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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday December 11 2019, @01:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-long-is-a-month? dept.

Submitted via IRC for chromas

A Once-a-Month Birth Control Pill Is Coming

Unless, that is, you embed them in a flexible silicon ninja star that folds up neatly into pill form.

That's the solution a team led by scientists at Brigham and Women's Hospital and MIT came up with about five years ago. Back then they were building slow-release pills designed to deliver treatments for malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV. But in a scientific first, they've now demonstrated that the same invention can also deliver a steady drip of contraceptive hormones in the body of a pig for up to 29 days.

"From an engineering aspect, the key novelty is the ability to deliver a drug for a month after a single ingestion event," says Giovanni Traverso, a gastroenterologist and biomedical engineer at Brigham and Women's and MIT, who co-authored the new study, published today in Science Translational Medicine. The proof-of-concept experiments were conducted late last year. Since then, the long-lasting contraceptive has begun to be commercially developed by a Boston-area company called Lyndra Therapeutics, which Traverso cofounded with MIT bioengineer Robert Langer in 2015. In July, the startup received $13 million from the Gates Foundation to advance the monthly pill to human trials, with a focus on bringing it to low- and middle-income countries.

A once-a-month oral contraceptive, Science Translational Medicine (DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aay2602)


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  • (Score: 1, Troll) by The Shire on Wednesday December 11 2019, @03:43PM (12 children)

    by The Shire (5824) on Wednesday December 11 2019, @03:43PM (#931076)

    Gates Foundation actively working to reduce mortality in third world countries while sterilizing woman in first world nations.

    This will not end well for humanity, but it's going to be awesome for the globalists like Gates.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Pslytely Psycho on Wednesday December 11 2019, @04:08PM (9 children)

    by Pslytely Psycho (1218) on Wednesday December 11 2019, @04:08PM (#931098)

    Voluntary birth control is a far cry from sterilization.
    Please cite where the Foundation is actively sterilizing anyone.

    Many women opt for voluntary sterilization after a couple of births. Many men opt for it to not leave a trail of unwanted children. Both are voluntary actions that have been occurring since procedures were available, long before the Gates Foundation existed.
    You make it sound like they are actively sterilizing people against their will.
    If that is your claim, cite your sources.

    --
    Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @04:55PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @04:55PM (#931124)

      Voluntary birth control is a far cry from sterilization.

      Not all that far. It's all right there in the lower abdomen/pelvic region.

    • (Score: 2) by The Shire on Wednesday December 11 2019, @06:25PM (7 children)

      by The Shire (5824) on Wednesday December 11 2019, @06:25PM (#931158)

      Perhaps you can enlighten me on the practical difference between voluntary birth control and voluntary sterilization. They mean the same thing - make it easy and convenient in first world nations to avoid having children while simultaneously encouraging rapid breeding in third world nations. Then turning around and claiming that first world nations must import immigrants to make up for their declining population growth. This is precisely what UN Agenda 21 is designed to do.

      • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Pslytely Psycho on Wednesday December 11 2019, @06:40PM (4 children)

        by Pslytely Psycho (1218) on Wednesday December 11 2019, @06:40PM (#931164)

        For one. I disagree with your conclusion*..but that isn't even relevant here. I was responding to The Gates Foundation accusation of sterilizing western women.

        Reducing the burden of humanity on the world is a good thing. But it takes cooperation amongst the entire world to achieve. That will never happen so your fears are misplaced.

        *yes, I have read the entire document.

        --
        Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
        • (Score: 2) by The Shire on Wednesday December 11 2019, @07:31PM (3 children)

          by The Shire (5824) on Wednesday December 11 2019, @07:31PM (#931184)

          "Reducing the burden of humanity on the world" is a phrase you will only hear them say in developed countries.

          In undeveloped countries they instead work hard to make sure the population skyrockets by providing free food, housing, and medical care, but never contraception. It's a well thought out process - you can't fault them for doing the humanitarian work to prevent disease and famine, but these activities also result in overpopulation. If you give rats an unlimited source of food and curb disease it's not hard to see what the result will be.

          But first world nations, they prefer to work towards reducing the family. Then they insist that populations from undeveloped countries must be moved here to offset that drop in population. Continue to mix all the nations up enough and suddenly you don't have nations anymore - just a world wide grey ooze that can more easily be subjected to globalist control.

          • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Pslytely Psycho on Wednesday December 11 2019, @08:07PM (2 children)

            by Pslytely Psycho (1218) on Wednesday December 11 2019, @08:07PM (#931211)

            You are entitled to your opinion. But I feel your reasoning to be inaccurate. Large families are necessary for subsistence farming due both to the large amount of work and mortality rate. Once past the subsistence level, populations historically tend to level off and reduce as it's no longer a survival requirement.
            As to third world countries, yes, some degree of what you say is accurate, but it's not like they have become food paradises, free of disease. Without economic and trade improvements they still live near the subsistence level with high mortality rates. Corruption in many of these places also counters any good that has been done. But overall, it still goes that advancement generally brings a leveling out of populations and there is no reason to believe the same will not occur if conditions can be improved.

            No nefarious reasons required.

            Good day to you. I'm off to take my grandchildren out to play in the freshly fallen snow. Sleds ahoy!

