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THE BELL CURVE
by ATUL GAWANDE What happens when patients find out how good their doctors really are? Every illness is a story, and Annie Page's began with the kinds of small, unexceptional details that mean nothing until seen in hindsight. Like the fact that, when she was a baby, her father sometimes called her Little Potato Chip, because her skin tasted salty when he kissed her. Or that Annie's mother noticed that her breathing was sometimes a little wheezy, though the pediatrician heard nothing through his stethoscope. [Atul Gawande, "The Bell Curve," New Yorker (December 6, 2004): 82-91.]
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STUDY THE CLONES FIRST
Twin research is finally beginning to reveal what really makes us tick. By Jeff Wheelwright "All roads lead to me," says Nancy Segal, as the car turns down a residential street just south of Los Angeles. On her way to visit a favorite set of identical twins, she is not bragging about her status. If you are a scientist or a journalist pursuing the characteristics of twins, sooner or later you will come across Nancy Segal, the doyenne of didymology in America. [Discover (August 2004).]
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FORBIDDEN SCIENCE
What can studies of pornography, prostitutes, and seedy truck stops contribute to society? By Barry Yeoman Yorghos Apostolopoulos was at his office at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta last October when his red voice-mail light started glowing. When he picked up the phone, he heard a somber voice. "We need to speak," said the caller, a program officer at the National Institutes of Health, which funds Apostolopoulos's research on infectious disease. Her voice was drained of its usual casualness. "Don't have any of your assistants call," she said. "I want to speak with you personally."
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HIGHWAY COWBOYS, OLD HANDS, AND CHRISTIAN TRUCKERS: RISK BEHAVIOR FOR HUMAN IMMUNODEFICIENCY VIRUS INFECTION AMONG LONG-HAUL TRUCKERS IN FLORIDA
by Dale Stratford, Tedd V. Ellerbrock, J. Keith Akins, and Heather L. Hall Several studies suggest that long-haul truck drivers may play an important role in HIV transmission over long distances in some developing countries. For example, a seroprevalence study in Kenya in 1991 - 1992 found that 73 (26%) of 283 truckers and their assistants, known as loaders, who transport goods between Kenya and Zaire, were HIV infected (Mbugua et al., 1995). Another study in five areas of India in 1995 suggested that a previous history of multiple sexually transmitted diseases, especially genital ulcer diseases, is common among intercity truckers (Roa et al., 1996). Additionally, recent studies in Thailand found that truckers often have multiple partners along their truck routes and use condoms infrequently (Morris et al., 1996). [Social Science & Medicine, 50.5 (March 2000): 737-749.]
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| (5) | BEHAVIORAL RISK FACTORS FOR STD/HIV TRANSMISSION IN BANGLADESH'S TRUCKING INDUSTRY
by Laura Gibney, Nazmus Saquib, and Jesse Metzger The dramatic rise of HIV infection in India and Myanmar alarmed public health officials in the adjacent country of Bangladesh (Chowhury, Choudhury, & Lazzari, 1995). Current prevalence in Bangladesh appears to be low, with 0.02% of the adult population estimated to be infected by June 2000 and infection rates of 2.48% in IDUs and 0.2–0.4% in commercial sex workers (CSWs) reported during the 1990s ( UNAIDS, 2000a). However, the rapid increase in infection rates in subpopulations of the neighboring countries of India and Myanmar during the 1990s ( Khan and UNAID) illustrates how quickly the disease can spread and suggests that segments of the Bangladeshi population could be vulnerable to the epidemic in the future. Among CSWs and intravenous drug users (IVDUs) in parts of India, for example, infection rates increased 20–50 times in 4–7 years ( Bollinger, Tripathy, & Quinn, 1995; Sarkar et al., 1993; Rodriguez et al., 1995). [Social Science & Medicine 56.7 (April 2003).]
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| (6) | ANTIMATTER
If we understand these mysterious particles, will we know why we exist? By Tim Folger There's a time machine on the Stanford University campus, and it runs day and night. It won't hurl anyone into the past or future, but it does something almost as audacious: It reenacts events that occurred just after the Big Bang, when some of the pure energy that filled the cosmos became all the matter that now exists. Inside an 18-foot-high, 1,200-ton particle detector, matter and antimatter moving at nearly the speed of light smash into each other billions of times a second, shattering into subatomic debris that hasn't existed for about 14 billion years. "We have the gall to believe that we can prepare a situation that is very analogous to what you had at the beginning of time," says physicist Jonathan Dorfan, director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. "We're trying to understand what happened during an extraordinarily energetic part of the birth of the universe—and we do a pretty good job." [DISCOVER Vol. 25 No. 08 | August 2004 | Astronomy & Physics]
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