Tag: health care

Out-of-season shape

There are no two ways around it. I am getting old. I’m one of the two oldest guys on my veteran’s team and it’s not even close; the average age is more than ten years younger than me. In the weight room, I’m usually one of the three oldest guys there. And the gradual weight of age and injuries is accumulating to the point that there are days when there are more exercises that I can’t do at full weight than those that I can.

And yet, ironically, in some ways I’m in better shape than I’ve been for fifteen years. I started stretching regularly and I’m back up to 130 degrees on the leg machine, which isn’t as good as the 150 degrees it was when I could kick six-footers in the face, but it’s a lot better than the 90 degrees it was when I first broke it out again. I definitely recovered a modicum of my lost speed through increasing my stride length. I’m not only able to play complete games when necessary, but I’m also the only player that the captain feels able to take out and put back in again, knowing that I’ll still be at something close to full speed by the end of the game.

What I’ve done is back down on the heavier weight exercises, increase the lighter ones, and increase my running. I run at least one 5k per week, ideally one 40-minute session that covers between 5.5k and 6k, and if I can find the time, a second 20-minute session doing 2.5k to 3k. It’s the time that matters, not the distance; we play 40-minute halves and I’m trying to keep my body accustomed to that time frame.

Despite the running, I’m at 192 these days, and I’m topping out my curls with 5-rep sets using the 60-pound dumbbells. I think I need to get down to 185 to really get ripped, but that’s not too bad considering all the holiday feasting of the last six weeks.

Three lifting days, two running days, and seven stretching days per week seems to be doing the trick. There is no fooling Father Time, but at least one can hope to mitigate some of his more deleterious effects.

Last season ended pretty well, as I got our only goal in the last game and ended up on five in seven fall games. I’d likely have had a second goal if the ball hadn’t abruptly stopped in a mud patch in the area when I was breaking on goal again.  But I’d really like to make it to the ten-goal mark in a half-season, so I’m training hard in order to try and make that possible. At the very least, I’d like to be sure I end up in double-digits for the full season as it’s already clear that playing a spoiler role is the most we can do.

We’ve actually played very well against the better teams, garnering ties against two of the top three teams, but we’ve also been playing down to the level of the lesser teams and failing to put them away. I’d like to win one more championship before I stop playing for good, but it won’t happen this year.

Pity the poor professors

If this isn’t an excuse for well-justified schadenfreude, I don’t know what is:

“Deplorable, deeply regressive, a sign of the corporatization of the university.”  That’s what Harvard Classics professor Richard F. Thomas calls the changes in Harvard’s health plan, which have a large number of the faculty up in arms.

Are Harvard professors being forced onto Medicaid? Has their employer denied coverage for cancer treatment? Do they need to sign a corporate loyalty oath in order to access health insurance? Not exactly. But copayments are being raised and deductibles altered, making their plan … well, actually, their plan is still extraordinarily generous by any standard:

    The university is adopting standard features of most employer-sponsored health plans: Employees will now pay deductibles and a share of the costs, known as coinsurance, for hospitalization, surgery and certain advanced diagnostic tests. The plan has an annual deductible of $250 per individual and $750 for a family. For a doctor’s office visit, the charge is $20. For most other services, patients will pay 10 percent of the cost until they reach the out-of-pocket limit of $1,500 for an individual and $4,500 for a family.

The deepest irony is, of course, that Harvard professors helped to design Obamacare. And Obamacare is the reason that these changes are probably necessary.

Demonstrating, yet again, that nothing is more short-sighted than an activist rabbit. Give them exactly what they want, provide them exactly what they are agitating for, and they are outraged!

“When I demanded more comprehensive government services requiring more taxes, I didn’t mean that I wanted to pay for them myself!”

Is it any surprise that college educations are increasingly worthless, given that idiots like these are supposedly the creme de la creme of the professoriat?

Preparations for the post-holiday

If you want to get lean, lift:

According to a new study, weight training is the most effective way of keeping abdominal fat in check, compared to other activities such as running or cycling. Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health measured the activity levels of over 10,000 men aged 40-plus, monitoring their weight and waist circumference over a 12-year period.

They found that those men who spent an extra 20 minutes a day weight training
gained less abdominal weight over the course of the study than men who
increased the amount of time they spent doing aerobic exercise. Combining weight training with aerobic exerise led to even better results, the
study found.

I’m not surprised. I’ve noticed over time that lifting alone is much better than cardio alone, but the most effective program involves running once or twice per week in addition to at least three lifting days per week.

Don’t worry about your diet today and tomorrow. Eat, drink, and have a Merry Christmas. Then buckle down and address the fitness question the day after tomorrow. Any athlete will tell you that a cheat day makes no difference whatsoever.

