the blog quebecois

Barb Tarbox died last night and good riddance.

If you're not in Alberta you've probably not previously heard of her, though she was the second item on the CBC national news tonight.

She was a 41-year-old woman who contracted lung cancer after 29 years of smoking, up to two packs a day. Upon learning of her fate, she decided to preach the gospel to schoolchildren, which slots neatly into the governmental jihad on tobacco.

Tobacco: deadlier than plutonium, but more profitable. Especially to the government, which rakes in 800% more than what the tobacco companies get from it.

But don't let that foolish inconsistency hobble your inner goblin.

Graham Greene wrote that "A man chooses his death as surely as he chooses his suit."

That's probably a paraphrase, and don't ask me where or when or what I read it in.

Also, the feminists are probably at this very moment cranking up their latest argument:

"It's not faaaaaiiiiiirrrrr!!! Men get to choooooose!!!"

Well, women get to choose, too, and Ms Tarbox (if biology is destiny, then nomenclature comes a close second) chose to smoke heavily even though her own mother died of the same disease. Can we say: genetic predisposition?

To cancer. To addiction. To celebrity.

Because that's what Barb Tarbox became in the last months of her life. An addicted cancer celebrity who did the Scared Straight routine before shocked, tearful ninth-graders -- whipping off her hat to show her chemo-scalped skull, hectoring them with the awful details of her illness. It was all very dramatic, and from the TV clips that I've seen, she was good at it, a veritable Tony Robbins of non-smoking hip-hip-hooray.

The New Puritans. At least the old ones promised heavenly reward for earthly scraping; the new ones promise earthly reward for building a tower to God.

We all know how that turned out.

doctor, my eyes
tell me what is wrong
was I unwise to leave them open for so long

-- jackson browne

I don't often (well, actually, never) write about health care because the subject bores me to tears. I believe the medical term is lachrymotic tediumosis.

Nevertheless, I got involved in this comment thread at QandO, and I thought you might enjoy reading it. Or at least, weeping along with me.

In response to this:

Because many in the "health care is a right" club believe that our multi-payer, quasi-private insurance scheme is hopelessly inefficient and leads to ever-increasing administrative costs, and that a single-payer system will contain costs through mythical gains in efficiency.

I wrote this:

That's a common article of faith in Canada. It's much bruited about that the percentage of GDP spent on health care is only (these figures are only approximate) 9% in Canada versus 14% in the U.S., and that the difference is explained by the so-called efficiency of the one-payer (government) system.

In fact, you only get to those percentages by including medical research in the total. Again, I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but research expenditures in the U.S. absolutely dwarf what's spent in Canada -- not by the usual 10:1 ratio, but more like 50:1.

One useful, if rough yardstick would be to compare the number of Nobel laureates in medicine in each country. They do tend to follow the money. The U.S. probably has several thousand.

Canada? I couldn't name one.

At this point I had to give up, because I couldn't see the monitor anymore.

Now that my vision has more-or-less returned, I think I should amend that second-last sentence. Make it "several hundred" instead of "several thousand." (There's only one Nobel awarded for medicine each year, but because of the collaborative nature of science, the award is commonly shared among two or more people.)

It occurred to me that I wasn't very certain about the Canadian numbers, either. Using this wonderful tool called the "Internet" I soon enough turned up this:

1923 -- Sir Frederick Banting and J. R. Macleod, for the development of insulin, used in the treatment of diabetes, at the University of Toronto.

Woof! Should have remembered them. But they're dead, so they don't count. A dearth of Nobelists ensued, until:

1966 -- Charles Brenton Huggins, a Halifax native, graduate of Acadia University, Wolfville, N.S., head of Ben May Cancer Research Laboratory of the University of Chicago, for research into role of hormones in the control of human cancer. Shared award with Peyton Rous of the Rockefeller University.

And then:

1981 -- Dr. David Hubel, a native of Niagara Falls, Ont., for information processing in the visual system. Graduated from McGill University in Montreal before continuing his career in the United States.

(Proving that one can be brilliant in one area and a complete dunce in another, Hubel is one of the signers of this letter, urging the election of John Kerry.)

So that's a total of four Nobel laureates, two of whom moved to the States.

Q.E.D. and all that; and has anybody got a Kleenex?

Are you sitting down? Because I've just heard of this new disease, and man, it sounds bad:

Specifically, the Conference seeks to:

� expand public awareness of the continued impact of and global response to HIV/AIDS

Who knew? Hang on, I think I've uncovered what they call a "vector":

� Safer sex. If you are sexually active while in Toronto, be sure to practice safer sex. Free condoms are available at the Health Clinic and in the PLWHA Lounge.

