A few short notes

Few of my readers are probably unaware of this, but PZ Myers has been sued over some unfavorable book reviews of Stuart Pivar's LifeCode: The Theory of Biological Self Organization. Blake Stacey has more, with plenty of links. The Panda's Thumb also has a good post on it. PZ is keeping quiet about the case for now.

My take on this is that Pivar has absolutely no case, since he cant demonstrate neither financial loss, nor even that it's libel. As people probably know, truth is the best defense against libel lawsuits. One of Pivar's points is related to a prominent scientist (Neil deGrasse Tyson) withdrawing his endorsement of the book, but it's clear from the scientist's own statements that he has never endorsed the book, even though Pivar claims this.
For other good arguments against the lawsuit, see the comments at The Panda's Thumb

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Tara Smith, of Aetiology has written an article about HIV Denial in the Internet Era together with Steven Novella. It has been published by PLoS Medicine.

I some times participate in the HIV-AIDS debates over at Aetiology, but I have burned out on hearing the same denialist arguments again and again, so it's very little I venture into those threads these days.

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Last of all, an article that some might find interesting - I know that some will agree with it's basic message.

Science and mysticism: a tainted embrace

Scientists who indulge mystical and religious fantasies in the interest of popularisation are betraying their professional calling, says Yves Gingras

A couple of interesting PLoS articles

Translating Pharmacogenomics: Challenges on the Road to the Clinic by Jesse J. Swen et al in PLoS Medicine

Pharmacogenomics is one of the first clinical applications of the postgenomic era. It promises personalized medicine rather than the established “one size fits all” approach to drugs and dosages. The expected reduction in trial and error should ultimately lead to more efficient and safer drug therapy. In recent years, commercially available pharmacogenomic tests have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but their application in patient care remains very limited. More generally, the implementation of pharmacogenomics in routine clinical practice presents significant challenges. This article presents specific clinical examples of such challenges and discusses how obstacles to implementation of pharmacogenomic testing can be addressed.

Explains why the mapping of the human genome has yet to result in the expected tailoring of medicine, that take into account genetic differences.

Protistan Diversity in the Arctic: A Case of Paleoclimate Shaping Modern Biodiversity? by Thorsten Stoeck et al in PLoS One

The impact of climate on biodiversity is indisputable. Climate changes over geological time must have significantly influenced the evolution of biodiversity, ultimately leading to its present pattern. Here we consider the paleoclimate data record, inferring that present-day hot and cold environments should contain, respectively, the largest and the smallest diversity of ancestral lineages of microbial eukaryotes.

The findings are quite interesting

Conclusions/Significance

This pattern is consistent with natural selection sweeps on aerobic non-psychrophilic microbial eukaryotes repeatedly caused by low temperatures and global anoxia of snowball Earth conditions. It implies that cold refuges persisted through the periods of greenhouse conditions, which agrees with some, although not all, current views on the extent of the past global cooling and warming events. We therefore identify cold environments as promising targets for microbial discovery.

In other words, it seems like cold climates have the greates bio-diversity, probably due to the fact that these environments have stayed fairly unchanged through time.

Self-inflicted diseases are ignored

PLoS Medicine has an essay about chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and how it's becoming more widespread.

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: A Growing but Neglected Global Epidemic

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a major and increasing global health epidemic that has received insufficient attention from the health-care profession, governments, and the pharmaceutical industry. Urgent action is now required to recognise the disease, predicted to soon become one of the major causes of death and disability, and to develop more effective prevention and treatment strategies.

COPD is one of the major causes of death (fifth commonest cause of death among diseases) worldwide, and is the only disease that's a common cause of death, that has increased it's rate in the US over the last 40 years (HIV/AIDS haven't been along for that long, so it cannot be compared to COPD).

All of this would make it worth mentioning, but what really caught my attention was the reason why COPD has gotten so little attention from researchers and doctors.

Despite growing recognition as an important international health problem, COPD has suffered neglect from clinicians, researchers, and the pharmaceutical industry [8]. This is largely because COPD is viewed as self-inflicted (by smoking) and also because the underlying disease process is generally perceived to be irreversible.

HIV/AIDS is also generally perceived to be irreversible, yet a lot fo research goes into that disease, so it would seem that there is more to it than this. However, I think the general point is probably pretty correct. Just look at how the media talk about other "life-style" related diseases - it's quite clear that there is less calls for research into diseases that are perceived as being self-inflicted. See how HIV/AIDS was ignored in the US while the victims were predominatly homosexual - something many still think of as a choice - yet there was a call for a cure, when it began to spread among heterosexuals.

Ignoring the moral objects for a moment, I find it irresponsible to ignore diseases when they are only related to a given group. Given what we know about the behaviour and evolution of diseases, we know that any disease that't limited to a group of people, might very well start spreading to other people at any time.

Hopefully diseases like COPD will get more attention in the future, and less weight will be put on how "self-inflicted" they are.