Recent studies have shown that sleep-deprived people are 3 times more likely to catch a cold than the well rested and that each hour of rack time above 5 is associated with a 33% drop in the risk of developing (egad) coronary artery disease.

Meanwhile, 40% of Americans believe that getting adequate sleep is as important to overall health and well being as diet and exercise.

It doesn’t matter.

Americans are cutting back on sleep relentlessly.

According to a poll conducted by the National Sleep Foundation, the number of Americans who average less than six hours a night jumped from 13% to 20% between 2001 and 2008, while the number claiming to get at least eight fell from 38% to 28%.

In addition, 54% of adults-which works out to 110 million licensed drivers-report having driven while drowsy at least once last year. Frighteningly, nearly a third report nodding off or flat out falling asleep while driving a vehicle last year.

“The economy is a major factor why people are losing sleep,” understated sleep expert Raj Kakar to CNN.

To which David Cloud added, “it’s easy to understand why so many people are concerned over the economy and jobs, but sacrificing sleep is the wrong solution.”

The CEO of the National Sleep Foundation added, “sleep is essential for productivity and alertness and is a vital sign for one’s overall health.”

And besides, the sleep-skipping trend antedated the Great Economic Crisis, aided and abetted as it has been by SportsCenter, the Internet, cell phones and Crackberries, not to mention what Wilson Pickett had in mind.

And there’s a macho thing, too.

“Our society has valued people who brag about being able to function on very little sleep as a mark of someone who is aggressive, dynamic, successful,” Neil Kavey, Director of the Sleep Disorder Center at Columbia told CNN.

For decades, folks in Libby, Montana knew the fine dusty stuff that covered everything in town from big rigs to baseball fields was asbestos.
 
They knew where it was coming from, too. Right over there, wafting out of the W. R. Grace mine on the other side of town.

NBD. Just part of life, they assumed. No one told them otherwise.

Lifetime resident Helen Bundrock remembers Grace “called it a nuisance dust, (they) did.”

Helen, her husband and 4 of their 5 children have been diagnosed with asbestosis, a slowly progressive lung disease that is associated with mesothelioma and premature death.

Turns out the medical community and who knows, maybe some mining companies knew about the risks of asbestos for decades.

Now, Federal prosecutors have put the mining company on trial. They claim asbestosis sickened at least 1,000 residents of Libby Montana, and killed 200 more.

“There’s never been a case where so many people were sickened or killed by environmental crime,” says David Uhlmann, said the Justice Department’s former top prosecutor.

The Feds allege that until 1990, the company conspired to “knowingly release” asbestos and that it failed to reveal the risks to employees and residents, leaving them “in imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury.”

Grace faces fines of up to $280 million if convicted. Several executives could end up in jail.

Grace doesn’t deny that asbestos emanated from the mine nor that some were sickened and died. But it “categorically denies any criminal wrongdoing.” In fact Grace says, as information about the problem became known, it acted to mitigate the risk and communicate openly about it.

The trial is expected to last four months.

Only the good lord and a handful of scientists could know what goes through a man’s mind when he spots a bikini-clad woman, and one of the latter just reported at the AAAS meeting that men perceive such women to be objects.

Specifically, a part of the brain associated with tool handling and an intent to carry out tasks shows increased activity and blood flow when men watch images of scantily-clad women, according to Susan Fiske, a psychology professor at Princeton.

Meanwhile in many men, it was like somebody pulled the plug on the part of the brain that analyzes other people’s feelings, thoughts and intentions, she added.

The “study…was focused on the idea that men of a certain age view sex as a highly desirable goal, and if you present them with a provocative woman, then that will tend to prime goal-related responses,” Fiske explained to CNN.

Fiske’s study did not examine how women responded to similarly provocative images of men.

Fiske emphasized that the observed reactions in men were not a matter of conscious control. In fact, the poor guys weren’t necessarily even aware what was going on upstairs.

