By STEVEN JONAS MD, MPH  - 01.07.15

As the world that is interested in such matters knows, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee has finally released the (redacted) 524-page Executive Summary of its 6000-page report on torture and the CIA, headed "Panel Faults C.I.A. Over Brutality and Deceit in Terrorism Interrogations." One cannot be sure why the Chair, Sen. Diane Feinstein...

By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH - 12.05.14

The doctrine of white supremacy was invented in 17th century North America to justify the use and practice of slavery in the British colonies (and at the time not just limited to the south of what became the United States, but in all of them).  Just before the First US Civil War, the doctrine was well-summarized by Alexander Stephens, a Southern Unionist who later became Vice-President of the Confederate States of America under the arch-secessionist Jefferson Davis:

By STEVEN JONAS MD, MPH - 11.04.14

An epidemic is sweeping the country. Congress - especially the GOP - is outraged. The Republican propaganda machine, especially Fox - and increasingly CNN - is going full blast with an ongoing headline basically blaring, "The Increasingly Incompetent President's Responsibility to do Something, now!", claiming dilly-dallying, shilly-shallying on the part of the White House, the CDC and what have you.

By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH   on 10.03.14

Elizabeth Kolbert is a science and environmental affairs writer for The New Yorker.  She is also a master story teller.  A book like “The Sixth Extinction” could be both dry and depressing.  Depending upon your point of view, it certainly can be considered to be in the latter category, but dry, certainly not.  Ms. Kolbert has a lot to tell us about science, our environment, and what our species, Homo sapiens, is doing to it.  It could read like a doctoral dissertation, but it does not.  She tells her story in a lively, engaging way, and indeed, for some readers at least,...

By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH,  - 09.04.14

A couple of months ago I saw the movie the “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” and published a review of it. In that review, I noted that among the levels on which the movie could be seen was as an essay in paleo-anthropology.  In the movie, a group of great apes (collectively known as the “Simians”) and a group of Homo sapiens are survivors of a world-wide, highly fatal infectious disease epidemic which the humans conveniently name the “Simian flu” (even though its origin was of human manufacture, to be experimented with on apes.)