Needle exchange programs give out clean needles and syringes to IV drug users, who give their used, dirty needles in exchange for safe disposal. In quantity, they cost about 5 cents apiece. I've talked to heroin addicts about them. They're very effective.

They've significantly reduced the spread of AIDS (and hepatitis C, which kills even more people than AIDS, and is more expensive) in programs around the US and the world. The evidence is overwhelming. Public health doctors have done a lot of research and published many medical journal articles about it. It was one of the most effective, and cost-effective, ways to prevent the spread of AIDS.

The federal government had funds allocated for preventing AIDS, but Congress prohibited them from using it for needle exchange programs, supposedly because they encouraged IV drug use. So most of the programs were funded by private organizations or local governments. Finally the evidence became overwhelming, and the federal government allowed funding for needle exchanges again. But just recently, I saw that the Republican congressmen had cut needle exchanges out of the budget again.

The prohibition on needle exchange programs is one of the classic examples of a stupid government policy that goes against overwhelming scientific evidence and medical advice, kills people, encourages the spread of AIDS (especially to newborns), and costs the government a huge amount of money.

Actually, a surprising number of Slashdotters are experts in infectious diseases. Maybe you should get up to speed with Nature.

OTOH this is a rare event. It's not something they do every day, with long experience about how things can go wrong.

How many professionals have admitted that they fucked up? I've heard a few. One doctor admitted to me that he was wrong to oppose needle exchanges. I read medical journal articles every week in which doctors say, in effect, "We thought this would work, but this shows we were wrong."

The sign of a good scientist is that he's willing to admit it when he's wrong.

Unfortunately the US Congress just voted to prohibit federal funds from going to needle exchange programs. They prohibited medical marijuana research even after AIDS patients found that it could stop them from dying from AIDS wasting syndrome (according to a lecture I heard from Don Abrams, who was treating them). Bill Clinton fired Joycelin Elders for saying that sex education courses should teach about masturbation. They prevented the graphic cigarette warnings which were so effective in Australia.

I've talked to government public health officials, and I've heard them deflect controversial questions. I can see them thinking, "If I told the truth, I'd get fired, and then I couldn't accomplish anything."

I'll probably get fired for saying this, but: America is not perfect.

Many of the victims of SARS were doctors and especially nurses, who were following the established protocols. They work well, but how reliably? 99%? 99.9%?

Actually, the infected doctor, Kent Brantly, gave the treatment to another missionary, Nancy Writebol, and she's also being evacuated on that plane. http://www.washingtonpost.com/... They haven't announced what the treatment is, but it might have been IgG blood serum http://www.livescience.com/471... separated from the blood of one of the other victims. Or it might have been a new untested adenovirus vaccine, which works (on monkeys) even after they're infected. Or it might have been a monoclonal antibody. Or it might have been an experimental RNA virus. http://www.nature.com/news/ebo... I can't understand why they're keeping it a secret.

These untested treatments are all desperate measures. From what I've read in the New England Journal of Medicine clinical cases, these are the kind of treatments that they use when everything else fails, the patient is dying, they don't know what else to do, and there's nothing to lose.

As I understand it, the odds are against it, but they're the best doctors in the world, and I hope it works.

I also don't understand why they're bringing them to the U.S. The only treatment is supportive care. I think they also have planes that are set up with a transportable ICU, so they should be able to treat them on site.

There is a risk of the virus getting out, no matter how careful they are. They're doing this all for the first time. One problem is that handling a case like this is so complicated, and you only have to make one mistake. An ICU is full of equipment. Since ebola can't be treated, an epidemic spreads until it kills off so many of its victims that there's nobody left to infect, and it burns itself out.

With SARS, a lot of medical workers, particularly nurses, got infected, and they were a large number of the fatalities.

They're not literally fascist, in the sense of adopting a fascist economy, etc. They are fascist in the sense that demonstrators used to refer to the cops who beat them up at demonstrations as "fascist pigs," that is, they're being brutal to their political enemies just like the Nazis were. And indeed, the reports of Israeli human rights violations are uncomfortably similar to the descriptions of the Nazis.

That's not just one example. It's from the Goldstone report, and if you read the Goldstone report, or just search for "white flag", you'll find dozens of incidents just like that. And if you read the B'Tselem and Amnesty International reports, you'll find hundreds of incidents like that.

As for the water resources, I read a few articles about that in the New Scientist and elsewhere. You're absolutely right.

Because it is as accurate to claim that the Hamas Charter represents Hamas' unchangeable views as it is to claim 1 Samuel represents Jewish unchangeable views.

The Republican pollster Frank Luntz in his The Israel Project memo popularized the idea of promoting the Hamas Charter as the literal beliefs of Hamas today. If you read his memo you'll see he says that you shouldn't say things because they're true, but because they'll convince people. One of Luntz' students became an Israeli citizen and is now Israel's ambassador to the US.

Hamas has made repeated peace offers to Israel, and they've been repeatedly rejected. Ahmed Jabari was head of Hamas' military wing, had arranged the Giliad Shalat exchange, and was in charge of keeping the non-Hamas militant movements under control when Hamas was trying to keep a cease-fire with Israel. Jabari was working on a permanent peace agreement with Israel, and had just received the final draft, when the Israelis killed him with an air-to-surface missile in his car. That was no accident. The Israelis didn't want peace, because then they'd have to give up the settlements.

Quoting the Hamas Charter to prove that you can't make peace with Hamas is one of Luntz' strategies to avoid dealing with the facts. Luntz tells his clients that they should lie, and they do.

