BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG We should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive & well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate, bier or wein in hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WHOO-HOO, WHAT A RIDE!!!!!!"
Showing posts with label HIV/AIDS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HIV/AIDS. Show all posts
01 December 2016
29 October 2016
VIDEO: The Daily Show - Jordan Klepper Fingers the Pulse - Conspiracy Theories Thrive at a Trump Rally
The Daily Show - Jordan Klepper Fingers the Pulse - Conspiracy Theories Thrive at a Trump Rally
Published on Sep 21, 2016
Jordan Klepper gets Donald Trump supporters to share their non-reality-based opinions about Hillary Clinton and President Obama.
17 October 2014
PUSSY Rand Paul Thinks Ebola Is More Contagious Than AIDS & People don’t understand how Ebola is transmitted, new survey says & This is how you get Ebola, as explained by science 16OKT&30SEP14
sen rand paul r tb KY is a PUSSY (pussy3[poo s-ee] Slang: a timid, passive, or effeminate man.), a fear mongering coward and a hypocrite because he is one of the leaders of the gop / tea-bagger / grover norquist federal budget cutting cabal in congress. He is too pompous to be ashamed of his words and actions that are fueling unnecessary panic over Ebola, but he should be. The next time he starts running his mouth about Ebola and the inadequate federal government response someone should bitch slap him. This from +Mother Jones followed by a couple of reports from the +PBS NewsHour explaining just how Ebola is transmitted.
Sen.
Rand Paul (R-Ky) reportedly put on his scientist hat this morning,
telling CNN's Ashley Killough that Ebola is more easily spread than
AIDS–a statement that is an irresponsible, flat out lie.
Ashley Killough ✔ @KilloughCNN Follow
Paul's posturing is just the latest in a series of Ebola-truthing tactics he and other members of the GOP have been fully employing as of late. Perhaps more seriously, Paul's theory calls into question the types of feverish, vomit-spewing cocktail soirees he suggests he frequents.
For a deeper look into the contagiousness of Ebola compared to other diseases, check out the charts below from David McCandless and NPR:
| Thu Oct. 16, 2014 2:08 PM EDT
Ashley Killough ✔ @KilloughCNN Follow
Rand Paul tells me Ebola more
transmitable than AIDS. "If someone has Ebola at a cocktail party,
they're contagious and you can catch it."
Paul's posturing is just the latest in a series of Ebola-truthing tactics he and other members of the GOP have been fully employing as of late. Perhaps more seriously, Paul's theory calls into question the types of feverish, vomit-spewing cocktail soirees he suggests he frequents.
For a deeper look into the contagiousness of Ebola compared to other diseases, check out the charts below from David McCandless and NPR:
Adam Serwer ✔
@AdamSerwer
Follow
My @'s are filling with lots of derp about Ebola being more contagious than HIV. Here you go. http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/10/02/352983774/no-seriously-how-contagious-is-ebola …
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As the epidemic rages on, authorities are taking aim at critics in the press.Texas College Rejects Two Nigerian Applicants Because of Ebola Panic
Navarro College has since apologized for any "misinformation."Rand Paul Is the Best-Dressed Man in Washington
It's time to talk about the turtlenecks.Rand Paul Is Learning How To Be a Good Stage Actor
You'd almost believe his outrage is real. Almost.Mark Zuckerberg Just Donated $25 Million to Fight Ebola
Silicon Valley to the rescue.People don’t understand how Ebola is transmitted, new survey says
A new survey finds the public has a lot to learn about how the Ebola virus is transmitted, which could help explain the growing fears of the disease.
The survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that while nearly all adults (97 percent) know a person can become infected through direct contact with the blood or other body fluids of someone who is sick with Ebola, there are still misconceptions. (KHN is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)
One third of respondents are unaware they cannot become infected through the air. About 45 percent are unaware they cannot contract Ebola by shaking hands with someone who has been exposed to the virus but who does not have symptoms.
And only slightly more than a third (36 percent) of respondents know that a person must be showing Ebola symptoms to transmit the infection, the poll found.
The survey, which was fielded after a Liberian man was diagnosed with Ebola in Dallas, and remained in the field after a nurse who helped care for him contracted the disease, finds most Americans say they trust local, state, and federal health authorities to contain the disease in the U.S.
The public was near evenly split on the federal government’s response to the crisis. About 45 percent said the government was doing enough to fight the disease in Africa and 48 percent said it was doing enough to protect Americans.
