Most reports are that swine flu has been mild compared to the typical in most individuals. This includes reports that some exposed have never developed any symptom. The reported numbers for swine flu rely on the presumption of swine flu rather than the regular seasonal flu, not actual tests. That is, died so must have been swine flu.

What evidence there is suggests that children and the elderly should have priority for vaccination (greater potential benefit for the same risk). Healthy adults should be at the end of the list.

Fucking shit, could you cram any more potently concentrated misinformation into a single post?

The swine flu is *usually* a mild flu, just like the regular seasonal flu. But it *is* killing healthy young people, which the regular flu does not. It's landing them in the hospital, and then killing them after prolonged ICU courses. The mortality rate for pregnant women hospitalized with novel H1N1 infections is about 50% based on case series from several hospitals, including my own.

There is no "presumption" here. Novel H1N1 is tested via PCR of nasal swabs or sputum samples, and/or at autopsy on lung tissue. Every suspicious hospitalized case in California (at least) is tested like this. For certain, every death in the hospital is definitively tested. There is no "presumption". Novel H1N1, followed by bacterial superinfection, is what is killing these healthy young people. Just like in 1918.

The formal CDC recommendations are that *young* people be first in line for the vaccine. OK, pregnant women, infants and the immunocompromised are first, but of the general public, young people are next. For once, the elderly can safely wait, since most have partial immunity from the 1957 pandemic H1N1, and the most severe cases of novel H1N1 are in young people, not old (where it's acting much like the seasonal flu).

Seriously, read the CDC recommendations on who should get the vaccine. In fact, the CDC has an unbelievable website on novel H1N1 with the best real data available on rates, outcomes, and recommendations.

Read a few of the emerging case reports, like the these 68 young people in Oceania who were in the ICU on heart-lung machines, of whom 1/3 died. Or the 10 young ICU cases from Michigan back in the spring.

This is serious stuff, and healthy young people (especially pregnant) are at risk. If you want relative risk, then know that the swine flu has already, beyond any doubt, killed more young healthy Americans than the number who got Guillain-Barre from the 1976 vaccine, and the flu season hasn't even started yet. Get the vaccine.

How about vein or arteries stiffening? I can imagine that having a pulse might help these vessels keep certain elasticity and fight stiffening.

Sure, but being too stiff only matters in that it's harder for the vessel to accommodate the pressure increase of systole. The result then is that the peak BP is transmitted directly to the organs, instead of being dampened by the elastic vessels. If there is no systole, I'm not sure it would matter if your vessels became as stiff as lead pipes.

I wonder if the lack of elasticity would make them more likely or less likely to form atherosclerotic plaques - the "narrowing" of the arteries that goes with the "hardening" part and causes pain and damage to the organs those narrowed vessels feed. On the other hand it's probably academic to wonder what the effects would be 20 years down the line. Bridge to heart transplant is still the goal. I don't think we even did artificial hearts anymore (until this new one) because the benefit was so minimal. LVADs more or less replaced them, but are explicitly a bridge to transplant only.

non-stealthy F-35s

Is that the variant where you take a stealthy F-35 and strap it to a barn door?

The DNA in question must be "isolated". The DNA is not "isolated" when it is naturally occurring. Nobody is claiming your DNA that you were born with. Only an isolated DNA product.

Ah, thank you for clarifying that. Then I would be in the clear, of course, to isolate and clone BRCA1 from my own germline DNA and then develop a diagnostic test of my own. Because, by your interpretation, Myraid could only own the rights to their specific isolate of BRCA1. The current law, however, appears to extend that right to *any* isolate of BRCA1, even one created by completely independent technique from my very own DNA, as well as any application of any isolate of BRCA1 for genetic testing. How this is functionally different from owning the rights to the gene itself escapes me.

