Science, Technology & Health: January 2012 Archives
Um... abortion is safer than birth?
Getting a legal abortion is much safer than giving birth, suggests a new U.S. study published Monday.Researchers found that women were about 14 times more likely to die during or after giving birth to a live baby than to die from complications of an abortion.
It's not safer for the baby though.
(HT: James Taranto.)
Surgeon in Antarctic removes his own appendix.
One of the expedition's members was the 27 year old Leningrad surgeon Leonid Ivanovich Rogozov. He had interrupted a promising scholarly career and left on the expedition shortly before he was due to defend his dissertation on new methods of operating on cancer of the oesophagus. In the Antarctic he was first and foremost the team's doctor, although he also served as the meteorologist and the driver of their terrain vehicle.After several weeks Rogozov fell ill. He noticed symptoms of weakness, malaise, nausea, and, later, pain in the upper part of his abdomen, which shifted to the right lower quadrant. His body temperature rose to 37.5°C.1 2 Rogozov wrote in his diary:
"It seems that I have appendicitis. I am keeping quiet about it, even smiling. Why frighten my friends? Who could be of help? A polar explorer's only encounter with medicine is likely to have been in a dentist's chair."
(HT: GeekPress.)
