And you thought foot-and-mouth was bad

Pax Arcana

Our front-line Internet spy Jaelynne emailed me a story this morning that is absolutely kick-you-in-the-brain strange.

Doctors in Colorado operated on a 3-day old newborn after spotting a small tumor on the baby’s brain. What they found was… well, let’s let go straight to the story:

Grabb said that while removing the growth, he discovered it contained a nearly perfect foot and the formation of another foot, a hand and a thigh.

“It looked like the breach delivery of a baby, coming out of the brain,” Grabb said. “To find a perfectly formed structure (like this) is extremely unique, unusual, borderline unheard of.”

Here is an artist’s rendering of the scene:

Now, we know from reading Dr. French Fry that the human body is capable of creating some jacked-up shit, but this is taking things one step too far.

I bet the doctor regrets dragging his feet on taking pictures of the tumor to show incredulous colleagues. Honestly, without proof he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. I think something is afoot with all of this.

Tumor in Colorado newborn’s brain contained foot [AP]

The poor are even better at dying than they used to be

Pax Arcana

While overall life expectancy has risen since the 1960s, the Harvard School of Public Health says poor people are even better at dying than they were back when Pappy would set his own broken leg with an ironing board and a rusty bicycle chain:

“There has always been a view in U.S. health policy that inequalities are more tolerable as long as everyone’s health is improving. There is now evidence that there are large parts of the population in the United States whose health has been getting worse for about two decades,” said Majid Ezzati, associate professor of international health at HSPH and lead author of the study.

Fine, but where are these poor people exactly? My guess is they’re concentrated in suburban New Jersey and Massachusetts, with a strong contingent in the Bay Area.

Damn. Guess I was wrong:

The majority of the counties that had the worst downward swings in life expectancy were in the South, along the Mississippi River, and in Appalachia, extending into the southern portion of the Midwest and into Texas.

Public health outreach programs in areas like Appalachia are notoriously difficult to maintain over time, because local coordinators are often “ate.”

Life expectancy worsening or stagnating [Harvard Gazette]

Get your mouth off that corpse already

Pax Arcana

Here’s a bit of service journalism for your Tuesday morning: The American Heart Association now says you should not blow awkwardly into the mouth of the corpulent bastard that collapsed in front of you at Wendy’s. Instead you should go right for the boobies and motorboat those sons of bitches. With rapid-fire chest compressions, that is:

Hands-only CPR calls for uninterrupted chest presses — 100 a minute — until paramedics take over or an automated external defibrillator is available to restore a normal heart rhythm. This action should be taken only for adults who unexpectedly collapse, stop breathing and are unresponsive. The odds are that the person is having cardiac arrest — the heart suddenly stops — which can occur after a heart attack or be caused by other heart problems.

But what about the old way of doing things? When Pax Arcana was a lifeguard (1992 – 1994), I was taught to alternate 15 compressions and two breaths into the lungs of the unresponsive victim. As it turns out, the idea of getting that intimate with a soon-to-be-dead person kind of skeeves people out:

Anonymous surveys show that people are reluctant to do mouth-to-mouth, Ewy said, partly because of fear of infections.

“When people are honest, they’re not going to do it,” he said. “It’s not only the yuck factor.”

It’s about time someone in the medical community came forward and told the truth about this. Giving people mouth-to-mouth is gross if they’re not hot girls with minty-fresh breath. I remember when Mrs. Krauss collapsed during adult swim. We got her out of the pool OK, but the idea of giving her mouth-to-mouth was off-putting to say the least. Yuck.

Everything turned out OK, though, because apparently Mrs. Krauss liked to keep dozens of those little airplane bottles of vodka in her pool bag. Score!

In memory of Edna Krauss, 1928 – 1994.

Experts now recommend hands-only CPR [AP]

Airborne will reimburse you for being gullible

Pax Arcana

While they stopped short of copping to selling cheery tubes of snake oil pills, the makers of popular “anti-cold” herbal supplement Airborne have agreed to settle a class-action false advertising lawsuit for $23 million.

Turns out the “double-blind, placebo-controlled” study Airborne claimed proved the efficacy of the supplement was two guys in a motel room with a Dora the Explorer chemistry set:

GNG is actually a two-man operation started up just to do the Airborne study. There was no clinic, no scientists and no doctors. The man who ran things said he had lots of clinical trial experience. He added that he had a degree from Indiana University, but the school says he never graduated.

Of course, Airborne has money to spare. The company made about $100 million in 2006, according to the New York Times, largely on the strength of its innovative product positioning on store shelves:

Airborne carved out its niche through a combination of catchy commercials, star power and savvy placement on drugstore shelves. Dietary supplements are usually gathered in one place and cold medicines in another, but Airborne usually sits right next to NyQuil, without the trouble of Food and Drug Administration testing and approval.

