Month: September 2011

The state of non communicable diseases

Last week, United Nations gathered in New York, USA, to talk about prevention and control of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Non-communicable diseases are non-infectious, of long duration and generally progressing slowly. Due to the fact they are not infectious, there is no pathogen to target and there is no transmission medium to fight. Due to their long duration and slow progression, one usually notices NCDs when it’s too late and eradicating NCDs is less spectacular than other (not less important) infectious diseases. However WHO measured that NCDs represents more than 60% of all deaths in the world. For the occasion, WHO released an introductory video that summarize the issue.

So there are 4 main non-communicable diseases:

Cardiovascular diseases
Diabetes (both of them represent 70% of deaths by NCDs)
Cancers (~ 20% of deaths by NCDs)
Chronic respiratory diseases (~ 10% of deaths by NCDs)

NCDs are not directly in the UN Millenium Development Goals but I already mentioned they represent 4 of the top 5 killers in the USA. Two of them are also in the top 5 killers worldwide. If the Millenium Goals succeed, non-communicable diseases will be the next big issue in health.

Although NCDs were considered as a disease limited to high income countries (with infectious diseases affecting low income countries), this is not really the case anymore. For instance, the map of male deaths due to cardiovascular diseases and diabetes in 2008 shows an approximately uniform rate in high income countries with some higher rates in low income countries (especially on the African continent).

WHO World : Cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, death rates per 100 000 population, age standardized: Males, 2008

If you are looking for more numbers, visit the WHO Global Health Observatory on Noncommunicable diseases.

If nothing is done, the incidence of NCDs will increase. On top of being a health issue, a matter of life and death, it will also become an economical problem as the costs of treatment as well as the indirect costs will also dramatically increase (increase per case treated and increase due to the number of cases treated).

Incident cases and cost of diagnosed diabetes per 1,000 people (adapted from Boyle et al. 2010 and Alternative Futures Diabetes 2025)

If you are looking for more figures about the cost of non-communicable diseases, here are two detailed reports recently published:

WHO: Scaling up action against noncommunicable diseases: How much will it cost?
Harvard School of Public Health and the World Economic Forum: The Global Economic Burden of Non-communicable Diseases

In a nutshell, non-communicable diseases are everywhere and the future doesn’t look happy. However …

However risk factors are identified and many of them are related to our own lifestyle:

Physical inactivity
Unhealthy diet
Tobacco use
Harmful use of alcohol

To end on a positive note, all these risk factors can be easily controlled and for a limited additional cost. For instance, governments can protect people from tobacco (taxes as well as bans on tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship, …) and alcohol (access restriction, bans on advertising, …) as well as promote public awareness about diet and physical activity. Companies can also promote healthy diet and physical activities to their employees. On top of that, the food industry can also include relevant actions in their corporate social responsibility policies. Finally on a personal level, we can increase our physical activity, increase fruit and vegetable intake, reduce our use of tobacco and alcohol, etc. Simple, cheap actions ; huge interesting consequences.

Wearable electronics/communication

I became recently interested in wearable electronics and wearable communication. I think we usually don’t need a computer at home. But I also think that electronics, sensory / storage / communication / helper devices will invade our world (privacy) at one point.

A few months ago, I liked Phillip Torrone’s retrospective collection of wearable electronic devices (for Make:). It will be quite fun to wear some of the stuff he showed. However most of the current applications shown are mostly designed to collect information from the body they are attached to or to communicate with this body. This is very much self-centered.

Recently (tonight), I watched Kate Hartman’s TED talk: The art of wearable communication. As the title implies, Kate Hartman goes one step further and designs wearable communication devices. I must admit I’m not sure I would want to wear the devices she designed. But I admire how simple these devices can be and yet some of them create an effective embryo of communication with others.

Kate Hartman and her wearable communication devices

The full video is just below:

Funny update of ql2400 and ql2500 devices in Fedora 14

Although some people think it’s a joke (see kalev’s comment on 2011-09-17 19:13:44 in the bugfix report), I won’t install this update; I agree it’s funny but refusing to install it at least gives me the feeling I have still something to say on my system (that’s also what free software are for, isn’t it?).

I also like what the (same) submitter wrote for the first update:

Updated qlogic 2400 and 2500 firmware to 5.03.13. What does 5.03.13 do? No one knows, except for QLogic, and they’re not telling. I asked, and they told me that information was only available under NDA. So, I encourage you to imagine what this firmware does, and the bugs it fixes. While you’re at it, imagine a world where vendors release source code for their firmware.

Reference Manager 10 with Wine

Reference Manager is a commercial reference management software package. It is extensively used in biomedical research, along with Endnote (sold by the same company), mainly because the main OS in these labs is Windows from Microsoft. I used it at the university and still have some reference databases in its format (with file extension .rmd).