Hundreds of millions of years before humans developed consciousness, males of all species must have been driven to hook up with what they perceived to be the most fertile females as a means to keep their species in the game, so what’s the big deal?

Men “don’t know the extent to which they’re being influenced,” Fiske explained. “It’s important to recognize the effects.”

NASA scientists have detected methane in the atmosphere of Mars, making it more likely—though far from certain—that life exists or existed on the planet.

In early 2003, the scientists observed methane plumes arising from 3 regions of the Red Planet’s northern hemisphere. A little more than a pound of the gas was vented per second according to the scientists, and 19,000 metric tons were spewed in total.

Methane is the primary component of what Earthlings call natural gas. Most of the methane found on Earth is produced by living things (cows come to mind) as a byproduct of food digestion.

But some non-biological processes also produce methane.

So Martian methane comes either from living things past or present, weird and wholly unexplained geological activity or a comet strike.

Lisa Pratt put her money on the former. “Perhaps we need to…think in terms of present-day life holding on somewhere in the subsurface,” she said at a NASA briefing covered by CNN and the New York Times.

The Indiana University geologist who was not involved with the research added, “It’s prudent that we begin to explore Mars looking for the possibility of a life form that’s exhaling methane.”

The NASA scientists observed the methane plumes on Mars using the Keck Telescope and a NASA-owned Infrared Telescope in Hawaii. They recently published their findings in Science.

Just when it starts to look like we might finally expand health coverage and access in this country, we get word that 49% of physicians responding to a recent survey say they plan to reduce their panel sizes or quit practice altogether due to poor working conditions.

The Physician’s Foundation sent the survey to 250,000 primary care physicians and 50,000 specialists. It received 12,000 responses.

The results showed widespread frustration—particularly among primary care physicians—due to burdensome administrative responsibilities, reimbursement delays and governmental regulations.

- 94% said time spent on clerical duties increased in the last 3 years
- 63% said this caused them to spend less time with patients
- 82% said their practices would be unsustainable with further Medicare cuts
- 60% said they would not recommend medicine as a career
- 17% said their practices’ financial position was healthy and profitable
- 45% said they would retire today if they could

“Going into this project we generally knew about the shortage of physicians; what we didn’t know is how much worse it could get over the next few years,” said Lou Goodman, President of the Physicians’ Foundation. 

News of PCP dissatisfaction is not lost on students preparing to graduate US medical schools, where only 2% have indicated plans to enter primary care. That’s down from 9% in 1990.

The American Medical Association used this and other data to estimate that the US will be 35,000 PCPs short by 2025.

And strung-out PCPs don’t want to hear it but we’re more likely to empower nurse practitioners, utilize new provider venues like retail clinics and recruit more foreign medical graduates than we are to fix the fundamental issues raised by the surveys.

Tainted milk produced in China has sickened 53,000 children and tarnished the nation’s reputation as a food exporter. And the scandal isn’t going away soon.

Toxic melamine, a nitrogen-rich product used to make plastics and by scoundrels to drive up apparent protein concentrations in watered-down milk, has now been detected in yogurt, cake and sweets. Several countries in Africa and Asia have banned diary imports from China after receiving shipments of affected milk. European chocolate-maker Cadbury recalled its China-produced products as well.

A month ago, China’s government did an abrupt about-face on the matter. In the run-up to the Olympics, government-controlled Internet portals squelched stories about the scandal. After the Olympics, the government made a showy effort to get out front. It detained the chairwoman of Sanlu, one of the dairy concerns at the heart of the scandal.  It arrested some milk distributers and detained others. The mayor and local Communist Party leader of Sanlu’s home city have resigned, as has the head of China’s national quality control bureau.

It’s unlikely these steps will fix China’s food-processing systems. Local party leaders are responsible for quality control, and many enjoy cozy relations with food producers.

Foreign companies have known the Chinese system was suspect. Unilever ended joint ventures with local producers years ago. McDonald’s developed a closed supply chain for its signature offerings, and Coca-Cola monitors suppliers with enormous vigor.