There aren’t many areas where Google is behind Microsoft but Personal Health Records might be one of them. Then again, the gap may be closing.

Last October, MSFT partnered with Cleveland Clinic and together, they enrolled several hundred of the Clinic’s most intrepid chronic disease patients into a pilot.

The patients are using multiple home monitoring devices to upload data to their Healthvault PHRs.

These heavily leaden HealthVaults are to be shared with Clinic physicians who presumably will have time to peruse all that data and know what to do next.

So when Google announced a PHR deal with IBM last week, people thought surely the 2 tech titans would have also roped in the boys up at Mayo or some place like that in response to MSFT’s deal with the Clinic.

But no, they haven’t gotten that far yet. Basically, IBM’s got software that lets patients upload data from their home monitoring devices into Google Health, so long as the devices comply with Continua Health Alliance standards.

That’s it from 2 companies whose CEOs have been carrying the Big O’s gym bags since Iowa?

Come to think of it, only a few hundred thousand people use Google Health and HealthVault combined, according to Parks Associates. A hundred times that still watch TVs running Rabbit Ears.

Despite that Sameer Samat, director of Google Health said he’s “pretty happy with progress so far” according to the Wall Street Journal. 

Then he got real. “We have had a lot of people who…rave, and probably more people who say it is a great start and here is what we want to see” feature-wise.

Days before the Big O’s special envoy Richard Holbrooke was scheduled to visit Islamabad, a Pakistani court released Abdul Qadeer Khan from house arrest.

He’d been living that way since 2004 after confessing to being top dog in the world’s largest nuclear black market.

Khan’s not going to be invited to many cocktail partys in the West, which reviles him as the man who sold nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea. But Pakistanis revere the man. After all, he built their bomb. 

The Pakistani press had been skewering President Asif Ali Zardari for cozying up to the US, so most viewed Khan’s release as politically motivated.

Fans and paparazzi mobbed the visibly elated Khan as he strode forth, not the least bit contrite and feigning disinterest in what the West might think about his release.

“Are they happy with our God? Are they happy with our prophet? Are they happy with our leaders? Never, so why should we bother what they say about us?” he told the New York Times.

Many Washington officials think Khan can reactivate his nuclear network, since it was never completely dismantled.

Why just awhile ago, computers seized from that network were found to contain 3 different designs for a nuclear bomb including one from China and 2 from Pakistan’s own nuclear blueprints.

“He’s still a proliferation threat,” State Department Robert Wood told the Times. “We’re very troubled by this.”

“The key question,” a Bush administration official said last year, “is whether he gave (those) designs to the Iranians.”

Of the 3 pirated designs, one was particularly compact and efficient; the sort that could be delivered by a Shahab-3 missile anywhere Iran aimed it within a 2,000 mile radius.

Reykjavik-based Decode Genetics, which is a lot better at personal genomics than selecting investment advisors, is back in the news now that its scientists have determined that 57% of all thyroid cancer is attributable to 2 genetic variations.

Julius Gudmundsson and colleagues report in Nature Genetics that the variants are simple base-pair substitutions occurring in genes residing near those controlling thyroid gland development, one on Chromosome 9 and the other on Chromosome 14.

Compared with those having neither variant, “the risk associated with these variants was almost six-fold, which is quite extraordinary,” Erich Sturgis, a head and neck surgeon at Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer told the New York Times.

Each year in the US, about 35,000 cases of thyroid cancer are diagnosed. Treatment generally includes surgical resection of the gland followed by lifelong thyroid replacement. It’s quite effective and only 1,500 people die from thyroid cancer each year.

The Decode breakthroughs are thus not going to trigger interest in population-wide screening programs, but the information would be useful in the assessment of people at high risk, such as those with a positive family history of the disease. 

Gudmundsson’s group reached its conclusions by performing a genome-wide association study involving 192 positive cases and a large control group.

They showed that people having both genetic variants had low levels of thyroid-stimulating hormone, which is produced normally by the pituitary gland.

TSH helps thyroid cells mature, so the authors postulate that chronically low TSH levels might impede their differentiation and thus increase the risk of malignant transformation.

If this theory proves correct, TSH supplementation might reduce the risk of developing thyroid cancer in affected individuals.