This evening, I had to go back into one of those proprietary, closed databases I still had (most of my references were later re-entered in a BibTeX file). I could have borrowed my wife’s computer running Windows or tried some Open Source software that can open .rmd files. But it would have been too easy. So I tried it with Wine, a program that allows Microsoft Windows applications to run under Linux. In Wine AppDB, it is written people had tried version 9 and 11. In the old time, I bought a student license for version 10.

I’m running Fedora 14 and Wine 1.3.24. The installation didn’t cause any problem. Launching the application neither. I can easily open existing database and see the reference summary (bottom part of the screen, see screenshot below). But I can’t properly see the reference details (upper part of the screen). In fact, all the details are there but they are not properly rendered. If you click in one of these fields, you’ll see the text from these fields. But once you’ll click elsewhere, the previously clicked field will disappear. The search function in the database is working. The export of a bibliography list from a selection of references in the application works. I was not able to test the integration with MS-Word. Note that it cannot search in PubMed (but it’s probably due to the fact the update for PubMed was not installed).

Screenshot of Reference Manager under Linux via Wine — Reference Manager running under Linux via Wine

I also submitted an entry in the Wine AppDB ; it is currently reviewed.

References, references, references!

When I studied biology as well as when I did my Ph.D., our professors were always after us because of references. I think with their precious help we learnt the art of referencing: choosing good references, citing them at the appropriate location in a text and, of course, giving enough information at the bottom of the text to allow the reader to find these references.

I just finished reading two articles in a recent edition of The Economist and they reminded me how important are these references. These articles are What would Jesus hack? and Worrying about wireless.

First an aside: it might be an editorial choice but I would prefer to know who wrote an article rather than anonymity. I don’t have (and won’t have) anything personal against any author. I just like to know if I’m reading something written by a young Mr. I-know-everything with no background in the topic of the article or by a Mrs Specialist who appears to work in the field she’s writing about. In this blog, who I am is in the “About” section in the bar above.

In What would Jesus hack? the anonymous author is throwing a mix of everything and anything to make a story. And actually it works: the article has some logic in its sequence of statements. From an external point of view you may even think it’s a nice article. You discover news and organisations that you may have missed: an opinion from Antonio Spadaro in “Hacker ethics and Christian vision” (Google translation of the abstract), the reply from Eric S. Raymond, Elèutheros, … But you will also be staggered at the hotchpotch mixing Open Source, internet, Twitter, … Why not add Facebook then, the archetypal anti-privacy web service?

The only point that the article might get right is that some software programmers are somehow seeing themselves and / or seen by others as gods: Richard Stallmann, Linus Torvalds, Bill Gates (god turned philanthropist), Steve Jobs (god turned designer), etc. On top of that, every programmer had her/his Eureka moment when she/he solves a bug after hours trying to fix the code. Otherwise, I agree with what the unnamed author puts in the mouth of Kevin Kelly and that I can summarize by: “with more power comes more responsibilities”.

And, as I pointed out in the beginning, there isn’t any reference at the bottom of the paper version, any link in the digital version. Statements and people in this article could have been 100% fictional, no one would have known that (until you look for them on the web).

I have the same issue with Worrying about wireless: no sources, no references. I don’t forbid the anonymous writer to have an opinion on the topic. Just let the others also make their own opinion by citing the sources you are using. This article is just shaping the opinion of readers in a hurry by using a partisan language and not citing sources. Even when indirectly citing sources (e.g. the WHO IARC classification), the anonymous coward succeeds in using negative wording to dismiss what doesn’t please his / her theory. I would have liked to have more information about the potential adverse effects of wifi waves in the long run, for instance. But I will unfortunately not believe such one-way gibberish.

Now you’ll tell me I don’t have to read The Economist and you’ll be right 🙂

Illustration credit: Duty calls by xkcd and Richard Stallman by Pladour on Flickr (CC-by-nc)

Adobe Flash Player update: qui fait le malin tombe dans le ravin

This well-known French proverb is similar to: “pride comes before a fall”.

This evening I was told by the newly installed version of Firefox that my Flash player was outdated. Firefox provides a simple link to download that Flash Player. I save the installer (install_flashplayer10_mssd_aih.exe) in a directory where I save all my downloads before sorting them. I launch the installer. It moves itself to my system temporary directory and launches itself again. First I find it very rude from the installer to move itself anywhere on my disk. Then now, since 15 minutes it’s stuck at the step where it tries “retrieving install”.

Adobe Flash, if you want to play tricks, do it cleverly! Now your installation is stuck and cannot download the remaining part of the installer because it should use a proxy. This is a known issue, of course. And the simple and most obvious solution is that you can download the true, full Flash player installer here. Why not provide this link immediately?