husband. The debris under the pigeon includes rubble from the Berlin Wall.
On the other hand, the grander, more prominent, glass-case-enclosed "The Diva Surgery" struck me as beautiful, but inflated, the kind of thing that seems designed to be in a museum collection. It brought to mind similar pieces by Josiah McElheny (an obvious progenitor to Robleto's work) and Damien Hirst. A vintage laboratory of glass beakers and porcelain mortars, syringes, mirrors and vials of chemical powders, the assemblage has plenty of glitter and charm — but I also found it a bit tiresome. Of course, that could be Robleto's point. It is about divas, after all.
Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com
See Also
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)