revere
Posts by this author
December 18, 2006
One of the most important tools in the fight to reduce emissions of toxic agents into the environment has nothing to do with emission controls. It has to do with information. Since 1984 Americans have had access to information about how much individual companies were emitting into their…
December 18, 2006
I like stories like this. If there is a pandemic, while some places will do very badly, many places will find a way. I say "if there is a pandemic," but if you are poultry producer in southeast asia the pandemic has already happened, where it is a panzootic, a pandemic in animals (in this case…
December 17, 2006
We continue our summary of the Institute of Medicine "Letter Report" on non-drug non-vaccine measures to slow or contain the spread of an influenza pandemic of a severity similar or worse than that of 1918 (see previous post on models here). The IOM report examined several analyses of historical…
December 17, 2006
I don't watch much network TV and I certainly don't watch Charlie Sheen's new show, Two and a Half Men. So I didn't know that the Christian Right is going bonkers over his mocking of Christ, Christmas and Christians earlier this week. At least that's their version.
Apparently what he did is sing…
December 16, 2006
The verdict in the Tripoli 6 case is scheduled to be handed down on December 19. There has been worldwide recognition the science now shows the six defendants arrived in the country after the viral strains were circulating in the hospital and its environs, making the 400+ cases of HIV infection in…
December 16, 2006
On December 11, The Institute of Medicine, one of the four constituent parts of the National Academies of Science, released a "letter report" reviewing the scant information on effects from non-drug measures to slow or contain spread of an influenza pandemic (available as a free download here). The…
December 15, 2006
The Bush Administration hates science. Science is reality-based and some truths are politically inconvenient. But there are things that can be done. Like this:
The Bush administration is clamping down on scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey, the latest agency subjected to controls on research…
December 15, 2006
There are many local stories about pandemic flu planning and they all sound pretty much the same. Local officials saying they are making good progress but there's still much left to do and if a pandemic struck they'd be in trouble. Yawn. But every once in a while you read one where you say to…
December 14, 2006
The FDA has announced that Scott Gottlieb, their guy in charge of science, is leaving, headed back to his spiritual home, The American Enterprise Institute, denizen of right wing ideologues and other apologists for do-nothing government. As the American Enterprise Institue describe themselves:
The…
December 14, 2006
Last week we posted on the Canadians realizing that if a a pandemic hit, even a moderate one, their hospital system would be in deep feces. This week it's the US's turn. Not that this is news, exactly, but it bears repeating. Again. And again. And again. So here's the message. Again:
Half of all U.…
December 13, 2006
New scientific information travels in various ways. The internet is the lastest. Sometimes it's the quickest, too, but often the old ways also work. The oldest method of communication between scientists used to be correspondence. Leibniz was famous for his extensive letter writing to other…
December 13, 2006
Again, H5N1 is rewriting the book. Influenza A is usually thought of as an intestinal disease of birds. Surveillance and monitoring, therefore, has been carried out by sampling bird feces and cloacal (rectal) swabs. In a meeting in Singapore, however, the dean of flu virologists, Robert Webster of…
December 12, 2006
The sanitary revolution of the 19th century began with providing clean water and food to urban residents. Piped water supplies brought an essential, health giving commondity to city dwellers starting around the beginning of the 19th century (i.e., the 1800s) and the result was an improvement in…
December 12, 2006
Many readers of this site come here because they are interested in or worried about bird flu. Bird flu isn't the only thing people are worried about and no doubt there are sites that talk about each of them --asbestos or nanotechnology or genetically modified foods, for example. Most of us are glad…
December 11, 2006
A serviceable and knowledgeable article by AP's Maria Cheng, lately of the WHO public information office, has just appeared on the wires. Readers of this site won't find much new, but what is interesting are the headlines. Yes, headlines, in the plural. Here are ten different headlines to the same…
