• A lab-grown kidney has been transplanted into a rat -- giving the rat a functioning organ. If this technique can be scaled up to work with humans, it could be a huge relief for organ donor shortages. [url]
• Supplies of human serum albumin (HSA) normally come from blood donations, but it may be possible to grow HSA from rice seeds in yields high enough to be worthwhile. There's still some testing to be done to make sure the rice-derived HSA is as safe and effective as HSA from human blood, but this development could make HSA supplies abundant and help a lot patients who've lost fluids from trauma. [url]
• Horseshoe crabs are routinely captured (temporarily) to extract their blood for a clotting agent called Limulus amoebocyte lysate (LAL). The LAL isolated from the crabs' blood can detect bacteria and other contaminants in various medical supplies at less than one part per trillion, and a quart of the stuff can sell for about $15,000. [url]

That might seem a reasonable request, since there is no doubt that India's production of generics reduces the profits of the pharma companies in Europe, which could charge far higher prices were there no competition from generics. But what that overlooks -- and what secret negotiations allow those involved to overlook -- is the impact such a move would have on millions of people around the world.

A letter from a group of Cambodian activists that struggle to supply much-needed medicines to those too poor to buy them, published on the infojustice.org site, provides us with a rare insight into what the EU's demands would mean for the world's poor:

We are saddened that behind the rhetoric of democracy, human rights and freedom the EU is in fact prioritising corporate interests to the lives of millions of people. It is needless to say that those affordable generic drugs are absolutely vital for the lives of millions who otherwise cannot afford expensive treatment of life threatening diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria and HIV-AIDS. Many suffering from such serious diseases would not be able to survive without these generic drugs produced in India.

…

Having seen the importance of made-in-India generic drugs for the lives of millions, we in no ways can express our frustration about the attempt of EU and European pharmaceutical giants to control the production of these cheap medicines. This must stop right now. It is a true example of putting profits before people's lives and take advantage of people's illness for corporate profits. Our lives should not be regarded as a business opportunity. We urge the EU to reconsider its pursuit of intellectual property rights for medicines and to realise that blindly protecting the interests of large European pharmaceutical corporations will lead to nothing but a subtle form of genocide of the poor, their families and children in developing countries across the world.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

"We are against the patent extension. According to the agreement, if a medicine is launched in the US, and then three years later it is launched in Malaysia, the patent would start from when it is launched here and not when it was launched earlier in the US," said Liow. "This is not fair."

Vioxx, the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug once prescribed for arthritis, was on the market for over five years before it was withdrawn from the market in 2004. Though a group of small-scale studies had found a correlation between Vioxx and increased risk of heart attack, the FDA did not have convincing evidence until it completed its own analysis of 1.4 million Kaiser Permanente HMO members. By the time Vioxx was pulled, it had caused between 88,000 and 139,000 unnecessary heart attacks, and 27,000-55,000 avoidable deaths.

The Vioxx debacle is a haunting illustration of the importance of large-scale data research. If researchers had had access to 7 million longitudinal patient record, a statistically significant relationship between Vioxx and heart attack would have been revealed in under three years. If researchers had had access to 100 million longitudinal patient records, the relationship would have been discovered in just three months. Of course, if public health researchers did post-market studies that looked for everything all the time, many of the results that look significant would be the product of random noise. But even if it took six months or one year to become confident in the results from a nation-wide health research database, tens of thousands of deaths may have been averted.

Latanya Sweeney used census data to estimate that 87% of the population has a unique combination of 5-digit zip code, birthdate, and gender, and implied that the same sort of attack, using voter registration records or other public files. Phillip Golle's replication corrected the figure to 63%, though that's hardly comforting. But these uniqueness statistics are rather misleading. There is an important difference between distinguishability and identifiability. Distinguishability is a necessary condition to conduct the sort of matching attack that Ohm describes, but it is not sufficient. Latanya Sweeney conflated the two when she suggested that a unique individual can be identified by linking the unique combination of attributes to public records-voter registration records, e.g.. But public records are never complete. We know, for example, that a significant portion of the population is not registered to vote. How was Sweeney so sure that there was not another man who shared Gov. Weld's birth date and zip code who was not registered to vote?

Daniel Barth-Jones has recently uploaded a fascinating new article that revisits the famous Gov. Weld reidentification. To start with, Sweeney's estimate of the Cambridge population is way off. There were nearly 100,000 people living in Cambridge at the time of the William Weld attack. This should have been the first hint that Sweeney's methodology was overly simple. She reported a population of 54,000 because that is the number of Cambridge residents who were registered to vote. Sweeney used these records as if they described the entire population.

By comparing Sweeney's count of Cambridge voter registrants with U.S. Census records, Barth-Jones confirmed that many voting-age adults in Cambridge (about 35%) were not registered to vote. In William Weld's case, the census data show that approximately 174 men living in Weld's zip code were Weld's age. We don't know their precise birth dates, but we can calculate that the chance another man living in Weld's zip code shared his birthdate was about 35%. This is quite important all on its own to illustrate the difference between identifiability and distinguishability. Most of those 174 men had a unique combination of birth date, gender, and zip code, but each one of them was quite likely-35% likely-to be non-unique.

Sweeney presumably used the voter registration records to rule out the possibility that some of these 174 Cambridge men shared Gov. Weld's birth date. But even if Sweeney did indeed confirm that no other registered voter shared Weld's gender, zip, and birth date, she could not have been sure about the 50 or so Cambridge residents who were Weld's age and were not registered to vote. Thus, at best, Weld's chance of having a unique birth date, zip code, and gender combination is 87%. Put differently, the chance that Latanya Sweeney's matching attack would have been wrong using these three variables alone was 13%- much worse than traditional 5% statistical confidence.

This isn't too surprising knowing that the entire healthcare system is wrought with ill-conceived ideas against efficient and ready access to patient health records.

Physicians with a "Big Brother" mindset apparently think people having imaging tests are incapable of dealing with the outcomes without suffering from so much anxiety they must be protected from seeing the results.

It's not clear exactly that this attitude is akin to an Orwellian state, rather than simply an elitist mindset.  Many "experts" feel that people outside of their field have no business reviewing their work (look at the commenters on Techdirt who claim others should not comment on music/patents/laws/newspapers if they aren't a musician/inventor/lawyer/journalist).

The attitude of these physicians is just one reason of a whole host as to why the healthcare system is one of the last industries holding out against the IT revolution.  The argument that patients will freak out being exposed to the core information that leads to diagnoses is ridiculous.  If someone is going to be overly anxious, it isn't because they have information; they'll be anxious because they have symptoms and a diagnosis, but little-to-no information.  They'll be anxious because the medical industry is unwilling to have a two-way conversation with the patient themselves.

There are many examples of this elitism when it comes to sourcing and analysis of information. Why is it that experts fail to recognize that more points of view have a greater opportunity for catching errors and bringing different perspectives to the forefront?  In addition, bringing the patients into the conversation gets them involved in their own health stories, leading to many long term benefits and ultimately lower healthcare costs.  But maybe this is another one of the reasons the healthcare industry is unwilling to change?