Archive for the ‘Science’
Turns out using expired drugs won’t kill you
The FDA started requiring drug companies to place expiration dates on drugs in 1978 on the reasonable grounds that people shouldn’t be using medicine so old it was no longer safe or effective. What the FDA didn’t do was set expiration dates, leaving that up to manufacturers. In 1985 the U.S. Pharmacopeia, a not-for-profit standards-setting body, began urging that medicines not sold in the manufacturer’s original container (that is, most medicines dispensed by pharmacists) have a one-year expiration date. The theory was that pharmacy pill bottles left in the notoriously hostile environment of your medicine cabinet (or, to be fair, a hot glove compartment) were less likely to prevent their contents from going bad.
But the truth is your meds will probably keep just fine. In the mid-80s the FDA started testing drugs as part of the U.S. military’s Shelf Life Extension Program — the Pentagon then had a $1 billion stockpile of drugs it didn’t feel like throwing out. As reported in that Wall Street Journal article in 2000, around 90 percent of the drugs were safe and effective well after they’d nominally expired .
To be sure, some drugs deteriorate faster than others. For example, epinephrine, used to treat cardiac arrest, steadily loses its potency over time. Liquid drugs and suspensions are less stable than solids. Medications custom-prepared by your local pharmacy are likely to have a short shelf life.
But even then it’s not like drugs go bad at the stroke of midnight. An update on the Shelf Life program published in 2009 established that 88 percent of tested medications worked fine more than five years past their expiration date, which admittedly just confirmed previous research. The more pertinent finding from a practical standpoint was this: one year post-expiration, every drug tested was still OK.
Will using expired drugs kill you? The Straight Dope replies.
We were going to illustrate this post with a scene from Drugstore Cowboy (Gus Van Sant, 1989, Matt Dillon and his crew rob drugstores for drugs), but all the videos we found disallow embedding.
A life of quality, not just quantity
Highgate Cemetery, June 2010
Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.
It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.
Read How Doctors Die. It’s Not Like the Rest of Us, But It Should Be. A thought-provoking piece by Ken Murray, MD.
Save the crocodile, not the corrupt politician
Crocodile, meet shirt. Chris Banks, Melbourne Zoo’s director for international conservation partnerships, introduces a baby crocodile to David Celdran, Philippine endorser of the Lacoste Save Your Logo project.
Unless you are cut off from civilization you have probably heard about biodiversity loss and its impact on the environment. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List reports that 1 in 8 birds, 1 in 4 mammals, and 1 in 3 amphibians are endangered species. An estimated 15 to 37 percent of all species will be extinct in 40 years unless we do something more than rattle off alarming statistics or claim to be environmentalists in order to look cool.
Some species have advantages over others. We’ll donate to campaigns to protect whales and dolphins because they’re cute and in the event of an ocean disaster we imagine they would be our aquatic Leonardo DiCaprios. We’ll buy T-shirts with pictures of lions and stuffed toy tigers because big cats are beautiful, majestic creatures. We’ll visit tarsier reservations because they’re cute, although we really need to weigh the nocturnal beasties’ interests against the entertainment of loud tourists with their blinding flash cameras.
But crocodiles? Not an easy species to love. They’re hideous, they’re scary, and in countless movies we’ve seen them eat people (hence their bad reputation, which is unfair). But if crocodiles cease to exist, the complex balance in wetland ecosystems would be upset. We would lose one of the last survivors of the prehistoric age, a creature that has not changed in the last 100 million years. Crocodiles lived through the rise and extinction of the dinosaurs and the evolution of our own ancestors; it would be terrible if they don’t survive human encroachment into their natural habitats.
Read our column Emotional Weather Report today in the Philippine Star.
Kawawa naman ang bobo
From the Coens’ Blood Simple, a smart movie about people doing stupid shit.
That title goes out to our friend The Bone. What’s our one movie of the year this year?
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There’s no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.
The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.
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