The Haversian Canal

My wife is an occupational therapist, and I haven't found many OT blogs, anyone know of others?

Starting at 50
BoHo chick
Soul Far I Kenya (maybe)

Here's a story from Texas A&M's medical school, which has been unbelievably kind to my family and I.

COLLEGE STATION, Texas (October 4, 2005) – When asked where he's from, Niels Olson simply replies, "All over the place". He attended the U.S. Naval Academy in Maryland and was stationed in San Diego with the Navy for several years before settling in New Orleans with his wife and children. Olson started medical school at Tulane University School of Medicine August 9, just 20 days before Hurricane Katrina would devastate the Central Gulf Coast. Luckily for Olson and his family, his parents had moved into their new home in College Station just three days before they evacuated New Orleans on Saturday, August 27.

As the storm approached, Olson and his wife Brooke had two choices when deciding where to evacuate their family: her aunt and uncle in Tennessee or his parents in Texas. As fate would have it, evacuees could only go south from their section of the city. That sent them packing for College Station, where there just happened to be a medical school in the form of The Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine.

"I had a big test coming up that next Monday (August 29), so I decided to go study over at the Medical Sciences Library on campus," Olson remembers. "Then on Monday, the levees broke and I thought, ‘There goes my school.' Bad news does not age well, so I started talking to Casey Huckaby in the Student Affairs office to start coming up with a plan."

Olson spent the week studying in the library until administrators at the college were able to get him set up for classes. His first day as an "Aggie medical student" also happened to fall on the first day of the head and neck block of gross anatomy. Olson fell in with A&M's first-year class, also taking biochemistry and Becoming a Clinician courses.

In all, Olson spent a month at the College of Medicine while Tulane officials planned their next move. After deciding to resume classes in late September on the Baylor College of Medicine campus in Houston, Tulane students and leaders experienced another setback with the arrival of Hurricane Rita. Eventually, Tulane students were able to have orientation Saturday, October 1 and started classes yesterday.

Olson looks forward to returning to his studies with his Tulane classmates, but is grateful for the help he received at the A&M College of Medicine.

"They just asked me what I needed and helped me work out a plan," Olson says. "Everyone was unbelievably supportive and helpful. Other people in the community have also been great, as they helped my wife get a job and my daughter into school. Everybody really thought outside the box in helping us get our feet back on the ground. After being here a month, I think I know more A&M students than Tulane students."

Olson's home in Jefferson parish was relatively untouched by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita with the exception of minor wind damage, but he doesn't plan to move his family back until the school opens back up in New Orleans.

"Right now my mom is taking care of my kids, my wife has a job and I'm living with two other students in Houston while I take classes, so we're set," Olson says. "There couldn't have been a better place to evacuate than College Station, because the people at the College of Medicine really made everything possible. Dr. (Christopher) Colenda and Dr. (Gary) McCord really did so much, and I owe them gargantuan thanks."

To keep track of Olson, visit his blog, "The Haversian Canal", at: http://nielsolson.us/Haversian/, where he is hosting Grand Rounds Tuesday, October 4.

The nephrologist at Kidney Notes has posted Grand Rounds, Volume 2, No 6. Check out the knitted digestive system (I'm not linking: click yourself over there!)

http://www.humansecurityreport.info/
http://hdr.undp.org/

Grand Rounds Volume 2 Issue 7 is up at MSSP Nexus.

So I was reading Grand Rounds and read Dr Lei's article on the 'fear' gene, stathmin

Mice who were genetically engineered to have inactive stathmin genes lacked the ability to sense fear. In situations where normal mice would freeze in fear, such as a particular area of the cage where electric shocks were administered, mice lacking stathmin would continue about their business.

Then I read Maria's article on assessing the potential for future violence in any particular patient, which led me to this Wikipedia entry on antisocial personality disorder. Read paragraph four

Research has shown that individuals with APD are indifferent to the possibility of physical pain or many punishments, and show no indications that they experience fear when so threatened; this may explain their apparent disregard for the consequences of their actions, and their lack of empathy when others are suffering.