What complicates this specific case, as I'm sure you know, is that Myraid did not discover the identity nor the importance of the BRCA1 gene, nor did they develop any unique techniques for isolating it. Nor was it their idea to develop a diagnostic test for the gene (seriously? How could anyone think this wasn't a goal of the scientific community from the beginning?). They were the first to create an isolate, likely by a matter of days, by completely obvious and open techniques, and they were the first to file a patent.

it's just that without Myriad, *no one* would know that having the BRCA1 gene was a precursor to breast cancer.

Are you ^!&%! kidding? Are people so bamboozled by the FUD of pharmaceutical companies that anyone who doesn't know the truth assumes that the big, nice company must have sunk a ton of time and money into finding this gene from scratch, and without them the gene would never have been found? The truth is very, very different, and this is why Myriad is so hated in the scientific community.

BRCA1 was discovered by Mary-Claire King, now a geneticist at the University of Washington, following over a decade of government-funded basic science work that started when she was a graduate student and then junior faculty at UC Berkeley. Back then genetics was hard work - not hard like today, *really* hard. When she started no one really believed that one could even find a gene for a trait that wasn't expressed 100%, it just seemed too complicated to pick one mutation out of a huge haystack when you had to allow for some people having the bad mutation yet having a normal phenotype. Remember this is before the human genome project, before automated sequencing; she even started before PCR. Just pinning the candidate gene down to one small region of one chromosome took over a decade of work by dozens of people.

As the process came towards fruition, they first narrowed the field to a small part of chromosome 17 (paper), then made a laborious map of the region of interest (paper), and then together with a group at the NIH, they identified the actual single gene we now know as BRCA1, sequenced it, and spelled out the mutations in it that caused breast cancer in the affected families (paper1, paper2). Notice that all of this was done completely in the public eye, with all of her lab's results published immediately so as to help other researchers advance the field with her. It was good science.

But wait, where's Myriad genetics so far? What's left to do? Didn't we already "discover" BRCA1? How could anyone patent it now? All good questions. The next thing to do was to make a copy of this gene, by itself, in a test tube. This would be preliminary work for all sorts of biochemical analysis. The act of copying a gene off of a chromosome onto a separate loop of DNA in a test tube is called "cloning". Cloning is still pretty hard even today, especially for long genes like BRCA1. It can take months, especially since you usually need to copy it in bits and then glue those bits together.

What Myriad understood, and perhaps Dr. King did not, is that a cloned gene (that loop in a test tube) is patentable because it's considered "artificial", even if it's a perfect copy of a natural sequence of DNA. Myriad jumped in at this point, threw their whole company into cloning the gene and then patenting it, and did it before Dr. King or anyone else realized they were in a race. Ironically, Dr. King's lab had probably already cloned it in pieces (usually a prerequisite to sequencing) but hadn't made a complete intact copy yet, and certainly hadn't filed any patents. Myriad did none of the prior work on BRCA1. They did not come up with the idea of hereditary breast cancer. They did not do the laborious work of mapping where BRCA1 might be. They did not pinpoint the gene that was BRCA1. They did not sequence it. They did not find the mutations in that gene that cause breast cancer. They just copied it into a test tube first, and filed a patent. They did not even publish their result, nor make it available to the scientific community. Given the publicly available knowledge, *anyone* in the genetics community could have done this, and a number did. It was pure grunt work. There was no insight, no great advancement involved. Many genes had been cloned before, the techniques were widely published. Once you knew the location and the sequence, cloning just took time. Myriad's only insight was appreciating that a patent lay at the end of that grunt work.

So that's the real story of BRCA1. Finding it was a triumph of government-funded university science, open and collaborative to a fault. Then Myriad swooped in with patent lawyers at the opportune moment to lock things up, close them off, and proceed to make money off the public's huge investment. It was a brilliant business move. But the result has only been to disrupt and delay the science and medicine and breast cancer.

What you link to is the real "Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery", which *is* a very reputable, genuinely peer-reviewed, and very old journal for actual orthopedists. Definitely not to be confused with the Merck fake.