The Binary Circumstance

Gold hit $500 an ounce today before backing off.

LONDON (Reuters) – Gold spiked above $500 an ounce for the first time in 18 years on Tuesday but ended in New York trade just below the psychological threshold as investors quickly claimed their reward after weeks of fervent buying.

Platinum closed near a 25-year high above $1,000 an ounce, while funds, as in gold, cashed in some of the bullish bets booked in recent weeks.

The metals retreated from their highs in Asian trade, but growing demand, supply constraints and plans by some central banks to buy more gold were expected to support prices, dealers said.

My previous posts about the price of gold are here and in the Investing Category. The last time I wrote about the price of gold it was selling for $472/oz., a 17-year high.

Tag: Gold

I got one of those photo Christmas cards from my sister with a picture of her kids on it. I enjoy getting these every year as they show my how the kids are growing.

I checked out the site where she ordered hers and though it was very expensive. They were asking over $100 for 25 cards and envelopes.

Then I found ImageStation.com which is owned by Sony. There I was able to upload an photo, design the text for the front of the card and also the inside. The cost for 20 cards and envelopes was about $12 plus tax and shipping. With the huge savings in printing cost, I was able to order overnight shipping which is probably a good idea given this late date. The total cost was less than $24.

The only problem that I had was that they kept rejecting my picture, the error message said the resolution wasn’t high enough. So I had to re-scan the picture at 600 dpi in order to get the system to accept it. This is probably because I was blowing it up from its original size. This is not really a problem; it just shows that they have standards for the quality of prints that they’ll do.

You can also load your photos into albums on their site and get prints or other photo-related gifts at very reasonable prices.

It looks like a great site.

I should have the cards in about a week and I’ll know better how the quality turned out.

Dr. Jay Levy, one of the first scientists to discover HIV has written an excellent op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle where he calls for more research into therapies that strengthen the body’s natural resistance to HIV, an approach that I have advocated previously on my blog and in fact for the past 20 years.

With more than 65 million people already infected by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), AIDS continues to spread and invoke economic and social damage to countries throughout the world. Infection rates in Sub-Saharan Africa are astounding: A person is infected every 6 seconds, dies every 9 seconds and a child becomes an orphan every 14 seconds. In the United States, at least one person is infected every 15 minutes; in San Francisco alone, an estimated 1,000 new infections occur every year despite all of our attention to this disease.

What challenges lie ahead in conquering this worst global epidemic? While current antiretroviral drugs are very helpful, they are not the long-term solution to this devasting worldwide public-health problem. Emphasis must be given to enhancing the immune system’s reaction against HIV in infected individuals and inducing this response through a vaccine in people exposed to the virus.

[...]

In a sense, the challenge of HIV resembles that of cancer. All HIV-infected cells, just like all cancer cells, must be eliminated. Thus, because anti-HIV therapies attack the virus but not the infected cells, most of us recognize that a cure for HIV infection is not presently possible. Nevertheless, control of HIV is achievable, as is shown by HIV-infected individuals who remain healthy for many years (some for more than 25 years) without therapy and with no detectable virus in their blood.

These long-term survivors have taught us that the immune system holds the secret. The white cells of these infected individuals can suppress HIV so it cannot replicate and spread. This block is mediated, in part, by an antiretroviral factor, CAF, which suppresses the ability of HIV to replicate and cause disease. Since this immune response can inhibit all HIV strains, its potential for long-term control of the infection is evident. We need to focus our approaches to bring these immune responses to all infected individuals.

In a recent post about Andrew Simpson, the man in Great Britain who claims that he was “cured” of AIDS, I wrote:

I’m sure there’s a way for the body’s natural resistance to HIV to be strengthened to the point where HIV is kept in check. I’ve always believed that was the best way to attack the problem because when you attack the virus directly, it can quickly develop resistance to the drugs. The immune system, which in most people is highly effective in fighting HIV in the early years of infection, is more flexible.

I’m sure that if all patients with life-threatening illnesses had the freedom to experiment on themselves with every kind of drug and supplement available, we would quickly have cures for diseases.

Nature solves the problem of survival by making every individual genetically unique. The more combinations of genes in the gene pool, the stronger the species will be in fighting off extinction.

The more people experimenting on different approaches to finding a cure or more effective, lower-cost treatments for HIV or any other disease, the faster we will find solutions to the problem.

Having majored in Biology/Pre-Med with an emphasis in genetics, I was very frustrated in the early years of the epidemic in San Francisco with all the doctors, scientists and AIDS activists who kept saying that all people infected with HIV would die within a short period of time after infection. In order to reach such a conclusion, it was necessary to throw out millions of years of evolutionary history and some of the most basic principles of genetics.

Every doctor or AIDS researcher that I challenged on their belief that HIV was an automatic “death sentence” looked at me like I was nuts.

It took me almost ten years to find an AIDS expert who would agree with my position that there would be individuals who were genetically resistant to HIV and who would probably never develop any symptoms of AIDS. That person was Jay Levy.

I met Jay Levy around 1990 and had the privilege of visiting his laboratory at UCSF and chatting with him about HIV and AIDS. At the time, Dr. Levy agreed with me that individuals with a natural resistance to HIV where the key to finding an effective treatment for HIV/AIDS.

It’s nice to see that he’s still doing great work, even though as he notes in his article, there is little funding for research into strengthening the body’s natural resistance to HIV. There has always been relatively little funding for that approach.

Why?

Compared to drug cocktails that individuals must take for the rest of their lives and which can cause all kinds of other medical complications that also require treatments, there is little money to be made from vaccines because they usually only have to be taken once, and once taken they eliminate the need for future treatments and the profits that come from providing a lifetime of therapy.

