Delicious LiveJournal Links for 3-4-2010

[andrewducker]

• The 1983 Labour Manifesto - some ideas whose time has no come...
  (tags: finance pension uk politics)
• What actually effects teenage pregnancy rates?
  (tags: abortion contraception statistics uk)
• Hand-held device on trial for migraine sufferers - works for 40% of them.
  (tags: migraine pain technology)
• "American Taliban" Isn't Hyperbole Anymore
  (tags: america religion)
• New French anti-smoking ads are...odd to put it mildly.
  (tags: smoking advertising)
• Damn Cool Algorithms Part 1: BK-Trees
  (tags: algorithms programming search trees datastructures algorithm)
• To Avoid Funding Married Homosexuals, Catholic Charities Denies Benefits to All Spouses
  (tags: gay rights usa christianity catholicism)
• We're so good at medical studies that most of them are wrong
  (tags: science statistics research)
• Chicago skyscraper wins 2009 architecture award
  Oooh, shiny
  (tags: Architecture)

Comments

[feorag.livejournal.com]

There's a weird thing in that teen pregnancy link. There are two trends mentioned:

* health scares about STIs reduce conceptions in women under 20,
* health scares about contraception increase conceptions in women under 20.

But, the type of contraception used to protect against STIs, condoms, haven't been the subject of a health scare in the period concerned.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Surely not that weird if the overall effect is for STI scares to reduce the rate of PIV intercourse, and for contraception scares to reduce the rate of contraceptive use but not to reduce the rate of PIV intercourse sufficiently to keep the conception rate steady - or perhaps swapping a reliable actual-use method (oral contraceptive) for less reliable ones (condoms).

More simply, a clap scare puts you off sex but a pill scare doesn't.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

The reliability of condoms is about the same as the pill, IIRC. Both need to be used correctly to work, which is harder than it seems, and the pill can be rendered unreliable by a stomach upset.

Most younger women I know use a long term form of contraception administered as an injection.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

The reliability of condoms is about the same as the pill, IIRC.

Er, not so far as I know - although to be fair my memory was that the difference was much greater than the data I can put my hands on suggest.

Taking theNHS Clinical Knowledge Summary you get typical use failure rates (i.e. including all the user cockups, as it were) of 15% for condom and 8% for oral pill, and perfect use failure rates (method failure) of 2% for condom and 0.3% for oral pill.

(These percentages are women experiencing an unintended pregnancy within the first year of use.)

Long term implants/injectables are fairly recent as contraceptives and would only show up in the last quarter or so of the time span in the article. But they are a lot more reliable in both typical use and perfect use senses - Depo Provera is 3% typical use and 0.3% perfect use, and Implanon (etonogestrel implant) is 0.05%/0.05%, which is getting down to below detectable given sampling - ten times better than female sterilisation!

If you switched from Depo Provera to condoms, you'd be about five times as likely to get pregnant. If you switched from the oral pill to condoms, you'd be about two to five times as likely to get pregnant. If a lot of young women were doing that you'd definitely see an increase in the birth rate.

"American Taliban"

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

So wait, they're against earth day? And breast cancer awareness? And churches? AGH! So so wrong :(