Recent Blog Posts in March 2008

Briefly: the cost of medical care posted a small 0.1 percent increase in February as doctors' fees actually fell.

However, medical care, the fastest-rising price category outside of energy, is still up by 4.5 percent over the past year.

The Reno Gazette reports that the State Health Division has fallen behind in inspecting surgical centers for more than 10 years and has failed to inspect half of all centers over the past six years as is called for by Federal guidelines.

More specifically, State inspectors failed to inspect 22 of Nevada's 50 surgical centers over the last six years and at least one center has gone without inspection for 15 years.

The Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has indicated that it is assessing whether unsanitary practices are occurring at surgical centers nationwide. Interestingly, she noted "tremendous cost incentive" for clinics to skirt proper procedures.

According to an article from PBS: Newshour Extra dated March 7, 2008, a number of parents are blaming vaccinations for the emergence of autism in their children.

Parents are filing their cases in a "federal vaccine court," which was set up to protect vaccine makers from bankruptcy. If the vaccination companies are found at fault, the award plaintiffs will come from a government fund and not from the industry itself.

The parents claim that thimerosal, a preservative in vaccines that contains mercury, caused their children to have autism. This is a preservative that is common in many of the vaccinations given to young children.

A study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control in 2003 disputes this contention and maintains that there is no scientific evidence to show that the preservative causes autism in children.

Some parents argue that autism levels are rising in the U.S. Only one infant in every 10,000 births in the 1880's was diagnosed with autism while that number rose to one in every 166 births in 2003.

Some scientists argue that the increase in autistic children is actually do to the fact that autism is being used more liberally as a label for any child who is mentally retarded or learning disabled. Using autism as the classification of the illness qualifies the child for financial aid and other education assistance.

Nine test cases in this matter are set to be resolved in June and will set the precedent for thousands of other cases to follow. 

Here's a great link to the Las Vegas Review Journal's Clearinghouse page of links. Highly recommended!

Review Journal Links on Hepatitis Scare: http://www.lvrj.com/hottopics/hepatitis_investigation.html

A number of weeks back I was flying into Vegas, and as we were nearly on the ground I looked out my airplane window and noticed an unusual sight, even for Vegas: the top floor of the Monte Carlo was on fire and there were flames jumping off the top of the hotel. And then, suddenly, the pilot aborted the landing and we were back up in the air. No explanation given.

That's the way authorities now seem to want to handle the Ricin find: they want us up in the air without explanations.

That's fair enough, but if they're going to handle things that way then why reassure us that there's no link to terrorism? Every statement from authorities as of yesterday emphasized that: no reason to suspect terrorism.

Or is it that what they're really saying is that there's no reason to suspect "foreign" terrorism? And since they allegedly know so little, why urge even that conclusion?

Associated Press reports that:

As police tried to piece together how a rare, deadly poison ended up in a motel for transients, the 57-year-old man who could hold the key lay unconscious in a hospital.

Adding to the mystery, police said firearms and an "anarchist type textbook" were found in the same room where the ricin was discovered two days later.

I'm not much of a criminologist, and less of a conspiracy theorist, but when one finds a bunch of Ricin in a transient hotel and along with it they find an "anarchist type textbook," perhaps eliminating terrorism, domestic or foreign, from the list of what's conceivable might be a tad premature.

And if authorities, who according to their own admission don't really know much, then why eliminate the possibility that a man with Ricin and a chemical weapons cookbook might just want to do some harm?