The telephone poll of 1,503 adults was conducted from October 8-14 and has a margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan health policy research and communication organization not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.This is how you get Ebola, as explained by science
September 30, 2014 at 8:24 PM EDTThis post was originally published on Aug. 21 and updated on Sep. 30 to reflect the latest numbers from the World Health Organization.A colorized, magnified electron microscope image of the Ebola virus growing out of an infected VERO 46 cell. Image by National Institute of Allerfy and Infectious Diseases
As of Sep. 30, the Ebola virus had killed more than 3,000 people in the West African countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria, according to the latest numbers released by the World Health Organization.
As the virus spreads and medical workers feverishly battle to contain it, we wanted to know, how exactly is this virus transmitted from human to human?
What is Ebola?
Ebola is one of the world’s most virulent diseases. It comes from an extended family of viruses called Filoviridae, which also include the deadly Marburg virus. It is a swift and effective killer, known to kill up to 90 percent of those it infects. And it is a “hemorrhagic fever virus,” which means it causes fluid to leak from blood vessels, resulting in a dangerously low drop in blood pressure.Illustrations by Ruth Tam
Understanding Ebola requires an understanding of viruses and how they work. “Viruses,” science writer Carl Zimmer writes in his book “A Planet of Viruses”, “can replicate themselves, despite their paltry genetic instructions, by hijacking other forms of life. They… inject their genes and proteins into a host cell, which they [manipulate] into producing new copies of the virus. One virus might go into a cell, and within a day, a thousand viruses [come] out.”
All viruses contain “attachment proteins,” which, as the name suggests, attach to host cells through the cells’ “receptor sites.” This is how they invade healthy human cells.
While some virus particles are shaped like spheres, the particles that make up Ebola are filament-like in structure, giving them more surface area to potentially attack a greater number of cells. Each Ebola virus particle is covered in a membrane of these attachment proteins, or glycoproteins.
“[The virus] has a tremendous number of glycoproteins, which can increase its ability to affect cells,” said Richard Cummings, chair of Emory’s Dept. of Biochemistry and director of the National Center for Functional Glycomics. “It’s extremely infectious in that regard.”
Imagine Ebola’s glycoproteins as giant oak trees with branches and leaves, said Erica Ollmann Saphire, a structural biologist at the Scripps Research Institute. The Ebola virus has its own critical receptor site, which lies beneath these branches and leaves to avoid detection from the immune system. Each glycoprotein can attach itself to a host cell in a number of different ways, but once its branches fasten themselves to a host cell’s molecules, that host cell pulls in the attachment protein, slicing off its leaves and branches and exposing the trunk, the virus’s receptor site.
“The previously hidden receptor rearranges itself and spring loads like a spear fishing rod,” said Saphire. “It uncoils, springs forward and penetrates the membrane, driving itself into the cytoplasm.”
The cells then internalize the virus, and Ebola’s race against the human immune system begins.
How Ebola moves from person to person
Ebola spreads through direct contact with infected bodily fluids or tissue. The virus can be transmitted when an infected person’s vomit, blood or other fluids contact another person’s mouth, eyes or openings in their skin, said Dr. Ameesh Mehta, an infectious disease doctor at Emory University.
Even after a person has died, the virus persists. In West Africa where funeral rites include washing, touching and kissing corpses by family members, putting the dead to rest can be just as deadly as caring for a living patient.
“Contact with any aspect of it is considered very dangerous,” Cummings said. “Any physical contact.”
Ebola’s sucker punch is its speed of replication. At the time of death, a patient can have 1 billion copies of the virus in one cubic centimeter of blood. In comparison, HIV, a similar virus, has the same rate at the time of death. But unlike HIV, which only infects two types of immune cells, Ebola first infects white blood cells that disable the body’s ability to destroy foreign substances, then seizes nearly every cell type.
“It’s a systemic viral infection throughout your body as opposed to an infection of just your immune system,” Saphire said. “Patients may die before they’re able to mount much of an immune response.”
This process takes anywhere from two to 21 days (though it’s typically between four to 10 days). When the immune system begins breaking down, the symptoms begin to show.
Patients experience fevers, headaches and fatigue early on. After the virus overwhelms healthy cells, they burst, causing a chemical release leading to inflammation. Their remains are taken over by other cells, perpetuating the virus. As the symptoms worsen, patients suffer from bloody diarrhea, severe sore throat, jaundice, vomiting or loss of appetite.
Infected cells that haven’t yet burst carry the virus through the bloodstream to invade different parts of the body like the lymph nodes, spleen and liver. When infected cells attach themselves to the inside of blood vessels, it weakens them, causing fluids to leak. This triggers the uncontrollable bleeding for which Ebola is known, though it only happens for about 50 percent of patients and occurs mostly inside the body.
In fatal cases, blood pressure plummets after blood vessel damage, and death from shock or multiple organ failure occurs within six to 16 days.