Oprah Winfrey, Howard Stern, Kevin Costner and other stars endorse the product, and the teacher-inventor has appeared on the “Dr. Phil” and “Live With Regis and Kelly” television shows and others, chattering away about Airborne’s benefits.

But, but, but I just know it works

Full disclosure: Pax Arcana has purchased and used Airborne — before a flight from Vegas to Boston in 2006 when I was feeling a bit fatigued and scratchy in the throat. I felt better after landing in Boston, but I suspect that had more to do with leaving the hostile ambient environment of a hotel/casino than with the cheap vitamin supplement I paid $15 for.

I doubt I’ll do it, but if you’re so inclined, you can head to this Web site to apply for reimbursement for your Airbone purchase. And next time, just take some Vitamin C or, you know, something with actual medicine in it.

Makers of Airborne Settle False-Ad Suit With Refunds [New York Times]
Fake cold remedy Airborne settles lawsuit — get your cash back [Boing Boing]

Eat (fruit), drink, and be merry

From a mom-and-pop website called Yahoo! comes an interesting (by my standards) study about lengthening your life by making four seemingly unrelated health changes.

People who drink moderately, exercise, quit smoking and eat five servings of fruit and vegetables each day live on average 14 years longer than people who adopt none of these behaviors[.]

Just another day at the apothecary

I find a couple of things interesting about this study. First of all, 14 years is, scientifically speaking, an assload of time. The study “proved” this by noting that people who received a score of 4 (i.e., exhibiting all four behaviors) lived 14 years longer than people who received a score of 0 (i.e., the guy you see at the pool hall every day).

Secondly, the wording is odd — does this imply that you’re healthier by smoking and then giving it up than not smoking ever? (Unfortunately the full article fails to specify.) And usually drinking in health stories is solely devoted to wine — nice to see that other liver destroyers may provide benefit as well.

Personally, I’m pretty pumped about this. See, the other day I went home and went for a run, came back and drank three jack-and-cokes, and did not smoke. I don’t think my frozen dinner had any fruit or vegetables, but still, 3 out of 4 ain’t bad. I must have added, like, 6 hours to my life.

-Father Scott

Silly yogic snot pots are all the rage

Today’s Times has an article on the Neti Pot, the goofy ceramic contraption your turquoise-bedazzled holistic healing aunt sticks in her nose, sending a tide of salty booger water out the other nostril. Like this:

Pax Arcana is typically dismissive of faddish voodoo magic cures like ginseng, echinacea, and dentistry. However, there seems to be something to this Neti Pot business, and it’s not just annoying Whole Foods denizens saying so.

Another reason to avoid nachos

From the freaks at Freakonomics comes a study that shows fat asses make less money than their skinny-assed coworkers.

And we thought they were broke because they blew their money on Gorditas.

One day he’ll be working here

About the only really interesting thing about the abstract is that they researchers seem to have developed a more accurate way of tallying someone’s body composition than simply relying on the ridiculous Body Mass Index (BMI) that has been shoved in everyone’s face for the past decade or so (and which classified the 1997 version of Michael Jordan as “obese”).

From the abstract:

Our work addresses an important limitation of the current literature on the economics of obesity. Previous research relied on body weight or BMI for measuring obesity despite the growing agreement in the medical literature that they represent misleading measures of obesity because of their inability to distinguish between body fat and fat-free body mass. Body composition measures used in this paper represent significant improvements over the previously used measures because they allow for the effects of fat and fat free components of body composition to be separately identified.

In other words, there is a difference between different kinds of heavy. More muscular people always get lumped into “overweight” BMI categories because height and weight are not enough to get a clear picture of whether you’re fat or not.

Pax Arcana’s anecdotal evidence to support the above research is as follows: Shortly after shedding 32 pounds (11.8% of total bodyweight), Pax was given a big raise. See? It’s science.

The Wage Effect of Fat [Freakonomics]

Smaller tub for tubby

The pleasant and hotastic Mrs. Pax Arcana occasionally buys “low carb” bread for guilt-reduced grilled cheese purposes, even though as far as we can tell, it’s “low carb” because each slice is about 40% smaller than regular old bread.

A Consumerist reader today catches margarine maker Parkay engaging in just such deceptitude, labeling packages of their spreadable butter-like vegetable something as a “new” and seemingly healthier formula — while in reality they were simply pumping more air into the stuff and reducing the volume for the same price.

Now you get 13 ounces where you once got 16 ounces. Great. At these prices I’ll never afford to open my Hot Cup o’ Margarine! chain of mall stores.

New Parkay, Now With More Air and Less Margarine [Consumerist]