Welcome to your Wednesday open thread. I’m sure a lot of you are traveling today. Are people protesting the TSA pat downs? Are you driving or staying home for the holiday? I’m working today but I’m off tomorrow and Friday. I can’t wait!
Much money and research effort has been expended on searching for a vaccine to prevent people from getting infected by HIV. Although it’s not a vaccine, a new study shows that taking a pill for treating HIV cuts the infection rate:
Healthy gay men who took an anti-AIDS pill every day were well protected against contracting H.I.V. in a study suggesting that a new weapon against the epidemic has emerged.
In the study, published Tuesday by the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers found that the men taking Truvada, a common combination of two antiretroviral drugs, were 44 percent less likely to get infected with the virus that causes AIDS than an equal number taking a placebo.
But when only the men whose blood tests showed that they had taken their pill faithfully every day were considered, the pill was more than 90 percent effective, said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, head of the infectious diseases division of the National Institutes of Health, which paid for the study along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
This is a great advance but these treatments are still quite expensive, about $35/day. Hopefully this study means that these medications will become more affordable and available. It could make a big difference in some communities.
The dissonance is getting dizzying:
Bloomberg News had an item a couple of weeks ago, reporting, “Investors around the world say President Barack Obama is bad for the bottom line.”
The complaints are pretty laughable given reality.
The nation’s workers may be struggling, but American companies just had their best quarter ever.
American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.66 trillion in the third quarter, according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday. That is the highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago, at least in nominal or non-inflation-adjusted terms.
Corporate profits have been going gangbusters for a while. Since their cyclical low in the fourth quarter of 2008, profits have grown for seven consecutive quarters, at some of the fastest rates in history.
The point about adjusting these figures for inflation — in adjusted terms, corporate profits are merely fantastic, as opposed to record-breaking.
Either way, the point is corporate profits aren’t exactly faltering. Indeed, this data from the Commerce Department comes a month after a related report showing profits rising faster “than during any other 18-month period since the 1920s.”
We live in such odd times – businesses screaming about “anti-business” government while cleaning up in government bailouts. We keep talking about extending tax cuts for the rich for economic reasons while suffering through the worst job-creation decade ever. I’m not sure what we call what we’re experiencing – the post-fact era?