The path ahead
Saphire is part of a large, multi-site team made up of 25 laboratories that’s mapping Ebola’s glycoprotein to better understand and defeat the virus. Among the potential strategies they’re studying is an antibody cocktail called ZMapp, an experimental drug that drew media attention after its use on two U.S. aid workers and three Liberian doctors. First developed by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases a decade ago, this “Ebola serum” potentially works to neutralize the virus by preventing its rearrangement and flagging it for destruction by the immune system.
Clinical trials for ZMapp are set to begin in 2015, but according to Saphire, doses for “experimental compassionate therapy,” treatment provided to critically-ill patients before the drug has been approved, could be ready in three months.
“The central dogma of molecular biology is that sequence dictates fold, which dictates function,” Saphire said. “But Ebola does more with less. While the human genome has 20,000 kinds of genes, Ebola has seven, and by rearranging its protein structure, it can carry out far more than seven functions.”
Ebola, Saphire explained, remodels its molecules “like a Transformer: those toys that unfold and refold to change between a robot and a truck,” she said. “We don’t typically expect molecules in biology to do that. We expect proteins to have one particular form – just the robot. If you didn’t know that the Ebola robot would also refold into a truck, you would design all your drugs against the robot structure.”
In addition, due to its extreme nature, there are far fewer human studies on Ebola than other similar viruses.
“Ebola patients are often too sick to consent to research,” Mehta said. These cases are occurring in poor environments where it’s hard to collect the samples to really understand the pathogens. But hopefully science catches up with the clinical phenomenon.”
While the recent outbreak is not expected to reach far beyond West Africa, researchers like science writer Richard Preston fear the beginning of a more deadly and longer-lasting epidemic if the virus finds its way to metropolitan areas like Lagos, Nigeria, which has a population larger than the state of New York.
Despite Ebola’s pervasive spread, Cummings says the biggest misconceptions are that Ebola is easily transmitted and that the outbreak in West Africa could reach global levels.
While one should still exercise caution, Cummings says the requirement of transmission of fluids makes the disease more difficult to get if you’re not directly treating patients.
“It is more controllable than people realize.”
26 February 2013
C. Everett Koop, former surgeon general, dies at 96 25FEB13
C. EVERETT KOOP, Christian, conservative, former U.S. Surgeon General during the reagan administration. He lived his life, lived his faith, for the benefit of others without letting everyone know just how much he and his family were sacrificing. We are all better off because he was among us. Rest in Peace good Doctor.
A spokeswoman for the C. Everett Koop Institute at Dartmouth confirmed his death but did not disclose the cause.
Dr. Koop was the most recognized surgeon general of the 20th century. He almost always appeared in the epauleted and ribboned blue or white uniform denoting his leadership of the commissioned corps of the U.S. Public Health Service. With his mustacheless beard, deep voice and grim expression, he looked like a Civil War admiral or, as some cartoonists suggested, a refugee from a Gilbert and Sullivan musical.
The theatrical appearance, however, masked a fierce self-confidence, an unyielding commitment to professional excellence, and a willingness to challenge the expectations of his patrons.
A 64-year-old retired pediatric surgeon at the time Ronald Reagan nominated him in 1981, Dr. Koop had no formal public-health training. His chief credential was that he was a socially conservative, devout Christian physician who had written a popular treatise against abortion. His confirmation took eight months. Few people expected him to talk about homosexuality, anal intercourse, condoms and intravenous drug use when almost nobody else in the Reagan administration would even utter the word “AIDS.”
Dr. Koop, however, believed information was the most useful weapon against HIV at a time when there was little treatment for the infection and widespread fear that it might soon threaten the general population. In May 1988, he mailed a seven-page brochure, “Understanding AIDS,” to all 107 million households in the country.
“He was a guy who surprised everybody,” said Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who was Dr. Koop’s chief tutor in AIDS matters and became a close friend. “People expected one thing and they not only got another thing, they got someone who was amazingly effective.”
Among AIDS activists Dr. Koop became an unlikely hero, although some came to think that his sexually explicit talk tended to further stigmatize gay men.
“Most of us thought that a huge part of how the crisis grew exponentially was that those in power chose to ignore it for as long as they could,” recalled Peter Staley, a founding member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. “He was the only person in that administration who spoke the truth when it came to AIDS.”
Dr. Koop was also a tireless campaigner against tobacco. As surgeon general, he released a report in 1982 that attributed 30 percent of all cancer deaths to smoking. He wrote that nicotine was as addictive as heroin, warned against the hazards of secondhand smoke and updated the warning labels on cigarette packs.
