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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)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Pslytely Psycho on Wednesday December 11 2019, @08:07PM (2 children)
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
Don't argue with a white supremacist and expect reasoning.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 12 2019, @08:17AM
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.