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The precision medicine initiative proposed by President Barack Obama last week would center on a huge new biobank containing medical records and genetic information for perhaps a million Americans. It would not be created from scratch by enrolling new volunteers, however, but would instead pull together existing studies into one giant database. That’s according to several scientists familiar with the broad outlines of the project who spoke on background with ScienceInsider. The biobank would be used for studies ranging from finding new disease-gene associations to working out how to use genomic and other molecular information in routine medical care. On...

A new project from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is using computer simulated training sessions to teach doctors in Minnesota how to talk to fat kids.The nearly $500,000 study using “virtual role play” to coach doctors is the latest attempt by the federal government to combat obesity.“Obesity in the United States is at historically high levels and is an important health problem,” the grant for the project states. “Interventions targeting children are a high priority because children bear the greatest lifetime health risk from overweight and obesity.”“Health professionals in primary care settings are influential in the lives of families,”...

**SNIP** While its long-term effectiveness is still unclear, surgical sterilization seems to be gaining popularity in this white-tailed-rich region. The procedure, less invasive than dog and cat spaying, is an alternative to controlled hunting, which provokes opposition from animal-welfare activists, and to immunization, which requires yearly doses of a dart-delivered contraceptive vaccine. DeNicola has already spayed a herd in a Baltimore suburb, where a population boom has stabilized. And in Fairfax City, he conducted Virginia’s first ovary-removal program when his team operated on 18 female deer in the police garage. The procedures, which cost about $1,000 per doe, are being...

Isn’t there supposed to be a separation of cult and state? Mindfulness is a New Age kind of meditation that focuses on the present moment “non-judgmentally,” tracing its origins to Buddhism. The growing phenomenon was the subject of a 60 Minutes segment on Sunday, for which May and other fans of the practice were interviewed.The segment featured Rep. Tim Ryan (D., Ohio), a so-called “rock star among mindfulness evangelists” who earmarked nearly $1 million to teach mindfulness to preschool students in his district. The $982,000 project provided deep breathing exercises, and “Peace Corners” for kids in Youngstown, Ohio. I’m sure...

Government Waste: The good news is the National Institutes of Health pulled the plug on a national children's health study because it was fatally flawed. The bad news is they wasted 10 years and $1.3 billion before they admitted it. Congress mandated the National Children's Study as part of the Children's Health Act of 2000. The idea was to follow 100,000 newborns across the nation — in places ranging from urban California to the Florida swamps — until they turned 21, and measure how environmental and other factors affected their health. Yet for the past 14 years, all the NIH...

The National Institutes of Health through its National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases has awarded $524,403 in taxpayer dollars to San Diego University to study diabetes and sexual orientation in women. “Type 2 diabetes (T2D) contributes to substantial morbidity, disability, and premature mortality in the U.S.,” the grant said. “Lesbian and Bisexual (LB) women may be at elevated risk for developing T2D because they are more likely than heterosexual women to experience Obesity and other risk factors linked with T2D such as cigarette smoking, Violence victimization, and depressive distress,” the grant added. …

The National Institutes of Health through its National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism has funded a study to uncover the correlation between alcohol abuse and lesbian “intimate partner violence.” The grant, titled “Minority Stress, Alcohol Use, and Intimate Partner Violence Among Lesbians,” was awarded to Old Dominion University. “Alcohol abuse and dependence, and the constellation of problems associated with these disorders, including intimate partner violence (IPV) are a serious health concern for sexual minority women, their partners, their families, and society as a whole,” the grant abstract said. …

President Obama on Tuesday urged the lame-duck Congress to approve roughly $6 billion in emergency funding to fight the deadly Ebola virus, saying “we cannot beat” the disease without a greater financial investment from lawmakers. “The urgency remains. If we are actually going to solve this problem for ourselves, we have to solve it in West Africa as well,” he said after a tour of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. “Let's get it done,” Obama added. “This can't get caught up in normal politics.” Obama's visit to the National Institutes of Health was meant to promote the...

While most Americans put on a few pounds for Thanksgiving, the federal government has been spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars researching why obese girls don’t have sex.The National Institute for Health grant allocated $466,642 to the Magee-Women’s Research Institute to study the sexual habits of obese girls, including how often they have sex and why they are less likely to use protection when they do.“Obese girls consistently report having fewer dating and sexual experiences, but more sexual risk behaviors [i.e., condom nonuse] once they are sexually active,” the study abstract states.Money from the 2014 study will also be...

