It's Official! Big Brother Has Infiltrated the VA

The Department of Veterans Affairs has admitted to reporters at the Tampa Bay Times that it installed a surveillance camera in a patient's room.

Joseph Carnegie, an Air Force vet, checked into James A. Haley VA Medical Center last August to recover from an infection. Later on that month he suffered cardiac arrest and brain damage when staffers failed to notice fluid in his feeding tube had cut off his air supply. It was shortly after Carnegie's family notified the Haley VA Center of their intent to sue that the camera was installed.Although it was disguised to look like a smoke detector-and is even marketed by its manufacturer under the name "Vonnic C401W Smoke Detector Covert Camera"-VA officials denied the camera was hidden. They claimed instead that the smoke detector cam was necessary to monitor the patient's condition (because, you know, a pin hole camera stuck on the ceiling is much more effective than a standard heart monitor, or simply asking people to do their jobs). The family's request to have the camera removed was refused.

*This article has been edited for an error stating that Joseph Carnegie is comatose. In fact, he is brain damaged and unable to communicate. I apologize for the error.

Did Weed Cause Rudy Eugene's Face Munchies?

The toxicology reports are in on Rudy Eugene, aka the guy behind the Miami face-eating zombie attack. According to the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner, marijuana was the only drug found during autopsy, putting a huge, mouth-shaped hole in speculation that bath salts were responsible for the violent assault. A second lab confirmed the results. Ronald Poppo, the victim, is still recovering from his wounds.

http://news.yahoo.com/tests-only-marijuana-face-chewers-system-205604519.html
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/06/27/2871098/mes-report-eugene-had-no-drugs.html
http://miami.cbslocal.com/2012/06/27/medical-examiner-causeway-cannibal-not-high-on-bath-salts/

Zombie Attack Cover-Up?

According to the Indianapolis Star, last month a naked man was arrested following an incident at a local Taco Bell. Although the police reportedly chalked up the disturbance to excessive alcohol consumption, just days later a bystander recorded this video of police taking down a completely different rampaging naked guy:

What are the odds?

Similar UFOs Spotted Over Thailand Two Years Apart

The following video was taken by a YouTube user in June of this year:

And this was accidentally caught by a man in Thailand in 2010:

Though the resolution in the second video is poor due to being taken with a cell phone, there does seem to be at least a rudimentary resemblance between the two objects. If anyone has a guess they'd like to venture as to what these UFOs could be, I'd love to hear from you.

What's Killing the Children of Cambodia?

WHO wants to find out.

According to a joint statement issued Wednesday, the World Health Organization is collaborating with the Cambodian Ministry of Health to investigate a mystery illness responsible for the deaths of more than sixty children. Since last April, physicians in fourteen different provinces have been baffled by cases of “severe respiratory disease with neurological symptoms” seen in children under seven. Symptoms of the illness include high fever, respiratory distress, and in some cases, convulsions. Of the sixty-two documented cases so far, only one child has survived.

http://www.wpro.who.int/cambodiaPRdisease.pdf

http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/05/world/asia/cambodia-mystery-illness/index.html

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57466595/cambodia-mystery-illness-kills-61-kids/

Why I Blog

"When I reached intellectual maturity, and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last." -- Thomas Henry Huxley

A Rush to Judgment: When Medical Science Gets it Wrong

The mysterious illnesses in Le Roy have prompted some interesting divisions among observers, myself included. While some are willing to dismiss the girls’ symptoms as nothing more than conversion disorder, others of us recall all too clearly other times when experts in the scientific community got it just plain wrong. Here are but a few of those instances:

Autism- Once thought of as extremely early-onset schizophrenia, this condition was believed to be caused by parental detachment. Professional literature recommended treating affected children with electroshock therapy and LSD well into the 1970s. It wasn't until 1989 that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), the reference book health care professionals use to diagnose mental disorders, listed autism as a developmental disorder separate from schizophrenia.

http://www.neurodiversity.com/library_lichstein_1976.pdf

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/27/AR2008062703062.html

Female hysteria – Most people think this diagnosis went out with the Victorian era, but it wasn’t removed as a disease by the American Psychiatric Association until 1952. At that time, it was apparently decided that women were responsible enough to use vibrators on their own (the standard treatment). That still didn’t stop ‘experts' from attributing everything from frigidity to “an unusual amount of sexual pleasure” to this so-called disease.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/maines-technology.html

http://psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?articleid=150892

Lyme Disease – In the early 1970s, mother Polly Murray was very worried about what was going on in her Lyme, Connecticut neighborhood. People were getting sick at an alarming rate and no one really seemed to know why. Doctors first brushed off the complaints of excessive tiredness, skin rashes, swollen joints, and headaches. Polly, an artist who was no longer able to paint because of arthritis in her hands, was told by physicians that she was a hypochondriac. When her son also became sick, the diagnosis was that he was mimicking her “neurotic” behavior. (Is any of this sounding familiar?) He was eventually diagnosed with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis, but Mrs. Murray was convinced something more was going on. She teamed up with another mother of a sick child, Judith Mensch, and together the two women uncovered evidence of thirty-nine children and twelve adults in their area who’d been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis—100 times the normal rate of incidence. Armed with this information, Murray and Mensch pestered the Connecticut Department of Health until they agreed to send someone to investigate. A condition named “Lyme arthritis” was recognized two years later. It wasn’t until 1981 that Dr. Willy Burgdorfer discovered the spirochete responsible for the infection.

http://www.publichealthalert.org/Articles/davidkocurek/how%20lyme%20got%20a%20bad%20rap.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/27/books/tick-doc.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

http://www.niaid.nih.gov/topics/lymedisease/understanding/pages/intro.aspx#history

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC406537/

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1067442/index.htm

Moral of the story: Science is continually evolving. As a result sometimes even the experts are wrong. Question everything.