I’ve known for a long time that the Red Cross doesn’t accept blood donations from men who have had sex with another man, even once. I had thought that this was because the Red Cross wanted to be especially cautious about the possibility of transmitting HIV to recipients of donated blood; statistically speaking, male-male sex carries a higher rate of transmission than heterosexual sex or female-female sex, so I figured the Red Cross was simply choosing Read more

First, I’ll disclaim by saying this post is off-topic…at best, it’s super-tangentially related to health, since it’s not about running marathons, but about volunteering for them. But I’d like to speak up against one of the most common misconceptions about Objectivists — that being selfish means being a self-absorbed, insufferable twit who thinks only of oneself.

Not true. In fact, the self-absorbed jerk who tramples over other people Read more

New York City, whose Department of Health has meddled with food producers’ business for years, has recently begun issuing letter grades to restaurants based on the results of unannounced inspections. And, apparently, although keeping smoked fish at a temperature deemed too warm by the bureaucrats is enough to get a restaurant a C rating, you can have mouse poo on the floor and still get an A.

Food writer Kat Odell, based in Los Angeles Read more

…I’m just moving! I can’t wait — Dave’s and my new digs in Brooklyn will be literally double the size of the eensy beansy Upper East Side one-bedroom we live in now. Between hunting for apartments, arranging movers, starting to change addresses on about a zillion different accounts, and going through our stuff to weed out things that don’t need to come with us, I’ve had little time or inclination to write here. (Not to mention I’m running 30-40 Read more

In today’s podcast, Leonard Peikoff says that, under a proper legal system, one would not be able to charge a mother with child endangerment if she does something while she is pregnant that results in the child being born with a deformity. The reason Dr. Peikoff gives is that the damage happened while the fetus was still a potential, and not an actual, human being, and although such a mother would be immoral, her actions must not be deemed illegal Read more

Yesterday, Pfizer “voluntarily” withdrew its leukemia drug Mylotarg from the market (read: withdrew “voluntarily” because the FDA would have made Pfizer pull it otherwise) after a post-FDA-approval study showed that it didn’t slow the advance of leukemia or extend patients’ lives…

…in the aggregate, that is.

But, as Dr. Peter Marks of Yale-New Haven Hospital says, “Pfizer’s recall of the drug is ‘very bad news’ for Read more

The New England Journal of Medicine contains a piece this week on whether or not smoking should be banned in public housing, as the New York Times reports. On the one hand, we have those who argue that any amount of smoke, no matter how small, is harmful, and that the right of nonsmokers to live without that harm trumps the right of smokers to do as they please in their own homes; furthermore, just as the government doesn’t allow recipients of WIC Read more

The New York Times today presents a feature on Rwanda’s national healthcare plan, with a none-too-subtle tsk-tsk at the U.S.: “Sunny Ntayomba, an editorial writer for The New Times, a newspaper based in the capital, Kigali, is aware of the paradox: his nation, one of the world’s poorest, insures more of its citizens than the world’s richest does.” The New York Times author marvels at how Rwandans are guaranteed access to basic health Read more

The New York Times reports that the White House is set to issue rules telling employers they can’t cut health benefits or increase employees’ health insurance costs.

So, ObamaCare is going to increase health care costs. Employers recognize this. They would rationally respond by cutting benefits or asking workers to bear a share of the increased costs. But Obama doesn’t want them to do that.

Tom Bowden astutely compared Obama’s Read more

I just came back on Tuesday from a long business trip in Chicago. I never noticed until it was pointed out to me by a native that there are almost no food trucks in the city. That’s not an accident; Chicago’s draconian food-truck laws say that only trucks that don’t perform cooking or preparation of any kind of their food can exist.

Fortunately, New York is more lenient…at least for now. Councilwoman Jessica Lappin wants to revoke the Read more