Black Americans have higher rates of HIV than some African countries

Darkfrog submitted, created time 3 months 3 weeks (www.nytimes.com)

According to the Black AIDS Institute, the United States may have a lower incidence of HIV than other countries overall, but U.S. blacks, considered alone, aren't so lucky. With 600,000 African-Americans living with HIV and 30,000 new infections each year, if American blacks were a country on their own, they would rank sixteenth worldwide. What's more, infected blacks are much more likely to die than infected whites, after adjusting for age (the article does not say that it adjusted for socioeconomic status)

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Three Southern States Lead US in Obesity

sea-maid submitted, created time 4 months 3 days (www.time.com)

More than 30 percent of adults in each of the states tipped the scales enough to ensure the South remains the nation's fattest region.

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U.S.-Mexico border fence may trap jaguars as well as immigrants

Darkfrog submitted, created time 10 months 3 days (sciencenow.sciencemag.org)

This is fascinating. I never knew that any jaguars at all lived in the United States, let alone as far northeast as North Carolina!

Now this isn't a message of doom for all jaguars everywhere, just the eleven males who've been spotted in the Southwest over the past few years. Now, while the government's decision to not implement a recovery plan technically violates the Endangered Species Act, I find that I can see their point. For so few animals, any efforts toward the conservation of jaguars would be better spent elsewhere.

6 comments | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: migration jaguars Mexico Endangered Species Act conservation wildlife wildlife conservation politics endangered cat species border fence endangered mammalian species endangered species united states

Early Arrival: HIV came from Haiti to United States

wugongliang submitted, created time 1 year 2 weeks (www.sciencenews.org)

An analysis of 25-year-old blood samples pushes the arrival of HIV in the United States back to about 1969, 12 years before AIDS was first described by a doctor in Los Angeles. The virus came from Haiti, which served as a Western Hemisphere toehold for the early stages of the epidemic starting in the mid-1960s, according to the analysis.

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NYTimes article claims that Clean Air Act prevents crime

Darkfrog submitted, created time 1 year 4 weeks (www.nytimes.com)

We have yet another explanation for the drop in the American crime rate in the mid-1990's: This article cites a study proposing that lead causes brain damage of a sort that makes children less intelligent and more impulsive, that this makes the resulting teenagers more likely to commit crimes, and that the main source of this lead during the twentieth century was not paint but leaded gasoline.

The declining crime rate, she says, matches the declining average lead content in American blood, but with a twenty-year lag

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Risk Factors for Inguinal Hernia among Adults in the US Population

amanda submitted, created time 1 year 6 months (aje.oxfordjournals.org)

"The authors examined risk factors for incident inguinal hernia among US adults (5,316 men and 8,136 women) participating in the First National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (1971–1975) who were followed through 1992–1993 for a hospital (International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification, code 550) or physician diagnosis of inguinal hernia. Ninety-six percent of the baseline cohort was recontacted, with a median follow-up of 18.2 years (range, 0.02–22.1 years)."

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Cognitive dissonance and where the buck stops

Darkfrog submitted, created time 1 year 7 months (sciam.com)

Scientific American attempts to explain the reasoning behind the "mistakes that were made" in the Bush and Kennedy administrations and why such similar conflicts had such different results.

Fascinating.

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