Outsourcing guinea pigs

According to the BBC:

"India's outsourced call centres are well known, but not its outsourced patients. By 2010, some estimate there will be two million patients in India on clinical trials. An entire industry has sprung up, specialising in recruiting patients and managing experiments. And a BBC investigation into the conduct of these trials has found that some patients are unaware they are being experimented on at all. "

See "Drug trials outsourced to India," and a trailer for the BBC documentary.

The monkeys read Nietzsche

See Dance Monkeys Dance

Wheelchair Unbound

Harriet McBryde Johnson, a disabled lawyer from South Carolina, visits the Holocaust Museum.

"Then I see the wheelchair. It's similar to other prewar wheelchairs I've seen, but there's something unusual about the frame. Is this a tilting mechanism? A fancy suspension system? Looks like fine German engineering. I like vintage wheelchairs. An obsolete Everest & Jennings drive belt hangs in my office as a bit of nostalgia, like an old wagon wheel in a barbecue shack. I have an urge to jostle the chair, to see what that frame does. The sign mentions a German institution. So, no single owner. But even in institutions, people manage to bond with chairs. A state-owned chair may be occupied by the same person every day, parked beside that person's bed at night."

See "Wheelchair Unbound" in The New York Times Magazine.

Amy Laura Hall at the U

This Friday, April 21: Duke theologian Amy Laura Hall will give a talk titled "Human Mistakes and Mishaps: Disability, Children, and Atavism During the Center of Progress. It will be in 2-122 Molecular & Cellular Biology Building (MCB).

Grading health journalism

Gary Schwitzer has launched Health News and Review, which gives grades to health stories in the media based on accuracy, balance and completeness. It is modeled on Media Doctor, an Australian project that inspired a similar website in Canada.

Side Effects at the U

Side Effects, an independent fiction film about a drug rep, directed by Kathleen Slatter-Moschkau (a former rep for Johnson and Johnson) will be shown in Moos Tower 2-620 on Monday, April 17, at 5 pm. Kathleen Slattery-Moschkau will be here to answer questions after the film.

More symptoms to ADHD coming your way...

"Overly Wired? There's a Word for It"
"The frenzy of our wired world, he argues, is giving nearly all of us the symptoms of attention deficit disorder. To conquer the enemy, he says, we first need to name it."
So he has come up with the following suggestions, among others:

¶Screensucking, which he defines as "wasting time engaging with any screen — for instance, computer, video game, television, BlackBerry." He goes on to use his new word in a sentence: "I was supposed to write that article, but instead I spent the whole afternoon screensucking." That concept hits particularly close to home.

¶EMV, or E-Mail Voice. This, Dr. Hallowell writes, is "the unearthly tone a person's voice takes on when he is reading e-mail while talking to you on the telephone." Researchers at M.I.T., he tells us, have developed a program that can electronically measure how engaged people are in a conversation, giving scientific certainty to your suspicion that you are not being listened to.

And more!

Merck loses another one

Delivering a sharp blow to Merck, a New Jersey jury found Wednesday that the company had not properly warned patients of the dangers of its drug Vioxx and had caused a heart attack suffered by John McDarby in 2004. The jury awarded Mr. McDarby, who had taken Vioxx for four years, $3 million in compensatory damages and Irma, his wife, an additional $1.5 million. Read about it here.

Another drug trial accident....

Another drug trial accident: a healthy volunteer had to go to the hospital because a reaction to the drug makes his face "look like elephant man"...