If you’re going to face the world sober, you may as well do it with a hangover. So to speak.

Ebola Week 44

Now things are getting very odd indeed. Last week, the WHO-reported numbers were 13,703 cases and 4,920 deaths, which amounted
to 3,767 new cases and 43 new deaths and indicated a rate considerably HIGHER than the
infection rate required for the number of cases to continue doubling.

However, the Week 44 numbers were just released. 13,042 reported cases of Ebola, with 4,818 reported deaths. Now, I realize not all of you are particularly good at math, but it doesn’t require advanced mathematics to realize that 13,042 is less than 13,703 and 4,818 is less than 4,920.

So, either the WHO numbers are becoming openly unreliable or we have 102 undead Ebola Zombies wandering the Earth.

Polio-like paralysis

I understand that the CDC probably believes that it is theoretically impossible, but I would like to see some indication that these reports of “polio-like symptoms” are not symptoms of actual polio:

More than 50 children in 23 states have had mysterious episodes of paralysis to their arms or legs, according to data gathered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The cause is not known, although some doctors suspect the cases may be linked to infection with enterovirus 68, a respiratory virus that has sickened thousands of children in recent months.

Concerned by a cluster of cases in Colorado, the C.D.C. last month asked doctors and state health officials nationwide to begin compiling detailed reports about cases of unusual limb weakness in children. Experts convened by the agency plan next week to release interim guidelines on managing the condition.

That so many children have had full or partial paralysis in a short period is unusual, but officials said that the cases seemed to be extremely rare.

One would assume that researchers have tested the children for polio even if the coverage never seems to mention it. But if they haven’t done so yet, they might want to be sure that this isn’t an unexpected side-effect of the polio vaccine combined with another risk factor or two. Simple logic would suggest that if children are experiencing “polio-like symptoms”, ruling out polio would be the first order of business.

Perhaps they have, certainly one hopes they have. But far too often, one sees people trusting their assumptions rather than testing them.

Ebola Weeks 42-43

There has been some talk about a big leap upward in Ebola cases, to 12k+, on Wikipedia. While the reported numbers are known to be inconsistent, I will note that this worrisome leap is NOT reflected in the WHO numbers which I have been tracking.

The Week 42 numbers were 9936 cases and 4877 deaths. This is 939 new cases and 384 new deaths, which means the number of new cases has remained essentially flat for six weeks and the number of new deaths is falling. This is actually the first hint of a positive sign on the statistical front; other positive signs are the fact that there was no significant Dallas outbreak despite the lack of precautions utilized outside the hospital there.

This doesn’t mean that the disease is in retreat yet, but the pace of its advance appears, on the basis of the stastistics reported, to be slowing and falling well short of the 4-week redoubling rate that looked troublesome only two weeks ago. Obviously this analysis is useless if the numbers are junk, but if it is too soon to call the pandemic threat over, at least the situation doesn’t appear to be looking increasingly grim.

UPDATE: It appears I spoke too soon. I updated the WHO numbers two days ago, and while the Week 42 numbers were encouraging, the Week 43 numbers were just released today and they are downright problematic. In fact, one rather hopes that they are more the result of belated reporting than the actual jump statistically indicated. The Week 43 numbers report 13,703 cases and 4,920 deaths, which amounts to 3,767 new cases and 43 new deaths. This is 50 percent HIGHER than the infection rate required to continue doubling. The other strange thing is the collapsing number of reported deaths, which almost surely indicates a breakdown of the hospital system in the worst-affected countries rather than a reduction in the lethality of the virus.

Ebola in NYC

I suspect a lot of Americans will be feeling rather conflicted about the latest Ebola news:

A doctor in New York City who recently returned from treating Ebola patients in Guinea became the first person in the city to test positive for the virus Thursday, setting off a search for anyone who might have come into contact with him.

The doctor, Craig Spencer, was rushed to Bellevue Hospital Center and placed in isolation at the same time as investigators sought to retrace every step he had taken over the past several days.

At least three people he had contact with in recent days have been placed in isolation. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which dispatched a team to New York, is conducting its own test to confirm the positive test on Thursday, which was performed by a city lab.

The thing is, this variant of Ebola doesn’t appear to be as contagious as originally feared. Once it became clear that the family who stayed in an apartment with the sick Liberian who died did not become infected, and that none of the police and paramedics who attended him without proper precautions did not become infected either, the logical conclusion is that there will not be a massive African-style outbreak in the USA.

Of course, the logical conclusion can only hold insofar as the information we have is accurate. So, it’s certainly too soon to be confident that the danger has passed. But let’s face it, if the country wasn’t being run by the sort of idiot Axis of Lunacy people elected by NYC voters, there wouldn’t be any Ebola in the country in the first place. Actions have consequences, after all. Vote Obama, get Ebola in your neighborhood.