Michael C. Fiore, founder of the University of Wisconsin Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention, once said Dr. Koop’s reports on smoking “totally changed the landscape” of tobacco control.
He was among the last survivors of a small generation of American doctors forced by World War II into highly responsible roles at very young ages. After the war, many became academic physicians and researchers who helped fuel the explosion of medical therapeutics in the second half of the 20th century. In Dr. Koop’s case, the new frontier was pediatric surgery, a specialty that barely existed when he entered it. He became one of the half-dozen leading practitioners in the world.
A Coney Island epiphany
Charles Everett Koop, an only child, was born in Brooklyn, on Oct. 14, 1916. His father, who did not finish high school, was an officer at a bank. His mother occasionally assisted in at-home surgical operations in the neighborhood by administering anesthesia — a task the surgeon often farmed out to a responsible bystander. His paternal grandparents lived with his family, and his maternal grandparents and many cousins lived nearby.
Dr. Koop claimed he first expressed a desire to become a surgeon when he was 6 years old.
His maternal grandfather used to take him to Coney Island. In a conversation in 2007, Dr. Koop said this was not only for the entertainment, but also to teach the boy how to spot hustlers and grifters. He recalled an unusual sideshow — a display of premature infants in incubators, attended by nurses from the New York Foundling Hospital.
“I often thought how much of my life I spent with my hands in one of those incubators,” he said. “Every time I would go and work on a baby, in the beginning, I’d have these reminiscences of Coney Island, where I first saw them.”
Dr. Koop attended Dartmouth College on a football scholarship but had to give up the sport after suffering an eye injury. He majored in zoology and graduated in 1937. That fall he entered Cornell University’s Medical College, in New York City.
He graduated in 1941 and did an internship in Philadelphia before starting surgical training at the University of Pennsylvania. By the time his residency began, six months after the Pearl Harbor attack, much of the surgical staff had entered military service.
That left a large amount of work to the surgical residents, and Dr. Koop proved to be an unusually skilled and energetic one. Within six weeks of starting on July 1, 1942, he was removing gallbladders and doing unassisted partial resections of stomachs — his supervisors notified but not present.
Although he was married, and by 1944 a father as well, he spent nearly all his time at the hospital. He estimated that he did as many operations in four years as residents do in “seven or eight years — there was nobody around to do the surgery.”
He also did much of the work on a project assigned to Penn by the War Department to study the use of liquid gelatin as a substitute for blood plasma for the treatment of shock in battlefield casualties.
“I took to that investigational work very readily,” recalled Dr. Koop, who ultimately wrote a thesis and earned a doctor of science degree for the research. “I was my own guinea pig. I would operate after having lost 1,000 ccs of blood and taken 500 ccs of gelatin, and then recorded all my vital signs. I have probably taken my body weight in gelatin, intravenously.”
He and another Penn doctor were scheduled to run a clinical trial of the plasma substitute in China. Five days before they were to leave, however, the Army told them it wanted military physicians to run the study. Dr. Koop and his colleague unpacked their bags. The airplane carrying the Army researchers disappeared over the Atlantic.
Early achievements in surgery
After the war ended, the surgeon in chief at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania suggested that Dr. Koop take a job as the head of surgery at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. When he assumed the position in January 1946, he was not yet 30.
At the time, general surgeons, or specialty surgeons such as urologists, operated on infants and children without specific training in how their anatomy and physiology differed from adults. The only pediatric surgery program in the country was in Boston. Operations on newborns were rare and mortality was high.
“I went to the Children’s Hospital to do pediatric surgery. I spent the first 18 months doing pediatric anesthesia — trying to get rid of the barriers that were making it impossible to get living babies out of the operating room,” Dr. Koop said in 2007.
Often there wasn’t even appropriate equipment. Before an operation on a newborn, he and the anesthesiologist would make a tube for the windpipe by cutting the smallest urine catheter down to size, filing the edges smooth with an emery board, and then inserting a wire and boiling it to get the desired curvature.
Dr. Koop insisted that his team provide all the postoperative care to surgical patients, much to the consternation of pediatricians at CHOP old enough to be his father. In 1956, he created what was reputedly the first neonatal surgical intensive care unit in the country.
Over four decades of practice, he improved the technique for hernia repairs (and did 17,000 of them). He developed a correction for a congenital defect known as esophageal atresia, and a method for draining fluid from the brain into the abdomen for infants with hydrocephalus. He separated several sets of conjoined twins, including, in 1977, a pair joined at the heart in which only one baby could be saved. He trained dozens of pediatric surgeons who went on to head departments elsewhere.