            --
            Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 12 2019, @12:57AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 12 2019, @12:57AM (#931285)

              Don't argue with a white supremacist and expect reasoning.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 12 2019, @08:17AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 12 2019, @08:17AM (#931345)

              I find your reasoning suspect here as well. What you're arguing is based upon a correlation that is widely repeated but seems to run into problems when you look at the data. Most of the world, certainly the developed world, moved beyond subsistence farming long ago, yet the dramatic declines in fertility are an extremely new thing. And, more interestingly, it wasn't just a gradual decline in fertility as would be expected as we gradually transition from e.g. agrarian to industrial to post-industrial nations, but a hyper-rapid change. The world bank has a nice little page where you can graph and cross-map fertility between nations here [worldbank.org]. Another condemnation against the necessity argument is that there remain vast exceptions on both sides. For instance Israel currently has one of the highest fertility rates in the world outside Africa, and needless to say it's not so they can raise large families for subsistence farming. By contrast Brazil still has a huge agriculture sector that's relatively low tech, are extremely poor, and have an even lower fertility rate than the US (though we're catching down).

              I think one of the primary drivers of fertility is simply cultural. China and Iran are obvious examples of this. They both engaged in anti-fertility programs and they had a tremendously negative impact on their fertility rates. Both, incidentally, are now trying to reverse that and also seeing success. Those were top down law driven systems, but there's no reason to expect the same isn't true of culture in general. We currently live in a society where we celebrate homosexuality and massively overrepresented it in media, where boys can be girls, where being put off by that notion (perhaps because you view your partner as somebody to have children of your own with) is consider phobic, where women who toil to no end in pointless jobs are celebrated as 'liberated', where those who choose to raise a family and considered quaint, so forth and so on.

              The problem you might notice today is that this culture is mostly relegated to the west. And not just to the west, but to a section of it: high education, higher income, secular, liberal. These folks are dying off. And they're being replaced by those who don't adopt such cultures: lower education, lower income, religious, conservative. This is why I think the population predictions are misguided. We're going to indeed see a population decline but that's simply because the former group are currently dying off faster than the latter group are reproducing. Then we reach an inflection point where that changes and populations will continue growing - just with a vastly different primary demographic makeup worldwide. For instance Pew did an interesting study [pewforum.org] on religious population projections in the future:

              Buddhists - dying off incredibly fast
              Unaffiliated/Atheist/Agnostic - dying fast
              Christians - stagnating
              Muslims - skyrocketing

              The world's going to look extremely different in 50 years, and it's not because of a few degrees of temperature change.

      • (Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Wednesday December 11 2019, @06:42PM

        by Pslytely Psycho (1218) on Wednesday December 11 2019, @06:42PM (#931165)

        Oh, I forgot. Voluntary birth control is reversible at will as it is not mandatory.

        --
        Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 12 2019, @01:38PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 12 2019, @01:38PM (#931381)

        Actually, it has been shown that the best way to reduce population growth is to fight child mortality.

        I now that seems backwards, and it does take a generation to take effect, but what happens is people go from the mentality of:
        "My kids are gunna die, I must have enough of them that some survive!"
        to:
        "My kids are gunna be with me for at least 18 years, I have to ensure that I don't have more of them than I can provide for!"

        This chart shows how well correlated these metrics are currently:
        https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality-vs-population-growth [ourworldindata.org]

        I can't find the study that looked at it over time, but they basically found that what happened, in country after country is that mortality dropped, population exploded for a generation, then leveled off, or ever dropped after that.

  • (Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @07:30PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @07:30PM (#931183)

    I agree with everything you've said, except for this ending well for globalists like Gates. Globalists benefit from open borders, but it's quite easy to see what happens if you import a bunch of culturally incompatible, low education individuals into first world nations. You basically create a surge in nationalism that's going to likely result in far stronger borders in the mid to long run. You don't get a Brexit without a Merkel. You damn sure don't get an AfD without a Merkel. And globalists also benefit from economic growth and development, yet once again the 'import Mid Eastfrica' strategy goes rather against this.

    In my opinion Gates is just having his Carnegie moment - he lived a pretty scummy life, got old, realized he's going to die one day all those extra 0's on the end of his net worth are pretty much pointless in the end, and is trying to make up for it. Yet he does not know how to be 'good'. So he's trying to take his ques from others. His behavior feels a lot like what you would get if you had a robot, completely incapable of understanding 'goodness' (or long-term consequences), and told it to try to become 'good' as defined by some web searches.

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @11:14PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @11:14PM (#931257)

    Gates Foundation actively working to reduce mortality in third world countries while sterilizing woman in first world nations.

    This will not end well for humanity, but it's going to be awesome for the globalists like Gates.

    You tell 'em! You are so right! These librul scum are trying to destroy freedom and capitalism, to make way for the new global caliphate!

    Despite what good and decent folk think, our fearless leader has *not* (for fear of assassination by the deep state) dismantled the FEMA concentration camps. Unless dear leader gets another four years, good, right-thinking Americans will begin to be herded into those stinking holes on 21 January, 2021 to make way for the hordes of filthy muzzies* waiting at the Mexican border!

    Stock up on ammunition, friends. We're gonna need it!

    Jade Helm! Jade Helm!

    *And they will violate your sweet, innocent daughters with their dirty sand nigger sperm!