revere
Posts by this author
December 28, 2008
As far as the world is concerned, if any day can be said to be bird flu's birthday, it's today. The disease of birds doctors call influenza A subtype H5N1 may have had a long gestation period, but we're not sure how long. A form of the virus deadly to poultry was isolated from a goose in southern…
December 28, 2008
This June we lost George Carlin. He was only 71. We've had him often on our little Sunday get togethers, so on this last Freethinker Sermonette of the year of his death, why not again? You've seen it. Many times. Classics are forever. Joe Bless you, George:
December 27, 2008
Israel, a state entity, is committing war crimes in Gaza. They have blockaded and imprisoned an entire civilian population in the Gaza strip, over a million people, and have now launched air strikes against civilian targets with the expected results: the deaths of hundreds, among them women and…
December 27, 2008
Compared to five years ago, there is a lot of great science on the web, most of it free. New Scientist is one of the best general science publications dand comes from the UK (much like the US-based Science News). While each have subscriber-only Premium Content, there is quite a lot of free access…
December 26, 2008
It's the end of a year that saw historic election in the United States. An African American was elected President. To many of us felt like a turning point. We'll have to see. But if it is, it is due to many people, some of whom we know, most of whom we will never know. Black people fought hard and…
December 25, 2008
Sneezes occupy the attention of flu mavens because the aerosol created is likely one of the chief ways the virus finds a new host. So it's a selective advantage to a respiratory virus to make someone explosively expel air from the lungs through the nose. A sneeze even has a medical name:…
December 24, 2008
The Bagdad Hack is neither a journalist nor a clever trick to get something done in Iraq. It's a cough. And reading about it is dismaying and maddening. As someone who did a lot of work on unexplained illness following the Gulf War of 1991 -- illnesses steadfastly denied by the Pentagon and the…
December 23, 2008
One can understand why a government might be reluctant to release information to the public about the list of illegal food additives it has found in food products made within its borders when you read this:
China Releases List of Illegal Food Additives
As part of its long-term effort to improve…
December 22, 2008
It's influenza-like illness ("ILI") season again. We just call it flu season but in fact there are a lot of respiratory viruses running around besides the flu virus that look like flu. Recently we discussed one of the others, the human metapneumovirus (HMNV). It's been around infecting us for over…
December 21, 2008
Maybe the biggest science story of 2008 is that science will be back in government in 2009. In a way it is a commentary on how far we have fallen that the appointment of distinguished scientists to important posts in government is a story at all. It should be a given. But for eight years -- and…
December 21, 2008
Forty Fifty years ago this week, in a world even more strife torn than today's, the Apollo 8 spacecraft was approaching the moon, not to land there, but to orbit it:
Apollo 8 had set off a few days before Christmas. It was the most daring space mission ever, taking astronauts William Anders, Jim…
December 20, 2008
I spent about a decade as a researcher at a highly regarded technical university in the northeast, known by its three initials. This was in the sixties and seventies. I loved working there because there were probably more interesting people per square meter than any other place I ever worked.…
December 19, 2008
It should surprise no one that bird flu is back in Asia, not just in poultry but in people. That's because it's flu season and the bird flu virus, has been "out there" all along, simmering in the rich broth of aquatic and landbased birds. There are new outbreaks in India, China, Cambodia, and Hong…
December 18, 2008
The Holiday Season is upon us so we won't post daily on the Public Health Conversation series. But you can join in at any time, in two ways. Effect Measure and The Pump Handle, the two blog sites hosting the discussion, have comment threads for each post. You can make a comment at any time on any…
December 17, 2008
A couple of ideas are floating around in the comment threads as part of an initial conversation about public health. I'm not surprised they seem to be on different topics and have the feel of talking past each other. We are not used to discussing basic assumptions and have an immediate tendency to…
December 16, 2008
I'm (more than) pleased to say the public health conversation is starting. I assume it was already going on but not where we could all hear what others were saying. So let me continue by responding to a point raised at The Pump Handle (TPH) that was also the subject of offline discussion from…
December 15, 2008
Yesterday Flu Wiki founding editor and DailyKos frontpager DemFromCT reviewed three recent report cards on public health, one each by the American Public Health Association (APHA), The Trust for America's Health (TFAH) and the American College Of Emergency Physicians (ACEP). It was a great a…
December 14, 2008
I have three grandchildren (all wonderful, naturally) and the oldest is five years old today. I put wonderful in parentheses because most grandparents think their grandchildren are wonderful while the rest of the world just thinks they are a few more of the world's billions of children. Mine are…
December 14, 2008
The French philosophe, Denis Diderot (1713-1784), was a guiding intellect of The Enlightenment and a principal author of its central document, L'Encyclopédie, which set the tone for the modern view where religion is just another superstition.
