Teenage Boy Finds Finger in Arby’s Sandwich -
Clergy Can Fight HIV On Faith-Friendly Terms -
ScienceDaily (May 16, 2012) — In the United States, where blacks bear a disproportionate burden of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, black religious institutions could help turn the tide. In a new study in PLoS ONE based on dozens of interviews and focus groups with 38 of Philadelphia’s most influential black clergy, physicians and public health researchers find that traditional barriers to preaching about HIV prevention could give way to faith-friendly messages about getting tested and staying on treatment.
The public health community has long struggled with how best to reduce HIV infection rates among black Americans, which is seven times that of whites. In a new paper in the journal PLoS ONE, a team of physicians and public health researchers report that African-American clergy say they are ready to join the fight against the disease by focusing on HIV testing, treatment, and social justice, a strategy that is compatible with religious teaching.
“We in public health have done a poor job of engaging African-American community leaders and particularly black clergy members in HIV prevention,” said Amy Nunn, lead author of the study and assistant professor of medicine in the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. “There is a common misperception that African American churches are unwilling to address the AIDS epidemic. This paper highlights some of the historical barriers to effectively engaging African American clergy in HIV prevention and provides recommendations from clergy for how to move forward.”
Every year, cancer claims the lives of more than a quarter of a million women in America. Women can reduce their cancer risk by adopting a healthy lifestyle and getting the right cancer screening tests for their stage of life.
Many Rare Mutations May Underpin Diseases -
The task of finding the genetic roots of common disease seems a whole lot harder, dimming the promise of personal genomics and the chances of quick medical payoffs from the human genome project, given new data about the human genome in two reports published online in the journal Science on Thursday.
It now appears that large numbers of very rare genetic mutations may underlie common human diseases like schizophrenia and cancer. But because the mutations are so rare, costly studies involving large numbers of patients would be needed to identify their role in each disease.
Until recently, rare mutations have been hard to catalog because of the difficulty of distinguishing an unusual mutation from an error in the DNA decoding process. Now, however, a new generation of decoding machines allows each DNA unit in a genome to be examined 20 or more times, eliminating most errors.
The two reports in Science are particularly extensive surveys which establish that rare mutations are abundant in the human genome. Since most are likely to be deleterious, rare mutations could account for much of the burden of human disease, the authors say.
Learn more from Women Deliver.
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“Slut” is how we vilify a woman for exercising her right to say “yes”. “Friendzone” is how we vilify a woman for exercising her right to say “no”.” — (via buildingmosaicsoutoflife)
(Source: angels-and-angles, via rabbleprochoice)
Today’s Kindle Daily Deal sounds really interesting.
This riveting biography recounts the life of the world’s first truly modern explorer, a life of unrelenting adventure and the high drama of polar exploration. Hubert Wilkins was the most successful explorer in history: no one saw with his own eyes more undiscovered land and sea. Largely self-taught, he was a celebrated reporter, pilot, spy, war hero, scientist, and adventurer. He captured in his lens war and famine, cheated death repeatedly, met world leaders like Lenin, Mussolini, and King George V, and circled the globe on a zeppelin. Knighted for being the first person to fly across the North Pole, Wilkins was also the first to fly in the Antarctic, discover land by airplane, and take a submarine under the Arctic ice.
Only $1.99.
(I’ll try to not constantly post these sorts of things, I just know a lot of other Kindle users around here who might find this interesting.)
Today's Kindle Daily Deal is pretty awesome. 20 books that were made into films, $.99 each -
“How many men have walked to their cars holding their keys like spikes between each knuckle? How many have stared into the faces of those they pass, willing themselves to memorize facial features in the event that they find themselves sitting across from a sketch-artist, drinking bad coffee, shaking, and explaining the bump of a nose or the curve of a chin? How many are made to feel like it is their job to catalog the shape of victimization, prove their pain, and alter their mental state to accommodate it? For how many men is this perversion their only expectation of normalcy?” —
essence of my conversation with a dear friend over coffee. (via missl0nelyhearts)
seriously, guys. it’s almost impossible to understand the fear of sexual assault from our male perspective. start standing up to violence against women
(via davesmachine)
I was doing the key-thing since I was given house keys (somewhere in high school).
(via daskannnichtsein)
(via riotgrrrljacksonville)
Abraham Lincoln’s body paraded in the New York streets. The boys circled in red in the window is future president Teddy Roosevelt and his brother.
“In the face of starvation, some families divided, parents turning against children, and children against one another. As the state police, the OGPU, found itself obliged to record, in Soviet Ukraine “families kill their weakest members, usually children, and use the meat for eating.” Countless parents killed and ate their children and then died of starvation later anyway. One mother cooked her son for herself and her daughter. One six-year-old girl, saved by other relatives, last saw her father when he was sharpening a knife to slaughter her. Other combinations were, of course, possible. One family killed their daughter-in-law, fed her head to the pigs, and roasted the rest of the body.” — Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
“Schoolchildren at first wrote to the appropriate authorities in the hope that starvation was the result of a misunderstanding. One class of elementary school students, for example, sent a letter to party authorities asking “for your help, since we are falling down from hunger. We should be learning, but we are too hungry to walk.”
…Parents, even when alive and together and acting in the best of faith, could hardly care for children. One day a father in the Vynnitsia region went to bury one of his two children, and returned home to find the other dead. Some parents loved their children by protecting them, locking them in cottages to keep them safe from the roving bands of cannibals.”
— Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin