Author: Harriet A. Washington
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
ISBN: 0316277797
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
A groundbreaking look at the connection between germs and mental illness, and how we can protect ourselves. Is it possible to catch autism or OCD the same way we catch the flu? Can a child's contact with cat litter lead to schizophrenia? In her eye-opening new book, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Harriet Washington reveals that we can in fact "catch" mental illness. In Infectious Madness, Washington presents the new germ theory, which posits not only that many instances of Alzheimer's, OCD, and schizophrenia are caused by viruses, prions, and bacteria, but also that with antibiotics, vaccinations, and other strategies, these cases can be easily prevented or treated. Packed with cutting-edge research and tantalizing mysteries, Infectious Madness is rich in science, characters, and practical advice on how to protect yourself and your children from exposure to infectious threats that could sabotage your mental and physical health.
Author: Stanley B. Prusiner
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300191146
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
The author, a 1997 recipient of the Noble Prize in medicine, describes the years he spent researching and demonstrating how the infectious proteins known as prions were responsible for brain diseases and how his theory has now become widely accepted in the science establishment.
Author: Harriet A. Washington
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
ISBN: 0316509426
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
A "powerful and indispensable" look at the devastating consequences of environmental racism (Gerald Markowitz) -- and what we can do to remedy its toxic effects on marginalized communities. Did you know... Middle-class African American households with incomes between $50,000 and $60,000 live in neighborhoods that are more polluted than those of very poor white households with incomes below $10,000. When swallowed, a lead-paint chip no larger than a fingernail can send a toddler into a coma -- one-tenth of that amount will lower his IQ. Nearly two of every five African American homes in Baltimore are plagued by lead-based paint. Almost all of the 37,500 Baltimore children who suffered lead poisoning between 2003 and 2015 were African American. From injuries caused by lead poisoning to the devastating effects of atmospheric pollution, infectious disease, and industrial waste, Americans of color are harmed by environmental hazards in staggeringly disproportionate numbers. This systemic onslaught of toxic exposure and institutional negligence causes irreparable physical harm to millions of people across the country-cutting lives tragically short and needlessly burdening our health care system. But these deadly environments create another insidious and often overlooked consequence: robbing communities of color, and America as a whole, of intellectual power. The 1994 publication of The Bell Curve and its controversial thesis catapulted the topic of genetic racial differences in IQ to the forefront of a renewed and heated debate. Now, in A Terrible Thing to Waste, award-winning science writer Harriet A. Washington adds her incisive analysis to the fray, arguing that IQ is a biased and flawed metric, but that it is useful for tracking cognitive damage. She takes apart the spurious notion of intelligence as an inherited trait, using copious data that instead point to a different cause of the reported African American-white IQ gap: environmental racism - a confluence of racism and other institutional factors that relegate marginalized communities to living and working near sites of toxic waste, pollution, and insufficient sanitation services. She investigates heavy metals, neurotoxins, deficient prenatal care, bad nutrition, and even pathogens as chief agents influencing intelligence to explain why communities of color are disproportionately affected -- and what can be done to remedy this devastating problem. Featuring extensive scientific research and Washington's sharp, lively reporting, A Terrible Thing to Waste is sure to outrage, transform the conversation, and inspire debate.
Author: Harriet Washington
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781734420722
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Carte Blanche is the alarming tale of how the right of Americans to say "no" to risky medical research is eroding at a time when we are racing to produce a vaccine and treatments for Covid-19. This medical right that we have long taken for granted was first sacrificed on the altar of military expediency in 1990 when the Department of Defense asked for and received from the FDA a waiver that permitted it to force an experimental anthrax vaccine on the ranks of ground troops headed for the Persian Gulf. Since then, the military has pressed ahead to impose nonconsensual testing of the blood substitute PolyHeme in civilian urbanities, quietly enrolling more than 20,000 non-consenting subjects since 2005. Most Americans think that their right to give or withhold consent is protected by law, but the passing in 1996 of modifications to the Code of Federal Regulations, such as statute CFR 21 50.24, now permit investigators to conduct research wtih trauma victims without their consent or event their knowledge. More than a dozen studies since have used the 1996 loophole to recruit large numbers of subjects without their knowledge. The erosion of consent is the result of a U.S. medical-research system that has proven again and again that it cannot be trusted.