Classic Diderot is always bracing. Here is some:…
December 13, 2008
Whether they are called the White House Press Secretary or the regime's Information Minister, they seem to have in common one characteristic: they are professional liars. It goes without saying that all of Bush's press secretaries have been blatant liars, but it's also true of Clinton's and…
December 12, 2008
Energy may be the topic du jour but it's been the 800 lb. gorilla in the room for, oh, a couple of centuries. In a sense it's responsible for one of the greatest occupational health catastrophes of the 20th century, and a new report from CDC demonstrates once again it's still with us and killing…
December 11, 2008
In my younger days I was quite enamored of radiology as a specialty. I published some papers in that area and enjoyed reading x-rays, quite a complex task, requiring the reader to integrate three dimensional anatomy with two dimensional shadows and relate that to physiology, pathology, surgery,…
December 10, 2008
I'm sitting here reading Tuesday's Wall Street Journal -- what? Revere subscribes to the WSJ? No, but for reasons known only to Darwin, every couple of days a copy is delivered to my door, each with someone else's address on it, and never the same someone else two times in a row -- so, anyway, I'm…
December 9, 2008
Old folks are dangerous enough. I should know. I am one. Bad enough you allow me to hurtle down the highway in semi-control of a couple of tons of steel while thinking about science (at least I'm not thinking about decking some young thing or even decking some young thing while hurtling down the…
December 8, 2008
Blogging will be light for the next day or so because the eventuality I feared most, that I would get the day care incubated norovirus-like illness that grandson #2 incubated, has come to pass. I had to cancel an extremely important trip to a scientific meeting in California. There is no hope I'd…
December 7, 2008
I vaguely remember a medical school lecture about dracunculiasis, also known as Guinea Worm Disease. Also called the "fiery serpent" these are very long worms that grow in people and then the females get hungry and start to burrow out of them, sort of like Alien but not quite as quickly or as…
December 7, 2008
It seems Republicans have been inaccurately crediting George Bush with keeping us safe from terrorists since 9/11 (conveniently omitting the anthrax attacks which came from within the US weapons establishment; I guess that means whoever did it wasn't a terrorist). It took a Democrat in the Kentucky…
December 6, 2008
So here's the deal. Grandson #2 picked up some kind of norovirus-like thing at daycare and by late afternoon was seriously engaged in projectile vomiting. My daughter and I picked him and his little 'bro up (his dad was in class) and brought them to her house. Since I am getting ready for a…
December 6, 2008
44 more days until these murdering bastards are out of OUR government. Meanwhile how much damage will they do? Damage, as in broken bodies, maimed children, dead people:
An Afghan teenager who lost both legs in a cluster bomb explosion helped persuade his country to change its stance and join…
December 5, 2008
So what does heartburn have to do with diabetes? Funny you should ask. Big Pharma giant AstraZeneca is being sued by 15,000 people who claim that their atypical antipsychotic, Seroquel, causes diabetes. Seroquel is approved for bipolar disorder, but unless there are a lot more people with bipolar…