Does stathmin present a target for anti-APD therapy?

Actually, Dr Charles had it up on Tuesday and I'm a social derelict for not posting it until now.

As for me, test next week, so, if you see me, tell me to go study.

Professor Lowe at In the Pipeline is hosting vol 2, no 12. Check it out!

Dmitriy recently commented (Credibility Spat: Blogs vs. Peer-Reviewed Pubs) on George D. Lundberg's opinion of mass media's opinion of blogging. Dr Lundberg is the general editor of Medscape General Medicine. He starts by using a lot of loaded phrases (possibly designed to encourage blogging about it?), but I think Lundberg's central point, that blogs represent nothing more than the opinions of the bloggers who write them, is correct. However, the whole piece misses the larger issues: the real blogging community and the role of blogging in society.

Blogs are not peer-reviewed journals of the scientific community. Like any uncontrolled form of communication, blogs are a superb source of vast amounts of poor information. I didn't say bad information, just poor information. Looking down from thirty thousand feet, the blogs don't have much information. On average. Within the 70 million or so blogs, I'm fairly sure there are fewer bloggers than blogs. There are relatively few multi-author blogs, while there are many authors with multiple blogs. Among these authors, there are some who write poorly, inconsistently, and are factually wrong. Some write well, consistently, and are factually accurate. And there's everything in between.

Writing improves over time. We know that. The brain gets better at what it does repititiously. Einstein, Richard Feynman, Leonardo Da Vinci, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville. They weren't just good, they did a lot of what they did (ever read Moby Dick?). So, after allowing for a certain degree of talent, intelligence, whatever, writing consistently leads to writing consistently well, or at least better.

The third criteria one wants from a blogger is good fact-checking. Problem-solvers are less prone to factual error. Such things as solutions to real problems require facts. So the ability to appraise evidence is at a premium in problem-solving. There are classes dedicated to it. There are professors that spend their careers teaching the fine art of analyzing evidence. The fear of public embarrasment, more positively the pride of reputation, is an independent motivator for fact-checking.

Out of those 70 million blogs, a large number of those appear and disappear very frequently. Genuflecting on virtually any graph of internet traffic, with the high, sharp spike at 0 and a long right tail, it's easy enough to understand that most people don't stick with one thing on the internet for very long. So the longer from inception, the less likely it is that a blog is still posting new content. The only question is how many. My guess is that fewer than 1 million see the first six months. Why do I say that? Right now I'm ranked 15907 in the TTLB ecosystem, and 146,340 in Technorati. I've been blogging for six months, one week, and two days.

So how much more reliable are journals than blogs? The work of John Ionnidis is helpful here. His recent article in PLoS, Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, is representative. That article in particular indicates that any single work in a collected body of works (all journals, all textbooks, all blogs) has a certain probability of being wrong, and that, for traditional journals, this probability is high in an absolute sense. Picking up a random journal article, the odds of a correct conclusion are slim.

This, however, has to do with the medium's highly specific hypotheses. Textbooks, on the other hand, are amazingly reliable for general reasoning, though the more specific the clinician attempts to get, the closer to journal articles one has to go. It may be that the clincian would actually be able to get even more specific about a particular patient, and occasionally about a particular issue, through blogs than through journal articles, much as the textbooks are amazingly accurate at 30,000 feet, yet desperately myopic when compared the the truth at ground level. By honing in on the recorded thoughts and actions of one individual, the clinician may gain considerable insight into clinically important things, like the person's values, models of disease, and decision-making processes.

On a different tack, an expert blogger might post some exceptionally specific and useful information about their particular research interests in a blog. Unlike the medical column of the typical newspaper, where it is extremely difficult to assess the background, decision-making, and values of the once-weekly 500 word columnist, a blog reader has instant access to the blogger's archives and can rapidly assess their reliability and degree of expertise.