Oh come on. I used to work in Israeli public relations. I know what they're doing. I've talked to them on the phone and in person, and I went to their meetings. When I first started out, I actually believed in it myself.

NGO Monitor and CAMERA are propaganda organizations paid by the Israeli government and their American millionaire and billionaire pro-settler supporters, as you can see from their Wikipedia entry. They don't have any investigators on the ground. They don't talk to witnesses or go to the scene. Everything they do is second-hand and third-hand, from their offices in Morningside Heights or wherever they're working. They have never researched a case and concluded that Israel was wrong. Try to find one.

The Rabbio incident was investigated by many human rights groups and news media, who sent people to the scene to look it over and interview witnesses. It was investigated by the Goldstone commission. Goldstone was appointed because he had unimpeachable Zionist credentials, until he came to a conclusion that they didn't like. The Israeli government itself didn't even try to challenge the facts. It's as true as anything we can know without a criminal proceeding, and Israel refuses to investigate it themselves. You might as well say the truth of the Holocaust isn't clear.

I've talked to many Israeli government officials about human rights abuses and killings. Their consistent response is to deny it all. And I regularly caught them in lies. They would admit it and brush it off.

NGO Monitor and CAMERA do one thing that is so deceptive and misleading that I have to call it out. I've worked with lawyers (on matters that have nothing to do with Israel) and they taught me something about how they (and the police) do investigations and interview witnesses. The cross-examination textbooks say that if you interview 5 different people about an incident, you'll get 5 different versions, even if they're all trying to tell the truth. There are always inconsistencies and contradictions in truthful testimony.

In fact, the lawyers who do cross examination say that if you get different people giving you the same version without inconsistencies and contradictions, that's a sign that they got together and colluded on their testimony. So that's a sign they're lying.

NGO Monitor and CAMERA are taking evidence of the accuracy of their testimony and using it to make it seem that it's evidence of inaccuracy.

I was going to respond to you seriously until I saw that.

For the benefit of any intelligent people who might be reading this, the "Hamas Charter" is one of Frank Luntz' talking points for the right-wing "The Israel Project," where he tells pro-settler supporters to keep repeating it, because it tested well in the polls.

In fact, Hamas had other documents that set those statements aside, and Ahmed Jabari, head of Hamas's military wing, who negotiated the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange, was communicating with Israelis and preparing a long-term peace agreement with Israel in 2012, when the Israelis assassinated him with a missile attack on a car he was riding in.

If there's one thing Netanyahu doesn't want, it's peace with Hamas. Then he'd have to deal with the settlements. Now (not sometime in the vague future, as Luntz tells him to do).

There's a long list of Palestinians who took risks for peace and were killed by Israel.

https://www.amnesty.org/fr/lib...

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL

AI Index: MDE 15/021/2009 Embargoed for 00:01 GMT Thursday 02 July 2009

Israel/Gaza: Operation ‘Cast Lead’ - 22 Days of Death and Destruction

Amnesty International found no evidence that rockets were launched from residential houses or buildings while civilians were in these buildings, but Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups at times launched rockets and located military equipment and positions near civilian homes.

Look, I used to work in public relations years ago and one of our clients was the Israeli government. I used to go into the stock room and copy press releases on our stock of blue-and-white Israeli government letterheads, and mail them out to the newspapers and broadcasters.

After I started reading about the IDF and settlers killing children, I didn't want to do that (relatively well-paid) work any more.

I used to call the Israeli government to check out the Amnesty International reports of killing Palestinians (mostly children) and other human rights abuses, like arresting journalists and Palestinian advocates of Ghandian non-violence.

I really was surprised that they routinely lied. A lot of times they really got caught red-handed. Once they claimed that a Palestinian peace activist had said in a newspaper interview that he wanted to take over all of Israel. I looked up the newspaper interview and he said just the opposite.

One Israeli embassy guy apologized to me when he checked something out and it became clear that his government had lied.

The Israeli government PR people claim that everybody lies. That's the "everybody does it" excuse. It's not true. Amnesty International, B'selem, Human Rights Watch never lie, and when they do make (rare) mistakes, they admit it. And I challenge anybody to demonstrate otherwise.

The human rights groups get their facts from eyewitnesses on the ground. The Israeli government gets its statements from government officials in Jerusalem who have never been on the ground. The Israeli government doesn't investigate what happened on the ground. The eyewitnesses say that nobody from the Israeli government asked them what they saw.

You could find all that out from reading the B'Tselem reports on their web site.

When those boys were shelled and killed on the beach in Gaza, they were killed in front of a hotel full of foreign reporters, including a guy from the New York Times. They deliberately killed a group of boys who were playing soccer. How do you justify that? The Israeli government hasn't even tried.

So I'll pull rank on you. I know more about the subject than you do. The Israeli government, and the IDF, lies. You can't trust what they say. And you can trust what B'Tselem says. If there were terrorist activities in Wafa hospital, I'd like to see the evidence. And the Israeli government's claims aren't evidence. They've proven that they'll just deny everything.

I once read an article about how some Japanese graduate students discovered a bunch of new genes and gave them all names that were obscene in Japanese.

I can't cite a source. I was pretty sure I read it in Science News but an editor at Science News tried to find it and couldn't.

I was pretty sure you're joking but I did check.

One author is Noriko Cassman.

Another is Ramy K. Aziz.

You can laugh but they've got tenure.