Those following space activities are probably familiar with various forms of the X Prize, which offers healthy sums of cash for groups or individuals that manage to meet certain scientific or technical accomplishments.  The most known is probably the Ansari X Prize, which was awarded to the folks behind SpaceShip One, who demonstrated private, reusable, suborbital spaceflight.  You can thank them for your ability to soar up to the edge of space on Virgin Galactic sometime in the near future (should you have the $200,000 price to flight).  Other X Prizes focus on space, genomics, automobiles and now, health care (Hat Tip, Scientifc Blogging).  DARPA – the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – has held several Grand Challenge events, where teams compete for prizes by demonstrating certain technological feats – most recently around autonomous driving.

Given the trend in this decade for flat (or close to it) government funding for research, alternative funding really is needed in order for the desired increases to happen.  However, I doubt that prizes can effectively bridge this gap.  They work – but are based on a fundamentally different economics than the scientific research that relies on the federal budget.  Prizes provide incentive, and the money and associated sales from the successful product or service can be used to fund other research, but the ’start-up costs’ (for lack of a better term) are born by the researchers.  They are also more application or problem focused, and while it’s not a stranger to academic research, it is not the focus of the majority of that research.

In today’s economic climate, it seems less than likely that universities will commit resources to support a speculative payoff.  However, private sector research has been on the decline for years, and it remains to be seen that there can be enough prizes to boost private sector activity to restore prior levels.  If foundation giving does decline, as it might given the current economy, prizes themselves may have difficulty expanding.  In short, it’s going to hurt all over.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported yesterday about the case of Dr. Ned Feder, an NIH employee who wrote to several publications suggesting that NIH grantees disclose payments they receive from medical companies.  The payments are rarely made public, either in articles published from the associated research or in grant applications.  Given that the results of this research will influence what products are prescribed or used, the conflict of interest – at least the potential for it – should be clear.

However, the NIH does not require disclosure of these payments, or of consulting arrangements between researchers and companies.  The latter usually has to be disclosed to the researchers’ home institutions, but that information remains confidential. Dr. Feder argued for strong public disclosure of any kind of financial relationships between researchers and medical companies as a condition of receiving grant money.  The NIH recently had to deal with incidents where researchers failed to disclose payments from pharmaceutical companies.  It has risen to the point where Senator Grassley has been investigating the matter.  Their response to Dr. Feder was to formally reprimand him, an action that was rescinded after protest.  While I can understand the need for an agency to present a consistent stand on matters of policy, their unwillingness to embrace this kind of open accesss is disappointing.  Dr. Feder is no longer with NIH, and works now for the Project on Government Oversight.

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Starting next Monday, October 27, there will be a national dialogue – conducted online – about health information technology and privacy.  While the campaign focus on health care has been on how and who should finance it, the transition from paper to electronic health records is a significant issue that does not attract a lot of public attention.  This dialogue will focus on privacy – how electronic records can or should be restricted and protected from individuals that have no business reading your health information.  The question that will frame the dialogue:

How can we use information technology to improve healthcare, while safeguarding privacy?

Health information technology legislation has been working through Congress, but has stalled, at least in part, due to privacy concerns.  Maybe this dialogue can hit on an idea to break through the legislative impass.

Did you know that today is “World Malaria Day“? I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t; a search of Google News shows 233 stories on “world malaria day” published in the past 24 hours. A search of “climate change” over the past 24 hours shows 45,819 stories. This post is about the inevitable conflict in objectives that results when we frame the challenge of global warming in terms of “reducing emissions” rather than “energy modernization.” The result is inevitably a battle between mitigation and adaptation, when in reality they should be complements.

Why does malaria matter? According to Jeffrey Sachs:

The numbers are staggering: there are 300 to 500 million clinical cases every year, and between one and three million deaths, mostly of children, are attributable to this disease. Every 40 seconds a child dies of malaria, resulting in a daily loss of more than 2,000 young lives worldwide. These estimates render malaria the pre-eminent tropical parasitic disease and one of the top three killers among communicable diseases.

