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)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @02:14PM
Only $13 million invested yet this could have far reaching effects in countries with poor access to birth control
(Score: 1, Troll) by The Shire on Wednesday December 11 2019, @03:43PM (12 children)
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.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Pslytely Psycho on Wednesday December 11 2019, @04:08PM (9 children)
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
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)
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)
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)
"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)
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.
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Wednesday December 11 2019, @06:42PM
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
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
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
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!
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Wednesday December 11 2019, @03:57PM (2 children)
The second link states:
Those who would benefit most from such drugs are frequently the ones least likely to accept them in the first place.
The people in many of these countries don't trust their own governments, and with good reason.
In addition many of those same people don't trust foreign health workers anymore either due to phony CIA operations.
So how are you going to convince these people that this is safe, effective and real?
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @11:27PM (1 child)
In many ways, it depends on what they are taking. It is sort of like any medical denialism in that it is a lot easier to deny the evidence-based medicine when people aren't dying/sick around you. So with things like Polio vaccination in Pakistan, Ebola treatment in DRC, or blood transfusions in the USA, you can safely ignore the problems because you don't see them. And if there is a flare up after the workers leave, then it is easy to blame them for causing the very thing they are trying to prevent. However, when you have an active outbreak killing your friends, family, and tribe, suddenly things look very different. That, and actually seeing the medicine work, is how most people get convinced in these situations.
This also has a benefit where, unlike other daily pills for things like Malaria, you don't have to have subsistence farmers meter out the doses for a month at a time, or stretching pills, just plain forgetting due to their daily subsistence farming grind, etc. So you can, basically, ensure compliance in most of the population due to the periodic pass-throughs of aide workers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 12 2019, @04:18AM
It has nothing to do with 'denialism'. One of the examples he specifically referenced, without stating, Pakistan. Do you know how we located Bin Laden? The CIA ran 'vaccination clinics' where they were mass harvesting DNA, looking to find people related to him, and then spying on them. Suffice to say that Pakistani views on Bin Laden were somewhat different than American views on him, and 'vaccine clinics' led to what would be perceived as his extrajudicial assassination. You're going to have a hell of a hard time pushing for more vaccine clinics in Pakistan now. We did even worse stateside with the Tuskegee experiment, offering people free 'medical treatment' and then running medical experiments on them, including infecting some with syphilis and then withholding the treatment (penicillin) even after it was discovered, to continue research. Yay government!
Similarly take the Orthodox Jews in NYC. They get a pass in the media for reasons one can only imagine, but are one of the most concentrated groups of unvaccinated peoples - and indeed one of the common spots for outbreaks. But they choose not to vaccinate because they feel it goes against their religion and do not have an issue with the potential fatal consequences of not doing such. The caricature of 'denialism' portrayed by our media is extremely inaccurate even for the west, but it's just completely and wholly inappropriate for regions outside the US. People don't seem to understand that mindsets change radically between groups.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @04:00PM (2 children)
My Greek buddy wants to know about sheep. He says nobody fucks pigs!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @04:07PM (1 child)
I hear they have to fuck pigs in a lot of countries just to stay in business :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @04:40PM
Q: What do you want to be when you grow up, Andy?
A: I don't know, but I don't want to be a pig fucker like my daddy!
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday December 11 2019, @04:10PM (5 children)
It must be interesting finding volunteers. "Hey we've got a new version of The Pill that we want to test...but it may not work." I would think that it's usually a binary switch for people, whether they absolutely do not want to get pregnant, or they want kids.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Wednesday December 11 2019, @04:59PM
Nah, the pitch is different form that. Try this one instead:
* Same drug as current pill you're already on
* More convenient than a once-a-day dose
* During trial period hormone levels will be monitored periodically to ensure correct dosage is achieved (can warn patient if effectiveness is compromised)
During the initial trial a closely-monitored patient would have less likelihood of becoming pregnant, not more.
