"When many cures are offered for a disease, it means the disease is not curable" -Anton Chekhov
''Once you tell people there's a cure for something, the more likely they are to pressure doctors to prescribe it.'' -Robert Ehrlich, drug advertising executive.
"Opinions are like sphincters, everyone has one." - Chris Rangel
Public Health Silliness: I was going to post something about last weekend’s announcement by the WHO that cancer deaths will be skyrocketing in the years to come, but Charles Murtaugh beat me to it. That’s the price I pay for being slow-witted. He’s right that the primary reason cancer will be increasing is that the population is aging. And he’s right, too, that the public health professionals are going to use it to push for restrictions on smoking, eating, and just about every other thing that can be related even remotely to cancer. This seems especially silly when we’re confronted with a very real public health threat in SARS. Public health is at its best when it concentrates on non-lifestyle issues like communicable diseases and proper sewage treatment. It's at its worst when it tries to make lifestyle choices public health problems. I like his suggestion:
If I were a university president, I would take our current heightened awareness of emerging diseases and bioterrorism, thanks to SARS and the anthrax attacks, and use it to leverage my school's public health faculty to get rid of its politically-correct, transnationalist, nanny-state crap-ass research, and focus on real problems. Does anyone know a university president sufficiently iconoclastic to take on the task?