A third value of blogs is penetration. Blogs are easier to read than journals so more people read them. At least, I'm willing to bet less than 30% of America's population read a scientific journal article in the first three months of 2005. However, blog readers may value the bloggers that do read the literature. Personally, I got my subscription ot the New England Journal of Medicine in April 2003 and I currently have subscriptions to the New England journal, Nature, JAMA, and The Medical Letter (a newsletter on medications supported only by subscriber dues, no advertising). As a student, a student, I'm paying over $250 a year for those four subscriptions, and the librarians assure me that I'm getting off cheap. Just like internet usage, most doctors get their information from similar sources. Most medbloggers, I'll bet, have a lot of similar subscriptions. And those subscriptions are expensive.

Note that I didn't make originality a value among blogs. While the fiction of medbloggers is particularly good, IMHO, I should hope there's not to much original research coming out in the blogs. Similarly to political blogs that ultimately rely on foot-leather journalists, medical blogs rely on scientists in the clinic and in the lab for at least some of their content.

I predict that if there are 300 medical blogs, 60 have been published for more than six months and 50 of those authors have subscriptions to at least either the New England Journal or JAMA. Maybe somebody could check my prediction on medlogs.com, technorati, or some other aggregator. More generally, I think bloggers and medical journals have similar philosophical goal of distributing knowledge. In the war against myth and pseudoscience, bloggers are more valuable not as original sources but as more diffuse translational resources for the general public. For the general public, blogs are more useful than journals because they are linguistically and economically more accessable.

Is up at The Health Care Blog. Thanks to Matthew Holt for hosting.

MedGadget is hosting the polling, so get rolling and start voting.

Some formats work on the web. Garland, a major publisher of scientific works, provided searchable, but not browsable text of one of its classic titles, Molecular Biology of the Cell to the National Library of Medicine. This is worthless in terms of electronic access because anyone who's using PubMed quite likely ALREADY OWNS THE BOOK! It is useful, but clearly it has been intentionally handicapped, and thus stands as a testament to the ailing status of science, crippled under the weight of publishers intent on their copyrights.

In my humble opinion.

Is up at Random Acts of Reality, which more usually hosts the posts of an emergency med tech on some island west of France. I hear they have a nice clock tower. Seriously, an excellent blog I can only hope to emulate.

A short article on being married to a radiologist. Courtesy of Sumer's Radiology and Grand Rounds at Random Acts of Reality.

Over at GruntDoc. Vol 2, No 17. I think the Navy collectively has the most Grand Rounds at this point.

I record all the audio for our class lectures and post them on my site so anyone can download them. To date lectures have been downloaded 844 times; the average lecture has been downloaded 17.2 times, ranging from 42 times for Dr Blake's collagen biochemistry lecture, to 2 downloads of Physiology's Membrane Transport Three lecture. Biochemistry's 13 lectures have been downloaded 299 times(range: 4—42); Physiology's 21 lectures have been downloaded 268 times (2—23), and Neuroscience's 15 lectures have been downloaded 277 times (2—41).

Two major populations visiting the site: the normal internet traffic that plots essentially as a horizontal bar (average download size in this group is independent of visit rate, it simply varies around the site's average file size); this is the grey arm in the graph. A small group (the green arm) visits regularly, but not exorbatantly, and downloads huge amounts of data—1000 times more than the normal traffic!

A few additional groups broke out, but I'm speculating about what they are. A tight cluster of machines have visited between 450 and 800 times and each has downloaded 15 to 20 KB. That's about how big my homepage is. There's a cluster in red that seems to come out of the cloud and increase until plateauing at 20 MB. I think these are the search engines and each one has probably accidentally downloaded an audio file (each is about 10 MB) and quickly learned not to do that again! Finally, there's a group that downloads slightly, but clearly, more than the typical user (the vertical axis is log scale). I'm completely speculating that these are spammers, but I think the number of machines is roughly the same as the number spam hits I get on my blog. I'm about 10% sure though. Finally, note the abrupt drop in activity at 1000 hits. Those labels aren't covering up any points, they just stop. I suspect this will grow longer over time. That, at least, is a testable hypothesis.

It will be interesting to run this again after the tests next week.

The number of hits is not the number of times a person visited, it is the number of times that computer asked for a file. Sometimes the machine may have already downloaded the file very recently, so the server tells it to check its cache. A page with images will also cause the hit count to go up because each image is a separate file request.

