[Reblog] (USDA) Pulled in Two Directions

From the 29 November 2012 post at BonAppeTERP :Terps talk about eating and living sustainably at UMD

November 29, 2012 by evabein

The USDA is charged with promoting the interests of U.S agriculture while simultaneously educating the public about proper eating habits. As American’s consume more meat than ever before and health concerns begin to surface about the advisability of this consumption, the two roles of the USDA have come into conflict. Advising more moderate meat consumption would not be in the interest of the meat industry, yet promoting it would not be in the interest of public health. Since these stakeholders often hold opposing views, the USDA can often only promote one of their interests at a time; and, pressure from either side can determine which interest is promoted.
For example, this summer, the USDA posted a statement on its website encouraging its employees to avoid meat on Meatless Monday  (a campaign to improve personal and environmental health). But after objections from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, it was removed from the website. Given the competing interests, how should we know when the USDA’s actions are benefiting us or when they are aimed to benefit another interest?

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[Reblog] Exposure to Animal Agriculture Increases Prevalence of Nerve Damage

ARS Campylobacter jejuni (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

[Reblog] From the 25 November 2012 post at Scot Nass MD’s blog

 

From Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine: Beef and dairy farmers are more likely to suffer from numbness and weakness, characteristics of peripheral neuropathy, compared with farmers who do not work with animals, according to new analysis of 16,340 participants of the Agricultural Health Study. The authors hypothesized that exposure to the common intestinal bacteria Campylobacter jejuni leads to greater risk of symptoms associated with Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Guillain-Barré Syndrome is an autoimmune disorder that can lead to muscle and nerve damage; it has no clear origin, although it usually appears after a minor infection. Dairy farmers also had a significantly higher prevalence of blurred vision, compared with farmers who had no exposure to animals.

Vegosen L, Davis MF, Silbergeld E, et al. Neurologic symptoms associated with cattle farming in the Agricultural Health Study. J Occup Environ Med. 2012;54:1253-1258. (12/13/12)

 

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Medical Cases in literature : an open database

Reblog from the 12 December 2012 posting at  Science Intelligence and InfoPros

Open access (OA) publisher BioMed Central has launched a new semantically-enriched search tool, Cases Database, which aims to enhance the discovery, filtering and aggregation of medical case reports from many journals. OA to journal articles published under Creative Commons licences, which permit text mining, enable the literature to be reused as a resource for scientific discovery

More than 11,000 cases from 100 different journals are reportedly available to be freely searched with Cases Database.

Cases Database uses text mining and medical term recognition to filter peer reviewed medical case reports and provide a semantically enriched search experience. The database offers structured search and filtering by condition, symptom, intervention, pathogen, patient demographic and many other data fields, allowing fast identification of relevant case reports to support clinical practice and research. Registered users can save cases, set up e-mail alerts tonew cases matching their search terms, and export their results. Cases Database will be free to access and is expected to be of particular interest to practicing clinicians, researchers, lecturers, drug regulators, patients, students and authors.

Announcement:

http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcblog/2012/12/10/embrace-information-overload-with-cases-database/

 

http://www.casesdatabase.com/

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Medical Cases in literature : an open database

Science Intelligence and InfoPros

Open access (OA) publisher BioMed Central has launched a new semantically-enriched search tool, Cases Database, which aims to enhance the discovery, filtering and aggregation of medical case reports from many journals. OA to journal articles published under Creative Commons licences, which permit text mining, enable the literature to be reused as a resource for scientific discovery

More than 11,000 cases from 100 different journals are reportedly available to be freely searched with Cases Database.

Cases Database uses text mining and medical term recognition to filter peer reviewed medical case reports and provide a semantically enriched search experience. The database offers structured search and filtering by condition, symptom, intervention, pathogen, patient demographic and many other data fields, allowing fast identification of relevant case reports to support clinical practice and research. Registered users can save cases, set up e-mail alerts tonew cases matching their search terms, and export their results. Cases Database…

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