After retiring as surgeon general in 1989, Dr. Koop lectured, wrote an autobiography, and in the 1990s with other investors established a Web site, DrKoop.com, that provided medical information. The enterprise proved an embarrassment, however, when it turned out some of the information was paid advertising. It no longer exists.
President Bill Clinton awarded Dr. Koop the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995. In recent years, he was a scholar at an institute that bears his name at Dartmouth Medical School. Its purpose is “promoting the health and well-being of all people.”
Dr. Koop’s wife of 67 years, the former Elizabeth Flanagan, died in 2007. She had worked as a secretary to support the couple while her husband was in medical school.
Survivors include his wife, the former Cora Hogue, whom he married in 2010; three children from his first marriage, Allen Koop, the Rev. Norman Koop and Elizabeth Thompson; and eight grandchildren.
A son from his first marriage, David Koop, was killed in a mountaineering accident in New Hampshire in 1968 when he was a 20-year-old student at Dartmouth. Dr. Koop and his first wife later wrote a book, “Sometimes Mountains Move,” about their experience of grieving in the hope it might help other parents who had lost children.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/c-everett-koop-former-surgeon-general-dies-at-96/2013/02/25/be6cc52e-c5da-11df-94e1-c5afa35a9e59_story.html?wpisrc=al_comboNP_p
By David Brown
C. Everett Koop, the former surgeon general of the United States who started the government’s public discussion of AIDS during the Reagan administration, died Feb. 25 at his home in Hanover, N.H. He was 96.A spokeswoman for the C. Everett Koop Institute at Dartmouth confirmed his death but did not disclose the cause.
Dr. Koop was the most recognized surgeon general of the 20th century. He almost always appeared in the epauleted and ribboned blue or white uniform denoting his leadership of the commissioned corps of the U.S. Public Health Service. With his mustacheless beard, deep voice and grim expression, he looked like a Civil War admiral or, as some cartoonists suggested, a refugee from a Gilbert and Sullivan musical.
The theatrical appearance, however, masked a fierce self-confidence, an unyielding commitment to professional excellence, and a willingness to challenge the expectations of his patrons.
A 64-year-old retired pediatric surgeon at the time Ronald Reagan nominated him in 1981, Dr. Koop had no formal public-health training. His chief credential was that he was a socially conservative, devout Christian physician who had written a popular treatise against abortion. His confirmation took eight months. Few people expected him to talk about homosexuality, anal intercourse, condoms and intravenous drug use when almost nobody else in the Reagan administration would even utter the word “AIDS.”
Dr. Koop, however, believed information was the most useful weapon against HIV at a time when there was little treatment for the infection and widespread fear that it might soon threaten the general population. In May 1988, he mailed a seven-page brochure, “Understanding AIDS,” to all 107 million households in the country.
“He was a guy who surprised everybody,” said Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who was Dr. Koop’s chief tutor in AIDS matters and became a close friend. “People expected one thing and they not only got another thing, they got someone who was amazingly effective.”
Among AIDS activists Dr. Koop became an unlikely hero, although some came to think that his sexually explicit talk tended to further stigmatize gay men.
“Most of us thought that a huge part of how the crisis grew exponentially was that those in power chose to ignore it for as long as they could,” recalled Peter Staley, a founding member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. “He was the only person in that administration who spoke the truth when it came to AIDS.”
Dr. Koop was also a tireless campaigner against tobacco. As surgeon general, he released a report in 1982 that attributed 30 percent of all cancer deaths to smoking. He wrote that nicotine was as addictive as heroin, warned against the hazards of secondhand smoke and updated the warning labels on cigarette packs.
Michael C. Fiore, founder of the University of Wisconsin Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention, once said Dr. Koop’s reports on smoking “totally changed the landscape” of tobacco control.
He was among the last survivors of a small generation of American doctors forced by World War II into highly responsible roles at very young ages. After the war, many became academic physicians and researchers who helped fuel the explosion of medical therapeutics in the second half of the 20th century. In Dr. Koop’s case, the new frontier was pediatric surgery, a specialty that barely existed when he entered it. He became one of the half-dozen leading practitioners in the world.
A Coney Island epiphany
Charles Everett Koop, an only child, was born in Brooklyn, on Oct. 14, 1916. His father, who did not finish high school, was an officer at a bank. His mother occasionally assisted in at-home surgical operations in the neighborhood by administering anesthesia — a task the surgeon often farmed out to a responsible bystander. His paternal grandparents lived with his family, and his maternal grandparents and many cousins lived nearby.
Dr. Koop claimed he first expressed a desire to become a surgeon when he was 6 years old.