I have recently figured out how to read my log files and draw some basic conclusions about how people use my site. This was in part motivated by a thread Professor Edward Tufte started on his site.

Here's a collection of things I've looked into over the years that get to the nitty gritty technical concepts involved.

First, the privacy policy of an organization that thinks about this issue a great deal: The Electronic Frontier Foundation's privacy policy.

IP address tracers are readily available free services on the net and will generally lead the investigator to an internet service provider. Providers fundamentally have to track IP addresses and associate them with the people who are paying the bills. If the government is interested in an IP address, it can subpoena the billing records from the internet service provider and then send an agent to the physical address to pick up the person.

If one really want to get into the weeds, some search phrases to start with are border gateway protocol and root server.

One may say "Why, can't I just use a whois search to find the registrar of any IP address?" Well, not any more. As many more machines continue to be added to the internet, the original global routing table scheme filled up. Most ISPs now control the delivery of packets to their subscribers through randomly assigned IP addresses that they register en bloc. This saves on registration costs (less than all subscribers have machines online at any given time), slows growth of the global routing tables, and does reduce the odds that to much information will be associated with one IP address. It also makes it harder to trace attacks, but it doesn't make it harder for governments to issue subpoenas.

Cookies, which the search engines also use, are a different story. Philip Greenspun has an excellent write-up on the spying potential of cookies (scroll down to the napkin drawing).

While resistance to a subpoena is probably argued on the assumption that the matter will end up in court, (otherwise, why the subpeona?), merely delivering a subpoena can be very coercive. Many people and businesses would decide it is in their best interest to cooperate, rather than spend time and money resolving the issue.

The big picture remains the same: if the information is recorded, the government can get it unless it's privileged communication, that is, the witnesses's relationship to the client would have to be spousal, attorney-client, clergy-parishoner, or psychotherapist-client. Even these few privileges only come into play in court, and only bear on what is actually admitted as evidence. Nothing prevents the government from using the subpoeneaed information for something else, once the information is in hand.

There is an interesting dilemma here: in order to know anything about my visitors, I have to collect some information for some period of time. But the first piece of information that has to be collected really is the IP address, which is fundamentally tracable. What is the best policy? To keep the information for no more than one month? Three months? Keep no log files at all and know nothing about who visits? From a consequentialist standpoint, I'm not sure it matters, as the content of this site is hardly controversial.

was up two days ago, at Kevin, M.D., but hey, I got tests next week, I'm slacking. Volume 2, No 18.

Barbados Butterfly is hosting Grand Rounds from downunder today. Go check it out. I'll be studying.

There's a great little discussion going on about carnival moderation over at California Medicine Man. It's stimulated by the recent growth of Grand Rounds, the weekly collection of medical blogging.

I was going through my site stats for the month of February (today is 1 February; the report was relatively small), mainly to find out if my classmates are downloading more class lectures during test week, when I happened to read through the search keyphrases. These are the search strings people have entered in search engines that led them to my site. Somebody searched for "sinonasal undifferentiated cancer hope". Good luck, whoever you are.

No, not the time, silly, the issue! Grand Rounds, volume 2, number 20 is up at Science & Politics.

Maria has first class Valentine's Day snark over at Inteuri: Grand Rounds 2:21. Be there or be square.

And tell her if she were a phaser, she'd be stuck on STUNNING.

Volume 2, Number 26

The Journal of Neurosurgery and Neurosurgery are considered the best journals for those interested. All my neurosugery links are on del.icio.us, including all the names dropped at the neurosugery interest group meeting on 29 March.

Grand Rounds is up at Anxiety, Addiction, and Depression Treatments. I'm personally glad to see the tables turned: the writing, poetry, and genuflection lead and the 'hot topics' are at the end. Perhaps the internet need not always have an extreme recency bias.

Fat Doctor is hosting Grand Rounds, the weekly round-up of the best in the medical blogs. Volume 2, Number 30. Man, I didn't even know most of these blogs existed. And they're all better than mine....