Honestly, if the delivery mechanism works as designed this would probably be a big improvement in outcomes compared to the current remember-to-take-your-pill-every-day dosage schedule many women are on. Most forms of birth control work perfectly if used perfectly; it's the human error ("I forgot to use a condom that one time") that drives up the stats for births per year per thousand women using a particular method.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 3, Informative) by Pslytely Psycho on Wednesday December 11 2019, @05:44PM (3 children)
The original pill trials had no trouble attracting participants and were performed in Puerto Rico to avoid anti-contraceptive laws in Massachusetts and the difficulty of keeping track of the subjects, making the isolated island the perfect place to conduct the studies.
Of course in a world with reasonably effective contraception and informed consent regulations, finding qualified test subjects will be more difficult. Optionally they could pay participants, or seek out participants in parts of the country where healthcare is poorest. I don't believe places with restrictive abortion bans also ban contraceptive use (but who knows anymore!) so there may be a rich pool of volunteers in places like Kentucky, Alabama and the like. People who either can't afford or have limited access to contraceptives.
All non-medically implanted contraceptives (placed in a clinical setting, IUD, Implants, injections) currently have failure rates greater than 4%.
Intrauterine Contraception
Copper T intrauterine device (IUD)-failure rate: 0.8%
Levonorgestrel intrauterine system (LNG IUD)-failure rate: 0.1-0.4%
Hormonal Methods
Implant-failure rate: 0.01%
Injection or “shot”-failure rate: 4%
Combined oral contraceptives-failure rate: 7%
Progestin only pill-failure rate: 7%
Patch-failure rate: 7%
Hormonal vaginal contraceptive ring-failure rate: 7%
Barrier Methods
Diaphragm or cervical cap failure rate for the diaphragm: 17%
Sponge-failure rate: 14% for women who have never had a baby and 27% for women who have had a baby
Male condom failure rate: 13%
Female condom-failure rate: 21%
Spermicides-failure rate: 21%
So as long as they can keep the failure rate around or less than 7% they should be good. After all, all contraceptive measures could be flown under the banner of 'Baby Maybe.'
The Rhythm Method could be called 'by the wombfull.' Since we know how bad the average person is with math...(average failure rate 24% per year)
:)
Sources:
https://www.plannedparenthood.org/files/1514/3518/7100/Pill_History_FactSheet.pdf [plannedparenthood.org]
https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/contraception/index.htm [cdc.gov]
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/rhythm-method/about/pac-20390918 [mayoclinic.org]
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Zinho on Wednesday December 11 2019, @07:12PM (2 children)
Reminder for the casual reader about how the "failure rate" is measured:
7 conceptions per year per 100 couples exclusively using that method for the entire year = 7% failure rate
If the failure rate were on a per-use basis then 7% would be entirely unacceptable for the majority of couples.
Also note that much of the higher failure rates for barrier/spermicide methods is due to inconsistent use of the method, i.e. "Yes, we have a box of condoms on our nightstand, and we have been using them all year except that one time when we were just caught up in the moment." Apparently, ~21% of couples using condoms have at least one "caught up in the moment" event per year, because plastic barriers are kind of impermeable when they're in the right place.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Wednesday December 11 2019, @07:48PM
Thank you for adding that explanation. I had not thought about explaining the nature of such.
One note I got from reading the entire transcripts was about condoms. Using non-water soluble lubricants (oils) can cause condoms to break down, causing both breakage and permeability. I would also expect some level of defects, (not cited in the articles, personal opinion) even if very slight.
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @11:44PM
You described "typical use" measurement. There is also the "perfect use" metric, which tries to control for that and to make sure the technique is correctly used (e.g. fertility awareness not measuring the same time everyday or putting condoms on incorrectly). The problem with both measurements is that people provide false information: not mentioning that they both use a condom and withdraw, saying they use a condom every time when they don't, following proper diaphragm timing protocols, etc. In one study I read after going down that rabbit hole, they found that people misreported various measures more than half the time. In the case of the pill, they found that almost 80% of respondents misreported data enough to significantly affect their individual fertility from the reported data, and a large percentage misreported the sexual activities (both amount and type) they participated in.
(Score: 2, Troll) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday December 11 2019, @04:23PM (1 child)
All natural, called "periods".
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday December 12 2019, @03:32AM
Except that doesn't work. Ask the good Catholic girls you know with more kids than they bargained for. Like the song says: the rhythm [method] is gonna getcha!
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...