The Economist reported a few weeks ago on efforts to eradicate malaria. The article referenced a study by McKinsey and Co. on the “business case” (PDF) for eradicating malaria. Here are the reported 5-year benefits:

• Save 3.5 million lives

• Prevent 672 million malaria cases

• Free up 427,000 hospital beds in sub-Saharan Africa

• Generate more than $80 billion in increased GDP for Africa

I want to focus on the prospects for increasing African GDP, for as we have learned via the Kaya Identity, an increase in GDP will necessarily mean an increase in carbon dioxide emissions. So what are the implications of eradicating malaria for future greenhouse gas emissions from Africa?

To answer this question I obtained data on African greenhouse gas emissions from CDIAC, and I subtracted out South Africa, which accounts for a large share of current African emissions. I found that the average annual increase from 1990-2004 was 5.2%, which I will use as a baseline for projecting business-as-usual emissions growth into the future.

The next question is what effect the eradication of malaria might have on African GDP. The McKinsey & Co. report referenced a paper by Gallup and Sachs (2001, link) which speculates (and I think that is a fair characterization) that complete eradication could boost GDP growth by as much as 3% per year. This would take African emissions growth rates to 8.2%, which is still well short of what has been observed in China this decade, and thus not at all unreasonable. So I’ll use this as an upper bound (not as a prediction, to be clear). So if we graph future emissions under my definition of business-as-usual and also the Gallup/Sachs upper bound, we get the following curves to 2050.

The figure shows that by eradicating malaria, it is conceivable that there will be an corresponding increase in annual African emissions of more than 11 GtC above BAU. Today, the entire world has about 9 GtC. For those following our debate with Joe Romm earlier this week, this would mean that he would have to come up with another way to get 10 more “wedges,” as rapid African growth is included in none of the BAU emissions scenarios. Put another way, the success of his proposed policies depends on not eradicating malaria since rapid African GDP growth busts his wedge budget.

The implications should be obvious: If a goal of climate policy is simply to “reduce emissions” then this goal clearly conflicts with efforts to eradicate malaria, which will inevitably lead to an increase in emissions. But if the goal is to modernize the global energy system — including the developing the capacity to provide vast quantities of carbon-free energy, then there is no conflict here.

This distinction helps to explain why there persists an adaptation vs. mitigation debate, and why it is that advocates of adaptation (to which eradicating malaria falls under) are often excoriated as “deniers” or “delayers” — adaptation just doesn’t help the emissions reduction challenge. The continued denigration of those who support adaptation will continue until we reframe the climate debate in terms of energy modernization and adaptation, which are complementary approaches to sustainable development.

Over at The New Scientist Fred Pearce takes a broader view and warns of “green fascism” on the issue of development and population:

But there is another question that I find increasingly being asked. Should we be trying to stop others having babies, especially people in poor countries with fast-growing populations?

I must say I thought this kind of illiberal thinking had been banished from the environmental movement. But it keeps seeping back. When I give public talks on climate change, I am often asked if all the efforts in the rich world won’t be wiped out by rising populations in the poor world.

Isn’t overpopulation more dangerous than overconsumption? I say no. But the unpalatable truth is that a lot of environmental thinking over the past half century has been underpinned by an unhealthy preoccupation with the breeding propensity of Asians and Africans. . .

Only recently, US groups opposed to all migration tried to get their policies adopted by the blue-chip environment group, the Sierra Club. To many they sounded like a fringe group. Actually they were an echo of the earlier mainstream.

And the echo is becoming louder. We hear it in the climate change debate. No matter that the average European or North American has carbon emissions 10 times greater than the average Indian or African, somehow it is those pesky breeding foreigners who are really to blame.

And now food shortages are growing and we will get more. Ehrlich, we are bound to be told, was right after all. You have been warned: green fascism could soon be on the march.

It is long overdue to rethink how we think about the climate debate.

Coming in a little late to this one, but on 30-June the WSJ ran an op-ed by Roy Grinker of George Washington University on the vaccines-autism circus. The article is moneywalled, of course, so you’ll need special access to see it, but a couple of snippets should give a good idea of his arguments.