His maternal grandfather used to take him to Coney Island. In a conversation in 2007, Dr. Koop said this was not only for the entertainment, but also to teach the boy how to spot hustlers and grifters. He recalled an unusual sideshow — a display of premature infants in incubators, attended by nurses from the New York Foundling Hospital.
“I often thought how much of my life I spent with my hands in one of those incubators,” he said. “Every time I would go and work on a baby, in the beginning, I’d have these reminiscences of Coney Island, where I first saw them.”
Dr. Koop attended Dartmouth College on a football scholarship but had to give up the sport after suffering an eye injury. He majored in zoology and graduated in 1937. That fall he entered Cornell University’s Medical College, in New York City.
He graduated in 1941 and did an internship in Philadelphia before starting surgical training at the University of Pennsylvania. By the time his residency began, six months after the Pearl Harbor attack, much of the surgical staff had entered military service.
That left a large amount of work to the surgical residents, and Dr. Koop proved to be an unusually skilled and energetic one. Within six weeks of starting on July 1, 1942, he was removing gallbladders and doing unassisted partial resections of stomachs — his supervisors notified but not present.
Although he was married, and by 1944 a father as well, he spent nearly all his time at the hospital. He estimated that he did as many operations in four years as residents do in “seven or eight years — there was nobody around to do the surgery.”
He also did much of the work on a project assigned to Penn by the War Department to study the use of liquid gelatin as a substitute for blood plasma for the treatment of shock in battlefield casualties.
“I took to that investigational work very readily,” recalled Dr. Koop, who ultimately wrote a thesis and earned a doctor of science degree for the research. “I was my own guinea pig. I would operate after having lost 1,000 ccs of blood and taken 500 ccs of gelatin, and then recorded all my vital signs. I have probably taken my body weight in gelatin, intravenously.”
He and another Penn doctor were scheduled to run a clinical trial of the plasma substitute in China. Five days before they were to leave, however, the Army told them it wanted military physicians to run the study. Dr. Koop and his colleague unpacked their bags. The airplane carrying the Army researchers disappeared over the Atlantic.
Early achievements in surgery
After the war ended, the surgeon in chief at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania suggested that Dr. Koop take a job as the head of surgery at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. When he assumed the position in January 1946, he was not yet 30.
At the time, general surgeons, or specialty surgeons such as urologists, operated on infants and children without specific training in how their anatomy and physiology differed from adults. The only pediatric surgery program in the country was in Boston. Operations on newborns were rare and mortality was high.
“I went to the Children’s Hospital to do pediatric surgery. I spent the first 18 months doing pediatric anesthesia — trying to get rid of the barriers that were making it impossible to get living babies out of the operating room,” Dr. Koop said in 2007.
Often there wasn’t even appropriate equipment. Before an operation on a newborn, he and the anesthesiologist would make a tube for the windpipe by cutting the smallest urine catheter down to size, filing the edges smooth with an emery board, and then inserting a wire and boiling it to get the desired curvature.
Dr. Koop insisted that his team provide all the postoperative care to surgical patients, much to the consternation of pediatricians at CHOP old enough to be his father. In 1956, he created what was reputedly the first neonatal surgical intensive care unit in the country.
Over four decades of practice, he improved the technique for hernia repairs (and did 17,000 of them). He developed a correction for a congenital defect known as esophageal atresia, and a method for draining fluid from the brain into the abdomen for infants with hydrocephalus. He separated several sets of conjoined twins, including, in 1977, a pair joined at the heart in which only one baby could be saved. He trained dozens of pediatric surgeons who went on to head departments elsewhere.
After retiring as surgeon general in 1989, Dr. Koop lectured, wrote an autobiography, and in the 1990s with other investors established a Web site, DrKoop.com, that provided medical information. The enterprise proved an embarrassment, however, when it turned out some of the information was paid advertising. It no longer exists.
President Bill Clinton awarded Dr. Koop the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995. In recent years, he was a scholar at an institute that bears his name at Dartmouth Medical School. Its purpose is “promoting the health and well-being of all people.”
Dr. Koop’s wife of 67 years, the former Elizabeth Flanagan, died in 2007. She had worked as a secretary to support the couple while her husband was in medical school.
Survivors include his wife, the former Cora Hogue, whom he married in 2010; three children from his first marriage, Allen Koop, the Rev. Norman Koop and Elizabeth Thompson; and eight grandchildren.
