Science

And they thought I was weird not to go in the water

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So on Saturday my eldest nephew celebrated his fifth anniversary and he wanted to go to the swimming pool, the same “subtropical paradise” we used to visit as kids in the eighties and which hadn’t changed since. I used to swim a lot as a kid, but have become grossed once I started to think too much about what was in that chlorine filled water and especially what people put in it. So I spent the afternoon in a beach chair catching up on my reading, which the family found hilarious and teased me about. Well, who’s laughing now:

While some people are disgusted by the thought of human pee in their pool water, others figure there’s no harm in letting loose a little urine while swimming. It turns out, however, that when urine reacts with chlorinated water, it may be creating chemical byproducts hazardous to everyone in the pool.

Cyanogen chloride (CNCl) and trichloramine (NCl3) are nitrogen-containing disinfection byproducts (N-DBPs) that are commonly found in swimming pools. In low levels, N-DBPs have been linked to eye and throat irritation, and in high levels, they have been linked to nervous and cardiovascular problems. It turns out that this toxic swimming pool environment may be caused, at least in part, by swimmers peeing in chlorinated pools.

So next time your eyes are stinging when you’re swimming in a public pool, it’s not the chlorine that’s causing it, it’s the byproducts of piss reacting to the chlorine…. (As my brother in law also pointed out on saturday)

I love living in the future

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Scientists are building a internet based simulation of a nematode worm:

OpenWorm is an attempt to build a complete cellular-level simulation of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans. Of the 959 cells in the hermaphrodite, 302 are neurons and 95 are muscle cells. The simulation will model electrical activity in all the muscles and neurons. An integrated soft-body physics simulation will also model body movement and physical forces within the worm and from its environment.

Best part: anybody can access this simulation through your browser. (Via.)

#Transdocfail

LGBT, sciencebollocks
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Julie Burchill being nasty again about trans people in The Guardian (in an article since replaced by an apology of the editor) is bad enough, as it might provide cover for bullying but much more worrying is the general disrespect and disdain many trans people receive from their own doctors, as documented in stories shared through Twitter and elsewhere.

Two weeks ago, one of the few doctors providing gender re-assignment outside the NHS, doctor Richard Curtis came under investigation by the General Medical Council, for alleged errors made during gender reassignment, including one alleged wrongful referral for surgery.

For many trans people this investigation looked like yet another attack on the already scarce resources for gender reassignment in the UK, once again focusing on the alleged harm that might have been done to people erroneously under going gender realignment therapies, rather than the everyday difficulties many trans people have with getting the right medical support.

This anger led to the establishment of the TransDocFail hashtag on twitter, started by trans activists Zoe O’Connell and Lib Dem councillor Sarah Brown, asking UK trans patients to relate their experiences with gender reassignment and health care in general. It led to a flood of tweets by trans people, often anonymously describing the problems and bigotry they encounter at their GP or hospital.

The heart of the problem still seems to be the idea that trans people need to be protected from making a potential mistake more than they need to be helped become what they really are, as well as a continuing transphobia amongst some health care workers, not often addressed in the news media. As Sarah Brown is quoted:

“The media are typically invested in presenting a rigid narrative about how trans people interact with medicine. The stories trans people would like to tell, stories of outrageous levels of systemic abuse and transphobia, don’t fit this narrative and so go ignored and unreported. Social media is changing this. The stories trans people have to tell are reaching people who seldom hear them, and people are often appalled by what they hear. We can’t even begin to tackle widespread medical abuse of trans people until there is wider awareness of just how bad it is.”

A related problem is the fact that so often, the only trans stories covered in the media are negative ones, which is something the We Happy Trans project attempts to do something about.

(Originally posted on MetaFilter.)

Health care as a moral issue

posts interesting only to me, Reefer Madness, sciencebollocks
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Alex talks about medical surveillance technology and the assumptions driving it and how wrong they can be and in the process makes a point that can be applied more generally:

Now, there is obviously some truth to this. Giving up smoking is a really good idea, as is taking your damn pills. But it is also highly problematic. For one thing, it assumes that the problem is non-compliance. In that sense, it transfers your problem from the domain of reality – a physical problem to be solved – into the domain of morality – a statement about good and bad. Rather than being poor, stressed, addicted, etc, the problem is that you are wrong and a bad person. As a rule, this is normatively evil, and of course it only works if the problem is not actually a real problem.

I’ve seen this sort of reasoning play out, or at least this was what it looked like from the outside, in the hospital Sandra stayed in for most of the last two-three years of her life. Sandra was a smoker, had been for decades and while fully aware of the risks, she also was certain that this would not be the thing that killed her and of course she was right… For her, as for many other people, the short term benefits of having a quick fag were more important than the long term health consequences.

Now when she first went into hospital it still have a couple of smoking rooms on the premisses, where both staff (more of whom smoked than you’d expect) and patients could go to. Then one day, in the middle of winter these were closed down because some busybody in higher management decided they don’t belong in a hospital. So now all those patients had to trundle out in the cold to get their fix, which certainly for Sandra didn’t do much for her health.

It’s that sort of attitude where the health health health message has to be driven home, even to people who are in no state to quit smoking, who are dealing with much more immediate problems and need the stress release fags offer. No, people need to be harassed and bullied into doing the right thing, even when it’s inappropriate.