STD Ad Campaign

These pictures are from a Canadian ad campaign which displays images of bacteria and viruses with gift tags attached.
I think this is a very interesting series of ads, and I think its effectiveness lies in its simplicity. They are accurate in that each image represents what each STD looks like at the cellular level, and I commend the creators for not adding goriness where non was needed. I'm not sure who the ads are targeting, but I think they would be effective for any age group that understood what they were looking at.

Clinton's Tuskegee Apology

The artical for this week's blog concerned the public apology offered to the unwilling participants of the Tuskegee Syphillis study and the greater African American community. This apology was necessary because of the dishonest and extremely unethical treatment of poor African Americans over a period of 40 years to study the effects of untreated syphillis, despite the availability of treatment.

Mr. Clinton made several very good points regarding the impropriety of the study itself, as well as the irresponsibility of the government officials and health care providers involved. I felt that it was very good that Mr. Clinton not only for the study itself, but also for the long wait for an apology. He mentioned the loss of faith by the African American community in our government and the consequential loss of participation and trust in the healthcare system as a whole. He also expressed the importance of remembering such unfortunate events in our country's history.

However, I feel that Mr. Clinton fell short of providing truly effective policies relevant to African Americans that could have repaired their trust of our government. A memorial in Tuskegee is great, but there was only a vague reference to "increasing community involvement" to restore trust and encourage minority involvement in medical research in a positive way. Increasing research training in bioethics is of course welcomed, but that is only a preventive measure to ensure that such a study does not take place again. These steps proposed by Mr. Clinton were very good ideas, but I feel that he could have done more to take responsibility for the government's actions. For example, I think he should have brought the doctors and other individuals responsible for this study to justice. I believe it also would have been very effective to extend the charter for the National Bioethics Advisory Commission indefinitely to ensure effective oversight and ethical practices in all human-subject research studies and projects.

MDR-TB Cases in United States

According to the podcast issued by the CDC regarding Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (MDR-TB), there are around 9 million cases reported annually worldwide and 130,000 deaths each year. The CDC officials discussed a recent importation of the disease, carried by Thai immigrants, despite pre-departure screening for TB in Thailand. Considering that drug-resistance is a call for alarm by itself as it erodes our ability to fight diseases, MDR-TB is especially alarming as this disease can be transmitted from person to person via breathing, allowing it to spread quickly. Furthermore, if one has a weakened immune system due to an illness or coinfection such as HIV-AIDS, the body's ability to fight off infection is even weaker than normal and MDR-TB could easily be fatal. In these cases, the increased duration of treatment and increased toxicity of the medications required to treat MDR-TB may further exacerbate the negative impact of any concurrent illnesses or infections.

An interesting point that was discussed on the podcast was the fact that misuse and/or mismanagement of antibiotics has promoted the development of drug-resistant strains of bacteria, including that which causes MDR-TB. Dr. Oldman discussed this misuse in foreign countries such as Thailand, but failed to mention that misuse and mismanagement can and does happen here in the U.S. as well. I know of many people who have been given antibiotics by a doctor and either not completed the scheduled regimen or have saved the pills for another time, when they would self-diagnose an illness, such as the flu, and mistakenly believed that the antibiotics would heal them. This is how bacteria develop resistance to our medical weaponry and pose such an enormous health threat worldwide, as MDR-TB now does.

So should we be worried about MDR-TB? Of course, but I believe it is a mistake to only look outside the US for the source of this disease or believe that we here in the U.S. are not equally capable of misusing and mismanaging our own antibiotics.