Zetsubou-san posted:

thehomemaster posted:

Can someone help me on the brain cancer thing? Namely actual funding and health stats, DALYs compared with other cancers, etc. I just want to know if this is a celeb endorsement thing (the beanie thing is just an excuse for celebs to get likes on Instagram) or if it is in actual dire need of attention, compared to say lung cancer and other lung diseases, or prostate cancer.

Jumpingmanjim posted:

Disturbing

thehomemaster posted:

Can someone help me on the brain cancer thing? Namely actual funding and health stats, DALYs compared with other cancers, etc. I just want to know if this is a celeb endorsement thing (the beanie thing is just an excuse for celebs to get likes on Instagram) or if it is in actual dire need of attention, compared to say lung cancer and other lung diseases, or prostate cancer.

Zetsubou-san posted:

gay picnic defence posted:

Also regularly eating too much of something is probably going to make you fat no matter how much the Heart Foundation rates it.

bowmore posted:

Probably not carrots

bowmore posted:

Probably not carrots

bowmore posted:

and that's a bad thing??

Zetsubou-san posted:

thehomemaster posted:

In the name of gender equality, cartoonists should be drawing at least one cop as female.

Or are they too difficult to draw?

You Am I posted:

So latest polls show that both Abbott and Shorten are disliked equally by the public.

Time to start the leadership rumour mill for both parties

thehomemaster posted:

In the name of gender equality, cartoonists should be drawing at least one cop as female.

Or are they too difficult to draw?

Birb Katter posted:

Lol if you think Abbott wants any female cops around him. The only one that was there was sent off for coffee.

Tokamak posted:

The one on the right is a woman. It is kind of hard to tell with the cops being squared bricked amorphous blobs.

open24hours posted:

This shows the incidence rates
http://www.aihw.gov.au/cancer/cancer-in-australia-overview-2012/appendixc/

and this shows the burden of disease.
http://www.aihw.gov.au/cancer/cancer-in-australia-overview-2012/ch7/

Tomberforce posted:

Like most cancers, it's a complex condition with many manifestations. Having just lost a close relative a variant of it in the last 6 months - it is generally hosed and basically a death sentence (at least with glioblastoma, the most common and most aggressive type). It responds poorly to surgery as the cancer cells are poorly differentiated from surrounding healthy brain tissue, and most drugs are ineffective as they cannot cross the blood brain barrier. Even if resectioned as much as possible, reoccurance is also extremely likely. Certainly it is one area of cancer treatment where throwing money at it could be effective - for example funding intra-operative MRI scanners etc, but really all the therapy for late stage brain tumours is directed at preserving quality of life for as long as possible, but the timeframes are terribly short, even with the most effective therapy.

Some stats and info here:

http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/type/brain-tumour/treatment/statistics-and-outlook-for-brain-tumours

bowmore posted:

Probably not carrots

You Am I posted:

So latest polls show that both Abbott and Shorten are disliked equally by the public.

Time to start the leadership rumour mill for both parties

thehomemaster posted:

As a dude with a partner in the AFP it's good to see that it isn't just liberal cartoonists who are sexist.



Cheers for this, both of you. Any funding info? Mostly curious about funding-to-incidence/mortality rates. From what I could see prostate and brain receive the same amount of funding but prostate has a higher incident rate, though brain has a higher mortality rate.

Obviously I reckon lung cancer needs the most looking after, though it would be interesting to see studies that control for smoking.

I think what I'm really getting at is my annoyance at a celebrity endorsement of a cancer that is rarer than most, very difficult to treat, and therefore the money could, if you take Peter Singer's line, be used more efficiently.

quote:

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quote:

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quote:

End of carbon tax drives brown coal use increase Michael Edwards reported this story on Tuesday, May 5, 2015 08:23:00

MICHAEL BRISSENDEN: New data shows brown coal use in electricity production has surged to its highest level in three years. High emission brown coal now constitutes up to a quarter of the coal used to generate electricity in Australia's largest energy market - the most since 2012. The abolishment of the carbon tax is thought to be the driving the increase. Environmental groups say it casts serious doubt on the Government's claim that it can cut carbon emissions by 5 per cent by 2020.

Michael Edwards reports.

MICHAEL EDWARDS: Brown coal produces 50 per cent more emissions than black coal, but it's also one of cheapest ways to produce electricity. And since the middle of last year, around the same time as the end of the carbon tax, its use has been on the rise.

HUGH SADDLER: Brown coal generation has just continued to climb steadily, as it has been doing since June of last year.

MICHAEL EDWARDS: That's Dr Hugh Saddler, the principal consultant for Pitt and Sherry, an environmental engineering consultancy. It compiles monthly data on the national energy market, which supplies electricity to 80 per cent of Australian consumers.

Coal generates 75 per cent of that electricity and the figures from April indicate that brown coal now constitutes 24 per cent of that amount.

HUGH SADDLER: The short term, or so-called (inaudible) marginal costs of production from the brown coal generators is extremely low because the cost of their fuel is very, very low, much lower than for the black coal generators. And that's what gives them their competitive advantage.

MICHAEL EDWARDS: According to Dr Saddler the removal of the carbon tax is the key reason for the increase.

HUGH SADDLER: As soon as the carbon price was abolished it started to go up. That's what we saw. And what we've been reporting every month since July of last year when the price went off is that brown coal generation immediately started going up. And that was because it was put in a much better competitive position than it has previously been, vis-a-vis the other coal and gas fire generators.

MICHAEL EDWARDS: Environmental groups are alarmed but not surprised.

Kellie Caught is the manager for Climate Change for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

KELLIE CAUGHT: Our electricity sector has just become more polluting, which is quite the opposite of what we're meant to be doing.