House Republicans have scheduled two more hearings on the U.S. response to Ebola, focusing on the health system's readiness for more cases and the development of cures and treatments. The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittees on Health and Oversight and Investigations will host the events on Tuesday and Wednesday. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Tom Frieden will appear at one to discuss training for U.S. health workers and other preventative measures against the virus's spread. "The threat of the Ebola outbreak is real and extends beyond its source in West Africa," said Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred...

Man injects himself with Ebola DELIBERATELY in a bid to battle the deadly diseaseA man has revealed he has been injected with the Ebola virus ON PURPOSE in a bid to fight the deadly disease. Peter Hubbard said he hopes the small risk he is taking could help create a vaccine to prevent further outbreaks of the disease, which has claimed thousands of lives in west Africa. Speaking from his apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, Mr Hubbard, a consultant who specialises in natural gas and peer markets, said: "I get a lot of satisfaction out of the fact that this could...

On Monday, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention head Thomas Frieden announced a new policy on health care workers returning from Ebola-plagued West Africa. Parroting President Obama’s Saturday radio address, Frieden cautioned that Americans must be “guided by the science,” not fear. Sorry. The Obama administration’s halfway approach is based on political correctness, not science. And it is a gamble. According to Frieden, about five health care workers fly back from West Africa to the U.S. every day, landing at Chicago, Newark, Atlanta, New York’s JFK or Dulles outside of Washington, D.C. For months, the CDC did almost nothing to...

One of the top doctors leading the government’s response to the Ebola crisis on Sunday slammed policies quarantining healthcare workers who return from treating patients in West Africa. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned that overly aggressive quarantines could make healthcare workers "very, very uncomfortable” and discourage them from volunteering. "The best way to protect us is to stop the epidemic in Africa, and we need those healthcare workers,” Fauci said on "Fox News Sunday.” "So we do not want to put them in a position where it makes it very, very...

Submitted by Brandon Smith of Alt-Market.com, One of the most dangerous philosophical contentions even amongst liberty movement activists is the conundrum of government force and prevention during times of imminent pandemic. All of us at one time or another have had this debate. If a legitimate viral threat existed and threatened to infect and kill millions of Americans, is it then acceptable for the government to step in, remove civil liberties, enforce quarantines, and stop people from spreading the disease? After all, during a viral event, the decisions of each individual can truly have a positive or negative effect on...

At least 4,877 people have died in the world's worst recorded outbreak of Ebola, and at least 9,936 cases of the disease had been recorded as of Oct. 19, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday, but the true toll may be three times as much. The WHO has said real numbers of cases are believed to be much higher than reported: by a factor of 1.5 in Guinea, 2 in Sierra Leone and 2.5 in Liberia, while the death rate is thought to be about 70 percent of all cases. That would suggest a toll of almost 15,000.

I have spent a little time compiling links to threads about the Ebola outbreak in the interest of having all the links in one thread for future reference. Please add links to new threads and articles of interest as the situation develops. Thank You all for you participation.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Judith White, who runs a research lab at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, submitted a proposal to the National Institutes of Health to test potential countermeasures against Ebola in March — just as Liberia was confirming its first two cases of the deadly virus. The project, a collaboration of the university, the Army and a drug company, showed promising early results: Mice injected with two compounds — one used in a drug to treat female infertility, the other found in a breast cancer drug — showed immunity to Ebola. But a few months later, not...

The empirical evidence of an airborne Ebola Strain is overwhelming Hat Tip GWP - Patrick Sawyer was the American businessman, who contracted Ebola while working in Liberia, then collapsed after he got off a plane to Nigeria and died July 25. He was the first patient in Nigeria with the Ebola virus. The Nigerian authorities have refused to release the names of other passengers on the plane with Mr. Sawyer, or notify the media of their status.

U.S. Army warns of potential 'airborne' Ebola Virus could be transmitted by means other than contact NEW YORK – While Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization officials continue to insist Ebola cannot be transmitted by air from one person to another, an Army manual clearly warns the virus could be an airborne threat in certain circumstances. The handbook published by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, USAMRID, titled “USAMRID’s Medical Management of Biological Casualties Handbook,” is now in its seventh edition. The most recent edition was published in 2011, with more than 100,000 copies distributed...

Kevin LoriaOctober 6, 2014 The idea that Ebola could go airborne is terrifying. Once you are infected, few diseases are more likely to kill you — and death by hemorrhagic fever, diarrhea and vomiting often accompanied by bleeding and organ failure, sounds particularly awful. At present it's hard to get infected — healthcare workers and family members caring for victims are at highest risk — but that would change if the virus were to mutate so that it could be transmitted through the air while keeping its present lethality. That's a nightmare scenario. But it's more the stuff of bad...