revere
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March 7, 2009
The Economist is a right-of-center weekly from the UK that I like quite a lot. While I'm on the other side of the political center line, the writing is extremely clear and the arguments usually cogent. Even when I don't agree, it's thought provoking and the articles are not over long. Even so, I…
March 6, 2009
Flu season is in full swing and cases of bird flu seem to follow the same kind of seasonal pattern as "ordinary" flu. Last year more than half the reported human bird flu cases were in Indoesia. But the Indonesian health minister has already warned the world she was only going to tell us what was…
March 5, 2009
The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that if the FDA approves a drug, it doesn't mean you don't have to keep the labeling up to date if you should warn people. So that settles one question about FDA approval. The FDA put its stamp of approval on the drug Vioxx, too, but approved or not, Vioxx was not…
March 4, 2009
When I was in medical school it was common to get gifts from drug companies. Since many of us had very little money, the gifts were welcome. One company gave me a Littman stethoscope, at the time, the most advanced stethoscope around. The same model costs about $100 now. I was glad to get it,…
March 3, 2009
The United States has an influenza surveillance system composed of five overlapping parts. You can get an overview of each here. In 2004 laboratory confirmed deaths from influenza in children (persons less than 18 years old) was made a notifiable cause of death by the states and through this we…
March 2, 2009
There is as yet no pandemic bird flu vaccine but there are a lot of potential vaccines. The recent fiasco involving Baxter International (here, here) involved one in development. There are many more. They employ old and new technologies and are in various stages, a few in early clinical trials.…
March 1, 2009
The scientific literature is full of specialized papers that on their face would seem to be of little interest. Here's a title like that: "Prevalence and seasonality of influenza-like illness in children, Nicaragua, 2005-2007" (Gordon et al., Emerging Infectious Diseases 2009 Mar). Over 4000…
March 1, 2009
Most of the world believes in Darwin, but of course, not everyone thinks Darwin was right. And even some people who were brought up believing in Darwin can losw that belief:
February 28, 2009
In a post the other day on some kind of flu vaccine mishap in Austria we called it a colossal screw-up. It turns out we may have understated the case. Maybe. Because while more details are leaking out, the company responsible for it, Baxter International, isn't saying exactly what happened on the…
February 27, 2009
When the FBI said that they had conclusive scientific evidence that biodefense scientists Bruce Ivins of the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) was the 2001 anthrax attacker, many people asked to see the evidence. Don't worry, we were told. It will be published for…
February 26, 2009
As I write this the story is still hazy [see Addendum] but it sounds like the kind of colossal screw-up we had four years ago when the American College of Pathology sent a pandemic flu strain (H2N2) to thousands of clinical and hospital laboratories as part of routine competency testing (see here,…
February 25, 2009
A just released report on world wide vaccine production capacity says . . . if you don't have access to the report (and I don't, as yet), what it says depends on which news source you want to read. For example you can read Reuters (the glass half full wire service stroy) or Agence France Presse (…
February 24, 2009
I'm not sure what to make of the report that scientists in Boston, California and the CDC in Atlanta have made monoclonal antibodies that protect mice against many different flu subtypes. Monoclonal antibodies are antibodies made by the descendants of a single immune cell (that is a single clone,…
February 23, 2009
DemFromCT continues his public health series over at DailyKos, thus also continuing to make my early week blogging easier. This week is a brief look at this year's flu season, already in full swing, including what is happening in pediatric deaths from flu. He follows this with another interview,…
February 22, 2009
I've seen surgeons blow up in the operating room but never saw an operating room blow up. But according to the Wall Street Journal, it's not that rare for them to catch fire and sometimes worse. Operating rooms are full of flammable gases and materials and oxygen. Moreover it isn't just a matter of…
February 22, 2009
I've never read a column by Dan Gardner in the Ottawa Citizen before, but I think I've been missing something, at least judging by his recent observations on how three Ottawa city councillors (by name: Marianne Wilkinson, Rainer Bloess, and Doug Thompson) have done so much to advance the cause of…
February 21, 2009
The good news (for me) is I've been doing a lot of science lately. The bad news is that I have had to use some research software written in C# that uses Microsoft's .Net framework. Said another way, I, a long time Mac user, have been forced to use the Windoz operating system. It's not just…
February 20, 2009
Nothing like a massive food contamination outbreak from a plant in your state to concentrate the minds of state legislators (more here and links therein). Especially when an important industry is involved. We're talking Georgia peanuts, of course. Peanuts employ an estimated 50,000 workers in…
February 19, 2009
Like a lot of people I am more inclined to believe research that is in accord with my prior beliefs. Put another (Bayesian) way, I don't have to change my beliefs much on the basis of evidence. That means I don't question the evidence rigorously. So with that warning, here's a story I instinctively…
February 18, 2009
While I like Obama I'm none too fond of some of the people he has around him, especially in the economic area. Larry Summers and his pals (Rubin, Geithner, etc.) helped bring us the current crisis, although it took GWB and the Republican Congress to turn a bad situation into a catastrophe. We threw…
February 17, 2009
The plant in Blakely, Georgia that was the apparent source of the salmonella peanut butter outbreak didn't make peanut butter for retail consumption. It made bulk peanut butter and peanut butter paste which became an ingredient in many other products. The number of products is now around 2000, the…
February 16, 2009
Keeping public health in the spot light is critical and what better place to do it than the front page of DailyKos, one of the most visited blogs in the world (average daily visits over 800,000). For six weeks DKos frontpager DemFromCT, one of the founders of FluWiki and himself a pulmonary…
February 15, 2009
Mix a little hard line nationalism with religious fundamentalism and what do you get? The formula for cow piss soft drink:
A hardline Hindu organisation, known for its opposition to "corrupting" Western food imports, is planning to launch a new soft drink made from cow's urine, often seen as sacred…
February 15, 2009
Just a few days ago we celebrated a pair of birthdays of two remarkable men, one an Englishman, Charles Darwin, the other an American, Abraham Lincoln. To commemorate the 200th anniversary of their births, Darwin and Lincoln celebrations were held in many cities and towns, and at least one American…
February 14, 2009
Another death to add to the nine already attributed to the peanut cum salmonella affair. This one is the company itself and the jobs of its employees. The Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) is going belly up. I don't mean Chapter 11 (reorganizing under the bankruptcy laws). I mean Chapter 7, as in…
February 14, 2009
Among the many things going on (or not going on) the last couple of weeks is a total "stand down" of the country's main biodefense research laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Here's the inter memo, dated February 4:
I will institute a stand down of all biological select agents and toxin (BSAT)…
February 13, 2009
People who make products containing peanut butter are seeing a dramatic drop in sales because of the salmonella problem (other posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here). That includes jarred peanut butters found in supermarkets (down 22% over the same period last year), although none are…
February 12, 2009
My sciblings at Scienceblogs have done a pretty thorough fisking of the Andrew Wakefield affair.To recap breifly, a paper by Wakefield and others in The Lancet in 1998 raised an alarm that the widely used measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine was the cause of some cases of childhood autism and a…
February 11, 2009
The Chinese like chicken. The biggest restaurant chain in China is Kentucky Fried Chicken (2300 in 500 cities). The source of supply is always close. China raises more poultry than any nation on earth. But that poultry also has outbreaks of bird flu, and there have been eight human cases in the…
February 10, 2009
Nature has just published another new paper on the basic biology of influenza virus. Unlike other recent papers it doesn't purport to reveal the secret of why some flu (e.g., H5N1, 1918 H1N1) is so virulent and "normal" seasonal influenza much less so. Instead it involves a process and structures…