Some really excellent public health resources are provided by those involved in indigent healthcare. I'm working on a project and the common thread is indigent healthcare, so I tag my internet sources indigent in del.icio.us. I thought I would really get some good ideas by looking at what sites all the other del.icio.us users in the world had labelled indigent. 36 links. How about homeless health? 69 links. How about charity? 2696 links; most of which have to do with soliciting money from rich people for low-rate-of-return projects like middle-class people hand-knitting scarves and giving them to poor people. Hey, I'm all for hand-knit scarves keeping people warm in the winter, but I'm thinking there are cheaper ways to get more scarves to more people.

All in all, I'm pretty savvy at literature review, and it's fairly obvious that not a lot of people think about taking care of the poor, but the ones that do think about it really hard. Probably some of the finest people in the world do this work. I'd say 94% of involvement is skin deep. The other 6% work themselves to the bone doing great work.

Grand Rounds here on June 13th! Send your submissions to haversian [dot]canal {at}gmail /dot/com.

Grand Rounds, and its audience, continues to grow, and there have been several conversations about the conflict between linking to all who submit the products of their labor and providing readers with a relatively clean, concise introduction to the medical blogosphere. Some Rounds have pushed 100 submissions and the average is over 50. Maybe we should link to everybody. Maybe we should link to five. I don't know. As most hosts link to everyone, I am going to take the road less travelled, and I hope you will join me.

I will link to thirty articles from thirty authors. My goal is not to select the most popular bloggers or those I think are the best. I want the thirty best articles written. I don't care when they were written, how many times they've been edited, or what your credentials are. I like Henci Goer's opinion on this:

You may be wondering about my credentials to write this book since I am not a doctor—either M.D. or Ph.D. I respond with a story. Penny Simkin, well known educator, writer, speaker, and editor, was called on the carpet by an anesthesiologist, irate that she had written a handout listing the potential trade-offs of epidural anesthesia when she was not a doctor (although he did not dispute her accuracy). "What are your credentials?" he demanded. "I can read," was her reply. So can I. For that matter, you can too.

I will place emphasis, and you can see it the categories below, on references. Those articles not included will either be posted in an 'extended post' in the order they are received or I'll pass them on to the next host. Here are the categories and what I'm looking for in each:

Case Studies - pictures and studies highly desired. Presentation, evaluation (history and physical, labs, differential diagnosis, etc), treatment, follow-up. These most often come from docs and nurses (Clinical Cases and Pulmonary Roundtable come to mind), but anybody can write one. They may be from your own experience, or that of a relative or friend. Do, however, make sure you protect the privacy of others. Some statement of consent or anonymization should be made "Some names have been changed..."

Articles in Brief - Summary of one original article from a journal cataloged by PubMed. Only that article must be cited, but supporting background and evidence is encouraged. Author should take a position on the article's quality and suggest how their position could be applied by patients, providers, or both. Statements presented as fact should be supported with a citation or link unless it is common knowledge. Article should be from the past six months. Extra consideration to write-ups that include abundant links to Wikipedia.

Interviews - Gotta favorite doc? Nurse? Physical therapist? Are you a medical student and your attending 'wrote the book'? Do you have a patient who learned the trumpet from Louis Armstrong? Was a coworker an Olympic competitor? Ask them for an hour, ask some questions, and write up what you learn. In our age of burning helicopter props and storyboard civilizations, this may be the only way we will find out about the great people who walk amongst us. You're notes and recording of your interviews constitute primary historical sources.

Ethics - Must address a topic of bioethics or general ethics in health care, take a position, and address how at least two cases have been resolved in the past. Cases may be personal, drawn from the legal literature, or anything in between.

Encounters - Patients, nurses, physicians, therapists, techs, administrators, business people, researchers, their encounters with each other, their selves, and the world. No need for references here. Quality of writing, from punctuation to poignancy, will play heavily.

Complementary and Alternative Medicine - Brief reviews of over-the-counter supplements, devices, off-label uses currently making the rounds, diets, etc, somewhat like Medline Plus or The Medical Letter. Author must take a position, not necessarily the consensus position, and address and rebut one or more alternate viewpoints. Must link to current FDA findings (example), specialty guidelines, primary sources via PubMed, or some equivalent authorities. Again, abundant links to Wikipedia are encouraged.