MICHAEL EDWARDS: Electricity production generates about a third of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions. The Federal Government is confident Australia will meet its target for cutting year 2000 level greenhouse gas emissions by 5 per cent by 2020. This is partly due to a prediction of declining demand for energy.

But Kellie Caught says this new data adds to the scepticism about the Government's plan.

KELLIE CAUGHT: Certainly all the analysis that we've seen from the experts have doubts that the Government will still be able to achieve the 5 per cent cut by 2020. The Government's latest emissions reduction fund auction shows that a lot of what they purchased won't be realised until after 2020.

So we're very concerned that they won't achieve that 5 per cent cut. And that 5 per cent cut is quite weak compared to other countries. We'd be asking the Government to do a lot more than what's currently on the table.

MICHAEL EDWARDS: Overall, emissions from the electricity generation sector have increased by more than 3 per cent since the end of the carbon tax.

MICHAEL BRISSENDEN: That report there from Michael Edwards.

The Daily Telegraph posted:

Struggle Street: SBS documentary has garbos trucking mad EXCLUSIVE MILES GODFREY THE DAILY TELEGRAPH MAY 05, 2015 12:00AM SHARE

GARBAGE trucks will blockade SBS’s headquarters as fury grows over the public broadcaster’s controversial Struggle Street program, which paints Mount Druitt residents in a hugely unflattering light and has been branded ­“publicly funded poverty porn”.

About a dozen trucks from Blacktown Council will stage the noisy protest outside SBS’s Artarmon offices tomorrow morning, piling more pressure on the taxpayer-funded broadcaster to postpone Struggle Street, which it says documents “the experiences of Australians living on the fringe”. The three-part program, which is due to air tomorrow night, follows the lives of at least 10 Mount Druitt residents. Preview ads have showed people with drugs and alcohol, people shouting and swearing, those with mental illness and a woman who calls her cat a “slut” for not ­telling the truth. It cost an estimated $350,000 an episode to produce, funded by SBS, Screen Australia and Screen NSW, and was made by Keo Films. “These stories could be told on the margins of any Australian capital or major regional town,” an SBS spokesman said.

“Pockets of disadvantage exist in many suburbs across Australia, this pocket being just representative of one.”

Blacktown Mayor Stephen Bali has sanctioned the garbos’ protest and wants SBS, under chief executive Michael Ebeid, to delay Struggle Street, which he branded “publicly funded poverty porn”, until all those who featured in the documentary had previewed their parts. He also wants it re-edited into a “proper documentary rather than a reality show”.

About 1200 people have signed a change.org petition to have the program suspended.(Yeah are TISM going to Eurovision? Think again sheeple!)

“We don’t run away from the fact there are social issues, not only in Mount Druitt but across NSW,” Mr Bali said. “But why are they attacking Mount Druitt instead of taking families from across the city? The trucks show what we think of the show: it’s garbage.” SBS has already made two edits, removing a scene where a central character, who has dementia, is shown breaking wind. It has also re-edited its ­promotional trailer, which contrasted “sparkling Sydney Harbour” with Mount Druitt, which it described as not the Sydney “in the brochures”.

Blacktown Senior Citizen of the Year Barry Robson said Struggle Street would reinforce stereotyping. “I’ve put up with this crap for 40 years,” he said.

SBS declined to comment last night.

quote:

The Italian Coast Guard says the corpses of ten people were discovered off the coast of Libya on Sunday during rescue operations. Officials came to the aid of at least 16 boats packed full of migrants, after people smugglers took advantage of calm seas to send several overcrowded vessels across the Mediterranean Sea. A tug and a merchant ship also helped in the efforts. The bodies were found in three separate operations, with Italian news agency Ansa reporting seven were found onboard two dinghies, while three people died when they jumped into the sea, and attempted to swim to a nearby trawler. Italy said it coordinated the rescue of more than 2,150 migrants on Sunday after announcing 3,427 had been saved earlier in the weekend.

quote:

Italian coastguard and navy ships led the rescue of more than 6,550 migrants in the Mediterranean Sea at the weekend, in a sign that the surge of refugees fleeing via Libya for a better life on European shores has accelerated. On Saturday, Italian coastguard officials say 3,790 people were saved from 17 separate boats in distress, marking one of the largest single-day tallies of rescued refugees. An additional 2,861 were estimated to have been rescued on Sunday, officials said.

gay picnic defence posted:

If you eat 3000 calories of them a day you'd still get fat... and orange. Some things are obviously harder to eat heaps of though.

Serrath posted:

It's not that simple, some cancers are simply less expensive to research, can be modelled on animals better or are further along in their research meaning we're closing to a treatment. It's not fair to compare research dollars vs mortality vs incidence side by side for different disorders, especially when those disorders are in such wildly different regions as the neural system vs the cardiovascular system.

A lot of funding toward prevention of lung cancer goes toward public awareness campaigns about modifiable risk factors (e.g., quit smoking programs) and this is appropriate due to the cost benefit analysis and intimate relationship between behaviours and risk of <this particular> class of cancers. Such distribution of funds aren't really appropriate for brain cancers, where the relationship between these risk factors and progression of the disease is less understood and more nebulous. I can guarantee that you'd save less people per dollar investing in brain cancer research but those dollars may contribute toward developing a better model of risk factors to development of the disease and maybe dollars invested in 2050 can be better allocated to risk factor type interventions.

thehomemaster posted:

Wow, good job wishing for a boring better world.

QUACKTASTIC posted:

RBA gonna cut interest rates again, that's sure to fix things.

QUACKTASTIC posted:

RBA gonna cut interest rates again, that's sure to fix things.