Links on Saving the World

Got called out late yesterday afternoon for an incoming flight with a "sick dog" that turned out not to be as advertised: the flight was six hours out, not 45 minutes, and the dog was lame, not sick.

Sick, if it included 'collapsed' or 'vomiting' or 'passing blood' could mean any number of life threatening issues, for which I would want to be there right then. Lame, on the other hand, is rarely life threatening, and generally isn't an emergency, technically speaking. (Although a very severe fracture could require bandaging before travel to immediate treatment to prevent severe limb impairment.)

In a way, it turned out for the best, as the aircraft was arriving at the more distant airport, and not the close one. So we got to practice emergency response (verdict: we need more practice) and still got done with work fairly early.

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Grand Rounds Blog Calender - I love Grand Rounds, even though it's nearly all heavily human-medicine oriented.

Ten Ways the American Health Care System Is Better Than You Think - doesn't cover care of pre-term babies, (and I'm too lazy to look up links right now) which is another area in which we excell. (We just have too many pre-term babies, and not enough of a handle on how to prevent this significant risk factor.) (I will also note how easy it is to cherry-pick data comparing one country's sytem to another.)

Grant System Encourages Cancer Researchers To Play It Safe - So far, grants haven't helped find treatments. That's a bummer.

Catholic Conservation Center - like it says on the wrapper - Catholic-pov-driven conservation/ecological movement. Perhaps a hair too anti-pagan in tone, but otherwise a site I intend to spend more time looking through.

Blog post discussing recent UK study finding no added nutritional value to 'organic' food. I don't support organic animal husbandry, because sick things shuold get medicine, and I don't support large scale organic vegtable and grain production, because pulling weeds for a living sucks. But I have no problems with people indulging in organic methods for backyard produce, and I am opposed to non-organic lawncare.

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Note for writing later: New Kind of Beanstalk