Tags: HIV, AIDS

Not having a need for contraception in my life, I did not know what the drug called “Plan B” is.

One thing I can be thankful for this Thanksgiving weekend is that CBS Sixty Minutes has educated me. Not only about the drug itself but also about how the religious right has been successful in keeping the drug from being sold over the counter without a prescription, even though the drug has been shown to be very safe.

(CBS) When the “morning after pill,” also known as “Plan B,” was put on the market in 1999, it was described as an emergency contraceptive that prevents a pregnancy in cases of rape or accidents like condom breaks.

It is only available by prescription. But because women need to take it within 72 hours, the drug’s manufacturer applied to the Food and Drug Administration two years ago for permission to sell Plan B over the counter.

The drug is considered totally safe, so the request was seen as a slam dunk. But then Plan B became the target of anti-abortion rights groups, and part of the wider controversy over whether religious beliefs are encroaching on scientific decision-making.

Some confuse “Plan B” with RU-486, the so-called “morning after” pill, although they work differently.

But [Dr. Susan] Wood says this is not an abortion pill. “There is an abortion pill called RU-486, and this is not it,” she says. “An abortion pill interrupts an established pregnancy. This product is contraception. It does not interrupt an established pregnancy.”

She says even if you took it and were already pregnant, it would not end the pregnancy. “The only connection this product has with abortion is that it can prevent them by preventing an unintended pregnancy,” says Wood.

There is some debate about that interpretation. Most of the time, Plan B works by stopping ovulation so that a pregnancy cannot occur. In a small percentage of cases, when a woman is ovulating on the day she has unprotected sex, a fertilized egg could form. In that case, Plan B might prevent the egg from implanting in her uterus.

While most doctors do not consider that an abortion, anti-abortion-rights doctors do, such as David Hager, a gynecologist from Lexington, Ky., who won’t prescribe Plan B for his own patients.

“One of the mechanisms of action can be to inhibit implantation, which means that it may act as an abortifacient,” says Dr. Hager. He says abortifacient means it causes an abortion and that this medication may act to inhibit implantation.

Without implantation there cannot be a pregnancy. How can a woman be pregnant if the egg has not been successfully implanted in the womb? Without a pregnancy, there can be no interruption of said pregnancy.

Nature allows fertilized eggs to be passed out of the uterus all the time without implantation. It even flushes them out after implantation when a woman has a spontaneous abortion. What’s Dr. Hager doing about that? Maybe he should try to put nature in jail.

The fact is that Dr. Hager, who was asked to serve on the committee by the White House, was one of four people on the FDA advisory committee to vote against the over-the-counter sale of “Plan B.” Twenty-three members of the panel voted in favor of approving over-the-counter sales.

Under normal circumstances, a lopsided vote like that would guarantee over-the-counter sales of the drug.

While he denies that his vote was related to his religious beliefs, CBS had a video of a speech that Hager gave at a Christian college.

Some people believe Hager raised these objections because of his religious beliefs, but that’s something he denies. “The religious aspect did not enter into that decision for me,” he says.

But in to a speech he gave to a Christian college, he seemed to admit his role was all about religion. “God has used me to stand in the breach for the cause of the kingdom,” Hager said at the time.

He was talking about Plan B.

“I argued it from a scientific perspective. And God took that information and He used it through this minority report to influence a decision. You don’t have to wave your bible to have an effect as a Christian in the public arena,” says Hager.

Hager says he did not mean to suggest that God wanted Plan B to fail, and that he was His instrument. “I thought that God used me, He’d used my individual gifts of, whatever, in an individual way to be able to express my opinion.”

But with the speech, Hager may have fueled the fire of those who say that all he did was try to cloak religious beliefs in scientific language.

One other important thing that I learned from this story is that Walmart has a nationwide ban on selling the Plan B in their pharmacies.

In a survey of drugstores in Kentucky, Dr. Hager’s home state, the American Civil Liberties Union found that most pharmacies didn’t carry Plan B; 83 of them said they would even refuse to order it for women with prescriptions. These include Wal-Mart, which has a nationwide policy against dispensing Plan B.

So the issue is not safety. The issue is the right of individuals to make informed choices for their own lives.

I was looking forward to shopping at the new Walmart in Poulsbo which is set to open in the near future, if it hasn’t opened already. I’m a big fan of discount stores.

Having read that Walmart will not even sell this drug when a patient has a prescription, however, I don’t think I’ll be doing any shopping at Walmart. What good does it do me to save 10 cents on a bottle of dishwashing liquid, if my money supports a business that doesn’t think individuals should have control over their own bodies when it comes to sexuality and reproduction?

If I am willing to give up such an important liberty in order to save a a little money on household items, then I don’t place a very high value on science or individual liberty.

Walmart has every right to set their own policies in a free society, and we all have the right to boycott their stores if we do not wish to financially support such policies. Boycotting Walmart, especially during the holiday season, would be a very effective way to get this policy changed. As far as I’m concerned, this is one policy that has got to go.

I encourage you to read the entire CBS 60 Minutes transcript because it starts out with the story of a young woman who was raped and then to the emergency room of a Catholic hospital, where she was not offered the option of taking “Plan B”, even though the hospital was required by state law to do so.

First the rapist(s) denies her control over her own body, then the hospital that treats her after the assault does the same. It’s like being raped all over again.

What’s our Plan B when the religious fanatics in our country have taken away all of our liberties, when they have substituted faith for science?

Tags: Plan B, Walmart, Abortion