Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

The Next Stage in the War on Polio

polio-war

Before it all started, in the early summer of 1950, there was a persistent promise of prosperity in Wytheville, Virginia. As farmland mushroomed into split-level ranch houses and kitchens sprouted automatic toasters, the town, population 5,500, revolved around a brick-lined main street with just one soda fountain. It was, John Johnson told PBS' American Experience, “more or less a lazy type, laid-back” kind of place. Wytheville only had two ambulances that summer when children started to get sick. At first, there were just a handful of cases, mostly young boys. Then doctors named the ... Read More

Update: Many Malaria Meds Still Fake, and Now the Real Ones Are Iffy Too

Mosquito sucking blood

Over the summer we we reported the curious story behind a National Institutes of Health study, which had found a third of malaria medications taken around the world are fake. Most commentary on the research intimated that unscrupulous, large, likely Chinese pharmaceutical companies were to blame. It turned out the dummy pills were actually produced by small criminal syndicates, shoestring counterfeit operations run in garages and back rooms, pushing fake meds in convincing packaging to customers in their own communities. Fortunately, none of this would matter soon, we thought—because a ... Read More

You Got a License for Those Kools?

Governments routinely restrict the sale of dangerous drugs. The same goes for firearms. But another deadly consumer product—cigarettes—can be purchased by virtually any adult, pretty much anywhere, in any quantity. “There would seem to be a case for redressing this bizarre but historically based inconsistency,” Simon Chapman, professor of public health at the University of Sydney, argues in an opinion piece just posted on the online journal PLOS Medicine. He goes on to offer a creative answer: One should need a license to buy tobacco products. His detailed proposal, and a ... Read More

Would Breaking Bad’s Czech Meth Scheme Work?

Syringe on the Ground

Fans of the critically-adored Breaking Bad, the story of a high-school chemistry teacher who becomes a Southwest narcotics kingpin, know that Sunday night's cliffhanger turned on a successful scheme to export methamphetamine from New Mexico to the Czech Republic. It's fiction. Most studies of global drug use suggest Europeans don't use methamphetamine in large numbers. Why not? What do Europeans know about keeping meth use at bay, while North America gets slammed by the drug, straining health systems, clogging the courts, and converting rural homes into chemical bombs? Nothing. ... Read More

China Arrests 2000 in Fake Meds Bust

Here's an interesting postscript to our story on fake malaria meds: a report out of Beijing this morning says Chinese officials have rounded up 2000 people it says are involved in the fake pharmaceuticals racket. Rob Schmitz at Marketplace reported a few hours ago that the arrests involved members of "two dozen crime organizations involved in making nearly $200 million worth of drugs." However, he also quotes a Chinese observer noting that these sorts of round-ups may be more PR than police work. The general tone of the report squares with what we found in our look at the ... Read More

Stayin’ Alive, Stayin’ Alive—Seriously

Properly performed CPR can double the chance of survival after sudden cardiac arrest. But even health-care professionals often have trouble complying with the American Heart Association’s CPR guidelines of at least 100 compressions per minute. To address this problem, Dr. John Hafner of the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Peoria had 15 physicians and med students perform the 100-compression procedure (on mannequins) while listening to the Bee Gees classic “Stayin’ Alive.” As Hafner reports in the Journal of Emergency Medicine, their mean compression rate was an ... Read More

Battling Tuberculosis in Its First World Bastions

Between May and October 2006, nurses in a mid-sized town in British Columbia saw a public health threat on the horizon. The number of tuberculosis cases was steadily increasing. Without intervention, the infectious disease was primed to overtake a community already facing an above-average number of homeless and pervasive drug and alcohol abuse. Similar outbreaks like this had happened before in British Columbia, but the size of this one was worrying. So during its investigation, the Tuberculosis/Mycobacteriology Program at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control, led by Patrick ... Read More

ARCHIVE Says Home Is Where the Health Is

Peter Williams

Growing up in Kingston, Jamaica, Peter Williams took for granted the holes in the wood floors of his house — and the rats that crawled through them. But when his father contracted a bacterial infection that left him paralyzed, Williams, a budding architect, began to recognize the connection between shoddy housing and ill health. "The disease was directly attributed to the fact that the house was poorly constructed," says Williams, 35. "I saw firsthand how housing was both responsible for his illness and also incapable of meeting his care needs, given that he was quite immobile." If the ... Read More

Staunching Aggression From the Womb

Crime and delinquency have roots in the womb, and so the risks can and should be addressed early on, even before a child is born, a University of Pennsylvania researcher says. According to a large body of research, the early risk factors that may predispose a child to violence include teen pregnancy, birth complications, lead exposure, head injury, child abuse, and maternal stress and depression. Jianghong Liu, an assistant professor at Penn’s School of Nursing and School of Medicine, argues that these factors, whether biological, psychological or environmental, can interact with each ... Read More

Teaming with Technology to Fight TB and HIV

Tuberculosis — already infecting the global population about one new case a second — is considered one of the most dangerous opportunistic infections attacking people with HIV. The STOP TB Partnership reports that TB is the leading cause of death among persons infected with HIV in Africa. Worldwide, 1 in 4 TB deaths is HIV-related. While the calculus seems straightforward — get HIV, see your immune system falter, then get TB — the tangled tango between the two deadly diseases is more complex. According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health Division of Acquired ... Read More