December 11, 2006
Compared to other viruses, the influenza virus is relatively simple, although its biology is not. To date, the eight genetic segments in the viral genome (the totality of its genetic information) has been shown to code for only eleven proteins. A virus can get away with this because it hijacks the…
December 10, 2006
Rodney King was the African American made famous when his violent arrest by the Los Angeles Police Department was videotaped by a bystander. The acquittal of the arresting officers in 1991 set off three days of civil disorder. In a bid to stop the rioting, King appeared in front of television…
December 10, 2006
I see a lot of crap about how atheists are narrow-minded and intolerant of religion and distort the Constitution. Maybe some are and do, but for sheer nuttiness, stupidity and delusion, any aberrations from the usual behavior of the godless can't hold a candle to the faithful. The Sunday before the…
December 9, 2006
You may think bird flu is a disaster still waiting to happen, but in one way it is a disaster that already happened. One of the shoes dropped between October 2005 and May 2006 when the H5N1 subtyupe of highly pathogenic avian influnza spread to the poultry flocks of 50 countries. Since 2003 the…
December 8, 2006
We've talked a lot about the terrible effects of the war in Iraq on this site. In this country the emphasis, quite naturally, is on the American victims, so we have tended to discuss the Iraqi victims. But a victim is a victim and war has too many of them. Our fellow ScienceBlogger Mike Dunford at…
December 8, 2006
With all the news about Polonium-210 poisoning and the steady drumbeat of bird flu news, we failed to take note of the announcement that 70% of Thailand's toilets were not up to WHO standards. The shocking news came as Thailand hosted the 2006 World Toilet Expo and Forum in Bangkok. Health Minister…
December 8, 2006
Part of raising awareness about the potential problems we would have in an influenza pandemic is saying the same thing over and over again, sometimes in different ways and sometimes just repeating it. So we're going to do it again. From the Globe and Mail (Toronto):
Severe restrictions that allowed…
December 7, 2006
I don't know whether it is a preoccupation with Iraq or a preoccupation with oil or whether there's a difference, but the US State Department doesn't seem to have a clue about the Tripoli 6 case. This, is from yesterday's State Department press briefing, courtesy Declan Butler's ongoing roster of…
December 7, 2006
There is a new paper in the Journal of Immunology I found more than a little disconcerting. University of Rochester scientists have found that the cells in the immune system responsible for antibody production, the B-cells, also express high levels of the enzyme cyclooxygenase-2 (Cox-2).…
December 6, 2006
We are asking the scienceblogging community once again to rally on behalf of our colleagues on trial for their lives in Libya. They have been accused of infecting over 400 children with HIV (see previous posts, here, here, here, here, here and here). When last we made an appeal (here) the response…
December 6, 2006
Four months ago Nigeria had its first cases of avian flu in poultry. None since. We think. Or maybe we should say, we hope. Because as experts gather this week in Mali, no one seems to be that confident there's nothing there, or anywhere else in Africa:
Health experts say insufficient surveillance…
December 5, 2006
I had to laugh when I saw this piece in New Scientist. It's about a new high tech ultrasound stethoscope supposedly immune to background noise.
The stethoscope is a useful tool for quickly diagnosing damage to the heart or lungs, which many victims of traumatic injuries can suffer. But they can be…
December 5, 2006
After all this time and no small amount of heated argument, we are still unsure how H5N1 is making its way around the world in birds. The commercial movements the poultry trade, smuggling of exotic birds or poultry by-products and the migrations of wild birds over long distances have all been…
December 4, 2006
Years ago we used to joke that the cigarette murderers should just short circuit the process and add chemotherapeutic agents to their products. One stop cancer initiation and treatment. That was years ago.
Functional beer is another emerging product identified by Datamonitor, with beer…
December 4, 2006
It is quite evident from the reports we see but sometimes we fail to recognize it, that the confirmed victims of bird flu to date have been overwhelmingly young compared to what we see in seasonal flu. Here is the age distribution in the latest WHO tally, as graphed for us by WHO's Pacific Regional…