Announcements - DVT Awareness month? Donations sought? Position to fill? The anesthesiologists are going on strike? If it's happening on or after June 13th, let me know. I'm not going to count these as part of the thirty.

Other topics I'll consider but may pass on to the next host:

Book Reviews - Must address the nature of the work — collected essays, position piece, memoir, biography, fiction, et cetera. Should introduce a few to several vignettes or issues raised in the work, then evaluate the quality of writing and consider alternate viewpoints for each.

Business and Politics - Any issue, from a personal experience with billing, novel IT solutions, to national or international concerns are welcome. At least two pertinent cases should be described, including how they were resolved. Cases may range from the personal to major historical outcomes, but should describe them, including resolution.

Original works of poetry, music, spoken word, film, video, photography, litho, electron micrograph, painting, or other visual art. Seriously, I would love to lead the issue with some original art.

Anything I haven't thought of...

Admin

• submissions are due by 6 PM EST Monday night 6/12.

• Grand Rounds will posted on Tuesday 6/13 at 7 AM.

• Send the link to your post and tell me, if I don't put your post in the main event, would you rather have it forwarded to the next week's host or have me put it in an 'extended' entry on a first-come, first-serve basis?

• No word limit: War and Peace, haiku, or anything in between.

• Posts should be written for a general audience. I firmly believe the average newspaper reader can grasp lipid solubility in the duodenal unstirred water layer, but I will be checking for Latin, Greek, and passive voice.

If my method creates a certain degree of tension, well, perhaps that's not so bad.

Encounters

Insanity, however, is inherited.... Hannah Railing of Milliner's Dream on club feet.

Heroines, by Dr Charles.

Vent Wars, Part 3; or the Decannulization of Fred by PixelRN.

The Death Hour and a Translation, by Dr Hebert.

Sister's Bladder by Fat Doctor.

Part IV—The Conclusion, by Dream Mom.

Pruning, by Moreena T. of The Wait and the Wonder.

Seeing Patients, by the Tundra PA.

People like you, by Ian Miller of ImpactEDnurse.

Interviews

Dr David Moskowitz, President of Genomed, by Hsien-Hsien Lei of Genetics & Health.

Rhythm & Rhyme

If it Makes You Happy, then Why the Hell am I so Sad? A poem, with introduction, by Kim at Emergiblog.

Death Wish, by Dr Emer. About a relative—patient.

Ward Around, by Alex J Hamilton.

Complimentary and Alternative Medicine

Mercury and autism: Well look what the Griers are up to now, by Orac at Respectful Insolence.

Alternative. In the war of words, Neonatal Doc offers an alternative to "alternative" medicine.

Articles in Brief

New Study Reveals More Self-Injury on Campus. Jon Schnaars of Anxiety, Addiction and Depression Treatments discusses a study in last week's Pediatrics.

Boost Your Lungs's Health With Flaxseed Oil, by Gloria Gamat of Straight From the Doc, summarizes a study from the Journal of Nutrition.

Correspondence

Too much and too little. David Williams relates a personal encounter with conflicting opinions about the utility of chemotherapy.

Paint the Walls or Bulldoze the Building, Rita Schwab of MSSPNexus on leading committees.

How docs can be our own worst enemies, by GruntDoc.

Look Back in Anger, by Dr Hildreth, the Cheerful Oncologist, on a woman who raged against the dying of the light.

New Labor Induction Test, by Nurse Practitioner News

Knockin' Boots and Breakin' Hips, by Aetiology.

VA Data Stolen - What impact on public perception of privacy of health information?, by Bob Coffield of the Health Care Law Blog.

The Many Faces of Sexual Abuse, by Moof of All Blogged Up.

Her First Baby, by the Storkdoc.

Merry Olde England, by InsureBlog.

A Tree Grows in Oregon...Maybe, by the California Medicine Man.