� Safer drug use. If you use prescription or non-prescription injection drugs, always use new equipment (needles, filters, sterile water, stems for smoking crack, etc.) Free safer drug use equipment will be available at the The Harm Reduction Networking Zone in the Global Village or you can call The Works at Toronto Public Health 416 392-0520 for information on where else you can access free safer drug use supplies.

which would be -- if you can't keep it in your pants, let alone suppress your other appetites over a six-day, ostensibly scientific, meeting; then -- maybe, just maybe -- it might be that you are part of the problem.

The Guardian:

Bill Clinton called for the world to prepare to tackle the cultural taboos surrounding circumcision yesterday if, as many expect, trials show that it protects men and the women they sleep with from Aids.

In a speech to the International Aids conference in Toronto, Canada, Mr Clinton said that if the trials had good results, there would be a major job of persuasion ahead. "Should this be shown to be effective, we will have another means to prevent the spread of the disease and to save lives, and we will have a big job to do," he said. "It is important that as we leave here we all be prepared for a green light that could have a staggering impact on the male population but that will be frankly a lot of trouble to get done."

Uh, yeah, good luck with that one.

When I ran across the story at Dust My Broom I was immediately reminded of a very funny scene in a novel by Joseph (Catch-22) Heller, God Knows, an "autobiography" of the biblical King David. I only dimly recalled the punchline (it's been years since I read it), so I googled around and found this pr�cis of it:

Take the story of Michal�s dowry, for example. Saul sets Michal�s dowry at 100 Philistine foreskins. Heller spends pages (pages!) discussing David�s deliberations with Abner on how to go about this. First they figure on six men per Philistine; four to hold him, one to prop up the phallus, and one to perform the circumcism. Eventually they figure they can just kill each Philistine, and �bring back the whole dick.�

The National Post:

Mr. Lewis criticized Stephen Harper's government for not responding to fears over the future of Vancouver's safe-injection centre Insite for intravenous drug users. The site's three-year exemption from federal drug laws expires on Sept. 11 but despite numerous appeals, the government has yet to announce whether it will extend it.

"It would be positively perverse to close the Insite safe injection facility when it has been positively evaluated in a number of studies," he said. "In fact, there should be several more such facilities. To shut Insite down is to invite HIV infection and death. One has to wonder about the minds of those who would so readily punish injecting drug-users rather than understanding the problem for what it is: a matter of public health."

Mr. Lewis described the Bush administration's insistence that a third of the U.S. AIDS prevention budget is spent on abstinence programs as "ideological rigidity."

"Abstinence-only programs don't work," he told the crowd of 6,000. "Ideological rigidity never works when applied to the human condition. It's an antiquated throwback to the conditionality of yesteryear to tell any government how to spend its money for prevention. That approach has a name: neo-colonialism."

. . . to cure AIDS by throwing Stephen Lewis into a volcano. I don't know if that would lead to a cure for AIDS. But it can't hurt, and we'll never find out if we don't try, right?

Especially if you have children, this might be the most important thing you read this summer.

Mario Vittone:

The new captain jumped from the cockpit, fully dressed, and sprinted through the water. A former lifeguard, he kept his eyes on his victim as he headed straight for the owners who were swimming between their anchored sportfisher and the beach. “I think he thinks you’re drowning,” the husband said to his wife. They had been splashing each other and she had screamed but now they were just standing, neck-deep on the sand bar. “We’re fine, what is he doing?” she asked, a little annoyed. “We’re fine!” the husband yelled, waving him off, but his captain kept swimming hard. ”Move!” he barked as he sprinted between the stunned owners. Directly behind them, not ten feet away, their nine-year-old daughter was drowning. Safely above the surface in the arms of the captain, she burst into tears, “Daddy!”

How did this captain know - from fifty feet away - what the father couldn’t recognize from just ten? Drowning is not the violent, splashing, call for help that most people expect. The captain was trained to recognize drowning by experts and years of experience. The father, on the other hand, had learned what drowning looks like by watching television. If you spend time on or near the water (hint: that’s all of us) then you should make sure that you and your crew knows what to look for whenever people enter the water. Until she cried a tearful, “Daddy,” she hadn’t made a sound. As a former Coast Guard rescue swimmer, I wasn’t surprised at all by this story. Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for, is rarely seen in real life.