I base my opinion on scientific literature and no court decision is going to change it. Neither will a court decision change the minds of the antivaccine advocates. Two distinct communities have emerged, and though they both employ the language of science, their ideas are simply incommensurable. The two groups co-exist, like creationism and evolutionary biology, but they operate on such different premises that a true dialogue is nearly impossible.

The real problem here, as we have pointed out a few thousand times, is Dan Sarewitz’s excess of objectivity. There is enough ammunition for both sides to keep firing.

We should not expect too much out of this trial, or the next eight. The scientific community and antivaccine parent groups will each continue to look for clues under their own lampposts, because that is where the light is. But we should pay careful attention to this conflict. The antivaccine movement may be evidence that public confidence in science is eroding, which means that public health is at risk too.

Grinker may be right here, but I think something else is important that he misses. The vaccines debate is not and has never been about the science, and it will continue to not be about the science. It is about whether it is reasonable for the government to mandate (whether it does so explicitly or implicitly) that all children receive vaccines. This is a social liberty and public health policy question, not a science question. The antivaccine movement has been forced to debate in the world of science when they want to be debating in the world of social policy. But science as a machine is a hard thing to stand up to, and the antivaccine movement must have sensed that they would get more traction making arguments about bad science than about social liberty. Clearly the argument “I don’t want the government to force my kid to get a shot” is a lot less compelling than “the government is poisoning our kids and covering it up with bad science.”

Well, according Hannah Brown writing in BMJ the answer is “yes” (h/t SciDev.net). It turns out that simply investing money in scientific research or technology development is not sufficient to realize benefits on the ground. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has already changed he world for the better, and has much future potential, so it is good that it is learning the limitations of the so-called “linear model” of science and society sooner rather than later. Here is an excerpt from Brown’s commentary:

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This news story from Reuters highlights the consequences of neglecting certain areas of research and policy:

One billion poor suffer from neglected diseases: WHO

Last Updated: 2007-02-14 9:44:10 -0400 (Reuters Health)

JAKARTA (Reuters) – One billion people in tropical countries are still suffering from debilitating and disfiguring diseases associated with poverty, but many remain untreated due to official neglect, health officials said on Wednesday.

Despite the existence of inexpensive and safe treatment, those who suffer from diseases such as leprosy, elephantiasis and yaws remain untreated due to a lack of resources and political will, said Jai Narain, South East Asia director of communicable diseases at the World Health Organization (WHO).

“These tropical diseases have been neglected by policy makers, by the research community and also by the international community,” Nairan told a news conference at the start of an international meeting to tackle tropical diseases.

“But at the same time these diseases cause considerable amount of suffering, disability, disfigurement and even social economic impact, particularly for populations which are extremely marginalised,” he said.

Nairan said the fact that the diseases were not in the headlines and not global problems like polio, HIV/AIDS and malaria contributed to the lack of attention.

“These diseases are closely related to poverty. The elimination of such diseases would be a significant step toward poverty reduction,” he said. Many who contract the diseases suffer from discrimination and are shunned by their communities, said Nyoman Kandun, director general for communicable disease control at the Indonesian health ministry. . . .

A story in the New York Times today on the effectiveness of colonoscopy highlights the importance of evaluating the effectiveness of action. One of the biggest areas of study in academic policy research is evaluation, and the federal government has an entire agency that focuses on evaluation in the Government Accountability Office.

But in policy as in medicine – as the colonoscopy case illustrates — it is amazing how often evaluation of the effectiveness of action is overlooked or simply not done. Evaluation matters because it indicates what is working and what works. In the case of colonoscopy, improved health outcomes are apparently achieved with only a minor change in medical practice.

Saturday’s New York Times had an interesting article (registration required) about scientific stuides finding possible health benefits of red wine, and the political constraints on the wine industry to advertise those benefits. Here is an excerpt from the article:

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In a world where influential leaders commonly claim that it is terrorism or global warming that is the world’s greatest problem, I was struck by this page 8 article from today’s New York Times, which contained the following:

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