SpankyMcFarland

Any sensible person would have been vaccinated long before the current wave.

If you’re going to drive a truck across the country, you should be vaccinated first. I don’t what is difficult to understand about that.

These best place to live lists are daft. There’s little to be learned from them.

We Radical Leftists prefer to call it the 1619 Project.

Here’s a little more detail on what the four knocked out genes coded for: And the six added human genes: Explained: How surgeons gave a pig heart — and hope of life — to a human The patient, David Bennett (57), was deemed ineligible for a conventional heart transplant or an artificial heart by leading transplant centres after a review of his medical records. indianexpress.com

I was surprised to learn that this not the first time a surgeon has attempted such an operation. In 1997 an Indian surgeon had a go without the gene modification etc. etc. The patient died and he was jailed. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/science/in-1997-this-indian-doctor-tried-pig-heart-transplant-was-jailed/articleshow/67111349.cms

OK, I can see seal valves being durable given the depths they dive to. They’re basically acellular aren’t they? In any case there’s much less of a rejection problem with them than with full organs.

I never heard of that before. Pigs are a known quantity with a fully mapped genome and loads of research groups around the world tinkering with them.

On January 7, a 57 year old man with terminal cardiac failure underwent a nine hour operation at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and received a cardiac transplant from a pig. Three innovations made this historic procedure possible: 1. Genetic modification. Ten genes were changed in the pig: three were removed that would have caused a rapid, antibody-mediated rejection of the foreign organ; one was removed that would have made the heart too big; and six human genes were added to reduce inflammation, rejection and blood coagulation. 2. A perfusion solution to keep the porcine heart in optimal condition between operations. Apparently, this product contains cocaine which caused a regulatory headache for the researchers. 3. A powerful drug, KPL-404, that suppresses the body’s immunological reaction (in particular, CD-40) to the foreign organ. The potential significance is enormous - many thousands die every year awaiting organ transplantation form human donors and demand will only increase - but there’s an army of potential problems ahead. One expert called the patient ‘courageous’ which is not something you want to hear. On the medical side, rejection and infection are the two big immediate dangers. Rejection comes in three basic types - hyperacute, acute and chronic. The hyperacute stage seems to have been successfully navigated but the body has a myriad of responses to foreign antigens that are not fully understood. An infection is made more likely because of the immunosuppressive medication the patient is on. This could be any extrinsic infectious agent or might have travelled in the transplanted organ itself. Longer term, one has to wonder how a heart from a quadruped will perform pumping blood all the way up to the head in a biped. Not a major worry right now. There are ethical issues. If the patient dies in the next few weeks the decision to go ahead will be questioned; this is an experimental treatment and I’d say the surgical team are not getting much sleep at the moment. Some people may have concerns about any animal transplants to humans. There are also those may be put off specifically by a pig donor for religious reasons. Dr. Mohiuddin addressed this issue directly. The patient was denied a human transplant partly because of his poor compliance with treatment recommendations in the past, including management of hypertension. One aspect of the story dominating coverage at the moment is that the patient did time for a serious assault and the family of the victim are asking why a person guilty of a serious felony deserves such expensive care. Doctors would say they treat anybody regardless of their past. https://www.dicardiology.com/videos/video-details-first-pig-heart-transplant-surgery-human

Death certification is an incredibly complicated issue. With the demise of the hospital autopsy, figuring out the cause of death involves a fair bit of guesswork. Understanding what death rates mean within a province is tricky enough; comparing countries is another level entirely.

The evidence backing Fowler’s testimony was weak, e.g. CO intoxication. It is also telling that the defence chose not to dispute Martin Tobin’s testimony, including that Chauvin’s assault would have killed a healthy person, with opposing evidence from another recognized authority in lung medicine. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2021/apr/08/derek-chauvin-trial-george-floyd-death-latest-updates?page=with:block-606f14928f087dc3964a332c

In every wealthy country, there are people who think their system is uniquely bad. We could be having exactly the same conversation on an Irish or British forum. So there’s really no point discussing one country in isolation and not much point comparing ourselves to the Yanks - nobody wants to copy their chaotic model. How do we rack up against peer nations, e.g. in Europe and Asia, and what criteria do they use to measure the same problem? BTW in some areas of medicine, poorer labs and hospitals have lower error rates because they don’t detect anything near all the errors. I think Canada has a bigger challenge with healthcare access than quality. Something like 20% of the patients in my province don’t have a family practitioner (FP). Within the existing system we need better integrated care focused on need, more family practitioners, and more nurse practitioners (and other professionals) who can take the load off FPs. There’s a good argument for more private care as well. People who can afford it should be able to pay an annual fee for their FP.

Something else we need to be more honest about; young Canadians don’t want to live in the back of beyond. Most of them prefer cities. In my province a few years ago, one stat buried in a review of medical manpower showed that only 20% of doctors working in smaller towns (under 10,000) were Canadian grads, an incredible statistic if you didn’t know the field. The financial incentives to recruit people to these remoter spots would need to be greatly enhanced but that runs up against medical politics where many of the most highly paid physicians live in the most attractive locations and have no desire to see this state of affairs changing.

The requirements to enter residency training programs are unnecessarily strict and some of the best potential applicants aren’t eligible to apply because they have been out of clinical medicine too long. I have seen this particularly with foreign grads living in Canada who may never work as doctors again. If we had a bigger private healthcare sector we might have less fear of having ‘too many’ physicians billing the system. In my province, something like 20% of patients don’t have a GP and the health hubs designed to fill in the gaps and take the pressure off ERs are just telephone numbers that ring and ring - a typically Canadian pretend solution.

Given that everyone is entitled to legal representation and this person got Khadr a good deal, I can’t see what the problem is.