A son from his first marriage, David Koop, was killed in a mountaineering accident in New Hampshire in 1968 when he was a 20-year-old student at Dartmouth. Dr. Koop and his first wife later wrote a book, “Sometimes Mountains Move,” about their experience of grieving in the hope it might help other parents who had lost children.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/c-everett-koop-former-surgeon-general-dies-at-96/2013/02/25/be6cc52e-c5da-11df-94e1-c5afa35a9e59_story.html?wpisrc=al_comboNP_p
20 August 2011
MSF / DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS NEWSLETTER 18AUG11
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09 June 2011
Religion and AIDS at 30 7JUN11
IT is a shame this aspect of the story of HIV/AIDS was mainly overlooked, because in reality the Christian, and other religious communities in the U.S. overcame their horror and fear of the disease and offered care, support and love for the victims, gay and straight, as their consciences reminded them of the true tenants of their faith and moved them to live their faith. Yes, there is still a lot of ignorance about HIV/AIDS in the American religious community, but it is obvious now the ignorant are the minority.
Many news outlets marked the 30th anniversary of the discovery of AIDS -- or, more accurately, the first reports of five otherwise healthy homosexuals in Los Angeles who had contracted a rare cancer -- with stories on the medical and scientific aspects of the disease. "The AIDS war still rages," according to the Los Angeles Times. And the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported "hope for a cure."
Others supplemented medical pieces with first-person accounts of living with the disease or explorations of AIDS' impact on culture.
Was religion mentioned? Deep down in several pieces, reporters remarked that some religious conservatives remain opposed to condom use and others still call AIDS "the wrath of God."
Yet, glossing over the entangled relationship between religion and AIDS, or simply consigning that history to conservative sound bites, overlooks crucial links between the impact of the epidemic and changing coverage of sexuality. It also occludes shifts in the GLBT community's public profile as well as important theological developments in mainline Protestantism and progressive denominations and traditions.
When AIDS emerged in the early 1980s, the decades-old campaign for gay acceptance, rights and non-discrimination had achieved some notable victories. Newspapers covered the new gay scene, profiling a subculture with its own bars, clubs, music and freewheeling sexual mores. (That this "gay community" was depicted as predominantly white, urban and middle class deserves its own media critique.) At the same time, journalists followed a growing religious backlash against gay rights, crystallized by Anita Bryant's 1977 drive to repeal a Dade County, Fla., non-discrimination statute. Bryant's "Save Our Children" campaign alleged that homosexual behavior endangered children and was an unacceptable affront to biblical morality.
These two types of stories -- gays as hedonists and gays as a social menace -- were more sophisticated spins on homophobic news stories from the 1950s and 1960s that almost invariably framed gay life in terms of deviancy and perversion. Arguably, this coverage merely reflected or echoed widespread discomfort with same-sex relations (most reporters shared the same preconceptions as the public), whereas stories in the '80s tended to evince the news values of sensationalism and conflict.
The first reports of a mysterious cancer afflicting otherwise healthy gay men seemed neither controversial nor titillating. But as the contours and scope of the disease became clear, the story suggested both. Why were gays susceptible to this terrible epidemic? Religious conservatives had a biblically based answer: immorality.
Many of the early human-interest stories incorporated this condemnation. Either a religious conservative was quoted saying AIDS was a divine punishment or an AIDS patient or family member voiced shame and guilt that explicitly stemmed from a sense of God's anger.
At the same time, other Christians were beginning to articulate an alternative religious response. They told reporters that God loves AIDS patients and that Jesus would be ministering to them. These beliefs were quoted as a counterpoint to conservatives, but as the decade progressed and journalists wrote more about coping with AIDS and caring for the afflicted, stories that offered a religious angle on "Why me?" and "What should I do?" proliferated.
By the 1990s, many Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant churches had direct experience of people with AIDS, either as congregants, clergy, friends or family. Articles about their experiences documented their (often evolving) beliefs about the disease -- it carried no divine stigma and could strike anyone -- as well as about gays, whom God loved too. Moreover, once sexual contact was discovered to be an avenue for transmitting the disease, journalists reported that some churches were initiating conversations about safe sex and others were distributing condoms.
Did working through their theological response to AIDS help some mainline Christians come to accept GLBT people as God's children, equal members of the congregation, deserving of ordination and entitled to the sanction of religious and civil marriage? Likewise did reporting on mainline Protestants' beliefs about gays and activities around AIDS predispose news consumers to rethink their own opinions? Or, on other hand, did hearing Falwellian assertions about gay immorality harden some hearts and convert others?
Academics wrestle with the question of whether journalism reflects public opinion, shapes it or does a little of both. Insofar as religion influences attitudes about sexuality, which it does directly to the faithful and indirectly, through cultural osmosis, to many others, coverage of religious responses to homosexuality provides a glimpse into living history. It also offers a way to chart broader and deeper currents of cultural change.
