revere
Posts by this author
June 9, 2009
You learn a lot when you move from investigator to subject. I just heard about Drive-by Tylenol for day-care and school age kids. This is the practice of stuffing a couple of Tylenol down the little tyke's throat to bring down a fever just before entering the daycare center. The objective is to get…
June 8, 2009
An interesting piece on an infection trial of novel H1N1 in pigs appeared on ProMed over a week ago, but with dealing with swine flu up close and personal and all, I am only just getting to comment on it. This was a study done in the EU (VLA-Weybridge, Mammalian Influenza Group) to see how easy it…
June 7, 2009
There is no reason why a flu blogger-epidemiologist-physician's family should be immune to flu in the community. And it appears my family is not. My daughter has had a cough for the last few days and Friday night was suddenly seized by nausea, vomiting and fever. Her HMO's urgent care directed her…
June 7, 2009
Regarding the murder (in Church) of Dr. George Tiller:
June 6, 2009
CDC is reporting about 14,000 confirmed or probable cases of swine flu, although they have already said this may represent only a fraction of the total number of infected. I wasn't able to find the latest number of those hospitalized (some of you probably have it but I couldn't locate it with a…
June 5, 2009
In New York City, an illness termed "mild" for many has killed 7 and put 300 in the hospital. A preliminary analysis of about half of those hospitalized, most (82%) were said to have some underlying medical condition. That's common with flu, but it's also a reminder that one of five were otherwise…
June 4, 2009
The UK is having quite a swine flu outbreak, although the authorities aren't owning up to it. As for the public, they are being whipsawed between the usual poles of "it's all hype" and "we're all going to die," with the latter fading in parallel with the fading of effectiveness in selling tabloids…
June 3, 2009
Here is an interesting follow-up to the leaked meeting minutes of the BPA cabal. Henry Waxman's Energy and Commerce Committee has a Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. As a result of reports in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and the Washington Post about the meeting minutes of BPA…
June 3, 2009
The unpredictability of flu and difficulty of making any predictions with confidence is tiring to repeat and tiresome to listen to. Unfortunately that doesn't make it any less true. There are things we know -- because we see them happening -- and things we don't know -- because the information isn'…
June 2, 2009
Ten days ago Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius announced that the US government was allocating $1 billion to help companies with production costs for a swine flu vaccine. Among the beneficiaries was French vaccine giant, Sanofi-Aventis, whose Sanofi Pasteur unit got a $190…
June 1, 2009
Since I talk a lot about flu in my real life as well as on the blog, I get questions from moms and care givers who wonder when they should start to get worried about a sick child or relative. It's context dependent, of course. The same symptoms that would be shrugged off at any other time take on a…
May 31, 2009
We've had occasion to write about the endocrine noise-maker bisphenol-A (BPA) quote a few times (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here for starters). The word about BPA has gotten to consumers and they have fled BPA-containing products like they are swine flu carriers. Meanwhile the…
May 31, 2009
In the view of New Scientist journalist Amanda Gefter, The Discovery Institute, high priests of Creationism as an allegedly rational enterprise, aren't really worried about Richard Dawkins. Presumably he's just a great fund raising device for them. The one who really scares the BeJesus out of them…
May 30, 2009
The natural reservoir for most influenza viruses is birds, especially aquatic birds, but some versions of the virus have also become adapted to the host cells of other species, among them sea mammals, horses, dogs and of course pigs and humans (among others). How long is the list? We really don't…
May 29, 2009
As flu season ramps up in the southern hemisphere, the US, Europe and Asia are keeping an eye on it to see what will happen as swine flu finds new pieces of meat to sate its appetite for human flesh. Sorry about the overheated image. I've been reading what's going on in Australia. Because another…
May 28, 2009
Influenza surveillance in the US has at least five component parts (depending on how you count it is as many as seven). We discussed the virologic surveillance system in another post. CDC has two surveillance sub-systems that look at hospitalized cases with laboratory confirmed influenza, the New…
May 27, 2009
Yesterday New York reported two more swine flu deaths (a 41-year-old woman from Queens and a 34-year-old man from Brooklyn). CDC and just about everyone else who knows anything about influenza have been telling people to expect this. The influenza virus kills people all the time. We don't know…
May 27, 2009
We don't usually think of power outages as an important cause of poisoning but it is. Electrical power has become such a necessary part of basic needs -- think of light at night and refrigeration -- that if it is interrupted for more than a few hours people will turn to gasoline powered generators…
May 26, 2009
Last week another expedited-review paper appeared in the high profile journal Science, this one summarizing the genetics of the novel H1N1 influenza A virus causing the current outbreak cum pandemic. This time there is quite a bit of interesting material in this paper for non-virologist scientists…
May 25, 2009
We are now in the seventh Memorial Day of the Iraq War and the eighth of the Afghanistan War. This Priscilla Herdman version of Eric Bogle's "And the Band Played Waltzing Mathilda" appeared here last Memorial Day. Then, we were deeply dismayed by our government's actions. We remain so today. So…
May 25, 2009
The World Health Organization (WHO) is not the world's health department or the world's doctor. It is an intergovernmental agency that is part of the United Nations (UN). The UN, despite what hard right wingnuts might think, is not a world government. The international system is technically…
May 24, 2009
On Friday Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that the US was asking vaccine manufacturers to get ready to make an vaccine against this year's swine flu. Before a vaccine can be made there is a substantial amount of preparation that needs to be done, so…
May 24, 2009
I'm not a paleontologist, but my children consider me an authentic fossil. This week PLoS ONE published an important paper featuring a fossil find (lots of good coverage here at Scienceblogs; Brian at Laelaps has a characteristically thorough run down). The discovery of this primate skeleton has…
May 23, 2009
Queens, a borough of the city of New York, seems to be a hotspot for swine flu and a New York Times reporter on the city beat, Anemona Hartocollis, has been writing very astute and perceptive pieces from there. Yesterday she had one on the problem posed by the "worried well" who are flooding…
May 22, 2009
There is as yet no vaccine for the novel H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic strain of influenza now causing widespread illness in North America and what appears to be the start of growing outbreaks in Japan and parts of Europe (but check out this excellent piece over at ScienceInsider). WHO says most…
May 21, 2009
Military planners are fond of saying that no battle plan survives the first contact with the enemy. The same can be said for the military's pandemic flu plans, although they aren't telling us exactly what those plans are. Some good reporting by Associated Press's Lolita Baldor has uncovered some of…
May 20, 2009
We've talked a lot here over the years about preparing for a pandemic on a community level, not an individual level. Both are important, of course, but our interests here have always been on how neighbors can help neighbors and building strong communities to withstand all sorts of shocks, from…
May 20, 2009
A kind reader directed my attention late yesterday to an article on the Boston Globe's web site about three schools closing in Boston because of absenteeism from flu-like illnesses. I was struck by a comment made by a freshman at Boston Latin that seemed to get it exactly right:
The closing…
May 19, 2009
Is it a pandemic or is it not a pandemic? Since the world has never had a chance to make a call like this at the outset of a pandemic, nobody is quite sure how to handle it. The usual definition -- an epidemic (an increase in cases beyond what is expected) of global dimension -- has a lot of wiggle…