1. The flu vaccines have very, very little egg in them to begin with. Also, there are now completely egg-free flu vaccines out there, namely the ccIIV4 vaccines. Most of the cases of iatrogenically-induced anaphylaxis are to other medications with a known propensity to do that, such as IM antibiotics, IV contrast, allergy shots, and quite a few chemotherapy drugs. That is why you have to wait in the office for 30 minutes after you get them. 2. Celiac disease IS an allergy! You are describing a solely autoimmune process, which would NOT abate with dietary elimination since the body would be solely sensitized to one of its own antigens instead of wreaking collateral damage in an allergic reaction. Nope, you stop eating gluten if you have celiac and you stop the disease process, you heal, and you have no symptoms...until you eat gluten again. The eating gluten part is absolutely critical to the disease being active. 3. No. That would be for things like inflammatory bowel disease which IS solely an autoimmune process and has somewhat of a genetic predisposition. You have to take meds to quiet that down, it doesn't go away with not eating certain foods like celiac disease. 4. The fact that there are unpredictable results on RASTs for drugs is why it isn't generally done. Ask your local immunologist or allergist about that one. 5. No, my understanding is based on quite a bit more education than that. I strongly suggest that YOU read up as you are the one making significantly erroneous statements.

Did you actually read my post and the rest of the thread before you replied? First of all, we were talking about drug and vaccine allergies. Secondly, I specifically mentioned the different types of allergies possible INCLUDING the textbook example, celiac disease. Celiac disease absolutely IS an allergy, being a Type IV (delayed-type) hypersensitivity reaction which gives a specific set of GI symptoms in people who know they have the disorder. The familial tendency towards allergy manifsts itself as asthma/atopy/allergic rhinitis, not with allergies to specific drugs or foods. There has been a lot of research on the matter and this has been demonstrated many times over. Also you should know that the blood test (RAST) is absolutely worthless to determine if somebody is allergic to something if they have never been exposed to it before, such as for drugs. You have to have the initial antigen presentation from the allergen be able to get the antibody formation which is detected in the RAST. Basic immunology such as that should have been covered in your general college biology classes, if you took them.

There are at least two things you wrote which are generally medically incorrect. First of all, having only a stomach ache after ingesting a drug is very unlikely to be an allergy. True (IgE/T-cell-mediated) allergies usually cause things like hives, throat/lip/face swelling, low blood pressure, and trouble breathing. You simply describe a very well known NON-ALLERGIC adverse effect common to all opioids. True allergies are generally not heritable either, so the "my relative was allergic to X, so I can't take it" is nonsense. Your aunt and uncle simply had the same very common NON-ALLERGIC adverse effect you did. The exception to this is in people who have things like celiac disease who have a T-cell-mediated response to gluten in the medication which is an allergy. But you'd have a telltale set of symptoms involving more than just nausea if that was indeed the case for you. The only reason I mention this is because many people say they're "allergic" to vaccinations for similar nonsense reasons. A moderate fever and redness/aching at the injection site is a known adverse effect due to how vaccines work. You have symptoms of an immune response because you have to elicit an immune response for vaccines to work.

How about this: this? The human eye is generally limited to frequency response below 32 Hz.

There are multiple medical studies that prove that the ability of the human eye to discriminate between images over approximately 30 Hz is limited and discrimination over 60 Hz just doesn't happen. There is a lot of evidence in the environment to back that up. Movies recorded on film are shot at 24 Hz (fps). Most digital video is 29.997 Hz. The frequency of AC electricity was set at 50-60 Hz due to that being more than enough to cause a tungsten filament to appear to be constantly glowing to the human eye instead of flickering. Same with the 60 Hz (in effect, 30 Hz) refresh with the interlaced scan of the glowing phosphors of an old CRT computer monitor. I'd strongly bet that you could not reliably tell the difference between an otherwise similar 60 Hz setup and your 120 Hz setup if you were in fact blinded to which one you were using.

That being said, having a GPU capable of framerates over 60 Hz (60 fps) isn't a bad idea at all, because the minimum framerate there is really what matters more than the maximum. A GPU only able to muster 60 fps max might very well dip into the 20s during difficult parts and you can certainly see that. That's a different issue than having a monitor capable of >60 Hz refresh.

They will probably be available in a year or two. We moved from hackish 30 Hz split-input panels to native 60 Hz single-input panels in about a year. However anything beyond 60 Hz is pretty much useless except for bragging rights as you can't see it anyway. Broadcast TV and movies are shot at 29.997 and 24 Hz, respectively. The lack of benefit of higher refresh rates is especially true on a display that is capable of displaying static images like an LCD.

The point of the first two years of med school are to prepare you take Step 1 and to provide a reason for employment for some pretty useless PhDs. Let's not kid ourselves here.

Besides, about half of what you learn in your M1 year is obsolete by the time you graduate. Take notes with pen and paper, cram for the cram-and-dump trivia regurgitation test (which is what all med school tests are) and then throw away the notes after the test as they are useless and worthless. Anything that you really want to remember later can be found easily on UpToDate or a similar site and will be up to date instead of likely outdated.

The thing we are forgetting here is that how the bridge funding was supposed to have been thought of is "well, we residents of this area need a bridge here, here's $100M of our tax dollars to do so." Not this "the government is its own entity" junk. But that's what has been happening when the funding and decision making moves away from locals deciding how to spend their money to a big nebulous "black box" of a federal bureaucracy taking money from some people in one area and spending it somewhere wholly different.

I didn't known Penn and Teller had an account on Slashdot...

A junkie is not likely to go and complain? I take it you do not work in medicine. They usually complain the loudest and most obscenely.

Docs in the U.S. are being mandated to have higher patient satisfaction scores not so much by their employers but by the largest payor- the government. It's part of several of the recent pieces of healthcare legislation. Teeing off a patient because you won't give them 1000 mg of OxyContin daily for their chronic, negative-workup back pain or giving somebody with a viral cold antibiotics is a good way to drop your scores and get dinged by the feds. Also, the reimbursements from the feds are so low that you have to see a huge number of patients per day- just like in the U.K. Left to their own devices the vast majority of family docs (the U.S. equivalent of a U.K. GP) avoid prescribing narcotics for non-cancer chronic pain and don't prescribe antibiotics for most infections likely to be viral. Why? They are very aware of the negative outcomes from antibiotic overuse. You'll be far less likely to simply throw antibiotics at a likely viral cold after you have somebody spend 3 weeks in the hospital with C. difficile diarrhea and then die from it.

PhRMA banned meals over $10/head and is supposed to limit the food to prescribers. Also cruises and the like are banned as well. A rep bringing in five 11" Subway sandwiches is about as much as you see nowdays.

In the U.S. (or at least the Midwest and South), diesel dispenser handles most often are green. Dispenser handles for fuels with more than 15% ethanol are always yellow. Gasoline dispenser handles are often black but can be any color, although they are rarely yellow to avoid confusion with higher-concentration ethanol handles.

I live in the Dakotas. You can get diesel at pretty well every station. About the only thing you can't get everywhere is E85, even though that's still pretty common.