- The NIH budget included $2.4 million for a new condom design whose inventor is now being investigated for fraud
- Another $939,000 taught scientists that male fruit flies prefer younger females
- $257,000 went to create a companion website for first lady Michelle Obama’s White House garden
- It cost $592,000 to determine that chimpanzees with the best poop-flinging skills are also the best communicators, and another $117,000 to learn that most chimps are right-handed
- NIH director Dr. Francis Collins complained Sunday that a lack of funding is behind his agency’s failure to produce an Ebola vaccine in time to combat this year’s epidemic
David Martosko
The Daily Mail [UK]
13 Oct 2014
The $30 billion U.S. National Institutes of Health blamed tightening federal budgets on Monday for its inability to produce an Ebola vaccine, but a review of its grant-making history in the last 10 years has turned up highly unusual research that redirected precious funds away from more conventional public health projects.
The projects included $2.4 million to develop ‘origami’ condoms designed with Japanese folding paper in mind, and $939,000 to find out that male fruit flies prefer to romance younger females because the girl-flies’ hormone levels drop over time.
Other winners of NIH grants consumed $325,000 to learn that marriages are happier when wives calm down more quickly during arguments with their husbands, and $257,000 to make an online game as a companion to first lady Michelle Obama’s White House garden.
The agency also spent $117,000 in taxpayers’ grant dollars to discover that most chimpanzees are right-handed.
The same group of scientists determined, at a cost of $592,000 for NIH, that chimps with the best poop-throwing skills are also the best communicators. But while flinging feces might get another primate’s attention in the wild, they discovered, it’s not much good in captivity.
‘I’ve never in my life seen a chimp be given a banana for throwing s**t at someone,’ Emory University psychologist Bill Hopkins told Wired magazine…
Read the whole thing at The Daily Mail.
Related: Ebola Government Malfeasance
…If you went to a doctor and was told that your lump “could be cancer” and a second opinion was that “it cannot be cancer,” would you be confused? I would. Certainly not confidence-inspiring that two professionals can disagree so profoundly. One of those opinions is wrong and your life may hang in the balance until you sort through the haze. Similar disparate Ebola opinions understandably “shook confidence in the US’s ability to contain the virus.” How safe are we from Ebola? Many lives hang on that answer…
Betsy McCaughey writes, Our hospitals not ready for Ebola
…Explaining the Texas nurse’s infection, CDC chief Dr. Tom Frieden said, “At some point there was a breach of protocol, and that breach in protocol resulted in this infection.” That’s right: He blamed the nurse.
Frieden predicts more health-care workers will get Ebola if they too made mistakes. But doctors and nurses shouldn’t face an ultimatum: Make a mistake, and you die…
And in the “Are You Friggin’ Kidding Me Category?!?!?!”
Amid what some are calling the most severe medical emergency in modern times, CDC director Thomas Frieden says it’s time we start thinking about Ebola.
Frieden recently claimed that the U.S. infrastructure is so advanced that Ebola has no chance of spreading, but is now concerned with the procedures and protocols that are in place…
…The NBC News crew exposed to Ebola were forced into mandatory quarantine after chief medical correspondent Nancy Snyderman violated their voluntary isolation to visit her favorite soup restaurant, reports revealed…
Update: NIH says no money for Ebola virus? Somehow they found the money to study 14-year-old Chinese prostitutes (video)
…“Like rabid dogs in a butcher shop, Republicans have indiscriminately shredded everything in their path, including critical programs that could have dealt with the Ebola crisis before it reached our country. Yesterday, a health worker tested positive for the virus — now, the effects of the GOP’s fanatical hatred for our government may finally be exposed,” said Erica Payne, president and founder of the progressive Agenda Project Action Fund.”…