How could assessments of AIDS at 30 fail to look at the dramatically altered landscape of our cultural discussions? In 1981, for example, few Americans would have taken seriously the possibility of gay marriage, including many gays, who would have scoffed at the notion that mirroring what they saw as an inherently (hetero)sexist, monogamous lifestyle could be a milestone on their own path to liberation. What caused the change? AIDS for one, evolving religious opinion for another and -- arguably -- the news media's role in bringing both developments to public attention.
Many news outlets marked the 30th anniversary of the discovery of AIDS -- or, more accurately, the first reports of five otherwise healthy homosexuals in Los Angeles who had contracted a rare cancer -- with stories on the medical and scientific aspects of the disease. "The AIDS war still rages," according to the Los Angeles Times. And the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported "hope for a cure."
Others supplemented medical pieces with first-person accounts of living with the disease or explorations of AIDS' impact on culture.
Was religion mentioned? Deep down in several pieces, reporters remarked that some religious conservatives remain opposed to condom use and others still call AIDS "the wrath of God."
Yet, glossing over the entangled relationship between religion and AIDS, or simply consigning that history to conservative sound bites, overlooks crucial links between the impact of the epidemic and changing coverage of sexuality. It also occludes shifts in the GLBT community's public profile as well as important theological developments in mainline Protestantism and progressive denominations and traditions.
When AIDS emerged in the early 1980s, the decades-old campaign for gay acceptance, rights and non-discrimination had achieved some notable victories. Newspapers covered the new gay scene, profiling a subculture with its own bars, clubs, music and freewheeling sexual mores. (That this "gay community" was depicted as predominantly white, urban and middle class deserves its own media critique.) At the same time, journalists followed a growing religious backlash against gay rights, crystallized by Anita Bryant's 1977 drive to repeal a Dade County, Fla., non-discrimination statute. Bryant's "Save Our Children" campaign alleged that homosexual behavior endangered children and was an unacceptable affront to biblical morality.
These two types of stories -- gays as hedonists and gays as a social menace -- were more sophisticated spins on homophobic news stories from the 1950s and 1960s that almost invariably framed gay life in terms of deviancy and perversion. Arguably, this coverage merely reflected or echoed widespread discomfort with same-sex relations (most reporters shared the same preconceptions as the public), whereas stories in the '80s tended to evince the news values of sensationalism and conflict.
The first reports of a mysterious cancer afflicting otherwise healthy gay men seemed neither controversial nor titillating. But as the contours and scope of the disease became clear, the story suggested both. Why were gays susceptible to this terrible epidemic? Religious conservatives had a biblically based answer: immorality.
Many of the early human-interest stories incorporated this condemnation. Either a religious conservative was quoted saying AIDS was a divine punishment or an AIDS patient or family member voiced shame and guilt that explicitly stemmed from a sense of God's anger.
At the same time, other Christians were beginning to articulate an alternative religious response. They told reporters that God loves AIDS patients and that Jesus would be ministering to them. These beliefs were quoted as a counterpoint to conservatives, but as the decade progressed and journalists wrote more about coping with AIDS and caring for the afflicted, stories that offered a religious angle on "Why me?" and "What should I do?" proliferated.
By the 1990s, many Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant churches had direct experience of people with AIDS, either as congregants, clergy, friends or family. Articles about their experiences documented their (often evolving) beliefs about the disease -- it carried no divine stigma and could strike anyone -- as well as about gays, whom God loved too. Moreover, once sexual contact was discovered to be an avenue for transmitting the disease, journalists reported that some churches were initiating conversations about safe sex and others were distributing condoms.
Did working through their theological response to AIDS help some mainline Christians come to accept GLBT people as God's children, equal members of the congregation, deserving of ordination and entitled to the sanction of religious and civil marriage? Likewise did reporting on mainline Protestants' beliefs about gays and activities around AIDS predispose news consumers to rethink their own opinions? Or, on other hand, did hearing Falwellian assertions about gay immorality harden some hearts and convert others?
Academics wrestle with the question of whether journalism reflects public opinion, shapes it or does a little of both. Insofar as religion influences attitudes about sexuality, which it does directly to the faithful and indirectly, through cultural osmosis, to many others, coverage of religious responses to homosexuality provides a glimpse into living history. It also offers a way to chart broader and deeper currents of cultural change.
How could assessments of AIDS at 30 fail to look at the dramatically altered landscape of our cultural discussions? In 1981, for example, few Americans would have taken seriously the possibility of gay marriage, including many gays, who would have scoffed at the notion that mirroring what they saw as an inherently (hetero)sexist, monogamous lifestyle could be a milestone on their own path to liberation. What caused the change? AIDS for one, evolving religious opinion for another and -- arguably -- the news media's role in bringing both developments to public attention.
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