Announcements

Unintelligent Design will host Pediatric Grand Rounds this Sunday.

Dr Deborah Serani wil host Grand Rounds next week.

Radiology Grand Rounds. Sumer Sethi of Sumer's Radiology is soliciting contributions.

Kim, at Emergiblog, is soliciting contributions for a new nursing Grand Rounds, Change of Shift.

Enoch Choi will be hosting a 1.5 hour medblogger meetup at Bloggercon 4 in SF on June 23-34, a tradition from the previous three conventions.

Among others, it's National Safety Month and Workplace Safety Week.

Late addition: Amy Tenderich of DiabetesMine is liveblogging from the American Diabetes Association annual Scientific Sessions conference.

End Matter

Keagirlisms, by Keagirl of Urostream.

The first Radiology Grand Rounds will be hosted on Sumer's Radiology Site on 25 June, and it will be hosted every last Sunday of the month thereafter. Archives of Radiology Grand Rounds will be available at Sumer's site.

Dr Sethi will accept anything that is relevant to Radiology or medical imaging but you don't have to be a radiologist to contribute. I'd love to hear from physicians, patients, nurses, medical students, radiographers, imaging technicians etc, etc. Send submissions to sumerdoc@yahoo.com and if you're interested in Hosting Radiology Grand Rounds in future.

Some Aussies are all up in arms about some purported ban on Vegemite into the US, citing the folate content. If you can get over the taste, it can be quite tasty.

So I asked my friends at the FDA, one of whom responded

I didn't find "Vegemite" on the FDA website either. I also searched the Federal Register and did not find "vegemite". If there was a ruling it would be been printed in the Federal register.

Of course, there's still the possibility of a general ban on things other than bread that contain folate, so I searched the Federal Register for 'folate' and got this is all that came up (IOM: Institute of Medicine).

Pregnant, lactating, and non-breastfeeding postpartum women: Priority nutrients identified as lacking are calcium, iron, magnesium, vitamin E, potassium, and fiber. Nutrients with moderate, but still high, levels of inadequacy are vitamins A, C, and B6, and folate. Nutrients with lower levels of inadequacy are iron, zinc, thiamin, niacin, and protein. Sodium intakes and saturated fat intakes as a percentage of food energy intakes are excessive in the diets of pregnant, lactating, and non-breastfeeding postpartum women.

B. Nutrition-Related Health Priorities

In addition to analyses of nutrient adequacy, the IOM reviewed epidemiological evidence on body weight status, micronutrients of special concern during reproduction and early childhood, food allergies, and selected environmental risks to the health of women, infants, and children. Several concerns were identified by the IOM for all WIC subgroups--obesity, poor iron status, and contamination of food with dioxin and methylmercury. The IOM also determined that low folate intake is a concern for all women during their reproductive years because of its importance in preventing neural tube defects; insufficient calcium intake for pregnant and breastfeeding women may be associated with potential lead toxicity for the fetus and infant; low intake of vitamin D is a potential concern for women of reproductive age because of its importance in bone health; and inadequate zinc intake is a concern for breastfed infants 6 through 11 months of age because human milk does not provide recommended amounts of zinc for older infants. ——Federal Register, Vol 71 No 151, 7 August 2006)

Ah, scrolling through comments in the article above, turns out there are two reasons to not let Vegemite in, though it appears to be administrivia on the part of Kraft, not the government:

Reason: NEEDS FCE Section: 402(a)(4), 801(a)(3); ADULTERATION Charge: It appears the manufacturer is not registered as a low acid canned food or acidified food manufacturer pursuant to 21 CFR 108.25(c)(1) or 108.35(c)(1).

and

Reason: NO PROCESS Section: 402(a)(4), 801(a)(3); ADULTERATION Charge: It appears that the manufacturer has not filed information on its scheduled process as required by 21 CFR 108.25(c)(2) or 108.35(c)(2).

You've heard about it in class, so here's the list of the top 300 prescribed drugs (note, the url would seem to indicate it only lists the top 200, but the text swears it's the top 300. If you want to count, let me know what you find).
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Update: Gruntdoc reports 302 line items.