Since this is a special publication and since it was published in 1977 (after the Privacy Act of 1974), I'm wondering if NASA's condition for astronauts on this mission was to release mission-related medical science to the public.
Speculating:
If this is a condition of employment as an astronaut, then it probably wouldn't include conditions confirmed not to be caused by being in space, which means this'll stay confidential until NASA has fully diagnosed the crew member and figured out what likely happened.
And if it turns out the crew member's issue was entirely unrelated to the mission, it stays under wraps but new science or procedures are devised to better manage this and related conditions in space.
> Why be so secretive? This is not a military mission. These missions cost a lot of taxpayer money (money well spend you may argue), but we deserve full transparency.
We deserve as much transparency as we can get on the science we as taxpayers paid for, not full de-anonymization of the bodily happenings of living crew. There's certainly valuable science here, but the crew member doesn't have to be outed for it.
> You don't get to go to space on other people's money and expect privacy.
I don't think this is a healthy mindset, and there's a heck of a slippery slope with this argument. Would we apply this to companies receiving federal grants too? Contractors? Universities? Schools? That's a lot of people who'll lose medical privacy for something probably unrelated to their job, and there'll be a much smaller applicant pool for the jobs themselves if applicants are aware that their own internal issues might be disclosed when the public clamors for it.
> We might want to learn from what went wrong here.
Agree, NASA certainly will, and new science and engineering will come of it that we benefit from. But that doesn't have to involve breaching medical privacy and ethics.
I'm genuinely fine sharing my medical history, but I don't know if my lack of shame about e.g. testicular torsion, or the way that I lost my notes for a bit and unnecessarily got repeats of vaccines I'd already had, are a sign of being in possession of a boring medical history, or an indication of an uncommonly diminished shame response.
Whatever it is, I am aware that my lack of concern here is something which makes me different from normal people. I don't really get why people in general are ashamed of their medical histories, but I nevertheless absolutely do support everyone's right to keep such secrets, because there's a few specific cases where the medical history reveals something socially damaging either in the present or with a risk of it becoming so in the future, the obvious example of which is an abortion given the US seems to be facing a loss of freedom in this regard.
(Perhaps most people have something socially damaging in their medical histories, and I've just not noticed because nobody says the thing?)
The "I have nothing to hide" argument doesn't work for security, and it doesn't work for health care records either.
You might not have anything to hide now, but you might in the future. Someone you are closest to gets murdered or into a horrific violent accident right in front of you. Despite your best efforts this gives you crippling PTSD and you are committed involuntarily for a 72 hour hold. Now your future employer (legally or not) runs a quick records check and sees you have mental health concerns and really doesn't care about the context. Why roll the dice? Go with the candidate who was in a close 2nd and already a coin flip who doesn't have such a thing in their history.
Plenty of other scenarios that can happen to anyone even if they live the most perfect boring life imaginable and never do anything interesting ever. Plenty more for folks who step off the reservation of "acceptable social/corporate behavior" even a little bit.
Plus, if you want to protect folks like in your example of having an abortion on their record - you need to vehemently defend their right as a boring person yourself as that's the only way such individuals will ever be protected. It's like herd immunity but for privacy.
It's not about the people who have nothing to hide. It's about the people who do.
I don't know about 'a few specific cases'. STIs, mental health issues, pregnancies (interrupted or not, voluntarily or not), contraception methods and/or lapses, anything often misunderstood like MS or neurodegenerative diseases, huntington, substance use/abuse (voluntary or not), victim of assault (sexual or not), sterility/fertility/impotency/incontinence, any manageable medical issue someone might use to not give you a job, to rent you an apartment, although you do actually manage it well...
None of those I'd want shared anywhere, to anyone, against my will. Those (overall) are not rare.
This is not honestly engaging with GP's statement.
The benefit only accrues if the sharing is universal.
I am too private a person to agree with GP, but it does seem that most health issues that are visible to the passerby or casual acquaintence are less stigmatized than the ones that can be hidden. There might be something to the idea.
Of course you'd have to agree that de-stigmatizing is more socially important than privacy. I guess I'm privileged enough to have no stigmas, secret or otherwise, that I consider more important than my privacy. But I know others are less fortunate.
GP did not specify that their thought was scoped to the same people as GGP's (explicitly dystopian) scenario, so I read their comment as working on the kernel of the idea and not the horrifying class-based discriminatory version.
While I am still confident of that assessment, I'll grant you that "obvious" charitable interpretation is not as reliable as it should be. :-/
In fairness to flock, they just hired a CISO and are actively recruiting for a head of product security and privacy as well. So I'm not surprised they're dealing with some of this.
Edit: I'm standing by it. The person they hired for it has a good track record elsewhere. And much as I don't like what Flock is building as a company, at least they're building security in now, even if it wasn't front of mind for them in the past.