Author: John Crawley
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1524698997
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
Im going to piss you off, hopefully, in a good way so you can use the energy creatively and help me fight the fire that has been growing ever so steadily in our nation. The title of this book, The Fire Watchers is a metaphor referencing the lack of continuum of care for our mentally ill and substance-addled folks, often one and the same person. Much of my focus is on the veterans returning from harms way in various parts of the world. They have a high rate of mental illnessPTSD (Post- [delayed, sometimes for months or years] traumatic stress disorder} and other maladies like major depression, bi-polar affective disorder, and TBI (traumatic brain injuries). There are many effective treatments for these issues that are not being used as frequently or as effectively as they should. Why not? I will document and discuss major reasons why much of our treatment services delivery system is flawed and, in many places, broken. We need a major effort in this country to repair whats broken. I will take us through, step by step, ways in which we can all work together to provide an efficient, less costly, and model system that rivals any in the world.
Author: Harriet A. Washington
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 076791547X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 530
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Book Description
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • The first full history of Black America’s shocking mistreatment as unwilling and unwitting experimental subjects at the hands of the medical establishment. No one concerned with issues of public health and racial justice can afford not to read this masterful book. "[Washington] has unearthed a shocking amount of information and shaped it into a riveting, carefully documented book." —New York Times From the era of slavery to the present day, starting with the earliest encounters between Black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, Medical Apartheid details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge—a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It reveals how Blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the twentieth century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of Blacks. Shocking new details about the government’s notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions. The product of years of prodigious research into medical journals and experimental reports long undisturbed, Medical Apartheid reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit. At last, it provides the fullest possible context for comprehending the behavioral fallout that has caused Black Americans to view researchers—and indeed the whole medical establishment—with such deep distrust.
Author: Andrew Scull
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199608032
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 153
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Book Description
"Andrew Scull examines the social, historical, and culturally variable response to madness over the centuries, providing a provocative and entertaining examination of mental illness over more than two millennia."--P. [2] of cover.
Author: Penzance Natural History and Antiquarian Society
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 466
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Book Description
Author: Harriet A. Washington
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0767931238
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 450
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Book Description
From the award-winning author of Medical Apartheid, an exposé of the rush to own and exploit the raw materials of life—including yours. Think your body is your own to control and dispose of as you wish? Think again. The United States Patent Office has granted at least 40,000 patents on genes controlling the most basic processes of human life, and more are pending. If you undergo surgery in many hospitals you must sign away ownership rights to your excised tissues, even if they turn out to have medical and fiscal value. Life itself is rapidly becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of the medical-industrial complex. Deadly Monopolies is a powerful, disturbing, and deeply researched book that illuminates this “life patent” gold rush and its harmful, and even lethal, consequences for public health. Like the bestselling The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, it reveals in shocking detail just how far the profit motive has encroached in colonizing human life and compromising medical ethics.
Author: Miriam Felton-Dansky
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810137178
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
Digital culture has occasioned a seismic shift in the discourse around contagion, transmission, and viral circulation. Yet theater, in the cultural imagination, has always been contagious. Viral Performance proposes the concept of the viral as an essential means of understanding socially engaged and transmedial performance practices since the mid-twentieth century. Its chapters rethink the Living Theatre’s Artaudian revolution through the lens of affect theory, bring fresh attention to General Idea’s media-savvy performances of the 1970s, explore the digital-age provocations of Franco and Eva Mattes and Critical Art Ensemble, and survey the dramaturgies and political stakes of global theatrical networks. Viral performance practices testify to the age-old—and ever renewed—instinct that when people gather, something spreads. Performance, an art form requiring and relying on live contact, renders such spreading visible, raises its stakes, and encodes it in theatrical form. The artists explored here rarely disseminate their ideas or gestures as directly as a viral marketer or a political movement would; rather, they undermine simplified forms of contagion while holding dialogue with the philosophical and popular discourses, old and new, that have surrounded viral culture. Viral Performance argues that the concept of the viral is historically deeper than immediate associations with the contemporary digital landscape might suggest, and far more intimately linked to live performance