Travel ban? Who needs a travel ban?

Vomiting Africans dying on planes is an everyday occurrence, right?

A plane from Nigeria landed at JFK Airport Thursday with a male passenger aboard who had died during the flight after a fit of vomiting — and CDC officials conducted a “cursory” exam before announcing there was no Ebola and turning the corpse over to Port Authority cops to remove, Rep. Peter King said on Thursday.

The congressman was so alarmed by the incident — and by what he and employees see as troubling Ebola vulnerabilities at JFK — that he fired off a letter to the federal Department of Homeland Security demanding more training and tougher protocols for handling possible cases there.

The unnamed, 63-year-old passenger had boarded an Arik Air plane out of Lagos, Nigeria, on Wednesday night, a federal law enforcement source said. During the flight, the man had been vomiting in his seat, the source said. Some time before the plane landed, he passed away. Flight crew contacted the CDC, federal customs officials and Port Authority police, who all boarded the plane at around 6 a.m. as about 145 worried passengers remained on board, the source said.

I have the impression that if Ebola starts to spread, people are going to be very, very angry indeed.

As the Ebola crisis surges to the top issue on the minds of Americans,
a new poll finds that 82 percent of those following the issue closely
want to quarantine anybody who has recently traveled to the
virus-stricken nations. The Economist/YouGov poll found that women are
more concerned than men and would refuse entry to anybody from those
nations. Just 16 percent would allow them into the nation.

If you want change, scare the women. This is the immutable law of broad-spectrum democracy.

Ebola Curve Week 41

The Ebola curve may not be getting steeper. From the Ebola Response Roadmap Situation Report, 15 October 2014.

A total of 8997 confirmed, probable, and suspected cases of Ebola virus disease (EVD) have been reported in seven affected countries (Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Spain, and the United States of America) up to the end of 12 October. There have been 4493 deaths.

Data for epidemiological week 41 are incomplete, with missing data for 12 October from Liberia. This reflects the challenging nature of data gathering in countries with widespread and intense EVD transmission. These challenges remain particularly acute in Liberia, where there continues to be a mismatch between the relatively low numbers of new cases reported through official clinical surveillance systems on one hand, and reports from laboratory staff and first responders of large numbers of new cases on the other. Efforts are ongoing to reconcile different sources of data, and to rapidly scale-up capacity for epidemiological data gathering throughout each country with widespread and intense transmission.

It is clear, however, that the situation in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone is deteriorating, with widespread and persistent transmission of EVD. An increase in new cases in Guinea is being driven by a spike in confirmed and suspected cases in the capital, Conakry, and the nearby district of Coyah. In Liberia, problems with data gathering make it hard to draw any firm conclusions from recent data.

The good news is that the reported number of total cases are considerably shy of the 9,862 total cases that I calculated last week would indicate that the outbreak was getting out of control. The bad news is that the 8,997 cases reported do not include those that are are missing from Liberia. So, due to the lack of accurate reporting, it’s not safe to assume that the outbreak is already beginning to burn itself out, even though the number of new cases does not appear to be growing at the previous doubling rate any longer.

Patient #2 in Dallas

The math just got worse:

A second health care worker at a Dallas hospital who provided care for the first Ebola patient diagnosed in the U.S. has tested positive for the disease, the Texas Department of State Health Services said Wednesday. The department said in a statement that the worker reported a fever Tuesday and was immediately isolated at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. Health officials said the worker was among those who took care of Thomas Eric Duncan, who was diagnosed with Ebola after coming to the U.S. from Liberia. Duncan died Oct. 8.

The department said a preliminary Ebola test was conducted late Tuesday at a state public health laboratory in Austin, Texas, and came back positive during the night. Confirmatory testing was being conducted at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta…. Officials have said they don’t know how the first health worker, a nurse, became infected. But the second case pointed to lapses beyond how one individual may have donned and removed personal protective garb.

Two patients in the USA in Spain, two deaths, three health care worker infections. This is not reassuring. As I, and every other sane Westerner said at the time, infected aid workers should have been left to their fates in Africa, where they were infected.

UPDATE: The news just gets better:

 The CDC has announced that the second healthcare worker diagnosed with Ebola — now identified as Amber Joy Vinson of Dallas — traveled by air Oct. 13, the day before she first reported symptoms. The CDC is now reaching out to all passengers who flew on Frontier Airlines flight 1143 Cleveland to Dallas/Fort Worth. The flight landed at 8:16 p.m. CT. The CDC is asking all 132 passengers on the flight to call 1 800-CDC INFO.