That’s fairness to a new employee. Does the multibillion company of a widely-deployed sensitive product deserve a pass for having poor or nonexistent employees doing security previously? Not really IMO.
There should be no "Fairness to Flock" they're building the panopticon.
Freethinking Americans should do what they can to dismantle this overreach, lobby their city leaders with their poor track record on security and thereby safety.
I'm fine giving the new employees a pass on this, but not the company as a whole. Not building security into a product like this from day one should be a criminal offense.
> Apparently there is still a large stock of "hot" building material that are sitting in warehouses and every once in a while they make it into the supply chain.
I wonder how much of this is because folks in the supply chain might not be aware of what asbestos looks like.
I'd prefer to express it in hexadecimals, and 1 would be 256 cents. So it would come out to be very slightly more, at 0x00030000.00 hexadollars, or 196608.00 hexadollars, or 50331648 cents – $503,316.48
It's a pretty sad reflection of the times that there's a need to create a throwaway account to talk about long COVID symptoms, but this is a good personal anecdote to draw attention to what's likely happening. In my case, I only caught covid once - somepoint last year just before I would've gotten the updated booster. It took me well over a year to stop having acute pulmonary issues, and my lung performance is down year over year (measured during high intensity training) even though I finally feel no differently at baseline than I did before I caught it.
Most people don't exploit the full capacity of their bodies and so would never notice, which is essentially the point OP is making. This disease very likely ravaged the 20% claimed, but the vast majority may never know because they're just never pushing their bodies hard enough.
I mainly created the throwaway because I'm sharing personal medical information and I'd rather not do that with my main account where people know me IRL.
It ought to be possible to test that hypothesis by comparing publicly available race results for the same athletes on the same courses before and after the pandemic relative to the expected age-related performance loss. Anecdotally as an age-group endurance athlete I'm not seeing any big declines in myself and my friends so I'm highly skeptical that 20% were "ravaged". The actual incidence of significant loss of pulmonary function is probably much lower although I have no idea as to the actual number.
If anyone wants to quantify this then Athlinks is a good place to start for race results. Obviously the data is somewhat noisy, like you'd have to throw out the slower finishers who maybe weren't trying hard. But if there's a significant correlation then it ought to show up.
> you'd have to throw out the slower finishers who maybe weren't trying hard. But if there's a significant correlation then it ought to show up.
Poor performers and no shows are exactly the population you’re looking for. To be clear the argument isn’t about a 10% decline across the board among people with long COVID as there’s non cardio pulmonary symptoms like brain fog, loss of smell, and difficulty sleeping.
If 80% of the fit population had COVID, 20% of them had long COVID, and half the people with long COVID had a 10% decline in race performance. That’s something like an overall 0.8% drop of performance assuming nobody dropped out or joined, but again you’re loosing people on both sides who were most impacted. Thus I’d be highly skeptical of finding an actual connection here rather than something else that impacts more people.
A more useful approach is to take a cohort of people who raced in 2019 and track what happened to every single one of them specifically.
This makes sense. I would've been marked as a "no show" because I had to rescind a job offer because of long COVID which lasted a year. From the government's point of view I was just an unremarkable figure prolonging my bout of unemployment when in fact I had a great job offer lined up that went to shit because I got COVID while on my little bit of celebratory vacation
The PVCs, adrenaline dumps, sleeping problems and anxiety/panic were insane! The doctor thought that my hypothalamus was inflamed because of COVID.
Did any treatments help? Or just took a long time to settle down?
When you mention “adrenaline” was this somehow tested or just a frequent feeling of being stressed when you had no reason for such?
I find finding the right type of specialist isn’t always straightforward and even when one does, about 80% of the time they aren’t interested in diagnosing anything not blatantly obvious…
This, and also brain fog – which unless it is truly debilitating is hard to prove, hard to treat, and can feel pointless to talk about after a while. You won't necessarily hear people talk about "having Long Covid" unless their symptoms are easily measurable and debilitating in a key area of their life. 20% sounds viable to me, too.
> This is another article in a long tail of anti-American and anti-Western content that has been cropping up online for about two years now. It's getting to be a very popular subject.
1. Finland
2. Denmark
3. Iceland
4. Sweden
5. Netherlands
It's just an interesting assertion you're making, I suppose.
Had to add metric to an imperial unit application since it is to be sold internationally. I live in a Fahrenheit country so I set my phone, computer, and car to Celsius to learn how the the temperatures readings feel.
I 100% agree, "Freedom Fries Units" is quite fitting.
Turns out I prefer Celsius over Fahrenheit in day to day usage.
Speculating:
If this is a condition of employment as an astronaut, then it probably wouldn't include conditions confirmed not to be caused by being in space, which means this'll stay confidential until NASA has fully diagnosed the crew member and figured out what likely happened.
And if it turns out the crew member's issue was entirely unrelated to the mission, it stays under wraps but new science or procedures are devised to better manage this and related conditions in space.
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